Lifeworld

El objetivo del presente artículo es explicitar y discutir la relación entre el análisis fenomenológico del mundo de la vida desarrollado por Alfred Schutz y la metodología de las ciencias sociales. En primer lugar, se bosqueja el proyecto schutziano de fundamentar las ciencias sociales en una teoría del mundo de la vida. En segundo término, se presentan los postulados schutzianos referidos a las construcciones modélicas de las científico-sociales. Luego, se coloca el foco en el modo en que Max Weber y Schutz conciben el denominado postulado de adecuación. Finalmente, se pasa revista a intentos actuales de aplicar el análisis del mundo de la vida en la investigación social empírica.

В статье феноменология Гуссерля рассматривается как определенный проект обоснования науки. Своеобразие феноменологического обоснования науки подчеркивается в ходе сравнения понимания науки у Гуссерля с некоторыми концепциями философии науки ХХ в. Выдвигается и обосновывается положение о том, что, несмотря на признание утопическим понимание науки в качестве развивающегося абсолютного знания, тезис Гуссерля об обосновании науки в жизненном мире остается и сегодня актуальным. / In the article the phenomenology of Husserl is regarded as certain project of justification of science. The peculiarity of the phenomenological justification of Sciences is emphasized in the process of the comparison of the understanding of science by Husserl with the basic concepts of the philosophy of science of the twentieth century. The author puts forward and justifies the position that despite the utopian understanding of science as an evolving absolute knowledge, Husserl's thesis about the justification of scientific knowledge in the lifeworld and today remains relevant.

In this chapter, I consider place, place experience, and place attachment as they might be understood phenomenologically from three different perspectives: first, holistically; second, dialectically; and, third, generatively. I argue that each of these three perspectives points to a spectrum of complementary experiences, situations, actions, and meanings that remain faithful to the lived comprehensiveness of place and place experience. I suggest that these holistic, dialectical, and generative perspectives provide a range of useful ways for thinking about and understanding place attachment.

REFERENCE:: David Seamon, Merleau-Ponty, Lived Body and Place: Toward a Phenomenology of Human Situatedness, a chapter in T. Hünefeldt and A. Schlitte (eds.), Situatedness and Place (pp. 41-66). Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018.

ABSTRACT: In this chapter, I draw on French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's understanding of perception and corporeal sensibility to consider the significance of human situatedness as expressed via place and place experience. To illustrate how Merleau-Ponty's conceptual understanding might be applied to real-world place experiences, I draw on two sources of experiential evidence, the first of which is a passage from Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez's magical-realist novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967/1970). The second source is a set of first-person observations describing events and situations that I happened to take note of during weekday walks between my home and university office over the course of several months. My aim is to use these two narrative accounts as a means to illustrate, via vignettes of everyday human experience, Merleau-Ponty's central concepts of perception, body-subject, and lived embodiment. I contend that these accounts substantiate Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological claims and point to additional significant elements of human situatedness and place experience.

A Portuguese translation of this chapter by Andre Pinto is available here at academia.edu at:

https://www.academia.edu/42134992/Merleau-Ponty_Lived_Body_and_Place_Toward_a_Phenomenology_of_Human_Situatedness_-_Tradu%C3%A7%C3%A3o_em_Portugu%C3%AAs_do_Artigo_de_David_Seamon_2018_

In this chapter, I encapsulate the complex, shifting relationship between phenomenology and architecture by speaking of an architectural phenomenology, which I tentatively define as the descriptive and interpretive explication of architectural experiences, situations, and meanings as constituted by qualities and features of both the built environment and human life (Otero-Pailos 2012; Seamon 2017). In demonstrating that architectural phenomenology has significant research and design value today, I first describe the phenomenological approach more fully, highlighting two key phenomenological concepts relevant for architectural understanding—lifeworld and natural attitude. Second, I overview the complicated thread of events whereby architects and architectural theorists became interested in phenomenology. Third, I discuss two phenomenological topics that have come to have value for architecture and briefly discuss their significance for architectural thinking: (1) environmental embodiment; and (2) architectural atmospheres. Last, I identify some key criticisms of architectural phenomenology and suggest what value it might have for the future of architecture, particularly in regard to the imminent arrival of virtual reality, virtual places, and virtual buildings.

