Abstract
The aim of this article is to deal with the lack of concreteness in current theories about life projects and solution-focused activities regarding the capabilities and life skills through which such prospective life activities may be performed. A taxonomical model of domain- and level-specific generic and general human life task/life skill units will be outlined. This model is rooted in social and psychological domains given by prototypical theories in the field, and the article discusses how such a model, if implemented as an intervention tool in education, mentoring and counseling, may help avoid the pitfalls of ontological reductionism, system colonization, and essentialism.
Prospection, life projects, and life skills
People presume that it is possible to reach future goals and shape their own and common future life (Gilbert & Wilson, 2007; Seligman et al., 2016). Nature, culture, age, and personality, as well as socioeconomical position and current political situation and discourses, may define the personal content and meaning behind goals and future life and also limit the possibility of realizing these life projects. Nevertheless, under almost any given circumstances we are able to hope for—and at least try to work toward—a personal as well as a common future. This prospective capability to imagine alternative futures is significant for being human and for having a good enough grip on life, that is, to comprehend and manage life and life challenges in a meaningful way (Antonovsky, 1987; Bertelsen, 1994, 2005, 2013). Prospection is the mental process of projecting a future outcome of potential actions which, with some probability, will lead to setting goals (Railton, 2016). In the same vein, prospection may be considered an anticipation of future solutions to deal with current challenges and life tasks (de Shazer & Dolan, 2007) and goal-setting tasks (Locke & Latham, 2013).
The concept of prospection—and the concept of a good enough grip on life based on positive prospection—is relevant for social and personality psychology as far as these capabilities are associated with wellbeing and personality development (Brdar et al., 2009; Cantor et al., 1987; Emmons, 1986, 1991; Kasser & Ryan, 2001; Little, 1983; Pervin, 1989; Sheldon & Kasser, 1995). From a clinical psychological perspective, it has been demonstrated that in the case of anxiety, there exists a disproportionate amount of negative anticipation and with depression, an overall reduction of future imagination (Miloyan et al., 2013). From a societal psychology perspective, it has been proposed that developing prospection proves an evolutionary advantage not only to the goal-directedness of individuals but also as a social process of groups and communities. Division of labor and co-operation would not take place at all if a group of individuals or a society proved unable to plan in common or to engage in and commit to common-life-creating projects (kitchen technologies, shelters, clothes, tools, weapons, domestication of nature, cultural artifacts, social relations, administrative and political distribution principles). The ability to share visions of common futures remains necessary (Baumeister, 2016).
Prospection is about who we want to be as individuals and who we want to be together with others; it is ultimately about which common life we want to have. Therefore, prospection is about the capabilities and the intention to create, maintain, and evolve a common future. Prospection is based on having one’s own and shared projects in life, that is, on having life projects (Bertelsen, 1994, 2005; Little, 1983; Little et al., 2007). A life project is a personal system of acts and behaviors, as well as of relationships with others and the world, that characterizes the countless different ways in which one identifies tasks, realizes goals, and solves everyday life problems as well as problems faced in life at large (Bertelsen, 2010).
According to McAdams (2009), the notion of life projects is essential because it is closely connected to well-being and to feeling at home in life and in the world, and because it is about what people can do themselves, and together with others, to construct a good enough life. Unlike elusive concepts such as fundamental personality structures, personality tendencies, and personality traits, which by definition occur as fixed, the concept of life projects revolves around agency. Essentially, life projects can be developed and generally educated by the person and may be directed towards a hoped-for future life.
Clearly, a practicable concept of life projects requires a concept of life skills through which the agentive person can engage in creating, maintaining, and advancing their own and common life. Without a clear notion of skills, we can hardly talk about how deliberate, collaborative prospection and life projects can take place and how they can be developed at individual, social, cultural, and societal levels. It is therefore remarkable that such life skills are seldom explicitly outlined in theories and models of life projects and goal-directed and solution-focused activities. That leaves us with only an abstract idea of prospective activities, without any notion of how future-orientated agency is performed, that is, how goal-directed and solution-focused life projects are operationalized into concrete life-formatting activities.
