摘要：David C. Wood: Well, answering that question is a truly philosophical enterprise. One could start at various points in answering the question "how did this happen." For example, how did someone like me ever get into philosophy in the first place, or into s omething like continental philosophy in particular, and then how these kinds of questions are best pursued. When I look back at the boy who at the age of seventeen started reading philosophy, it was someone who at the age of ten had been uprooted from one context in England and thrown into a very different world in New Haven. Some of the things that I had been told were absolutes turned out not to be. For example, my teachers in England had told me that when you formed a 't' that it had to go two-thirds of the way up to the line above and then when I got to America I was told that it had to go all the way up. How can both of these be true. It dawned on me that they were both true in the sense that they conformed to local norms. This may seem trivial, compared, say to Derrida being excluded from his Algerian school because he was Jewish, but it made quite an impression on me at ten. The second thing that I remember was going every week to the local YMCA pool for school swimming and that we boys were expected to completely strip off and swim naked. I had never been asked to do tha t in my life and I thought "what is this." The force of cultural specificity hit home. The third thing was a six-week trip, driven by my family, around the United States seeing unbelievable landscapes such as the Grand Canyon that I could never have imagined and couldn't quite take in. It was an aesthetic trauma — a wonderful trauma — a taste of the sublime. This happened over and over again all over the Southwest and elsewhere. We drove 10,000 miles over six weeks camping everywhere. It changed the wiring in my brain — I was a different person after that. The shape of my imagination, my sense of what was possible, and my sense of the natural world had changed. This experience gave me what Heidegger would describe as a sense of not exactly being at home in the world anymore – in a positive way. It was as if the unheimlich was now on my shoulder like a parrot. That, I think, was what I brought into the study of philosophy and perhaps what brought me in.