For Husserl, the homeworld is the tacit, taken-for-granted sphere of experiences, understanding, and situations marking out a world that is comfortable, usual, and "the way things are and should be." Always, according to Husserl, the homeworld is in some mode of lived mutuality with an alienworld-a world as seen as a realm of difference, atypicality, and otherness. In this article, I draw on British-African novelist Doris Lessing's 1969 novel, The Four-Gated City, to consider the shifting homeworld of protagonist Martha Quest, a young white African woman emigrating to battle-scarred London immediately after World War II. Throughout the novel, Quest finds herself in unfamiliar or challenging situations where the world she takes for granted is called into question. Lessing draws on these life-testing experiences to portray Quest's shifting understandings of other individuals' homeworlds that at first she sees as atypical, abnormal, or unreal.

In this chapter, I draw upon the phenomenological concepts of lifeworld, natural attitude, homeworld and place to clarify what human-immersion-in-world and lived obliviousness might mean for research in well-being. To provide a real-world context for my argument, I present three narrative accounts of ordinary and out-of-the-ordinary place experiences written by interior designer Jane Barry (2012); British-African novelist Doris Lessing (1984); and sociologist Eric Klinenberg (2002). Using these three examples as evidence, I contend that place is an integral, non-contingent aspect of human life and helps to explain why well-being can typically be out of sight and thus not recognized as a significant dimension of one’s day-to-day experience. I conclude that, because of the always-already-present reciprocity between human-immersion-in-place and lived obliviousness, professional efforts to enhance well-being might sometimes be more successfully accomplished indirectly by changing aspects of place, including creative neighborhood design and planning that facilitate place attachment and a strong sense of environmental belonging.

FULL REFERENCE: Seamon, David. Well-being and Phenomenology: Lifeworld, Natural Attitude, Homeworld and Place, a chapter in Kathleen Galvin (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Well-being (pp. 103-111). London: Routledge, 2018.

Against the oft-repeated claim that Heideggerian authenticity calls for a resoluteness that is either indifferent or inimical to normative rationality, Steven Crowell has recently argued that the phenomenon of conscience in Sein und Zeit is specifically intended to ground normative rationality in the existential ontological account of Dasein so that Heidegger puts forward not a rejection of the life of reason but a more fundamental account of its condition of possibility in terms of self-responsibility. In what follows, I wish to take up the issue
of an existential grounding of rational life and its implications for the phenomenological reduction in relation to the work of Husserl by showing that he too is concerned with a self-responsible contextualizing of the life of reason even
at the level of individual human existence. In this way, Husserl, like Heidegger, can be read as framing the phenomenological reduction in terms of the subject’s concern for self-justification. However, this ‘framing’ cannot be seen
as a motivation to reduction but only as an ‘after-the-fact’ explanation of its import. But I will suggest, in conclusion, that the problem of the motivation to reduction is perhaps as much of a problem for Heidegger as it is for Husserl.

According to Habermas’ colonization thesis, reification is a social pathology that arises when the communicative infrastructure of the lifeworld is “colonized” by money and power. In this paper I argue that, thirty years after the publication of the Theory of Communicative Action, this thesis remains compelling. However, while Habermas offers a functionalist explanation of reification, his normative criticism of it remains largely implicit: he never explains what is wrong with reification from the perspective of the people whose social relations are reified. As a result, Habermas cannot explain why only some forms of colonization lead to reification effects. In particular, he suggests that reification effects result from the juridification of communicatively structured domains of action but not from the commodification of labour power. I criticize this argument and suggest that if the normative dimension of the colonization thesis is made explicit, a more nuanced explanation of reification becomes possible.

