I. The familiar as appearance

I begin with Hegel's description and analysis of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch painting (from the Hotho transcripts) for two reasons: first, the passage exhibits a set of interrelated, yet distinct, general dimensions of the concept of the familiar; and second, it displays, in paradoxical form, the limitation of the shape of the familiar it sketches out—paradoxical, in so far as Hegel draws attention to a constitutive feature of the familiar, but does not explore it at any deeper level. Here is Hegel's description:

The epoch of painting is born, at the level of form and content, by a turn to presence. Dutch painting is a moment in which this turn is articulated in a highly developed way. Presence, or ‘present existence’, is, in truth, a turn inward. It expresses subjective self-recognition; and such self-recognition finds its most idealized point of artistic and conceptual manifestation in the pictorial language of the familiar. The latter is the world of well-known, everyday objects: ‘flowers, deer’ and ‘an old woman […] threading a needle’. Yet, Hegel immediately adds an interesting qualifier to this highly standardized notion of the familiar (viz. that the familiar is embodied in familiar things): the familiar consists of ‘things we all of course have seen before’.Footnote ⁸

What is so striking about this phrase is the deeper sense of the familiar it stages, a sense that takes us beyond the seemingly self-evident meaning of the expression. Familiar things are well-known to us, but they are also things that are crystallizations of things already seen. The familiar, then, is a kind of continuous absorption of accumulated vision internalized by thinking as a thing always already known and thus progressively unseen. I will come to the contradictory logic of this sense of the familiar shortly. For now, it is important to note that the familiar, as the realm of everyday things, is a context in which consciousness and its ethical life—‘ordinary actuality’—is satisfied. The familiar operates in Hegel's description an image of a comfortable world in which we no longer experience ourselves (somatically and cognitively) as the site of bifurcations, divisions and tensions (that is, as modern) but are, rather, in a state of quietude, fully reconciled with ourselves in our given socio-historical context. In other words, the familiar is a tableau in which we are at home—or, more precisely put, an image in which the ‘we’ of ethical substance appears in a state of congenial repose.

And yet, this homeliness of the familiar, which is formally implied in Dutch painting, is only one artistic aspect of the familiar. As an expression of satisfied social life, the familiar functions as a kind of congealment of aggregated experience, so much so, in fact, that the familiar could be said to recede from our critical, reflective and analytic perception. It is at this point that the phenomenological genius of Dutch painting is philosophically clarified according to Hegel's exposition. What appears in Dutch painting is the structure of the appearance of appearing itself. Dutch painting achieved this odd, almost tautological operation, precisely by painting those objects that appear to us as familiar, and, therefore, are those things that recede from reflection. Hegel stresses the latter point by noting that ‘the objects themselves are not the concern’. This judgement is not, however, one developed by a connoisseurial consciousness that stands outside paintings. The devaluation of the particularity of objects is an immanent dimension of the way in which the pictorial ideology of Dutch painting functions at the very level of form. By rendering the supersaturated experience of the everyday things of life visible, Dutch painting articulates a perspective through which appearance itself is formally registered and thus presented for philosophical reflection and comprehension.

This ideological function produces an interesting contradiction. Appearance appears only by way of that which is excessively visible and, therefore, that which is invisible on account of it having been seen ad nauseum. This contradiction is recoded at the level of appearance itself and the attention to Dutch painting yields its precise dialectical logic: appearance is the singular process of appearance and disappearance; or, more precisely, of appearance as simultaneously the appearance of appearance and disappearance. I understand this contradiction to be the core of Hegel's beautiful judgement of Dutch painting as a pictorial practice in which ‘appearing is intensified within itself’. What is of interest for painting (viz. appearing) is brought to the surface of painting by way of what is assumed to be of no interest (the everyday stuff of familiar experience). Or, to note another important phrase from the passage, this contradiction of the rendering apparent of appearance as the dialectical relation of appearance and disappearance consists of the ‘[capturing of] something quite ephemeral and [fixing] it in time’. Appearance is what appears as ephemeral, or passing away (and thus in the process of disappearing), and the appearance—the giving form—of the cessation of the pure, abstract negativity of disappearance.Footnote ⁹

We have now two conceptions of the familiar that are sketched out in the passage, albeit in broad strokes: first, the familiar is what appears, at the level of immediacy, as what is most-known—this is manifest principally in the form of everyday objects; second, this initial sense of the familiar collapses on itself and yields a subtle dialectical contradiction immanent to appearance—appearance is the process of appearance and disappearance. There is a third notion of the familiar that I believe can be extracted from the passage: the familiar as the social-ethical substance of a given present.

