#thomas luckmann

[noosphe-re]

Language builds up semantic fields or zones of meaning that are linguistically circumscribed. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax are geared to the organization of these semantic fields.

Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge

[cleonard4]

Different skills are required at different ages in one society as against another, or indeed in varying sectors of the same society. The age at which, in one society, it may be deemed proper for a child to be able to drive an automobile may, in another, be the age at which he is expected to have killed his first enemy. An upper-class child may learn the "facts of life" at an age when a lower-class child has mastered the rudiments of abortion technique. Or, an upper-class child may experience his first stirrings of patriotic emotion about the time that his lower-class contemporary first experiences hatred of the police and everything they stand for.

The Social Construction of Reality by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, p. 137

[maaarine]

The Social Construction of Reality (Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, 1966)

“Consciousness is always intentional; it always intends or is directed towards objects.

We can never apprehend some putative substratum of consciousness as such, only consciousness of something or other.

This is so regardless of whether the object of consciousness is experienced as belonging to an external physical world or apprehended as an element of an inward subjective reality.

Whether I (the first person singular, here as in the following illustrations, standing for ordinary self-consciousness in everyday life) am viewing the panorama of New York City or whether I become conscious of an inner anxiety, the processes of consciousness involved are intentional in both instances. (...)

Different objects present themselves to consciousness as constituents of different spheres of reality.

I recognize the fellowmen I must deal with in the course of everyday life as pertaining to a reality quite different from the disembodied figures that appear in my dreams.

The two sets of objects introduce quite different tensions into my consciousness and I am attentive to them in quite different ways.

My consciousness, then, is capable of moving through different spheres of reality. Put differently, I am conscious of the world as consisting of multiple realities.

As I move from one reality to another, I experience the transition as a kind of shock.

This shock is to be understood as caused by the shift in attentiveness that the transition entails. Waking up from a dream illustrates this shift most simply.”

[noosphe-re]

...language is capable of transcending the reality of everyday life altogether. It can refer to experiences pertaining to finite provinces of meaning, it can span discrete spheres of reality.

Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge

[noosphe-re]

[noosphe-re]

Any significative theme that thus spans spheres of reality may be defined as a symbol, and the linguistic mode by which such transcendence is achieved may be called symbolic language. On the level of symbolism, then, linguistic signification attains the maximum detachment from the 'here and now' of everyday life, and language soars into regions that are not only de facto but a priori unavailable to everyday experience. Language now constructs immense edifices of symbolic representations that appear to tower over the reality of everyday life like gigantic presences from another world. Religion, philosophy, art, and science are the historically most important symbol systems of this kind. To name these is already to say that, despite the maximal detachment from everyday experience that the construction of these systems requires, they can be of very great importance indeed for the reality of everyday life. Language is capable not only of constructing symbols that are highly abstracted from everyday experience, but also of 'bringing back' these symbols and appresenting them as objectively real elements in everyday life. In this manner, symbolism and symbolic language become essential constituents of the reality of everyday life and of the common-sense apprehension of this reality. I live in a world of signs and symbols every day.

Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge

[maaarine]

The Social Construction of Reality (Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, 1966)

“Reification is the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or possibly supra-human terms.

Another way of saying this is that reification is the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something other than human products - such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will.

Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world, and, further, that the dialectic between man, the producer, and his products is lost to consciousness. (...)

The objectivity of the social world means that it confronts man as something outside of himself.

The decisive question is whether he still retains the awareness that, however objectivated, the social world was made by men - and, therefore, can be remade by them.”

[maaarine]

The Social Construction of Reality (Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, 1966)

“To be given an identity involves being assigned a specific place in the world. As this identity is subjectively appropriated by the child ('I am John Smith'), so is the world to which this identity points. (...)

He is imprisoned in the objective reality of his society, although that reality is subjectively present to him in an alien and truncated manner.

Such an individual will be unsuccessfully socialized, that is, there will be a high degree of asymmetry between the socially defined reality in which he is de facto caught, as in an alien world, and his own subjective reality, which reflects that world only very poorly. (...)

As long as such individuals, even if they number more than a handful, do not form a counter-community of their own, both their objective and subjective identities will be predefined in accordance with the community's institutional programme for them. They will be lepers, and nothing else. (...)

Incipient counter-definitions of reality and identity are present as soon as any such individuals congregate in socially durable groups.

This triggers a process of change that will introduce a more complex distribution of knowledge. A counter-reality may now begin to be objectivated in the marginal group of the unsuccessfully socialized. (...)

The individuals prevented from fully internalizing the reality of the community may now be socialized into the counter-reality of the lepers' colony; that is, unsuccessful socialization into one social world may be accompanied by successful socialization into another. (...)

Maximally, it will no longer be an easy matter to recognize anybody's identity - for if lepers can refuse to be what they are supposed to be, so can others; perhaps, so can oneself.

If this process appears fanciful at first, it is beautifully illustrated by Gandhi's designation of harijans, that is, 'children of God', for the outcastes of Hinduism.”