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

National Research Tomsk State University, 634050, Tomsk, Russia
Smolensk State University, 214000, Smolensk, Russia

^* Corresponding author: fan_tan@mail.tsu.ru

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.