“Whitehall From Charing Cross” (ca. 1899) by Herbert Menzies Marshall (Leithauser, 2021)
In his essay “Philosophy and ‘A Complete Appreciation of the Usual’,” Robert Hanna begins with Henry James’s insightful remark that Anthony Trollope’s “great … [and] inestimable merit” as a novelist was “a complete appreciation of the usual.” By “the usual,” in this context, Hanna means pervasive, regularly recurring, or universal events, facts, properties, or structures that are necessary and partially constitutive elements of our essentially embodied rational human condition and the manifestly real world in which we live, and move, and have our being—but which, despite their fundamental nature, are rarely recognized as such, and indeed are generally regarded as banal, obvious, trivial, or unimportant. “The usual” is the constant hum and thrum of our actual everyday existence in the manifestly real world. In Hanna’s opinion, therefore, philosophy should strive to achieve a complete appreciation of “the usual” in this sense. And as cases in point, he focuses on three modes of the usual: (i) sleeping and dreaming, (ii) reading, and (iii) weather. Reading and weather are especially much neglected by philosophers.
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