In my earlier post today I mentioned that I scanned Maxine Greene's Teacher as Stranger (1973) to locate instances of lived life in the text. There were none.
This was a hunch that I had prior to the data collection and knowing that, I made sure to also scan for what I might interpret as variations on lived life. And sure enough I was able to locate life-world which originated with Edmund Husserl. I also have a hunch that life-world becomes less frequent in Greene's later writings when lived life starts to make a presence. This may be a situation of coincidence, but it is possible that Greene abandoned Husserl's "Umwelt" for lived life.
With the scanning, I found myself talking to the text. Because lived life wasn't presenting itself, I started to take notice of other qualified "lifes" in Greene's writing: social life, family life, instinctual life, to name a few. I asked aloud if I would find these "lifes" in her later books. If I was to find that they're not present in her later books, would it be a fair deduction for me to think of these other "lifes" as being subsumed by lived life? Could lived life be a repository for the social, family, and instinctual aspects of life? If lived life is such a repository, could this mean that what once might have stood as a clear distinction among these other qualified "lifes" becomes blurred in Greene's later writing and thinking? Are these qualified "lifes" too intersubjectve/interconnected to be distinguished from one another?
I might be in line for a hermeneutic hat trick here...
I think you are on to something.
ReplyDeleteOn Saturday I found an interesting online piece on Wittgenstein:
http://www.mysteryfile.com/NDavis/Wit.html
In many ways it actually convinced me....and then in a few places I felt the author pressed the case beyond the bounds of "what could have been". And this seems to me always to be an inherent tension in doing this kind of interpretive work. But compared to what this author did, what you mention above seems, to my reading, completely possible and possibly completely true as well. Movement toward a thicker, blurred kind of grasp of things it seems to me moves one closer to important truths....versus the easier conceptual place-holders.
Interestingly, Dewey always struggled to distinguish for his readers what he meant by "experience" versus a concept that stands "for experiences". It could be that the "lived life" in the "repository" sense that you mention above is meant to ground the reader....moving them away from a disembodied, conceptual sense of where the action is happening, in the making.