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155 6 S Metaxological Metaphysics and the Equivocity of the Everyday Between Everydayness and the Edge of Eschatology Metaphysics and the Equivocity of the Everyday Philosophers have often looked with diffidence, if not disdain, on everyday life. We like to echo and reecho Socrates’s controvertible claim: The unexamined life is not worth living. Everyday life is blithe in its careless first commitment to living rather than to thought; irritable with speculations not immediately perceived relevant to pressing practical concerns; untroubled about recessed obscurities in its own defining attitudes; undisturbed by the ambiguities of its idiomatic ways of speaking. It gets by, and that is enough for the day, living carelessly with logos, living carelessly without logos. Philosophers have judged this to be the problem, not the solution. As if scalded by this happy stupidity, they have scolded common sense. The contentments of obtuseness are as a goad to them. Again and again they have dreamed of placing univocal precision where daily equivocity otherwise remains in its reign, blithe with itself, uncontested by anything beyond itself. We philosophers must pass from original confusion to terminal exactness. Is this the only way philosophers might appropriately respond to the equivocity of the everyday? Are there less hostile responses? Are metaphysicians fated to live on the flying island of Jonathan Swift’s Laputa, while ordinary people down below keep their feet on the solid ground? Recall, however, that philosophy in the twentieth century has shown its own, more intimate concern with the everyday, whether in the continen- 156  Metaphysics beyond Dialectic tal engagement with the Lebenswelt or in the analytic engagement with the ordinary and its languages. Can we be philosophical friends of doxa? I would describe the recent work of Stanley Rosen as very much concerned with the equivocity of the everyday and the appropriate philosophical response to it. Two recent books, Metaphysics in Ordinary Language and The Elusiveness of the Ordinary, contain essays of high quality that are written with an elegant clarity laced with refreshing wit, admirable in the sweep of their reference to the tradition of philosophy, yet sober in their respect for the moderations of common sense.1 Rosen goes so far as to speak of himself as an “ordinary language metaphysician.” Here is a representative citation: The ordinary is that from which we make our approach to philosophy. It is not at all what Heidegger calls durschnittliche Alltaglichkeit (average everydayness), which is already a denatured residue of the richness of ordinary existence, the mode of life of the anonymous das Man, “one” or “they” in English. Ordinary experience is a question of “I” and “thou.” It is therefore also not the Husserlian Lebenswelt, a kind of Kantian transcendental structure occupied by ghosts whose speeches and deeds are described in a vocabulary that abstracts from the psychic affects of emotion, value, and doctrinal conviction by which everyday life is in fact characterized. In short, ordinary life is not a kind of pallid or denatured existence, set off against more luxuriant and virile modes of experience. It is human existence in all its richness and complexity, and so it is not a Gedankending or artificial construction of a philosophical or scientific theory.2 I would say that everyday life too is a participation in the intimate strangeness of being, no less intimate or strange for the fact that ordinarily we do not make our participation in being a matter of more reflec1 . Metaphysics in Ordinary Language (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999); The Elusiveness of the Ordinary: Studies in the Possibility of Philosophy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002). Rosen is refreshingly free of the fashionable cant and intellectual idolatry attending some of the tin gods of contemporary culture. See the last chapter of Metaphysics in Ordinary Language, “Kojève’s Paris: A Memoir.” This is a little gem that offers us an engagingly opinionated view of encounters with the perhaps ordinary lives of some more than ordinary thinkers. It records Rosen’s meetings with, and impressions of, many intellectual eminences of France in the early 1960s, including among others Koyré, Marcel, and Aron. It is witty and perceptive, conveying an atmosphere as well as a response. It gives us some sharply deflationary evaluations (I think of his remarks on Lacan), but there is also much praise and respect. The memoir offers us an honest assessment of Kojève. See Hermeneutics as Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 2. The Elusiveness of the Ordinary, 296. [3.133...

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