The picture of the world as a part of social reality

Abstract

The most relevant term to describe initial situation, in which the person of modern world can find himself today, is a social reality, definition of which was given by Alfred Schutz, a follower of Edmund Husserl. Though there's a need to make his term more accurate: both cultural and social institutes and natural world can be considered as elements of reality's model, but the social reality itself isn't identical to this (its own) model. In most everyday and traditional situations person can only have ritual thinking and not create explicit images of the "whole", which contains these situations. It means that everyday practices are not necessarily connected to the system, however the complex of significant social institutions and traditions give person enough number of practices-rituals, which allow him and his group to set boundaries of these practices' effectiveness (boundaries of normality) and preserve their cultural universum in time.

By mastering during the process of initial socialization ways to identify socially significant values and modes of action ("rituals") according to these values the person is learning and forming a mental image of environment, which allows him to reproduce and translate his accumulated cultural experience. Complex of subjective skills and abilities allows person find himself at each moment of his life in some "real situation", forms of which are directed by society. Kaleidoscope of life situations, which bases on person's conscious and unconscious action (starting from controlling the moves of own body, use of objects and their identification, articulation of dangerous, desired etc. to special practices), more or less repetitive from person to person (i.e. intersubjective by their nature) and followed with certain mental images (which include interiorized view on significant things) should be considered as a social reality.