One of my readers commented not long ago that, in my writing, I often draw attention to everyday phenomena which we take so much for granted that we hardly notice them, let alone question or challenge them. It’s a bit like not being able to see the air we breathe, or even not being aware of breathing.
For example, in this blog I often draw attention to everyday examples of the barely noticed in organisational life, such as the way many people run conferences without questioning common habits, even when they aren't particularly effective.
Or here is another example from a conversation with a psychotherapist friend of mine: when I used the word ‘intersubjective’, he asked me what I meant. I tried to articulate why it was such an important word to me because it points to the way in which we are constantly creating our world together through our conversations and other interactions; so for me nothing we say is, strictly speaking, either subjective or objective. Indeed, the assumption that any observation must be either subjective or objective provides us with a small clue about taken-for-granted thinking in our society.
In recent years I have become aware of a whole body of literature that speaks to this unnoticed background to our lives. For example, over his lifetime, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu came to distance himself from the notion that the true nature of the social world lies behind or beneath the world of appearance – that it is only to be found in some kind of 'structure' (hence the term structuralism). And in his writing he used the term “habitus” to refer to the unseen ways in which we naturally classify the world, depending on the milieu we find ourselves in.
Similarly, Henri Bortoft, in his book Taking Appearance Seriously, lays out how, over the centuries, modern science developed in a way that moved us away from experiential knowledge and towards theoretical knowledge, which provides rational explanations about the world. Bortoft acknowledged that scientific explanation has been extraordinarily successful but, he wrote, it has “shifted our attention away from the phenomena themselves”.
Numerous other writers have addressed these questions, including Goethe in the nineteenth century, and the phenomenologists in the twentieth century. They were all inquiring into how we can cultivate our ability to notice our experience. But much of our taken-for-granted thinking and speaking today remains in the thrall of modern science.
Note: the phrase "invisible background" is drawn from Wittgenstein's writings. For more on this, see this article by John Shotter.
Related reading
Henri Bortoft (2012): Taking Appearance Seriously.
Richard Jenkins (1992): Pierre Bourdieu. Revised edition (2002). Routledge.
John Shotter (2015): The “Background” in Wittgenstein and others. Accessible at: www.johnshotter.com/2015/03/21/the-background-in-wittgenstein-and-others/
For example, in this blog I often draw attention to everyday examples of the barely noticed in organisational life, such as the way many people run conferences without questioning common habits, even when they aren't particularly effective.
Or here is another example from a conversation with a psychotherapist friend of mine: when I used the word ‘intersubjective’, he asked me what I meant. I tried to articulate why it was such an important word to me because it points to the way in which we are constantly creating our world together through our conversations and other interactions; so for me nothing we say is, strictly speaking, either subjective or objective. Indeed, the assumption that any observation must be either subjective or objective provides us with a small clue about taken-for-granted thinking in our society.
In recent years I have become aware of a whole body of literature that speaks to this unnoticed background to our lives. For example, over his lifetime, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu came to distance himself from the notion that the true nature of the social world lies behind or beneath the world of appearance – that it is only to be found in some kind of 'structure' (hence the term structuralism). And in his writing he used the term “habitus” to refer to the unseen ways in which we naturally classify the world, depending on the milieu we find ourselves in.
Similarly, Henri Bortoft, in his book Taking Appearance Seriously, lays out how, over the centuries, modern science developed in a way that moved us away from experiential knowledge and towards theoretical knowledge, which provides rational explanations about the world. Bortoft acknowledged that scientific explanation has been extraordinarily successful but, he wrote, it has “shifted our attention away from the phenomena themselves”.
Numerous other writers have addressed these questions, including Goethe in the nineteenth century, and the phenomenologists in the twentieth century. They were all inquiring into how we can cultivate our ability to notice our experience. But much of our taken-for-granted thinking and speaking today remains in the thrall of modern science.
Note: the phrase "invisible background" is drawn from Wittgenstein's writings. For more on this, see this article by John Shotter.
Related reading
Henri Bortoft (2012): Taking Appearance Seriously.
Richard Jenkins (1992): Pierre Bourdieu. Revised edition (2002). Routledge.
John Shotter (2015): The “Background” in Wittgenstein and others. Accessible at: www.johnshotter.com/2015/03/21/the-background-in-wittgenstein-and-others/
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