PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE LIFEWORLD OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY

Abstract

This research intends to extend a philosophy of the body and the flesh in Merleau-Ponty toward a phenomenology of the lifeworld in contemporary society. More precisely, the research puts together in a broader notion of life both a minimum anthropology perspective devoted to an ontology and a sociohistorical perspective committed to the critique of the lifeworld in contemporary society, which is marked by the neocapitalist vicissitudes and its peculiar type of subjectivity. More than a synthesis of both perspectives, what interests us most is its non-separation, its tension and its dialectical instability (Merleau-Ponty). This research project follows the previous Fapesp research grant (2014/17192-2), which was part of my postdoctoral project (2012/14330-0) also supported by Fapesp. Taking into account the exploratory, open feature of our research, what interests us most here is to reintroduce and update the state of the art on an issue that stimulates our current project. We will divide the research into three items that can be called three states of abandon, isolation or, to put it simply, contemporary malaise: 1) individualism, that is, a major theme for the beginning of this research, according to our postdoctoral report; 2) instrumental reason and technoscience, which are the products of modernity; 3) the autonomization of economics and its consequences. In this project, we bring a fourth element that illustrates the advancement of a new theme in our current research: the problem of the "common", which constitutes a privileged issue to the extent that the "common" unifies the two guiding perspectives that were mentioned above. (AU)