If I knew who or what I were, I would not write; I write out of those moments of anguish which are nameless and I am able to write only where the tradition can offer me a discipline, a means, to articulate and explore that anguish.
(Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity)
If, as I have argued, the task of philosophy is not just to say something, but to show (or even do) something, what is it that philosophy is supposed to show? And how should philosophy show it? In this essay I will offer an answer: philosophy should aim to show us—those of us who need philosophy—our own lived condition (the ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’) in a new light, and thus to bring us into a more conscious relationship with ourselves.
There is a historical precedent for distinguishing philosophy by the fact that, unlike other disciplines, it does not have its objects, or even its methods, determined before it begins its work. Thus Hegel begins his Encyclopaedia:
Philosophy lacks the advantage, which the other sciences enjoy, of being able to presuppose its objects as given immediately by representation. And, with regard to its beginning and advance, it cannot presuppose the method of cognition as one that is already accepted.1
Over a century later, Heidegger distinguished philosophy from science on the grounds that the latter ‘does not think’—that is, science enjoys ‘the assurance of its own appointed course’ while philosophy does not.2 It might follow, therefore, that any answer to the question ‘What is philosophy’s object?’ cannot be purely descriptive. That is, it cannot merely point out what the object of philosophy is (and always has been); rather, the answer will have a normative element. Intentionally or not, the word ‘is’ in the question will be taken as a ‘should be’. Insofar as philosophy is an undisciplined discipline, a practice with very few absolute rules, every philosopher’s personal conception of how philosophy is done can be taken as a prescription for how it ought to be done.3
With that in mind: the philosophy I feel personally invested in is one that, for the most part, takes ‘the ordinary’ as its object. In other words, I am interested in philosophy that aims to elucidate (and perhaps change) our relationship to the phenomena of life which, as humans, we are always already immersed in. There is a need to elucidate and change this relationship in the first place because—to quote Heidegger again—‘That which is ontically closest and well known, is ontologically the farthest and not known at all.’4 There are, in this sense, to ways of relating to something; in Heidegger’s jargon, these ways are the ‘ontic’ and ‘ontological’. In less technical terms, we might understand this distinction as that of pre-conscious, pre-reflective knowledge and conscious reflection.5 A common phenomenological example of this distinction points to our surroundings: we don’t typically notice the ground we are standing on, or the chair we are sitting in, until something alerts us to these facts. Following this alertness, however, it isn’t the case that we have learned something new; rather, we have become reflectively conscious of something we were already immersed in. Admittedly, however, this example doesn’t seem particularly pertinent: our relation to the ground beneath us is not one that especially demands transformation. But our relation to other ordinary things, on the other hand—selfhood, friendship, love, language, time, death and so on—is often bewildering and therefore demands more of us. This kind of ordinariness constitutes what Cora Diamond calls ‘the difficulties of reality’: ‘It is wholly inexplicable that it should be; and yet it is.’6 How can we—how can philosophy—respond to these demands at the reflective, ‘ontological’ level?
There is a famous literary passage which, in my view, exemplifies this distinction (of ontic and ontological knowing, pre-reflective knowledge and conscious reflection): the passage in Proust where the narrator is reminded of his childhood in Combray. This remembrance is not just a cognition of some facts about the past; it is a reawakening of ‘lost time’, a transformation of the narrator’s relation to his own memory.
I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being […] and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to […] obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.
And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which the material object will give us) which we do not suspect.7
The past Proust is concerned with is ‘hidden’ and ‘held captive’. As I understand it, this does not mean that it is totally vanished and absent from the mind as if it had never happened. Rather, I would suggest that the ‘spell’ or ‘prison’ which holds this past captive is precisely the ‘ontic closeness’ which Heidegger refers to. If the moment Proust describes is a remembrance rather than an invention or imagination, we must suppose that the past which is remembered is already present in the mind, pre-reflectively. This pre-reflective presence is weightless—it passes us by—precisely because it is so ordinary, so matter-of-fact. Remembrance of the past, in the Proustian sense, is therefore the moment that this past finally speaks (its voice is recognised, Proust writes) and comes to have a place not just in the ‘dead’, pre-conscious mind, but in one’s conscious and reflective experience—that is, it comes to ‘share our life’.8 This last point is precisely why philosophy should aim to bring about such a reflective experience: because, through such experiences, the facts and objects of reality are transformed into motivations for living a certain way. When it dawns on us in this ‘living’ way, an ordinary part of reality can alter our attunement towards ourselves and our lives.
Although, in this passage, it is memory that undergoes a reawakening and comes to be a ‘close’ part of life rather than a ‘distant’ object of the intellect, it can presumably be any such everyday phenomenon that undergoes such a process. Another Proustian example is the ‘little phrase’ in Vinteuil’s sonata. One can hear the same piece of music two, three, or four times, the narrator explains, and yet often it is not until much later that one properly hears it as if ‘for the first time’, when it truly awakens a feeling in oneself that, like the remembrance of Combray, lies beyond the intellect.9
To bring us back to philosophy, consider a similarity between both Proustian examples. In the case of the Vinteuil sonata, we are dealing with something that is listened to; in the remembrance of Combray, Proust refers to ‘recognising a voice’. This is worth comparing with Heidegger, who claims that philosophy must attend to the ‘melody, the ring and tone’ of a question or an assertion—‘the way in which it speaks’.10 Rather than just being a case of misleading language, it might be that this writing points to a particular quality of language, a quality which is relevant for philosophy. That both Heidegger and Proust use the imagery of ‘voice’ and ‘listening’ for their objects (memory and music in Proust, question and assertion in Heidegger) suggests that all these objects emanate some meaning that is not exhausted by what they factually (ontically) are. In other words, it suggests that these objects are capable of being understood in the ‘second way’ I have outlined above: the ontological, reflective, ‘lived’ way. Now, so far it seems that philosophy (as I understand it) tries to bring about this way of seeing, with the aim of transforming our relationship to our ordinary existence—making us more consciously aware of, more ‘authentically attuned to’, our lives and ourselves. In short: the object of philosophy is the ordinary, insofar as there is something extraordinary about it. By engaging with Proust and Heidegger I have tried to show that this extraordinary quality exists at all; what remains is to elucidate what it is and how it can be shown.