It is clear from Hegel's description that one of the merits of Dutch painting is that it depicts social life in its actuality—that is to say, in its present. Put another way, one could say, reconfiguring a memorable line from the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Dutch painting is orientated by the attempt to grasp its own time at the level of artistic form. This orientation is grounded on the giving form of the present as familiar—not only as objects (‘flowers, deer’) but equally in the form of social practices. Recall, for example, Hegel's sarcastic conflation of ‘vital’ life with an elderly seamstress. More importantly, this focus on practices is a central dimension of Hegel's historical judgement of the freedom of Dutch life. The latter is fully actualized by ‘civic virtue and Protestant piety’ and not the slavish obedience to the tyrannical laws of the papacy. To be sure, Dutch history is for Hegel the story of the triumph of Protestant life over Catholic hegemony. This is a remarkably restricted and instrumentalized narrative—one that excludes many socio-political and economic processes.

Hegel does not, for example, draw attention to Dutch mercantilism and colonialism that is so central to their ‘ethical life’ and was a distinctive feature since the sixteenth century (Holland abolished slavery in its colonies in the mid-1860s—the last European nation to do so).Footnote ¹⁰ The ‘present existence’ of Dutch life represented in Dutch paintings, as explored by Hegel, operates as an appearance in the strong ideological sense: that is, an illusion that dissimulates, through misrepresentations, the base mechanisms that determine, in the last instance, superstructural cultural practices (‘virtue’ and ‘piety’).Footnote ¹¹ The ideological (mis)representation of self-satisfied ethical life in mercantilist Protestant Holland is an image of the present made familiar through everyday social practices. The present qua familiar is life itself in repose. We are back at home, so to speak, but this time we are the subjects—through our life practices—of our homely dwelling (since we are the subjects of our own calm, measured, quotidian activities). Domesticity is no longer restricted to the level of an image, but it is a collection of interconnected practices that produce and reproduce the life of the subject and its self-understanding.

Not only does the familiar appear as a congealment of accumulated vision in objects and the rendering visible of the process of appearance as a self-negating, contradictory one, but it also registers, albeit in a highly generalized form, the ensemble of social practices that constitute a given social formation. Yet, these three senses of the familiar are only implied in the passage and, more importantly, are posited as if fully liberated from the social mechanisms that make certain objects experientially available as familiar (it is unsurprising that Hegel takes note of ‘flowers’ as a familiar object in Holland: the Tulip industry was an extremely lively aspect of economic exchange and expansionism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), and discipline individuals according to regimes or institutions of habituated practices (‘Protestant piety’, for example).Footnote ¹² In other words, what the passage on Dutch painting does not allow us to perceive is the power of the subsumption of individuals by institutional processes in the formation of familiar things and practices. The mediating force of institutionalized forms of living is another constitutive aspect of a Hegelian concept of the familiar, one that arguably runs through Hegel's work right from its earliest conceptions. This focus on institutionalization will defamiliarize the familiar sense of the familiar that is cultivated in the description and analysis of Dutch painting, leading us to inquire into the processes that render possible and intelligible the familiar.

II. The familiar as institutionalized practice

Composed during the year that Hegel finished his studies at the famous Stift in Tübingen, Hegel's fragmented ‘Tübingen Essay’ is significant for the way in which it both signals dimensions of Hegel's more mature philosophical investigations such as, for example, the conflict of classical ethical comportment and the modern categorical imperative of carrying out duty, the conception of ‘positivity’ and, as we shall see later, the phenomenological problem of the self-arrogation of the philosophical standpoint by mere association with philosophical concepts. The essay is of special relevance for our study in that it provides some coordinates for a philosophical construction of Hegel's concept of the familiar even though it does not thematize the notion in any direct way. The familiar is approached implicitly by a focus on the way in which determinate social practices are shaped. Hegel attends to the basic activities that constitute what he refers to as ‘folk religion’ or ‘subjective religion’. As I will show, the familiar is brought into relief by way of a broad analysis of the mechanisms that discipline individuals through the apparatus of a codified, authoritarian regime of corporeal acts—principally, that of prayer. In other words, the familiar is configured primarily through operations that produce and reproduce habituated and institutionalized practices, forcing them to become so internalized that we no longer see them.Footnote ¹³

