Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [108]
Against the conventional view that we simply live through time as disconnected observers (like an audience at a concert that will go on regardless of whether this or that audience member leaves or never shows up), most of these philosophers insist very differently that temporality is the very fabric or foundation of our experience that has made us who we are. Heidegger’s student Hans-Georg Gadamer, for example, introduced the concept of “historically affected consciousness” to capture the way that our awareness is determined by our specific pasts. “I want to say,” Gadamer wrote in his classic Truth and Method, “that our consciousness is really historically determined, that is . . . determined by real events rather than left on its own to float free over the past.” But this doesn’t mean our consciousness is fully controlled by events or epochs (such as those dividing Chopin’s exile from his earlier life in Poland), because we can develop an understanding of this “historically effected consciousness” itself and become conscious of the way time works on our understanding: “On the other hand, I want to say that it is important to produce within ourselves a consciousness of this operativeness” (Truth and Method, 1972, p. 238)
Heidegger placed less emphasis on history and more on the phenomenological significance of the human body. All our experience, while particular and unique among individuals, possesses certain structural necessities arising from the fact that we are embodied. Having a body or, better, being a body is one fundamental fact that we cannot escape in this human existence. Having a body itself has several ramifications. We experience things through our body—even ideas are experienced in reference to the understanding we all have of our unique selves as possessing this particular body. For example, we imagine ourselves trying to accomplish something for the first time, say playing a musical instrument. We imagine our clumsy, untrained hands fumbling for the keys or strings. It is not some ideal body we imagine, but our own unique body with all its incapacities and abilities.
By combining the structural necessities of our body with the passage of time, Heidegger as well as Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasize the rhythmic qualities of daily life. Every morning we rise from slumber and begin going through the paces of our day. These days have a regular rhythm marked by things like rising and brewing coffee, walking dogs, taking showers, preparing for work, packing a suitcase, finishing homework, greeting our families, and downloading In Rainbows. The redundancy and regularity of these activities establishes a rhythm and unity that we guide our lives by. Merleau-Pointy points out, in his major work The Phenomenology of Perception, that the body is “a nexus of living meaning” and that our habits “enable us to understand the general synthesis of our own body” (Phenomenology of Perception, 1962, p. 175). The redundancy of our habits and the rhythm of our embodied lives are found in the interconnections of our bodily activities and these provide us with a sense of unity to our lives.
One danger that both these philosophers and musicians like Chopin and Radiohead speak to is the way that we can become insensitive to these rhythms and find each day similar to the next. Obviously, there are deviations and extraordinary events. But these are exceptions to the pulse of life in which we find ourselves. According to Heidegger, our ordinary lives are characterized as a slipping into everydayness. In everydayness days bleed into days, months into months, and years into years. No longer are our lives unified, but in the most superficial way of the seemingly endless succession of moments. The danger involved in