The Expanse Between Familiar Lifeworlds
The felt-sense of a lifeworld’s aesthetic as portal to communicative interaction
The Challenge of Unfamiliar Lifeworlds
This essay explores what it is to have a familiar lifeworld; what it is to live among familiar lifeworlds, and what it is to find oneself encountering what is in the expanse between familiar lifeworlds.
It offers methods and views to build capacity for communicative interaction across disparate lifeworlds, unleashing beauty and effectiveness.
The Familiar Lifeworld
Much of our life occurs in familiar lifeworlds: social structures and cultural patterns that are relatively stable and navigable.
“Social structures” here refer to the external aspects: structures that maintain a lifeworld, such as buildings, laws, and roles. “Cultural patterns” here refer to the common internal aspects among participants in the lifeworld: patterns of being, thinking, and behaving.
The social and cultural, as exterior and interior, can each reproduce the other if well established. For example, a family that moves houses will generally over time conform the external social structures of the house to the family culture: when do people go to bed? What appliances are in the kitchen? What is the decision-making relationship between members of the household? And, conversely, if someone enters into the domain of the house, the social structures may conform their cultural patterns of interaction: the person may become the kind of person who goes to bed at a particular time, uses certain available kitchen appliances in their daily workflow, and defers to the existing decision-making structures. The social and cultural, altogether, form a relatively coherent socio-cultural lifeworld that can to some degree reproduce or repair itself if partially impaired.
In early life, one navigates a given socio-cultural terrain: school, family, playgroup…these are given socio-cultural patterns that form a tacit lifeworld. In development toward adulthood, first the capacity to actively maintain cultural norms forms (here is how we are in this family, friend group, workplace), and then, for some who continue to develop, the capacity to actively maintain the social structure (hiring people into roles, advocating for legislation, allocating resources to projects, for example).
For many, to be able to maintain cultural norms and social structures of a few lifeworlds is the fruition of adulthood.
Among Familiar Lifeworlds
To have fully entered and mastered a lifeworld is to have enough facility with the cultural norms and the social structures that you could participate in restoring it under impairment. For example, if your family house burnt down, you would have the ability to coordinate setting up a new homestead that restores that lifeworld. If you are a military commander and a battle has decimated your troops and equipment, you would have the capability to restore your army to function.
This mastering of lifeworlds takes time…a rough heuristic might be that it takes at least three-to-five years of engagement in a lifeworld to be able to comprehend what it means to restore it under impairment.
As we get older, we may find ourselves entering into more and more lifeworlds: we may marry and start the process of understanding the family lifeworld of our spouse. We may live in a community for a long time, and enter into the local political scene, getting into decision-making processes, for example, about “economic growth” vs. “maintaining community character”.
This moving between multiple independent lifeworlds brings the challenge of loss of coherence. There can be the vague sense that a single lifeworld could be a coherent socio-cultural world. But truly engaging in multiple lifeworlds requires the recognition that coherence between lifeworlds is not possible without assimilating one into the other. For example, the incoherence between a religious lifeworld and the lifeworld structured by a government can be resolved by choosing one as the “master lifeworld”, by negotiation, by compartmentalization; our interest here, though, is a free play of interaction between lifeworlds: finding an emergent possibility, not an accommodation from within current possibilities.
To fully inhabit multiple lifeworlds is to be able to serve as a communicative bridge that brings the lifeworlds into emergent interactions without an implicit demand that they unify or cohere.
Between Familiar Lifeworlds
Since it takes years to fully enter a lifeworld, we may come to recognize that, even being full participants in many lifeworlds, there are expanses of lifeworlds we encounter that are unfamiliar and will remain so. In these expanses are also partially formed and transient lifeworlds, socio-cultural potentials that are not fully developed, perhaps implicit in a moment or circumstance. How can we improve the quality of our interaction with unfamiliar lifeworlds, whether as distinctive socio-cultural structures and patterning or as amorphous socio-cultural differentiation?
The measure of mastery of a lifeworld is effective capability to reproduce it under impairment. Following on this, the scope of mastery can be measured by the magnitude of impairment one can restore. For example, a manager in a workplace can restore a lifeworld to functioning after an employee departs by wisely selecting a replacement hire. Broader in scope might be successfully leading a town’s restoration after a natural disaster has destroyed many structures and killed many prominent citizens.
A lifeworld’s smallest generative essence might be called the felt-sense of the lifeworld’s aesthetic. It is the most essential generative pattern of the lifeworld, persisting even when physical structures degrade and the momentum of cultural traditions is interrupted.
This essentialized aesthetic sense of the lifeworld is the portal to interaction in the expanse between familiar lifeworlds.
Stepping Into Lifeworlds; Locating Lifeworlds
There are two methods to enter unfamiliar lifeworlds: stepping into and locating.
To step into an unfamiliar lifeworld is to take on the external patterns of interaction in that lifeworld and let that reveal the aesthetic essence. It progressively reveals the interior that is the obverse of an external pattern. This is what often happens when we enter college, or a new workplace, or move to a new town. Being sensitive to the aesthetic felt-sense conveyed by the unfamiliar circumstance has a two-fold function: it radiates to concrete activity such that it is more in accordance with the lifeworld, and it provides a reference feeling that highlights how interactions do not match the aesthetic felt-sense, tacitly guiding its development. The scaffolding instruction might be: Participate in the external form of the lifeworld and let this reveal over time the felt-sense of the lifeworld’s essential aesthetic.
To locate an unfamiliar lifeworld is to start with an already-available aesthetic sense that seems in resonance with the lifeworld and magnify it so that it radiates into interaction. It guides external action that is the obverse of a subtle interior pattern. The scaffolding instruction might be: Feel the bodily resonance of this lifeworld within your available aesthetic sensibilities and allow that amorphous sensation to magnify into the space in which you are interacting. Appreciate the unfamiliar lifeworld as you would art; if it sparks resonance in you, for the moment let that felt-sense of resonance take over your whole being.
Stepping into and locating are not mutually exclusive; in any circumstance, each may be more or less available, and both can be employed to the degree conditions permit.
Communicative Interaction across Lifeworlds
The world is filled with lifeworlds: arising, sustaining, dissipating. When we cannot communicate with unfamiliar lifeworlds, we encounter a limitation in contributing beauty and effectiveness to the human sphere, which is comprised of innumerable distinctive large-scale lifeworlds; innumerable small-scale lifeworlds, overlapping; and in the interstices, constantly arising and dissipating lifeworld patterning.
When we can engage in communicative interaction across lifeworlds, our capability to contribute beauty and effectiveness to the world is fully unleashed.