A social subject’s identity in everydayness: a reflection on waldenfels’s legacy

Tatiana Fanenshtil,Olga Ivenkova,B Yazyev

doi:10.1051/shsconf/20197203047

Tatiana Fanenshtil, Olga Ivenkova + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/20197203047

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Abstract

Bernhard Waldenfels formulates the concept of everydayness as a “crucible of rationality”, in which everydayness is viewed as a social boundary and non-reflective social background of the subject’s interactions with the world of social reality. We explore the potential of everydayness in the detection of the identity of a social subject and rethink Waldenfels’s concept of everydayness. The research method is a phenomenological analysis. In everyday activities of the subject, structures of the humanity’s material culture are replicated and changed. The role of everydayness is growing in the modern world, along with the subjective role of a particular individual. The identification of the social subject in everydayness occurs at the level of natural and social corporeality, which is provided by the heuristics of the adaptive response to the transformation of social processes in the context of the subject’s everyday interactions. Everydayness is represented as constituent and constructive modes of the social being of the subject.

Highlights

In his article “Everydayness as a Crucible of Rationality”, Bernhard Waldenfels creates an image that has firmly entered socio-philosophical discourse as a stable association with everydayness (Waldenfels, 1991)
In the Russian tradition of socio-philosophical studies of everydayness, the image of a crucible as a heatproof vessel for melting materials has become a reflexive symbol of the external strength and internal complexity of this phenomenon and, at the same time, of its close connection with the world of social reality
More than 30 years ago, Waldenfels defined his concept of a crucible through the following characteristics: everydayness as the social border of “everydayization” and “overcoming everydayness”, everydayness as an interactive background of social processes, everydayness as a non-reflexive replication of social structures

Summary

Introduction

In his article “Everydayness as a Crucible of Rationality”, Bernhard Waldenfels creates an image that has firmly entered socio-philosophical discourse as a stable association with everydayness (Waldenfels, 1991). In the Russian tradition of socio-philosophical studies of everydayness, the image of a crucible as a heatproof vessel for melting materials has become a reflexive symbol of the external strength and internal complexity of this phenomenon and, at the same time, of its close connection with the world of social reality. In essence, this symbol marks the tendency to an interdisciplinary research of everydayness and the desire for integrity in the researcher’s inquiry into the invariant characteristics of everydayness and into its external determinants. We aim to comprehend the essential, according to Waldenfels, aspects of everydayness in the modern conditions of social reality and in the established tradition of everydayness studies.

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