The orientation we have been tracing does not culminate in a position. It culminates in a demand. Once the fantasy of neutral description has been relinquished, thinking itself is exposed as an act — one that commits, differentiates, and forecloses even as it opens.
This first post begins where the consequences become unavoidable: with the recognition that every thought is a cut.
The End of the View from Nowhere
Much philosophical and scientific discourse continues to operate as though thought could hover above its objects, surveying them without remainder. Concepts are offered as if they were discovered rather than enacted; explanations as if they were revealed rather than chosen.
But once instantiation is understood as perspectival rather than temporal, this posture becomes untenable. There is no view from nowhere because there is no nowhere from which to view. Every act of thinking occurs from within a field of relations that it simultaneously reshapes.
To think is not to report what is already there. It is to take up a position within structured possibility.
Owning the Cut
A cut is not a violent intervention imposed upon an otherwise seamless world. It is the minimal condition for anything to appear at all. Distinction is not an error; it is how phenomena come to be.
What changes under this orientation is not that cuts are made, but that they are owned.
To own a cut is to acknowledge:
that it could have been made otherwise,
that it brings some relations into focus while excluding others,
and that its consequences persist beyond the moment of its enactment.
This is not an invitation to hesitation or paralysis. It is a demand for accountability.
Thinking as Commitment
Once the cut is acknowledged, thought can no longer present itself as merely provisional opinion or detached analysis. Every conceptual move commits the thinker to a way the world now holds.
Commitment here is not psychological resolve or moral certainty. It is structural. To think is to stake a configuration of relations as salient, coherent, and actionable.
The familiar opposition between objectivity and subjectivity dissolves. What replaces it is responsibility: responsibility for the cuts one makes and the worlds they help stabilise.
Against Meta-Positions
A common response to this demand is to retreat upward — to meta-theory, meta-critique, or ironic distance. But this is merely another attempt to evade commitment by changing levels.
Relational thinking does not abolish levels; it abolishes exemption. Meta-positions still cut. They still privilege certain distinctions, values, and forms of intelligibility.
There is no safe altitude.
The Courage of Situated Thought
To think situationally is to accept exposure. Without guarantees, without final foundations, one must nevertheless decide, describe, and act.
This courage is not heroic. It is ordinary and continuous. It consists in making cuts carefully, revisably, and with attention to their effects — rather than pretending they are not being made at all.
A Discipline, Not a Stance
Situated commitment is not a stance one adopts for rhetorical effect. It is a discipline of thought that must be practiced repeatedly. Habits of neutrality reassert themselves easily; metaphysical comfort is always close at hand.
What this orientation demands, then, is vigilance rather than purity. One does not escape commitment; one learns to inhabit it.
This is the first unavoidable form of thinking after closure: thought that knows it acts, and acts anyway.
In the next post, we will turn to a second demand that follows immediately from this one: how to think systematically without totalising, and what kind of coherence remains possible once completeness is relinquished.
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