In response to the claim that our sense of will is illusory, some philosophers have called for a better understanding of the phenomenology of agency. Although I am broadly sympathetic with the tenor of this response, I question whether the positive-theoretic blueprint it promotes truly heralds a tenable undertaking. Marshaling a Schopenhauerian insight, I examine the possibility that agency might not be amenable to phenomenological description. Framing this thesis in terms of Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic framework, I suggest a way to integrate the idea of streaming experiences with that of bodily strivings, which, owing to their primitive structure, can never be represented.

This essay is a response to Shaun Moores’ commentary on the author’s A GEOGRAPHY OF THE LIFEWORLD, a book that  examines the significance of the everyday spaces, places, and environment in peoples’ daily lives (Seamon 1979). The author discusses a number of Moores’ concerns, including the role of media in supporting or undermining physical places; the value of phenomenological method for media and communication studies; and the charge that phenomenology is hindered by an essentialist approach that presupposes the presence and significance of invariant existential structures.

Keywords: architecture; digital media; everyday life; experience; media use; phenomenology; physical environment; place; space; placelessness; Merleau-Ponty

The political potential of the later period of Husserl's philosophy is, for the most part, ignored in Brazilian scholarship about the author. In this article, I intend to point at the relevance of such material, as the notions of co-generativity, topography and lifeworld developed in the later period of Husserl's philosophy will allow us to recognize, first, that a phenomenological approach is ultimately compatible with a modern reading of political philosophy, and, second, has a potential to better inform some of the current conundrums in the debate about social choice, preferences and constitution.

In this chapter, I examine directions for lifeworld research today, giving particular attention to recent phenomenological studies on place. I identify four important assumptions that underlie a phenomenological understanding of lifeworld and then draw on the concept of place to clarify some of the lifeworld’s social, environmental, spatial, and geographical aspects. As a means to concretize my discussion, I draw on descriptive evidence from British writer Penelope Lively’s Spiderweb, a 1990s novel describing one outsider’s efforts to come to inhabit a place—a fictitious present-day village in the southwestern British county of Somerset (Lively 1998).

Personal identity is an accretion of meaning which is indicative of situatedness in the questioning being which is in part conferred intersubjectively. As such it is temporal and must be curated and appropriated. Thus conferred meaning must be audited against one's identity-sense. Because of the passing of time, the questioning being, whose sense of the world is derived in pursuit of a desire for significance -capacity for purpose, must inevitably transcend that situatedness which identity represents.

The present paper aims to provide a contribution to the self-clarification of social scientists with regard to the using and abusing of the concept of "lifeworld" [Lebenswelt] and its surrogates. With this aim, the author adopts a dual approach which draws upon the one used by the late Husserl in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaft und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, namely: the combination of genealogical reflections on the origins and historic itinerary of the concept with phenomenological descriptions of the "thing itself". More precisely, the present article tries to systematically reconstruct Edmund Husserl"s phenomenological "proto-foundation" [Urstiftung] and Alfred Schutz"s "reprise" of the Lebenswelt.

In these pages we propose to reflect on the current proposal of inclusive language. In front of it, we adopt a critical posture, although moderate and open to the unfolded use of gender, which allows us to safeguard the ambiguity present in the use of the masculine in its genericor specific function. From our perspective, however, it is not so obvious that a morphological change in the linguistic plane entails a change in the conceptual and evaluative level in matters of inclusion. For this reason, we mention some idiomatic morphologies of other communities of speakers, to make it clear that a generically neutral language does not guarantee the promotion of the inclusion of generic identities, nor of equal rights. Then, the question of language games is focused since its emergence in the worlds of life, emphasizing its gradual, gradual and largely unconscious evolutions, pointing out the conditioning character that every language has established in the life of its speakers. Along these lines, the symbolic violence that connotes the irruptive imposition of a new way of speaking for strictly ideological reasons is noted. Finally, we warn that, contrary to what is sought to be imposed, an authentically inclusive language should not annul the identity differences that it includes, based on a homogenizing way of speaking.

