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Monday, March 02, 2020

Philosophy of everyday life


My blog last week about a cord hanging from a letterbox can be classified as an instance of philosophy of everyday life. This is a kind of philosophy that describes, studies and comments on phenomena around us that are often ignored because they are considered banal or not important since they are seen as routine. Everyone knows them but nobody talks about them, for why should they? In this way philosophy of everyday life ­̶ or everyday philosophy for short ­̶ should be distinguished from Grand Philosophy, which discusses Grand Questions, like evil, what is good, what gives life meaning, what is consciousness, free will, and so on; you’ll be able to think up such questions yourself. Now it is so that I have nothing against studying grand questions. I have done it myself in the past, also in these blogs, and I intend to do so in future as well. They are very important. Nevertheless, the importance of big questions is no reason to ignore the “little” phenomena that make up the stream of life, for to my mind they are as important. Without the stream of life there would be no life at all.
One of my main interests in philosophy is the philosophy of mind and action. This kind of philosophy is sometimes also called psychological philosophy. In the same way philosophy of everyday life can be called sociological philosophy. While in psychological philosophy the individual is the focus of study, in sociological philosophy our attention is fixed on phenomena in their social settings. So, for a philosopher of everyday life a cord hanging from a letterbox is not simply an action done by someone for a practical reason but it tells us something about society or social life as a whole; in this case that a characteristic of the society concerned is trust. Trust gives this action a meaning that is more than only practical but that is social and philosophical. Sociological philosophy must be distinguished from philosophy of sociology. The latter discusses the non-experiential foundations of sociology, while the former says something about society as a whole and about man as a social being. However, when describing everyday phenomena, everyday philosophy doesn’t want to judge and it doesn’t want to answer questions that tell us how we should arrange our lives; questions that can serve as guiding principles of our actions. This approach makes everyday philosophy also different from Grand Philosophy. Both types of philosophy are looking for a meaning in the phenomena they study, but while in Grand Philosophy ascribing a meaning involves ascribing a judgement about what is good or bad and what we should do, ascribing a meaning in everyday philosophy is a way of trying to understand why (for what reason) the phenomenon concerned happens and how it is related to other phenomena. In this sense everyday philosophy is often more a kind of theoretical sociology (just like psychological philosophy is often more a kind of theoretical psychology). Indeed, the difference between sociological philosophy and theoretical sociology are relative and they are ends of a sliding scale.
Why is a philosophy of everyday life important and necessary? Actually, I would say, because life is more than highlights, main points, essentials and morals. Basically, life is a stream and when the stream is absent, nothing happens. The significance of everyday philosophy is also (more or less implicitly) expressed in this quotation from an article by Finn Janning (pp. 2-3; see Sources below):
“A philosophy for everyday life is … an investigation of the raw reality of life, taking in all of life’s many ingredients. Such a philosophy is necessary because — this is my claim or thesis — we still have not tasted life in all its richness. We tend to cling on to certain norms or ideals in a way that does not honor our own experience and intuition. At worst our life becomes an imitation, image or representation of more authoritative ideals. An image is a copy, that is, a simulation of the real reality. We have lost contact with life because we follow ideas or images of how life should be. To paraphrase Jean Baudrillard … life no longer precedes our moral map, nor does it survive it. Instead, the moral map now precedes life and engenders it. We live our life as an imitation of a moral model, as if such a model was not just another human artifact.
A philosophy for everyday life tries to overcome seductive simulations and beliefs that the truth is certain, unchangeable, and universal. Instead, [it] … views each step as a courageous act because it invents the ground it steps onto. The point is to make philosophy, in every movement, concrete rather than abstract (or transcendent). … [A] philosophy for everyday life is relational. It favors direct contact.”
Or as Eric Kim, a photographer said about street photography:
I used to think that street photography was all about getting that one good shot... Wrong. Street photography is about cleansing and easing your mind. Street photography is about enjoying your walks (slowly) with your camera in your hand. Street photography is all about finding the beauty in the natural world. Street photography is about the common, plain, and rugged.” (source: see below; my italics). And so it is mutatis mutandis for the philosophy of everyday life as well.

Sources
- Finn Janning, “Philosophy for Everyday Life”, on http://www.philosophyoflife.org/jpl201501.pdf
- Eric Kim, “How to Be a Zen Photographer”, on https://erickimphotography.com/blog/zen-street-photographer/

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