At first blush, the notes that comprise what is left of the essay are centered on a concentration on the distinction between two forms of religious practice: subjective and objective. The former consists of the ensemble of actions that have their root in the cultivation of a religious sensibility, or feeling, and that manifest in the everyday practical realm. It is a sense of religion, according to Hegel, that is ‘[abstracted] (abstrahierte) absolutely from all scientific or, more precisely, metaphysical knowledge of God, and of our relation to Him, or that of the whole world, etc.’ (MW: 49/1:16). Subjective religion is the vitality of religious life. It is ‘alive, it is effective in the inwardness of our being, and active in our outward behavior’ (MW: 48/1:14).

In contrast to subjective religion, objective religion is, as Hegel puts it, an ‘abstraction’ of religious customs (Abstraktion) rather than ‘abstracted’ from them—by which he means the effect of religious practices subsumed by the force of understanding and conceptualization, and of the conversion of ethical activities to theoretical-theological problematics (the ontology of God, our existential relation to his infinitude, the principles that give us access, or not, to our understanding of Him, etc.).Footnote ¹⁴ Put another way, objective religion is the name of the crystallization of inherited doctrines that are appropriated by individuals and is not, crucially, the strict opposite of subjective religion. Yet, this abstraction is an immanent aspect of subjective religion rather than something outside it. Moreover, the character of the relation of objective religion's immanence to subjective religion is decisively uneven. For Hegel, objective religion is, in truth, ‘only a small and rather ineffective part’ of subjective religion since religious life is only partially the reflection on doctrines that shape the feelings that drive religious comportment (MW: 48/1:14).

A closer interrogation of the Tübingen essay discloses a more precise focus. Hegel's object of inquiry is not ‘what religious doctrines are most appealing to the heart’ but, rather, ‘to inquire what institutions [Anstalten] are requisite in order that the doctrines and the force of religion should enter into the web of human feelings, become associated with human impulses to action, and prove living and active in them’ (MW: 49/1:16). In other words, what Hegel is concerned with is the set of operations and mechanisms that determine religious practice in the emphatic subjective sense. Hegel proposes two forms of ‘institutions’ that produce the feeling embodied in subjective religion: ‘education’ (Erziehung) and ‘culture’ (Bildung) (MW: 49/1:16). Regrettably, these institutions lack any concrete content or specificity in Hegel's essay. That being said, Hegel does offer an important clue to how they function as operations. The clue comes in the form of a description of the disciplining of a child's prayer. The description is converted into an allegory of sorts, recurring as an emblem throughout the text (MW: 49, 55, 62/1:16, 24, 35). The description and the allegory are set out at the very beginning of the text:

The body of the child is shaped by distinctive practices that, through repetition, become powerfully incorporated habits—so much so, in fact, that no comprehension of why those activities either are necessary, or what they mean for the child, is involved. The child is a site of the production of abstract habituation—a pure, indeterminate kind of habit formation in which all that is required is that the young individual blindly obey the rules of action via the mimetic repetition of existing acts.Footnote ¹⁵ Subjective religious experience, that which is promised through internalized and unquestioned practices, is posited in a future point, one that reaches beyond the life of the child. This, of course, means that spiritual feeling is what is to be gained from strict physical observance of a regime of highly codified historical actions in which the authority of the institution is established by the sheer function of its status as a tradition in ethical substance.

Hegel's opening image recalls Blaise Pascal's famous paradoxical conception of the embodied automatization of prayer (the mechanical repetition of a spiritual experience): ‘We must combine outward and inward to obtain anything from God; in other words we must go down on our knees, pray with our lips, etc., so that the proud man who would not submit to God must now submit to his creature’ (Pascal Reference Pascal and Krailsheimer1995: 300). Pascal's ‘outward’ is what the young Hegel calls ‘objective religion’ and the ‘inward’ correlates to subjective religion. What renders Hegel's formulations distinct from those of Pascal, however, is the historicity of the mechanisms that shape, through force, the habituation of somatic practices. Religious education or cultivation, then, is first and foremost an externally imposed institutionalized power (the institution is registered in the form of physical activity—lisping, clasping and kneeling) that suspends access to a relation of understanding. In other words, for the child, there is no outward or inward that are to be reconciled. The child simply performs what will be retroactively comprehended by the adult as ‘outward’ relative to a powerfully internalized forgetting of physical education that is seen as ‘inward’. Put another way, the outward/inward opposition is produced from out of the abstract force of pure external techniques of manipulation.

