Abstract
The key form of spontaneity for everyday life is “working,” that pursuit of projects through bodily movement, centered about my self as the 0-point of all my coordinates, operating on various levels from the simplest bodily movement to higher level projects, and exercising mastery through typified patterns by which I have the recurrent sense that “I can do it again.” The pragmatic self, though, runs up against imposed relevances, such as death, ageing, or illness and other upsetting powers, events, or persons that disrupt my ability to master my situation and that require me to resort to my scheme of relevances, or intrinsic relevances, which are modified or adapted or called upon to provide interpretation in the face of such disruptions. Often to protect what they have already achieved and mastered and what is satisfying to their current relevance schemes, individuals or groups can resort to legitimate projects of “hyper-mastery,” such as constructing security mechanisms to protect against terrorism or defense-mechanisms to cope with potential personal risks. These projects of hyper-mastery can easily result in heightened and crippling anxieties or social pathologies—from which, so the rest of this book will argue—religion and humor can emancipate us.
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Notes
- 1.
For the rest of this book, all italics in any citation are those of the author of the citation.
- 2.
On a level that is not that of hyper-mastery and individual, one can imagine diseased sets of intrinsic relevances that people develop to come to terms with imposed relevances. For example, if parents by their child-rearing induced in a child neurotic patterns of action, one can spend a lifetime trying to take vengeance on his or her parents as a way of coming to terms with the imposed relevances the parents have given the child to cope with. One could spend years recalling what they did, despising them, discrediting them whenever possible—and of course, to borrow from Nietzsche, depicting oneself as utterly moral and right in one’s stance against their evil.
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Barber, M. (2017). Pragmatic Everyday Life. In: Religion and Humor as Emancipating Provinces of Meaning. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 91. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62190-6_2
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