What the hell are everyday metaphysics? Is it just another pretentious sitting-in-the-coffee-shop, Sarte-reading, black-wearing, no-relationship-having term invented to make us seem cool? Well, possibly. Except that reading Sarte is so passé (much better to read Lévi-Strauss) and black does tend to wash one out. Unless one pairs it with a charming scarf. But I digress.
No, the idea behind everyday metaphysics (a term, incidentally, shamelessly stolen from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's Production of Presence) is that much of our daily language and behavior is slightly more complicated than we give it credit for. For example, "deep" is an adjective which , when applied to someone's cognition or writing, connotes high-level analysis and generally good thinking. But why "deep"? Because there is a rarely-considered everyday spatial setup of value: deep=good, shallow=bad. It's intimately connected to the idea of meaning and our hermeneutical search for it: Shakespeare is great because there's loads of meaning to be dug out, ergo deep, and mass-market trade paperbacks are lousy because they lack depth.
The proposal, then, is that we deconstruct everyday assumptions with the same critical apparatus one might apply to texts. Why, for example, is deep better than shallow? Why is meaning the most important qualifier? Should it be? What assumptions and logical reasoning led to that stage? (This question, to be clear, is answered in Gumbrecht's book - he argues that it is a result of Enlightenment and Cartesian thought paradigms which render "meaning" far more worthy than "experience" or other presence effects. It's a useful book, really, even if good ol' Hans Ulrich is a lot more interested in himself than is strictly good form.)
As a medievalist and a historian, most of my examples will probably come from several centuries ago, and I'll be forced to restrain my love for Dante. But hopefully Everyday Metaphysics will be a forum for thinking aloud, critiquing often, and de- as well as re-construction. Comments are always welcome - please share your thoughts!
Editor's Note: As most of you probably know, I have another blog (In A Model Environment) which is a much more garden-variety personal musings type thing. It's accessible through my user profile, or via the link at right.
No, the idea behind everyday metaphysics (a term, incidentally, shamelessly stolen from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's Production of Presence) is that much of our daily language and behavior is slightly more complicated than we give it credit for. For example, "deep" is an adjective which , when applied to someone's cognition or writing, connotes high-level analysis and generally good thinking. But why "deep"? Because there is a rarely-considered everyday spatial setup of value: deep=good, shallow=bad. It's intimately connected to the idea of meaning and our hermeneutical search for it: Shakespeare is great because there's loads of meaning to be dug out, ergo deep, and mass-market trade paperbacks are lousy because they lack depth.
The proposal, then, is that we deconstruct everyday assumptions with the same critical apparatus one might apply to texts. Why, for example, is deep better than shallow? Why is meaning the most important qualifier? Should it be? What assumptions and logical reasoning led to that stage? (This question, to be clear, is answered in Gumbrecht's book - he argues that it is a result of Enlightenment and Cartesian thought paradigms which render "meaning" far more worthy than "experience" or other presence effects. It's a useful book, really, even if good ol' Hans Ulrich is a lot more interested in himself than is strictly good form.)
As a medievalist and a historian, most of my examples will probably come from several centuries ago, and I'll be forced to restrain my love for Dante. But hopefully Everyday Metaphysics will be a forum for thinking aloud, critiquing often, and de- as well as re-construction. Comments are always welcome - please share your thoughts!
Editor's Note: As most of you probably know, I have another blog (In A Model Environment) which is a much more garden-variety personal musings type thing. It's accessible through my user profile, or via the link at right.
posted by Katie at 11:32 AM
3 Comments:
I think it was Jerome Bruner(?) or Shiffrin and Atkinson, or one those cognitive scientists in the '60s that came up with an information processing theory that held that inoformation (in a broad sense) is only processed by the brain and stored if the individual gives it meaning and application (possibly experience). If not the information is tossed out in favor for something with both. So, for something to permeate are mind we must give it meaning. I think the more interesting question is how do we give something meaning
Often I think we call any "intaperonal" gleaning or observations as "deep."
Are those deep?
If I were to analyze, synthesize and evaluate a tootsie roll in regards to taste, would that still be "deep" thinking?
There are certainly two levels of meaning-production (meaning-imposition?) here:
(1) something happens, we give it meaning
(2) we examine something that isn't actually happening to us (i.e. a piece of literature, a war in the third century BC, a film about tootsie rolls, how nouvelle vague and we try to uncover the meaning that's in there
Except that I'm not entirely sure that's the best way to go about things. Surely, meaning is important - as historians, what we basically do is impose meaning and order on shit that happened. But all I'm saying is that meaning isn't the only useful category of analysis. Shit-which-happens (for which I'm sure there's a lovely German word) has more aspects than just the meaningful, right? Otherwise, why sense memory? Or is everything we encounter and process irretrivably bound up only in meaning-production?
I certainly don't know. But I tend to think it might be more complicated than imposing and recovering layers of meaning.
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