Encounters with the Good: A Phenomenology of the Ideal (2022 - 2023)

Abstract: Encounters with the Good: A Phenomenology of the Ideal

and there it is again –
beauty the brave, the exemplary, blazing open.
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?
- Mary Oliver

What it is like to encounter instances of perfection or ideality – manifestations of the true, the good, or the beautiful? How do such events blaze open and make us love the world, despite its many terrors?

In my most recent book, Existential Flourishing: A Phenomenology of the Virtues (2019), I argued that three distinct normative categories govern practical agency: the first-person perspective through which projects of self-fulfilment and self-realisation strike us as good, the second-person perspective, through which we are moved to help others become themselves, and the third-person perspective, through which the goodness of a shared world makes a claim on us. Throughout that book I refer to such manifestations of the normative as modes or types of claim, and speak broadly of practical reason as a kind of sensitivity to these claims; a skill or capacity through which we encounter and successfully respond to the different ways that things show up as better or worse. This kind of normative sensitivity is not to do solely with the ‘right’ or the ‘rational’ – a phenomenology of the ‘ought’, as some suggest (Levy 2019) – but rather with any of the ways that something strikes us as good.

My new research project expands on the question of how such normative ‘claims’ take different forms, with a particular focus on examining the nature of the experience of the normative ideal. Can we understand the language of ‘claim’ and ‘practical reason’ in a way that does not reduce such ideality to mundane practical considerations about who wants what and how to get it? While some normative claims are clearly prosaic instrumental demands, experiences of the ideal do not fit this model; they transcend and challenge such instrumental concerns. So while Existential Flourishing used the language of ‘claim’ and ‘demand’ as a general stand-in for the huge diversity of ways in which we can experience the sense of something being better or best or to-be-done, my new research analyses one particular kind of normative experience: the experience of the ideal or the exemplary; not simply the better, but the best.

An implicit recognition that we must be capable of encountering and being moved by such manifestations of the ideal underwrites value theory, though the nature of that encountering is itself rarely examined, except perhaps in certain mystical or religious traditions, or in Romantic poetry. Recent work by Sophie Grace Chappell attempts to fill this gap in the philosophical literature by examining what she names ‘epiphanies’, or transfiguring experiences of exemplary value. Understanding these kinds of transformative encounters with ideality – and the role they play in our moral lives – calls for three avenues of investigation:

Experiencing the Ideal

Questions of method

Implications for agency

This research programme is aimed at giving a central place to transfiguring experiences of exemplary value to our moral theories. It does so by thinking seriously about the paradoxes presented by these experiences: how they are both radically passive and profoundly motivating; how they take one outside of oneself and yet help one become more fully who one is; how they manifest as more fully real than other experiences, and yet resist our ability to know or categorise them.

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