Chapter 1

LEADING AN ORDINARY LIFE

Philosophy and the Ordinary

The philosopher Richard Wollheim, who sought in crosscurrents of philosophy, art, and psychoanalysis the productive tensions of human thought and the fraught expression of its possibilities, asked in a series of lectures delivered at Harvard in the mid-1980s the provocative question, “What is it to lead the life of a person?”1 It may be one of the most central questions we ask of ourselves, and it is at the core of trying to think about the everyday and the ordinary. Lives tend not to be led at the edges of consciousness, full of intensity and demanding concentration at every moment. Instead, lives for so many of us are full of events and decisions that are made without much thought: crossing a street, calling a friend, checking to see if the milk is spoiled, standing in line. Yet, just because these things are familiar, banal even, does not mean they should be left unexamined. The relationships we have with the world around us—people, things, events—particularly those most familiar of elements, are the ones most constitutive of the lives we all actually live.2
Wollheim’s thinking enters into the discussion, then, because of his focus on the ongoing process of leading a life as something distinct from the product of the process, or that which we would call “life.”3 These are two different things for him. Life results from all the choices, decisions, and relationships a person undertakes through time. “Leading a life” is an ongoing action composed of countless threads of smaller actions. Wollheim posits, “The core of this process is to be found in three characteristic interactions: one, between the person’s past and his present, and between his present and his future; two, between his mental dispositions and his mental states; and, three, between the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious, systems of his mind.”4 The model here, in its interlinking tripartite structure, is clearly Freudian. Although that might be evident, it is worth paying attention to the structure and concepts as well as their background, in that Wollheim’s intent is to make us conscious of how we trace out a pattern of ourselves and our experiences so as to perceive these as coherent. “Leading a life” entails a consciousness of these interactions. Whatever else Freud might have done, he strove to show even the minutest, most banal actions to be legible texts capable of expressing dimensions of subjectivity that otherwise escape intent or conscious self-awareness. Building from Freud’s premises, Wollheim then makes it clear that the process is determined by the forming and re-forming of relationships, all of which continually change over time and, in part, change because of time.
Of course, most of us are often not conscious of the patterns, tropes, and concepts we use in fashioning a life. In fact, one usually does not pay conscious attention to the fact that a life is continually finding its shape and that any life’s context is not wholly constant. A life just happens, whether anyone pays attention or not. And yet this absence of attention to what a person is continuously doing distances him or her from such processes as Wollheim describes. The actions are unconscious or, perhaps worse, mechanical. I say “worse” because “mechanical” implies that although it is one thing to be biologically human, there is the more complicated matter that being human entails large metaphysical and humanist frames of conceptualizing thought, attention, and volition. Yet lacking the ordinary and everyday elements that are the stuff of living a life, such frames will remain incomplete. These may not be new issues, but they are worth returning to through new points of entry. Art, in its various capacities, and philosophy can offer these points of entry to widened perspectives on the familiar through the paradoxes and complexities they reveal to be present in ordinary experience.
Nearly three hundred pages after he first asks his question in The Thread of Life, Wollheim concludes with the insistence that “for a person, not only is understanding the life he leads intrinsic to leading it, but for much of the time leading his life is, or is mostly, understanding it.”5 I am sympathetic to Wollheim’s questions and his focus on determining what constitutes living and a life, even if I cannot be as confident as he in those final claims about understanding.6 Understanding implies some stable purchase, a thoroughgoing perspective. Yet understanding sounds too conclusive if indeed the process of leading a life is also ongoing. What it means to lead one’s own life continues to change and evolve as experiences accumulate; therefore, a relationship to oneself can never be complete. For that reason and for others, complete or full understanding in any real way is elusive, even if life is that which is most in need of being understood. The relationships that are so central to the process of leading a life never come to rest, so understanding a life can never really be complete. What we can hope for is the recognition that there are patterns—or that we create patterns when we look at the facts, events, and experiences of life.
Whereas Wollheim focuses on the process of living and sees “leading a life” as referring to one’s awareness of these subjective forces that unfold over time, I want to shift the focus somewhat and ask questions about the context within which that process occurs and how one makes that relationship legible to oneself and to others. Discovering that context and how we represent it can reveal how “leading a life” includes not only a conscious relationship to the world within which it occurs but also a consciousness of how we make such a relationship.