Michel Henry radicalises phenomenology by putting forward the idea of a double manifestation: the "Truth of Life" and "truth of the world. " For Henry, the world turns out to be empty of Life. To find its essence, the self must dive completely inward, away from the exterior movements of intentionality. Hence, Life, or God, for Henry, lies in non-intentional, immanent self-experience, which is felt and yet remains invisible, in an absolutist sense, as an a priori condition of all conscious experience. In Christian theology, the doctrine of the Trinity illuminates the distinction between the immanent Trinity (God's self-relation) and the economic workings of the Trinity (God-world relation). However, the mystery of God's inmost being and the economy of salvation are here understood as inseparable. In light of this, the paper aims to: 1) elucidate the significance of Henry's engagement with the phenomenological tradition and his proposal of a phenomenology of Life which advocates an immanent auto-affection, radically separate from the ek-static nature of intentionality, and 2) confront the division between Life and world in Henry's Christian phenomenology and its discordancy with the doctrine of the Trinity, as the latter attests to the harmonious unity that subsists between inner life and the world.

This thesis brings together the works of Jürgen Habermas and Alasdair MacIntyre in an attempt to overcome what I have identified as problems in the normative sociological project of the former. Critiques levied against the is-ought problem implicit in the normative aspects of Habermas’ theory of communicative action, and the role that the concept of lifeworld plays in Habermas’ overall theory, are overcome through a dialogue with the works of MacIntyre. In proposing MacIntyre’s idea of ‘traditions of inquiry’ as a sociologically valuable tool of investigation and understanding, the author also seeks to access some of the normatively driving ideas about human goods, communities, and flourishing from MacIntyre and bring them into dialogue with Habermas’ normative project. To do this however, certain disagreements, especially about modernity, must be either overcome or shown to be not significant enough to questions at hand. In facilitating this dialogue between Habermas and MacIntyre, the MacIntyrean concept of ‘translatability’ is employed to judge the similarities and differences between the two theorists’ ideas, and judge how debilitating the differences that exist are. All this is aimed at reconceptualizing sociology as a normative exercise, not merely restricted to the description of the social world, but fruitfully engaging with questions of ‘what ought we to do.’

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on the issue of preference heterogeneity in cooperatives.
Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on the ideas of Habermas and Luhmann, this paper interprets preference heterogeneity of cooperative members in terms of the precarious relationship between the categories of “system” and “lifeworld.” The argument is buttressed with a case study of an agricultural cooperative recently founded in Central Greece.
Findings – The sensitivity of cooperatives to the lifeworld contexts of their members exacts the price in the form of the member preference heterogeneity problem. If this sensitivity is taken to be the constitutive
characteristic of cooperatives, then the proposed argument hammers home their fundamental ambivalence, as they are necessarily fraught with the potential for internal conflict.
Research limitations/implications – The paper urges for a radical rethinking of Georg Draheim’s thesis of the “double nature” of cooperatives. “Double nature” is shown to aggravate the member preference heterogeneity problem.
Practical implications – The results of this study inform the cooperative leaders’ quest to strike a balance between the interests of their members and the demands of the external socio-economic environment.
Originality/value – This research contributes significantly to the literature on collective decision-making costs incurred by cooperatives. The failure of cooperatives to balance the sensitivity to members’ interests and to the external environment is exposed as the root cause of the divergence and heterogeneity of member preferences. This heterogeneity is shown to boost collective decision-making costs.

El presente artículo intenta brindar un aporte al autoesclarecimiento y la autocomprensión de los cientistas sociales en lo que refiere al uso –y abuso– del concepto de "mundo de la vida" [Lebenswelt] y sus sucedáneos. Con este objetivo, se adopta un modo de proceder bifronte que se inspira en la metodología empleada por el Husserl tardío en la Krisis, a saber: la combinación de (a) reflexiones genealógicas acerca del surgimiento e itinerario histórico del concepto con (b) descripciones fenomenológicas de la "cosa" misma. En términos más precisos, se intenta reconstruir la "protofundación" [Urstiftung] filosófica del concepto por parte de Edmund Husserl y la "retoma" [reprise] científico social del mismo efectuada por Alfred Schutz.