For Hegel, then, the metaphors of husbandry that run through the Tübingen essay (‘roots’, ‘plot’, ‘flourish’) should not be exclusively correlated with a bucolic, organicist image of development. Neither should it be misconstrued as a happy and beautiful process of the harmonious unification of subject and object. The promise of cultivation—Bildung—can sometimes be coercive, troubling, and even violent since it is, on occasion, born of externally imposed institutionalized modes of practices that subjugate individuals to its order.Footnote ¹⁶ It is a force in which individuals are acculturated by way of institutionalized forms of physical and mental activities. Moreover, educational and formative operations are processes through which actions become naturalized customs through repetition: infants do not lisp their prayers and clasp their hands together only once. Institutionalized actions are immanently recursive.

The child, then, is also a site in which traditions—inherited practices—are socially reproduced. Or, more precisely put, the material and ideological forces of social reproduction find a powerful instantiation in infants since they appear to us as formless, yet-to-be modelled, individuals. In this instance, it is the dogmas and doctrines of the Church that Hegel isolates. Although Hegel does not offer any precise analyses of the formation of the Church, it is presented as one institution through which children are interpellated as future subjects of religious practice.Footnote ¹⁷ Accordingly, habits are not only indistinguishable from modalities of institutionalized cultivation, but they are also a process through which practices and ideas become familiar to us. The first sense of the familiar to be distilled here is that it is an ossified effect of an ensemble of interconnected institutional processes. It is the process, Hegel seems to suggest, in which our most inner sense of self and our relation to others in ethical life (the arena of religion) are shaped. The familiar is a paradoxical manifestation of long, complex, entangled histories that are spontaneously concealed in the manifestation. Put another way, the familiar is a kind of purloined institutional phenomenon: we give expression to it in our outward actions, on a day-to-day level, and, for precisely that reason, cannot see (or recall, since, in the case of prayer, subjugated individuals were infants) its formation. It is experienced as what is simply there, a naturalized aspect of our everyday existence, part of who and what we are. The familiar is a determined effect of the (often coerced) processes of habituation.

The ‘Tübingen Essay’ provides us with an initial sketch of familiar posited as the result of internalized habituated practices that are produced and reproduced by institutionalized techniques of activity. It offers us, then, the mechanisms through which something like Dutch ‘ordinary’ consciousness comes to feel at home in the familiar (or comes to understand that home as the realm of the familiar). The familiar does not, consequently, only raise epistemological issues focused on the limits of knowing and the boundaries of thought. It can be understood, rather, as a fulcrum that constellates entangled socio-political mechanisms across long periods of time.Footnote ¹⁸ To keep the category of the familiar contained within theoretical issues of cognition is to miss its dynamics as a historical process and its force of transforming individuals into predictable agents of ethical comportment—that is to say, those who are programmed to function correctly in a determinate social symbolic order.

I believe that Hegel develops this initial venture into the exploration of the familiar as the result of institutionalized social practices most enigmatically, yet prominently, in his under-explored ‘Aphorisms from the Wastebook’. Crucially for us, it is in these writings that Hegel underlines, perhaps for the first time, the familiar in its nominal form (Das Bekannte), thus suggesting a higher order conceptual status, by which I mean, to recall my remarks in the introduction, an abstraction of an entanglement of a multitude of social, ideological and historical processes that can be parsed into epistemological and ontological concerns.

III. The fear of the familiar

The ‘Wastebook’ writings comprise a collection of notes, theoretical memoranda and laconic jottings that Hegel made between 1803 and 1806—that is to say, while he was in Jena trying to establish both a job and a coherent philosophical system. Due to their unsystematic nature and their thematic diversity, it is extremely difficult to conceptually unify the entries. This obstacle notwithstanding, it is clear that there are elements that recur in the notes, thus suggesting a certain internal inter-connectedness to some of the entries. One in particular stands out: the juxtaposition of the everyday life, customs, maxims and manifestations of a proverbial wisdom (which appear usually in the form of similes and other allegorical images) with the history and ambition of philosophical science.Footnote ¹⁹ It is in the confrontation of the quotidian and science that the familiar is given a deeper philosophical significance as a complex abstraction.

