Appeal and Attitude: Prospects for Ultimate Meaning

1. Appeals

1 one Appeals The Question of Appeals How will we live? With experience we learn that this most basic of questions gets addressed and shaped by particular beings, relations, and events on various scales of complexity. We want to understand the question in order to comport ourselves in it in the best way. An understanding requires a construal of the situation. A construal must be constructed. A construction must start somewhere and in some manner. To philosophize is to seek understanding by starting this construction entirely afresh, openly, as free of prejudice as possible . But there are many ways of starting afresh, depending on which beings, relations, and events seem to require attention. What claims your attention? What is meaningful? If you are in doubt about the meaningfulness of X, with reference to what character and context of X do you determine that X is meaningful? When X and Y are rivals for your attention, on what basis do you respond to X rather than, or more than, Y? We can readily say what you do: you ‘‘value’’ (or ‘‘evaluate’’) them according to criteria implied by your interests. But what do X and Y contribute to that process? And how have past Xs and Ys contributed to the formation of what we are now calling your interests? The central focus of these questions is not on Appeal and Attitude 2 you alone but on what other beings offer you. If we suppose that the questions concern only your own measure of satisfaction or frustration in relation to X and Y, we reduce their normal seriousness; if you insist on construing them in that way, as though nothing were vitally at stake for you in their reality or in the reality of your relationship to them, we find you to be somehow impaired— jaded, cynical, narcissistic, or excessively controlling. A seriousness-impaired interpretation of our issues of attention is unfortunately the norm of the subjectivist modern philosophy of ‘‘value.’’ On this view, complementary to the ‘‘value-free’’ objectivist view of what is available for encounter, beings acquire meaningfulness only when they are picked out, taken over, and formed by the desires, emotions, plans, and cognitive requirements of subjects. Yet it is obviously reasonable to ask how beings themselves capture a subject’s attention. After all, our world is generally more like a colorful bazaar full of invitations to experience than like the grim sort of store where an item will appear only if you specifically request it at the counter. To speak of invitations to experience is to emphasize the possible and actual discontinuities in experience; we allow that beings are not already in our grasp or picked out by our own projection but that in some way they interrupt us, calling us over. They appeal to us. We find ourselves attending to them, or even committing to them, because they are appealing or have appealed to us and not merely because fears or desires are prompting us to keep track of them as means to an ulterior end. We say ‘‘X is appealing’’ or ‘‘X is more appealing than Y’’ to credit X for a power of bringing this about. We say experience of X is ‘‘meaningful’’ (or X ‘‘matters’’) to draw a contrast with purely utilitarian experience in which the distinct character of X plays no essential role, whatever logically discriminable ‘‘meaning’’ X may bear. Following the lead of Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion has recently made telling use of the idea of appeal in his account of supremely meaningful kinds of experience.1 Both thinkers properly emphasize that the subject of appeal does not exercise that mastery of experience that philosophy has typically wanted to establish for the subject. But in reserving appeal for a preeminent appellant, an exceptionally transcendent Other, Levinas and Marion break away from the ordinary worldly level of appealing and thus obscure the footing that their special appeal-events have in worldly life; they miss a chance to give a livelier, more adequately interactive general account of experience that would keep in check philosophy’s tendency to homogenize experience by imposing general meaning requirements (forms, ideas, alterity, givenness); and they miss vital connections in meaningful experience between issues of ideal priority and issues of empirical fact. My aim here is to show a way of deploying the idea of appeal that can lead to a richer and better integrated yield of insight in all these areas. The literal center of appeal-talk is a...