Usually regarded as a 1970s phenomenon, this article demonstrates that the debate between Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann continued until Luhmann’s death in 1998, and that the development of the two theorists’ positions during the 1980s and 1990s was characterised by convergence rather than by divergence. In the realm of legal theory, the article suggests, convergence advanced to the extent that Habermas’ discourse theory may be characterised as a normative superstructure to Luhmann’s descriptive theory of society. It is further shown that the debate’s result was an almost complete absorption of Habermas’ theory by Luhmann’s systems theoretical complex – an outcome facilitated by Luhmann’s deliberate translation of central Habermasian concepts into systems theoretical concepts. The article argues that both the debate and Habermas’ conversion were made possible because not only Habermas’ but also Luhmann’s work can be considered a further development of the German idealist tradition. What Luhmann did not acknowledge was that this manoeuvre permitted the achievement of Habermas’ normative objectives; nor did he notice that it could eradicate a central flaw in the system theoretical construction, by allowing the context within which distinctions are drawn to be mapped – an issue of pivotal importance for grasping relationships between different social systems, and coordinating them, via the deployment of legal instruments.

The concept of “network” has become the most central concept within the work of Karl‐Heinz Ladeur (KHL). It is an omnibus concept which he uses to extrapolate insights at all levels: It is used to provide a general framework at the level of Gesellschaftstheorie (social theory) in the sense that it provides insights into the general structure of society and thereby into the context within which legal processes unfold. At the level of organizational theory it provides a basis for understanding the transformation of organizational structures as it unfolds through the breakdown of hierarchy and the boundaries between the private and the public, just as the network concept plays an important role in its attempt to formulate a legal theory which is adequate for a society which, according to KHL, has become postmodern.
This article seeks to critically examine the function and “added value” of KHL’s network concept in relation to the European integration and constitutionalization process. It is argued that the concept provides a very useful overall framework, but that its usefulness might be enhanced when combined with more concrete studies of the actual function of networks in the EU context, just as the network concept should be more directly combined with an attempt to develop a conceptual framework for the juridification of networks.

This paper investigates the relationship between the subjective-private and intersubjective-public dimensions of the aesthetic experience in everyday life. I claim that our everyday aesthetic life cannot be conceived of as a mere private world in absolute discontinuity to the public world, such as the "artworld" or the "life-world", since it includes both personal and intersubjective dimensions. Likewise, although the "everyday" should not be thought of as absolutely one and the same for all, it is possible to search for the common features that emerge from the background of its multiple particularities. The intersubjective engagement is an essential element when analyzing the subject experiencing the everyday aesthetically, so we should acknowledge as well the intersubjective nature of a subject's self-constitution and experience. Against the idea of the overall discontinuous nature of one's aesthetic experience, in everyday context vs. artworld contexts, it is therefore important to consider everyday aesthetic experience as being both distinct and integrated into the continuous flux of one's experiences, as well as related to one's whole life. These claims will be supported by some insights on the experiencing self, supported by practical philosophy (Gadamer), as well as the characteristics of everyday life and life-world highlighted by phenomenology (Husserl, Simmel, Schutz). All these accounts offer powerful lines of argument in defending a consistent conception of the whole experiencing self and the structure of one's everyday aesthetic life as well as its intersubjective dimension.

Der Korrelationsgedanke eröffnet uns eine Perspektive, die zugleich die Einheitlichkeit und die Vielfältigkeit des Erfahrungslebens zum Vorschein kommen lässt. Das folgenschwere produktive und dynamische Begegnen von Subjekt und Objekt lässt sich dadurch als Hauptthema der Phänomenologie betrachten und bietet sich als Leitfaden der gesamten Entwicklung der Phänomenologie an. In diesem Zusammenhang analysiert der Paper Husserls Begriff der Lebenswelt sowie der Konstitution vom Selbst.

