proximality and everydayness • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Project	proximal cohering of ordinary life

	proximality and everydayness gary e. davis	August 16, 2023

Everyday life is usually beyond articulate capture because living is rarely cohered as a notion of “everyday life,” save among artists or academics.

Nonetheless, the media market thrives on appealing to ordinary days, one way
or another, especially by wanting to keep “eyeballs” available for advertising (“human interest” stories).

We may learn a lot from that, of course; and it’s entertaining (which editors ensure). One often wants to casually entertain what’s entertaining without chal-lenging one’s understanding—which often becomes addictive streaming for stress-filled lives (“without a paddle”).

I won’t belabor the trite point. I love my ordinary days. Dailiness can be enthrall-
ing, maybe art, and inspire aesthetics.

I’m fascinated by begenic efficacy of individuation shaping one’s “lifeworld” into feasible self/[inter]personal differentiation, which can be vital for mental health in complex lives, but often doesn’t individuate well because belonging well in bonds of neighborliness and mindfulness can become quite complex. That’s why the phenomenological literature on “lifeworld” (as such) derived from work which was “existential,” which just means life-al.

So, inquiry into conceptuality best begins where conceptuality itself begins: begenic individuation of a sensibility, partly inasmuch as that can tenably be about any sensibility; but all sensibility belongs to a life which is individuated. Conceptuality as such is always, in principle, relative to an individuation of implicit conceptuality.

One’s capability for conceptuality may remain able to stay open, such that indiv-
iduation of conceivability isn’t unduly constrained by given conceptability (rel-ative to interest in discovery), but rather individuation stays open to furthering capability for conceptuality, possibly in originary ways, which only later concept-
ualizes its originariness (e.g., in emergent research paradigm transitions).

But that’s far beyond any proximal conception of conceptuality. Even interest in proximal conceptuality is beyond the implicit, pre-reflective conceptuality of everyday life. In any event, appreciating that conceptuality is relative to individ-
uation entails that understanding is always potentially still individuating (a life welcoming that learning may never end), such that an ordinary concept tropes
its living condition of temporality: being implicitly futural, then genealogically articulable.

Conceptuality is integrally tropical. Conceptual inquiry is, to my mind, integrally philological.

next—> acting in ordinary attitude