Abstract
The quest for orientation emerges out of our ordinary, non-methodic experience of having to consciously lead a life. Ordinary experience is holistic, has a qualitative character, is deeply embodied, and at the same time, able to transcend local situations. It is embedded in action and primarily interested in the meaning facts and events have for the life of the experiencing subjects. Meaning is instantiated when the self is attracted to something which it experiences as having independent value.
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- 1.
It is true that some Romantics, like the late Clemens Brentano, succumbed to the temptation of irrationalism. Johann Gottfried Herder, however, regarded by Pinker (2018, 351) as an example of plain irrationalism, is another case: his criticism of Immanuel Kant, for example, entails important insights which should be read, not as irrationalism, but as a contribution to rational self-criticism, that is to very same project Kant pursued in his Critique of Pure Reason.
- 2.
Charles Peirce, though, does not fit well into this picture. His emphatic concept of experience was modeled on science, and he did not exhibit Dewey’s, Mead’s and James’s respect for ordinary people and their experiences.
- 3.
Even for Dewey himself, the case of science is special. In science, only educated experts should have their say. But scientific experience is only a part of the larger hole, and as soon as it comes to integrating scientific knowledge into questions of value and meaning, democratic participation of “the common man” becomes crucial.
- 4.
This is true despite the fact that towards the end of his life he despaired about the misunderstandings of his concept of experience and contemplated substituting it with “culture” (cf. Dewey’s re-introduction to his 1925 book Experience and Nature from 1948, Dewey 1925/2008, 361)—a conceptual move which doubtless would have invited other, no less severe, misunderstandings.
- 5.
To be sure, the rediscovery of ordinary experience already has a long, prestigious and diverse history. To mention only the most prominent positions in the twentieth century, Husserl’s and Heidegger’s emphasis on the “Lebenswelt,” the late Wittgenstein’s interest in ordinary language (and the ensuing speech act philosophy), the pragmatist’s focus on common sense and ordinary action have essentially contributed to it. I am deeply indebted to these thinkers and hope that my own emphasis on ordinary experience as the common ground for both science and religions or worldviews will further contribute to the richness and fruitfulness of the concept.—For the most part, my presentation will follow the one given in my book Gewöhnliche Erfahrung (Jung 2014).
- 6.
Actually, things are more complicated than that: in science, the holism of ordinary experience is not so much bracketed as modified in order to serve exclusively cognitive purposes. Scientists still need emotional assessments in order to get direction for their research and they use their willpower to conduct experiments.
- 7.
In a seminal essay titled “Qualitative Thought,” John Dewey has elaborated the basic idea in much more detail than it is possible here (cf. Dewey 1930/1998).
- 8.
It is important to see that “meaningfulness” here is used in way that is neutral pertaining to the distinction between positive and negative meaning. If, for example somebody experiences a devastating loss, the unifying quality of the situation will be charged with meaningfulness, albeit an entirely negative one.
- 9.
Cf. for example John Locke in his famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689/1975, 143): “[…] in bare naked Perception , the mind is, for the most part, only passive; and what it perceives, it cannot avoid perceiving.”
- 10.
Here once again, I follow the argument of Stephen Toulmin as already explained above.
- 11.
Psychotherapy (most notably Victor E. Frankl’s logotherapy) has generally been better in acknowledging the importance of meaning than philosophy.
- 12.
This radical de-anthropomorphization, as we have seen, pertains to scientific objects. For the process of doing science, social meanings and values nevertheless continue to play a crucial role.
- 13.
To avoid confusion: Wolf uses the term “values” in a very comprehensive sense comprising individual preferences, socially shared values, and normative obligations. Thus, meaningfulness is “a third sort of value a life can possess” (Wolf 2010, 3) and “activities, projects, or actions may be valuable in some way without being valuable in a way that contributes to meaningfulness” (ibid., 42). I would rather, following Hans Joas (1996), draw a clear distinction between preferences, norms, and values, and reserve the letter term (and the corresponding “valuable”) for emotionally attractive, but also articulated and reflective beliefs about what is actually worthwhile and desirable.
- 14.
Wolf rejects a Platonic reading of objectivity about values explicitly (cf. Wolf 2010, 45) and argues for a weaker understanding, one that focuses on the possibility to be wrong about values and their meaning as the main content of objectivity. One can, for example, be wrong in attributing meaning or one can mistake a, in her terminology, “objectively” meaningful activity as actually meaningless. Her fitting example: “Bob Dylan’s mother thinking her son was wasting his time messing around with that guitar” (ibid., 44).
- 15.
Wolf is keenly aware that it would be fatal for her position to be considered as paternalistic or elitist (cf. ibid., 39f.). For this reason, she emphasizes that the point of her insistence in an “objective” dimension of value is not to “produce a meaningfulness scale for ranking lives” (ibid.), but rather to point to the logic of meaning and initiate a discussion about it.
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Jung, M. (2019). Rediscovering the Importance of Ordinary Experience. In: Science, Humanism, and Religion. Studies in Humanism and Atheism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21492-0_4
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