It is not lost on me that the passage I just cited provides the last words of Wollheim’s quite magisterial book, a passage intended to drive home its authoritative tendencies. Yet, aside from Wollheim’s gesture toward a definitive conclusion, which may be mostly for the rhetorical flourish of ending the book, Wollheim remains engaged in the argument that leading a life is in reality an activity and that life itself results from that activity. Accordingly, a person is in essence a thing that undergoes a process, a process called living, that results in a life. Perceiving distinctions between the process, the agent, and the product offers a clearer view of what it means to be a self in the flow of time, responding to the world in its part and as a whole. We might think of it as drawing a line. The line appears only through the continuous action of moving the pencil across the page. The length of that line, its character and integrity, is determined only when the pencil lifts up and the drawing is done.
In place of the definitive understanding Wollheim suggests, we might propose a different idea for “understanding life” and say instead that to lead a life means to be active in its processes, self-aware of its motions as one is undertaking them. Such active engagement entails seeing oneself as a thing undergoing (and undertaking) processes that will, taken all in all, lead up to a life. One can strive for attentiveness, so I would like to substitute “examining” for Wollheim’s “understanding.” The attempts to keep focused the awareness and attention so necessary to the process of examining are complementary actions that also require effort. In other words, one needs to be actively engaged as well as working to maintain that engagement lest it lapse. A byproduct of these efforts will be an altered, even deepened, relationship with the most ordinary things around us, as well as a different sense of how these relationships determine the cut of our personhood. To that end, seeking out the potential for meaning in objects and situations of the most banal and daily sort provides opportunities to perpetuate that attention.
The implication of cohesion to life is based on Wollheim’s belief that every part of a person’s life is brought to bear on every aspect of living, which is why it becomes vital to have his ideas present in this discussion of the ordinary. A life coheres even if one’s identity is in flux, and that is how we recognize a continuity of a person’s subjectivity. Wollheim does not want to leave the self as a network of somewhat atomized relationships existing among a subject’s present and various points in the past and in light of its future (particularly in terms of the consciousness of death). Nor does he want to present the self as a collection of discrete experiences, but rather as a whole that holds together across time. The self’s structural integrity arises from an architecture of consciousness in the form of memories, desires, perceptions, and fears. These are ultimately the ways a person imagines himself or herself reflexively. Later, in thinking about film, art, and how marriages are represented on-screen, we will see how those representations, when reflected back to us, create a possibility for self-consciousness that allows for this engagement with how one crafts a relationship to life. Any event or decision involving a person engages all these elements of desire, perception, and so forth, with each response informing all the facts that touch and have touched a life. With any action or decision a person makes, one finds oneself at the center of all these forces. The shape of its becoming what it is, is formed from every action taken or not taken. Life is complete only when the agent, the person, no longer undergoes the process and its attendant transformations. This end of the process is what gives a life its boundaries and is what we call death.
I want to call to mind Wollheim’s question—“What is it to lead the life of a person?”—and its contexts and turn these toward an exploration of an everyday domain rather than a strictly theoretical discussion because just that question is at the heart of thinking about the ordinary. Wollheim’s terms, with some adjustments, and the concepts on which they depend can help provide the means for discussing the structure of the ordinary as a relationship between the self, its environment, and its experiences. The ordinary is the ongoing situation of a life, the context within which living is located, and to think about the ordinary means calling on a range of fields, discourses, and approaches because the ordinary is so varied. The ordinary recedes from thought because it is everywhere. The ordinary is not life in extremis but the opposite of this, and so feels, in its untrammeled ways rather, even definitively, unremarkable. That does not make it trivial, however.7
Leading a life depends on a perpetual process of negotiations between experience and understanding. The context that is the most relevant to leading a life is the one that is often the most overlooked: the ordinary. We might refer to the ordinary as the “invisible context.” One’s memories and desires and experiences are shaped by extraordinary occurrences, of course, but these are far outweighed by the ordinary ones, the events, encounters, and choices so familiar that we do not notice them as decisions or situations or experiences. Yet, just because these conditions and happenings occur beneath our level of conscious attention does not mean that they do not have some bearing on the process of leading a life. Opportunities for insight come in the most unexpected places, arriving as occasions and instances that might seem, at first glance, inconsequential. To overlook the ordinary, however, is to deny its potential to reveal the shape of human lives. To turn toward the ordinary and look at its role in one’s thinking is not to ask the grandly philosophical “how shall I live my life?” but rather to ask, “what is the life I am leading?”
To say more about the context of the ordinary, the everyday domain, I turn now to one of Wollheim’s contemporaries, Stanley Cavell, whose interest has long been the ordinary. These two philosophers (along with Arthur Danto, to whom I will turn in a subsequent chapter) train their attention on the choices and decisions that occur within daily human lives so as to see how these lead to and reflect a possibility of values. Cavell is an especially useful thinker for these issues because he has so doggedly pursued the claim that philosophy is not outside our daily lives but can be revealed in how we use language in our interactions with others and with the world as a whole, or in its parts. How we might learn to see within the familiarity of daily events, nothing less than a compelling possibility for meaningfulness, is his hope for what philosophy might become.
