Down the rabbit hole

Do you ever have the sensation that no matter how rigorously you position your situatedness in the worldings that give way to your research that there is always another ontologically prior position? What I mean is, to what lengths should we go to position ourselves in research philosophically? I'm always mulling over the idea of first principles: where am I staring? What is my ontological understanding of the real within which I find (create/enact/perform/cite, etc....) myself? How far down the rabbit hole must I go to feel that I am contributing something to a world-in-the-making that is 1) unique from what has come before, 2) interesting and not merely navel-gazing, self-congratulation, or self-flagellation, 3) ethically and politically disposed to social change-in many forms, 4) not completely insane. 

Thomas King in The Truth About Stories, has this great bit about telling (and re-telling) a story of creation where the world sits on the back of a turtle. An audience member, no matter the location or age of the audience, always asks: what's beneath the turtle? To which he responds, another turtle. It's turtles all the way down. Down the rabbit hole it's turtles, small, large, and variously adorned ontological turtles. That's the way I've been feeling lately. Like I'm trying to map a pile of turtles, ad infinitum.