Overview
- Original description of pragmatic everyday life through intrinsic/imposed relevances, hyper-mastery, individual anxiety, social pathology, and emancipation via non-pragmatic provinces of meaning
- First book tracing dialectic between working and non-pragmatic finite provinces in Schutz
- First book developing the six features of the cognitive style of religious/humorous provinces
- Original in presenting the religious “appresentative mindset,” integrating other disciplines, and showing applicability of Schutzian/phenomenological thought to concrete experience
Part of the book series: Contributions to Phenomenology (CTPH, volume 91)
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (10 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Pragmatic Mastery and Its Nemeses: A Dialectic
-
Front Matter
-
-
The Finite Province of Religious Meaning
-
Front Matter
-
-
The Finite Province of Meaning of Humor
-
Front Matter
-
-
Conclusion
-
Front Matter
-
-
Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book illustrates how non-pragmatic finite provinces of meaning emancipate one from pragmatic everyday pressures. Barber portrays everyday life originally, as including the interplay between intrinsic and imposed relevances, the unavoidable pursuit of pragmatic mastery, and the resulting tensions non-pragmatic provinces can relieve. But individuals and groups also inevitably resort to meta-level strategies of hyper-mastery to protect set ways of satisfying lower-level relevances—strategies that easily augment individual anxiety and social pathologies.
After creatively interpreting the Schutzian dialectic between the world of working and non-pragmatic provinces, Barber describes the experience of reality in the finite provinces of religion and humor. Schutz, who only mentioned these provinces, laid out the six features of the cognitive style that characterize any finite province of meaning. This book is the first to follow up on these suggestions and depict two newfinite provinces of meaning beyond those in “On Multiple Realities.” While entrance into these provinces reduces everyday life tensions, it does not suffice since pragmatic relevances infiltrate the provinces, as when one uses humor to belittle competing cultural groups or one deploys religion only as an instrument to ensure crop productivity. Instead, liberation from anxieties and pathologies is brought to completion when the ego agens, the 0-point of all its coordinates, discovers its value in relation to the transcendent, even if it fails to realize its pragmatic purposes, or when one becomes comical to oneself through the eyes of another different from oneself.
This book, aimed at advanced undergraduate, graduate, or scholarly audiences, presents stimulating analyses of the religious “appresentative mindset” or of the healing potential of interracial humor. Drawing heavily on interdisciplinary resources, the book also illustrates the relevance of phenomenological methods and concepts for concrete human experience. Barber offers a fresh understanding of pragmatic everyday life, original descriptions of the religious and humorous provinces of meaning, and a picture of how the overarching intentional stances of meaning-provinces, along with exposure to another perspective, can diminish the pressures everyday life engenders.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Religion and Humor as Emancipating Provinces of Meaning
Authors: Michael Barber
Series Title: Contributions to Phenomenology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62190-6
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer International Publishing AG 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-62189-0Published: 04 August 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-87252-0Published: 07 August 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-62190-6Published: 26 July 2017
Series ISSN: 0923-9545
Series E-ISSN: 2215-1915
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 231
Topics: Phenomenology, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of the Social Sciences