In a recent article in this journal,Andrew Sayer has argued that much feminist research on the gendered nature of organisations, such as bureaucracy and the market, confuses a contingent association of gender and organisational forms with a stronger claim that they are intrinsically gendered. Sayer accepts that this research has shown that the empirically found, concrete forms of organisations are gendered.However,deeper theoretical reflection, he suggests, reveals that, when considered as ‘abstract realist models’, bureaucracy and the market are, in fact, identity-blind.He makes two claims, one concerned with explanation, the other concerned with the political consequences of social inquiry.The first is that the construction of abstract models, rather than the ‘associational’ thinking concerned with the delineation of empirical regularities, is necessary to the
proper understanding of the operation of causal mechanisms and their mode of determination in social life. The second is that this will enable a more progressive and positive politics beyond a fatalism which he attributes to associational thinking.This paper
takes issue with both claims arguing that the abstract theory he defends has no positive role in social inquiry and that his political critique is misplaced.

The state of our current world has brought about a very active discussion concerning possible alternatives to our current society. In this article, I wish to consider Marx's idea of communism as a possible alternative, by understanding it as an undetermined concept that only proposes a society without classes and private property. The thesis I will defend here is that we can meaningfully think about such an alternative through the means of Science Fiction literature. In particular, I will take Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed (2006) as a case study. To clarify this relation between science fiction (SF) literature and communism as a particular case of an alternative society, I will introduce some concepts of Edmund Husserl's phenomenological theory. Thus, I shall argue that in SF we can presentify in bounded phantasy an alternative lifeworld, so furnishing with content the undetermined idea, and in doing so, strengthen the belief in the possibility of such an alternative society

Ronald Hitzler a fenomenológiai szociológia német képviselője; e tanulmánya az életstílusok és az életvilágok kutatásának összekapcsolásával az életstílusok megalkotásának (előállításának), illetve elsajátításának fő módszereit és fogalmait mutatja be.

Az életvilág egy empirikus kutatásoktól távol álló absztrakt fogalom.A gyakorlati alkalmazás nehézségei ellenére is vonzó, mert azt jelöli, ami magától értetődő, és eligazítást nyújt a mindennapi valóságban. A könyv gondolati vázát az életvilág-fogalom empirikus alkalmazhatóságát firtató kérdések alkotják, amelyek két felbomlott világ, egy holokausztban megsemmisített zsidó közösség és egy uradalmi cselédség által lakott puszta múltjának feltárását kísérték. A könyv a letűnt világokhoz vezető utakra hívja az olvasót: a társadalomtudományi elmélet és módszertan, valamint az empirikus eredmények kölcsönhatásainak értelmezésére, miközben reflektál a kutató megismerői pozíciójára és az emlékezet sajátos torzításaira.

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A translation in Portuguese of “Body-subject, time-space routines, and place ballets,” a chapter originally published in The Human Experience of Space and Place, edited by Anne Buttimer & David Seamon, London: Croom Helm, 1980.

This translation was published in GEOGRAFICIDADE, vol. 3, no. 2 (2013) and is directly available at:

http://www.uff.br/posarq/geograficidade/revista/index.php/geograficidade/article/view/93/pdf_1

The original chapter in English is available on this AE site at:

https://www.academia.edu/7842824/Body-Subject_Time-Space_Routines_and_Place_Ballets_1980_

The main goal of my inquiry is to lay out the proximity between Patočka’s and Ricœur’s readings of Husserl’s Krisis and to stress the role played by the concept of the life-world in the unfolding of their original philosophical undertakings. In the first part, I show the importance both Patočka and Ricœur assignedto the Husserlian project of an “ontology of the life-world”. In the second part, I expose the criticism these two authors addressed to Husserl’s understanding of the life-world and, more precisely, to the idea that the exploration of the life-world is merely another way of gaining access to transcendental subjectivity. In the last part, I show how the concrete descriptions of the life-world given by Patočka and Ricœur depart massively from the Husserlian perspective.