The aphorisms sketch a world of misers, drinking halls and milkmaids—and the realm is that of the familiar construed imagistically—very much similar to the depictions of social life in Dutch paintings as described by Hegel in his lectures on art. The marked difference in geopolitical particularity is noteworthy. Protestant Holland gives expression to an ethical life in which individuals find their satisfaction, thus freedom, there. By contrast, Prussia and the Germanophone realm West of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is a world of peasants and boozers who cannot be revived by even the most cataclysmic and destructive of cultural events. The German speaking world of the peasant and the common drinker is the world in which life does not transform immanently, but can only be forced to change according to extrinsic forces. In this context, history and self-consciousness are things that happen elsewhere. The peasant woman has before her the livestock she tends to and her children, and the drinker has his pint set out before him—and this is all that is of concern for them. These individuals inhabit a partitioned world in which the immediate concerns of everyday existence are divided off from those concerns that are not visible on the surface of immediacy. Significantly, the concept of the familiar emerges precisely at the point of cleavage of the everyday and what ostensibly lies beyond the ordinary. Hegel notes:

Not only is the language of ordinary consciousness and that of philosophy divided, but they are also posited in a specific relation to one another via the spatial character suggested in the German Scheidewand (Scheiden: the cleave, part, divided; Wand: a wooded bank, a wall, a physical partition). The two sides of the problem are perhaps positioned as being against one another in a space that constitutes the opposition. This spatialized partitioning is one reason as to why philosophical practice hesitates to think the familiar. But this is only one element. To develop a more detailed understanding of the reluctance, it is useful to situate the aphorisms within the broader context of Hegel's philosophical development after moving to Jena at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the then epicentre of philosophy in Europe.

After moving to Jena, Hegel momentarily suspended his ambitions of producing a philosophical system and developed, instead, a slow and somewhat comprehensive analysis of some of the most salient systems of philosophy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote ²⁰ In lieu of constructing philosophy directly, Hegel turned to how his contemporaries philosophized.Footnote ²¹ That being said, Hegel's new focus on methodology was not a strictly academic exercise (a literature review, of sorts), but, rather, it became the framework in which to diagnose the general presuppositions of philosophizing within the historical moment that he lived. Thus, philosophy itself was both historicized and grasped as a mediating symptom through which historical reality was given shape. A fortiori, a fundamental consequence of this inquiry was the claim that the state of philosophy and the nature of the present were dialectically interconnected. Hegel captures this connection in his exploration of the ‘need of philosophy’—which is not only an investigation into the necessity of philosophy at a given socio-historical conjunction, but is also an examination into what philosophy itself lacks and, thus, what it is in need of (D: 89/2:20).

The necessity of philosophy is its capacity to grasp the speculative truth, thus the resolution, of the divisions that mark modernity, principal of which being the diremption (Entzweiung) between the subject—the agent of theoretical and practical reason—and the object—the sphere of the subject's existence (D: 89/2:20). Philosophy is the science of unity. It is the language of, to borrow a formulation from Hegel's Frankfurt fragments on love, ‘true union’ (ETW: 304/1:245). Philosophy, however, lacked the power to produce this unity, according to Hegel, since post-Revolution Europe was not a hospitable moment for a science with ambitions of grasping the truth of the unity of subject and object in historical reality—that is, according to Hegel, philosophical science (Wissenschaft) as such.Footnote ²² In other words, the ‘need of philosophy’ articulates an aporia of sorts: it is simultaneously the need for philosophy in a bifurcated reality, and the reconfiguration of philosophy according to the recognition of its own need in a historical juncture that bars it. To put it another way: philosophy is needed precisely because modernity is divided against itself, and what philosophy needs is a higher-order formalization in light of a historical epoch that does not allow it to come into formation. Modernity is what must be overcome, but it is precisely modernity that articulates the tendency to prohibit any such overcoming.

To negotiate this seemingly insurmountable impasse, Hegel attempted to expose and explicate what it is that philosophy needed. The latter did not amount to a new systematic presentation of philosophical knowledge but, rather, was concerned with reconnecting philosophical knowledge to the life in which it is embedded. Truth was no longer conceived of as an unattainable knowledge (a ‘beyond’ or ‘result’) posited by a formalist nominalism that is epistemologically certain of truth's transcendental character. Instead, truth was an expression of life in its lived and living state. This dramatic shift in the conception of truth—from nominalism to a processual immanence—was clarified by Hegel in his Jena ‘Wastebook’ notes in at least two ways: first, that both the ‘fundamental principle’ (Grundsatz) and ‘result’ (Resultat) of philosophy were always already articulated—albeit in estranged form—in the process (MW: 249–50/2:550–51); and second, that, at the most basic level of the mode of presentation of philosophy—the very terminology it employs—there is no distinction between an esoteric, technical, professional, autonomous philosophical language and a commonplace, nonprofessional language of everyday thinking.

