No-one who reads this book will ever see the world the same again. Derek Mitchell’s aim is to pursue phenomenology, and therefore appearances obliquely, in a number of areas. Predominantly, these are the appearances of houses, landscapes, places, people and history; but these specific studies coalesce into a more general theory about appearances, place and time and thereby provide a phenomenology of the everyday. In this pursuit, the author brings together works of philosophy, literature, history and art in order to circumvent the apparent paradox of the ubiquity and inaccessibility of the everyday. This makes the work wide ranging and extensive, but by the end, a delicate coherence and unity emerges from allowing the coming together of these different avenues of approach to appearances.
Philosophically speaking, the author’s guides through all of this are Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Gaston Bachelard, with assistance notably from Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel and Sartre, although Mitchell endeavours to add some insights of his own as the book progresses. Other significant contributions come from the works of W. G. Sebald, Dennis Severs, Rainer Maria Rilke, Irene Nemirovsky; the writing of David Hockney; and some Dutch artists.