I would suggest that extraordinariness has its existence neither objectively (in ordinary things: in friendships, memories, artworks) nor subjectively (in our thoughts and feelings about things). If it were to exist only in things themselves, what would explain its capacity to ‘awaken’ something in us, to affect our lives? Likewise, if it exists only in our thoughts and feelings, how is it that it shocks us and takes us by surprise, as it does so famously in Proust? This dimension of the ordinary, which philosophy should try to bring in view, must therefore exist emergently, in moments of mediation between subject and object. In these moments, our experience must be one of mediopassive agency: it is not just that something happens to us, nor is it that we just actively do something. Rather, we play a role in what happens to us by taking a stand on our ordinary experience.
Most of the time, this mediation—this taking a stand—is simple enough to be pre-conscious, as we have established. Perhaps, then, the extraordinariness of the ordinary shows up in the moments of surprise where we are not quite sure on how to take a stand, and where we are unprepared for the way that reality weighs upon us. When a person remembers something truly profound, when they fall in love with someone, when they ‘finally grasp’ an artwork or a poem: these are the moments in which the world dawns on us in a genuinely new way, a way that cannot be assimilated into our ordinary and everyday knowledge, and therefore they are the moments which alter our self-understanding and our way of living. The ‘voice’ of a moment like this is captured in the final lines of Rilke’s poem on looking at an ancient sculpture:
for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.11
Finally, then—what good is philosophy in bringing about these moments? Consider that ordinary experience is often (if not always) mediated by language and concepts, and that language and concepts are precisely the currency that philosophy deals in. Furthermore, consider that the history of philosophy can be seen as a history of grappling with literary forms—we have moved from fragments and dialogues to the confession, from the enchiridion to the systematic treatise and back to fragments again, and so on. One implication of this, I think, is that philosophy has often been committed to placing pressure on our ordinary language and concepts, precisely by altering the form in which they take place. What might our sense of ‘beauty’ come to if it is subjected to the right kind of dialogue? How might our self-relations change if they are projected through a confession? Can religious beliefs withstand the rigidty of a philosophical system? I have argued that the extraordinary moments that philosophy calls for are mediated between subject and object. The actual practice of philosophy, therefore, puts tension on this mediation by stirring up the form in which a subject (the philosopher) places their object (the ordinary).
G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze), translated by T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991), §1.
Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, translated by J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 8.
To be more explicit: I take this point to be the same as the existentialist point that ‘in fashioning myself I fashion man’ (Sartre); both philosophy and the human being (according to existentialism) have an existence that precedes their essence, and thus their activity must be taken as essential.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), p. 69. This, too, seems to be a perennial thought in philosophy: Augustine, whom Heidegger cites approvingly, asks ‘what is closer to me than myself?’ and responds that ‘I have become to myself a land of trouble and inordinate sweat’ (Confessions X.16), and Hegel in a more general manner repeatedly demonstrates that, in fact, we have only the weakest grasp on the immediate, and that it is through mediation that we get closer to the truth of ourselves (and, as he writes in the Preface to the Phenomenology, ‘What is familiar and well known as such is not really known for the very reason that it is familiar and well known.’) Later, Nietzsche repeats this sentiment: ‘What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to “know”—that is to see as a problem.’ (The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, §355).
I accept that any reformulation of Heidegger’s philosophy outside of Heidegger’s jargon runs the risk of being challenged by Heideggerian scholarship.
Cora Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’ in Reading Cavell, edited by Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 106. Perhaps these ‘difficulties of reality’ are what give rise to the wonder that, for Plato (Theaetetus 155d) and Aristotle (Metaphysics 982b), is supposed to inaugurate philosophy.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1: Swann’s Way, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff.
Are there not multiple similarities here between Proust and Plato? Firstly, in the Phaedo (82e) Plato describes philosophy as a freedom from the captviity of everyday embodiment; so too does Proust describe his remembrance as a freedom from captivity. Secondly, in the Meno, the anamnesis (recollection—or remembrance) that characterises learning for Plato can take place only insofar as that which is remembered already has a place in the mind or soul. Proust is not a total Platonist, however. Although they both venerate experiences that free the mind from an ‘imprisonment’, Proust does not regard desire and emotions as elements of this imprisonment; furthermore, Proust is exempt from requiring a theory of reincarnation or immortal soul since he is not describing learning (wherein something new, or seemingly new, is presented to the mind) but a particular kind of remembrance (wherein something already in the mind is presented anew). For another comparison of Proust and Plato, see Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, translated by Richard Howard (London: Athlone Press, 2000).
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 2: Within a Budding Grove, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff.
Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 37.
Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ (1908), translated by Stephen Mitchell. https://poets.org/poem/archaic-torso-apollo