As Hegel's greatest and final Jena work—the Phenomenology of Spirit—shows, the separation of a philosophical consciousness and an ordinary or ‘natural’ consciousness is a separation premised on a false epistemological opposition between the knowing subject and the object known. For Hegel, there are only different stages of philosophical development rather than opposite modes; and for this reason, philosophy is not in need of its own private lexicon. It simply needs to speak in plain, everyday language.Footnote ²³ For Hegel, however, this does not mean that the technical terminology of philosophy is abandoned and replaced by a quotidian idiom and vernacular. Hegel is a much subtler thinker than this. He aims instead to locate the everyday, the familiar, within the very concepts that constitute the lexicon of philosophy. Or, more precisely put, Hegel aims to reveal how concepts such as ‘subject’, ‘object’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘absolute’ are always already points of productive contradiction and conflict between a discourse that arrogates to itself the position of philosophical knowledge—that is to say, that takes itself as being fully in a state of familiarity with itself—and a thinking that investigates that self-arrogation and familiarity.Footnote ²⁴

And yet, by avoiding the labour of understanding what is most familiar to itself—for Hegel, the fact that it ‘indiscriminately [takes] for granted as familiar’ a terminology that is supposedly its own—philosophy fails to grasp itself (PS: 18/3:35—translation slightly modified). To think the familiar, or what is given to us as familiar, requires an immense amount of effort since, as I have tried to show in my commentary of Hegel's analysis of Dutch painting and his allegory of the praying child in his Tübingen essay, the familiar has the whole of social life—its objects, images and practices—as its substance. This, then, suggests that thinking the familiar would require, above all else, effort, thus time.

For Hegel, it is the demand for time, for ‘patience’ (Geduld), that makes philosophy so detestable: philosophy requires an expenditure of time that transgresses the desires of those who yearn for ‘readymade’ (fertig gegeben) conceptions, systems and truths (that are like ‘minted coins that can be given and pocketed’) (PS: 22/3:40). As Hegel puts it in his Philosophy of Spirit, for those unwilling to take the time to think reality according to its own status, character and logic, philosophy is nothing but a ‘troublesome neighbor’ (lästige Nachbarin). And it is ‘troublesome’ in so far as ‘it is an enemy of all arbitrariness and hasty suggestions’ (EPS, PM: 278/10:348). Additionally, philosophy is not a readymade collection of ‘assumed conceptions’ that are ‘made to force events and actions in conformity’ with them (EPS, PM: 278/10:348). Such philosophizing would require little effort in that it did not struggle with the act of wresting philosophical truth from the events and actions themselves. It is the latter that takes time and energy. And, with the expenditure of both comes great risk—one can potentially end up with little to show for their efforts.

Thinking the familiar involves such a risk and thus appears for the first time in Hegel's oeuvre as a force of negation, rather than a mere negative of a given positive. It leads one into, as Hegel put it in a famous phrase in the Phenomenology, the ‘way of despair’ (PS: 49/3:72): philosophical labour often leads nowhere (it is not guaranteed that philosophy will locate the truth of reality in the familiar); it sometimes produces no immediately perceivable results. Thus, the reluctance to think the familiar is the fear of losing ourselves in an inquiry that generates no positive productivity, and no demonstrable results, from those things that are most proximate to us: the world of drunkards, peasants, philosophers, love, laws, cultural customs, institutions, everyday practices, lifeless objects, social relationships, and, more broadly, the immediate impositions of economics, politics, and history.Footnote ²⁵ Only when a philosophical patience is cultivated can the separation of philosophy's rarefied and technocratic terminology and ordinary consciousness be destroyed. The familiar is the obstacle and the spur to this patience since it is simultaneously that realm that we think we already know (since it is familiar), and that we relate to in our ordinary, everyday speech, and it is, when analysed more carefully, that arena in which that knowledge dissolves into alienating, estranged and defamiliarized forms.