This article focuses on Husserl's understanding of philosophy in his later works. As I show, the concept of vocation (Beruf) played a central role in Husserl's renewed understanding of philosophy as a reflexive practice that takes place always in relation to a particular historical lifeworld. Against his early analyses, which emphasized the Cartesian, individualistic aspects of philosophical reasoning, I argue that his later works point towards an understanding of philosophy as a generative phenomenon, that is, as an essentially social and historical practice. This transition led Husserl to reconsider the teleological nature of philosophy as a fundamentally open practice. This renewed understanding of philosophy and its " infinite task " had important consequences for the subject of philosophical reasoning. If philosophy denotes an infinite idea of critique and renewal of ideas, then it seems that it cannot realize itself within the finite life of the individual. Rather, it is only a community that can renew itself in a way that corresponds to the open-ended character of philosophy. Community is, so to speak, the closest thing to infinity on earth.

Departing from systems theory, Marc Amstutz has developed a refined theory of world law. In the course of developing this theory he has, however, reformulated or changed the status of a number of central system theoretical concepts, including the concepts of (co-)evolution, interpenetration and function. At first glance, these changes appear to be relatively inconsequential but at second glance they amount to a radical reformulation of systems theory because the focus is systematically shifted away from system internal processes and towards inter-systemic processes. Although Amstutz departs from a legal perspective, his theory is in fact projecting a mirror image of the wider society. Amstutz has, in other words, not just developed a theory of world law, but rather a central contribution to a novel inter-systemic theory of society as such.

While engineers play one of the main roles in the advanced industrial society, they also develop technologies and design our future. Yet, in contemporary philosophy, culture and engineering are usually discussed separately, engineering knowledge and education are usually contrasted with the socio-humanitarian knowledge. This can be dealt with using a “value-sensitive design” approach, which is explored through creativity, intentions and expectations. Therefore, this paper intends to overcome the opposition between technology and culture and provides a description of the engineer as an original technological “form of life”, not as a social and professional group. It first addresses E. Spranger’s idea of “forms of life”, which are a mode of conceiving a culture that arose at the turn of the 20th century in conjunction with phenomenology. A set of theoretical resources of sociological thought (H. Freyer) and German engineering philosophy of technology (F. Dessauer, M. Schröter, H. Hardensett) is further proposed to deal with the domination of economic rationality (or pseudo-economic pragmatism) and profile the type of engineer, which cannot be reduced to the “value-neutral” type of the “technician” or “technologist”. This paper focuses on the structure of the project activity as a particular modern “form of life“. It examines the type of engineer as homo creator, which is described as the dominant type in the advanced industrial society.
Although engineering activity produces material things or artefacts, still it has chiefly immaterial nature as far as includes projecting, planning, organizing and other intellectual activities. Investigation, development, production as integral parts of engeneering are always dependent on systems of market, political decision-making, cultural values, traditions and images of everyday life, i.e. incorporated within the life-world. In this regard, engineers don’t form the “technosphere“ but rather create guidelines for action by integrating concrete values of man’s life-world into technologies (for example, innovations and sustainable development). Integration of technology and culture proceeds not externally but within the project activity which provides an opportunity to implement the concrete technical form of life and transform life-worlds of contemporary industrial societies.
The principal hypothesis is that the activity of engineering, which produces technology is not a variation of the instrumental reason but the expression of the infinite creative freedom implemented in the European culture. It is pointed out that the compensative function of technology (Mangeltheorie) shall be called into question and replaced by the notion of technology as “optimation” (Optimierungstheorie). I claim that technology produces surplus possibilities which surpass all imagination. According to Dessauer, technology can be conceived real being from ideas and participation in divine creation (Weiterschöpfung). The engineering inventions and the technological transformation of the world make us aware of escalation, innovation and crossing of space and time borders which allow the technological spirit to unfold the perfect technological universe.