Bear in mind that equivocity is true to being only as one way of attending to and speaking of being. It is true to being as relative to being and as relative to the other senses of being. Against ironic postmodern truth-refusal and metamodern oscillations between sincerity and indifference at the expense of truth, Chesterton guides his readers to notice how preconceptions can warp attention and prevent clear perception. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in his detective fiction, which draws attention to puzzlement and indefiniteness, as well as the unexplained intractabilities of reality. Fitting the metaxological mode of attention at the heart of Chesterton's journalistic metaphysics, his interest is in restoring the adventurous side of life where the comfort of the overly familiar has caused us to lose our primal astonishment and foundational perplexity. How can we feel at home if we have lost a sense of wonder? That would not be home but a prison for the soul. And how can we truly wonder if we have no place of refuge? Without a safe haven, wonder turns into terror.
Chesteronian defamiliarization may be misunderstood as an attempt to restore passivity to the perceiver, given that univocity tends to put people in an active relationship with reality, albeit still unconscious and devoid of reflective reasoning. This is only part of the truth. As suggested, Chesterton wants to resist the "worship of law," especially the worship of arbitrary human laws, by restoring difference. But the deeper aim of this strategy is to restore the possibility of genuine consciousness and real choice; that means recovering participation in reality.
-Duncan Reyburn, The Roots of the World: The Remarkable Prescience of G. K. Chesterton
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