ordinary attitude • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Project	proximal cohering of ordinary life

	acting in ordinary attitude gary e. davis	August 17, 2023

Ordinary attitude is frameless. There’s no “phenomenality” as such. There are persons, things, scenes, etc., as they “are” (just that).

Though phenomenality may be a primary focus for analysis, that’s distanced from distance-less, frameless ordinary life. Relative to ordinary life, a phenomenality of anything is an abstraction.

An abstract stance toward phenomenality as such (e.g., interest in variable cate-
goriality of phenomena) is doubly abstracted from ordinary, proximal framing of “things” within a moment, context, situation, recognized consequences, preceding motives, etc. A focus on phenomenality may lead to notions of non-aware en-
framing (i.e., forgotten actions which framed), but proximal senses of framing are ordinarily absent.

Momentary action “has“ context, but realizing that isn’t ordinarily given attention. Likewise with there being situation, which is more than context, because con-
texted actions are nearly always part of a set of actions in a given situation, each action having an action-relative context or—I prefer—action-oriental context: Preceding intent which gives action a point is the context prevailing over relevant setting, anticipated consequences, assumptions, etc.

But ordinarily, the character of action is nebulous.

Though a situation of action is always a scene, that’s not realized ordinarily: “Something happens,” something’s done. But taking a moment to think back
likely feels like “I didn’t make a scene.“ No sense of extra-ordinarilness, no
drama, no scene.

Really, though, a scene belongs to every observable action, and also belongs to unobserved self-reflection, which has its private scenicness, since reflection is self- observational, in the interest of enlightening self disclosure. (The hyphen,
to me, pertains to recursivity; lack of hyphen pertains to the selfness which reflection serves.)

Actually, there’s a redundancy about phenomenality as such: What’s the pheno-
menality of seeing “you“ other than merely seeing you?—phenomenality of a tree other than there being a tree? One could abstract from the seeing, but that doesn’t enhance the seeing. It signals analytical interest. Relative to that, seeing as such can rightly be regarded as a deflationary sense of phenomenality: Ordinarily, there’s no phenomenality of the person, event, or thing. For ordinary life, there being the person, event, or thing itself is being there. Enough said about enough experienced.

Practical abstraction is themic rather than (or, at least, more than) phenomenal-
ization. A given context was a situation; a situation was a scene, but do we add anything interesting to a context by saying that a context was phenomenal?
(It may have been startling, thus “phenomenal,“ in that sense of ’phenomenal‘).

Every scene’s a little drama; but ordinarily, one doesn’t see that. Proximal lack
of drama is a kind of dramactionality of staying ordinary.

That’s a premise of dramatists, of course: dramactionality is everywhere, and also for reporters: The “story“ happened, and it’s notable. Or someone sought to “control the narrative“ which allegedly accounts for an otherwise incriminating event.

All in all, one ordinarily wants assurance that the world generally coheres favor-
ably for the sake of sustaining coherence of one’s externalist attitudes, relative to which one may secure cohering of one’s internal life, i.e., secure psychal cohering (a holistic notion of individuational mentability). Or conversely, securing one’s sense of external cohering is relative to secured internalist attitudes of one’s life. The two dispositions are usefully distinguished as sociocentric psychality (externalist) and autonomous psychality (internalist).

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