As a gesture toward a definition of the ordinary, Cavell argues, “the ordinary is discovered not as what is perceptually missable but as what is intellectually dismissable, not what may be but what must be set aside if philosophy’s aspirations to knowledge are to be satisfied.”8 Cavell gives us some idea of how part of what defines the ordinary is not only its seeming lack of urgency, but also that traditionally it has been seen as having no bearing on higher philosophical concepts. Cavell calls this “philosophy’s disparagement of, or its disappointment with, the ordinary.” Within such disappointment, everyday situations and events are set to the side as unimportant, according to what Cavell says in the passage I have cited, and therefore philosophy does not extend to the ordinary. Philosophy is so often brought to bear on limit situations and the sublime edge of justice, ethics, aesthetics, and ontology, while not necessarily tracing the presence of these questions in daily life and how the concepts shape perceptions of experience. No less a figure than Bertrand Russell voices the type of stance that so frustrates Cavell when Russell insists that “philosophy is merely the attempt to answer such ultimate questions, not carelessly and dogmatically, as we do in ordinary life and even in the sciences, but critically, after exploring all that makes such questions puzzling, and after realizing all the vagueness and confusion that underlie our ordinary ideas.”9 Within Russell’s sketch, what room is there for the everyday, then, existing as it does outside the “ultimate”? It cannot be, Cavell wants to insist, that the ordinary is actually without a space for questions. And yet there is a paradox involved in finding the space. If we stop to ask these questions—there is room for choice, of course—we risk transforming the ordinary into something else, deferring any escape and, in effect, continuing to perpetuate an alienating philosophical discourse.
By its very nature, the ordinary is not troubling. It makes no demands and no active claims for attention. In other words, there is no place to lay one’s attention, or a reason to do so. Philosophy, so the argument would follow, at least in its traditions and conventions, has a blind spot as big as daily experiences. That limitation constitutes the reason why Cavell has directed so much effort to finding alternative models of philosophy—such as those practiced by Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson—or finding surprising sites for philosophical questions, as in old movies or in the very language we use to express ourselves rather than that specialized discourse to which analytical philosophy, as a field, is so often given over.
Cavell has sought to move away from the analyses of logical propositions because he feels that such language is outside the flow of experience.10 Much of what he means by “ordinary” is balanced against those particular abstractions. He also seeks to avoid the tendency toward systematic thought so as to be able to approach language in its most at-hand contexts and on its own terms, with its own terms. In this way, Cavell seeks an alternative language for undertaking philosophy in order to liberate people’s lives. Changing perspective and seeking alternative routes for how philosophy might be done makes it available to thought or even wonder. Or, as William James extends the notion, “Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again.” He goes on to add, “It rouses us from our native ‘dogmatic slumber’ and breaks up our caked prejudices.”11 James’s undeniable Romanticism, inherited to some extent by Cavell, justifies looking at philosophy’s boundaries in order to reopen them in a way that lets thought and everyday life intertwine.12
As I mentioned earlier, Cavell’s subjects include everything from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays to television to Fred Astaire’s dance sequences—the sorts of things to which philosophers traditionally would not give their time. For more than a century, Emerson’s writing, for example, had been considered simply too literary to be regarded as a form of philosophy, and Astaire’s dancing or Hollywood movies were taken as subjects too common or popular to be points of entry for philosophical engagement. Over time, some of these attitudes have evolved. The search for alternatives to traditional forms of doing philosophy represents a frustration with the conventional discourse of philosophy. To address limitations of discourse, it becomes necessary to seek unconventional ways of approaching issues that have bearing on people’s lives in direct ways. These alternatives make it possible for people to bring key questions to bear on the things around them—questions such as who am I? What does it mean to live a life of my own?—and enable a philosophical comportment to do so. In short, it gives a person the opportunity to trace what Wollheim calls “the interactions between [a person’s] mental dispositions and his [or her] mental states” in connection to the objects and situations he or she confronts on a daily basis, and not simply in personal experiences but also in regard to a shared context of the everyday.
The ordinary, Cavell insists, still needs to be discovered by philosophy. In part, its place within a philosophical register needs to be established. This discovery requires first noticing what it is we overlook and then investigating how we look at things, asking, for instance, why do we miss what we miss? Why do we see what we see? Cavell has also suggested that to be able to hear the call of what otherwise might remain “dismissable,” attunement, or a discerning and active attention to the various elements of the experience of what we describe as ordinary, needs to be cultivated. The bandwidth of ...