User:Robbie McClintock/2023/Lifework and the Lifeworld

• My bio
• Current project
• MediaWiki development
• Lifework and the Lifeworld (2023 ongoing)
• Choice and the Continual Present (Journal excerpt, 1960)
• The Philosophy of Culture, 1964
• Machines and Vitalists (1966)
• Towards a Place for Study, 1971
• Universal Voluntary Study (1973)
• Education and Hegel's Phenomenology, 1981
• Study Design:Theory and Practice, 1992
• Power and Pedagogy, 1992
• Dewey in his Skivvies, 2017
• Kant in the Culture Factory, 2018
• Current correspondence
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Reflections on Lifework and the Lifeworld

Autobiographical Reflections

In what follows, I try to give an account of what I have learned and what it has meant to me in the course of living my life. Of course, I don't intend to give a quantitative inventory. Rather, at this juncture in life, personal and historical, I write because I feel the need to clarify my sense of agency, and because I suspect that others feel similar needs and examining them together may prove to be of mutual benefit.

I propose to examine how and why I've pursued my lifework, instituting my lifeworld within the one world in an effort to explicate those three concepts — lifework, lifeworld, and one world. I think it is important for any and all of us to examine life making use of these concepts and I think it may be particularly important for me to do so because I have acquired not only life experience with them, but considerable historical understanding of the widespread, long term difficulties in using them effectively in making sense of our lives under present day circumstances.

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Let's Begin

Here's my birth certificate:

It attests to a start, but not a beginning. Beginnings mark lives, and their stories. The certificate merely records a few static facts, added to all the data comprising the one world, the factual world fixed for all. In contrast, a beginning has a foreground in time and place, and it initiates unfolding life experience, generating diverse meanings, each varying within the different contexts of those involved. What begins? Lifework engaging its lifeworld.

So, here my side of the story begins. I, Robert Oliver McClintock, began lifework, first engaging my lifeworld, air rushing into tiny lungs as I flailed in incomprehension. Note that I don't yet say, "my lifework," but I do speak of "my lifeworld." At that first infantile breath, I was still far having formed sufficient self-consciousness to affirm my lifework as "my own." But even at that first breath, speaking of my lifeworld makes sense, for it refers to all the different meanings that take place in the world, acquiring significance through and for my life, and the lives of others in the context of our shared circumstances.