Lifeworld

Discussion

Adam Arvidsson:

"The problem becomes the articulation of what Milojevic & Inayatullah (2015) call ‘narrative foresight’: the ability to come up with new narratives that are able to link the concrete needs and desires of the present to imaginations of a ‘novel future’, which also allows for a different understanding of the present (Miller,2013). Such narratives are part of what sociologists call the lifeworld. On a mundane level, everyday beliefs and assumptions are anchored in a set of engrained practices that give stability and resilience to the world, even when confronted with extraordinary events or experiences. Starting with the work of Edmund Husserl, philosophers have called this the ‘lifeworld’. Alfred Shultz, who introduced Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld into social theory, stressed its intersubjective nature. To Schultz, the lifeworld is the common intersubjective reality that we take for granted and that we co-create as we go along, incorporating new experiences and events as intersubjectively recognized truths or manifestations of a shared reality. It is important to emphasize that the life-world does not simply imply a mental construct: while it contains abstract ideas (like ‘God’, ‘truth’, ’justice’), these are anchored in a thick web of concrete everyday practices. These ‘material’ structures of the lifeworld endow abstract ideas with a truth value that comes from concrete experience; and anchor norms and moral beliefs in everyday practice(Berger & Luckman, 1966).Importantly, the lifeworld allows for the articulation of a rationality: a system of means and ends and principles for their appropriate relation. Such a rationality can provide a system of principles for managing the risks and complexities of everyday life in ways that are sustainable or even resilient. A good example is James Scott’s classic account of the ‘moral economy of the peasant’, where a particular form of rationality, what he calls a ‘subsistence ethic’, is rooted in the material conditions of agricultural production as well as the engrained social rituals and shared beliefs that prescribe certain forms of solidarity and sanction an excessive orientation towards private accumulation. This moral economy, rooted in a common lifeworld, has provided resilience in the face of the continuous uncertainty inherent to peasant life, as well as an important resource in the articulation of resistance and rebellion, when the engrained reality of that peasant life is disrupted by, for example, the commercialization of agriculture sponsored by colonial and state powers(Scott, 1976).In the later instance we might see what Jurgen Habermas (1987) has called a ‘rationalization of the lifeworld’. As material conditions change, engrained beliefs and norms are put in a new perspective and transformed, perhaps mixed with new influences and ideas. A process of reflexion and re-elaboration occurs, and if successful, the new material conditions can be incorporated in a new worldview where they are both domesticated and made to ‘make sense’, and acted on in rational and coherent ways. Something similar seems to be happening today as radical peasant movements are incorporating the experience of climate change into a new coherent worldview."

(https://www.academia.edu/78903321/Climate_Perplexity_Pre_Pub)