Without a clear notion of life skills, we can hardly speak of prospection as anything other than an open endeavor into the unknown. Some would celebrate this as the very flavor of human life (and a leap of faith according to Kierkegaard). One could refer to the vast complexity of the world and human life to warn against an inevitable reductionism in any attempt to outline a limited set of life skills. Human life and human coexistence, one might argue, are formed by a shared vision of a common future—a future based on a common, unforeseen choreography in which contingent life projects and life skills will emerge in an ongoing life historical and cultural historical process. This is a core notion shared across a span of otherwise very different ideas, as reflected, for example, in Dewey’s pragmatism, which notes life activities emerge in practical interaction between the organism and the world (Dewey, 1896) and in Sartre’s (2003/1943) notion of existence before essence.
To be sure, due to its cultural historical nature, human life (Rogoff, 2003) is dynamic and marked by unceasing emergence. In ontological terms, we are situated in constantly moving frame conditions. However, in our concrete and common everyday life, as well as in ultimate life choices, we want to move toward distinct and apparent goals so we thrive by navigating in correlation with comprehensible, meaningful, and manageable regularities in, and models of, the world and human life (Antonovsky, 1987). The idea of liquid existence is simply not a practical position. So, while ontological reductionism, due to the emergent nature of the human world and human life, certainly is a mistake, methodological reductionism is inevitable both scientifically (Emmeche et al., 1997, 1998) and pragmatically in everyday life: scientifically, because we must approach the infinite complexity of any phenomena, given by its embeddedness in the world, by a methodological, delimited epistemology giving us a methodologically controlled yet narrow model of the phenomena, and pragmatically, because in any period of history—natural history (evolution), cultural history, and life history—we will always approach reality and life with a given set of forever emerging, but in any given time in fact limited, set of prospective life projects and life skills.
As coexistential beings who must deliberately co-ordinate and organize visions of common futures, we must at least be able to take our point of departure in commonly defined domains of human life, given by agreed-upon fundamental human life tasks—those tasks that all human beings face, regardless of age, gender, personal life history, culture, society, or, for that matter, psychological disorders or social cognitive disabilities. As coexistential beings, we must develop co-ordinated goal-directed and solution-focused prospective life projects that enable us to comprehend and manage these general human life tasks in a shared, meaningful way. Accordingly, we must be able to develop and educate a corresponding set of general and domain-specific human life skills that can be operationalized into actions that enable us to handle these life tasks.
Naturally, given the inexhaustible complexity of the world in general and the human lifeworld in particular, it is impossible to define sets of specific life tasks and corresponding life skills that apply to every single situation, in every domain of human life in which a life task may appear. However, a necessary methodologic-reductionist approach may be based on the idea of a generic set of domain-specific general human life tasks, manifesting in any concrete life task, and correspondingly, a generic set of general human life skills. A generic life skill generates a specific direction for action that is required in a specific situation; for example, a generic skill for establishing relations can generate numerous different relational acts corresponding to the requirements of any given situation, be it in the family, among friends, or in schools, as well as in a group of Indigenous people in the Amazon jungle or among coworkers in a New York-based company.
Overall, this points to an elaboration of the concept of goal-directed and solution-focused prospection, or an elaboration of prospection based on the notion of personally lived and coexistentially organized life projects realized by sets of life task/life skill units. The aim of this article is therefore to outline a theory-based taxonomical model for sets of domain-specific, generic, and general human life task/life skill units.
The construction principles for a taxonomical model of life task/life skill units
Let us first consider the construction principles of the taxonomical model and next define the theoretical content and the theoretical definitions of the life task/life skill units based on general psychology and well-known theoretical domains.
The point of departure for constructing a taxonomical model of life task/life skill units is the notion that nothing in the world exists on its own. The particular qualities of a phenomenon, which might be called its qualitative identity, derive from its particular forms of interactions, that is, its connectedness to other phenomena, and ultimately from its embeddedness in the world (Østerberg, 1966). However, human beings are not passively connected to the world. Human connectedness is based on agency characterized by intentionality, which is always two-sided (Heidegger, 1967): “inside-out” (intentio) relates to how humans are directed at something or someone based on needs, wishes, aspirations, hopes, and life projects, while “outside-in” relates to how humans are directed by something or someone based on laws, possibilities, and frame conditions, as well as on challenges of the surrounding natural, social, cultural, and societal world. Thus, we are always directed at/by something or someone. We develop and format our surroundings and we are shaped by these given and human-created surroundings. This is the horizontal dimension in humans’ intentional connectivity (Bertelsen, 2005; Emmeche et al., 1997, 1998).
Furthermore, there is a vertical dimension. Bottom-up, our life projects and life skills are based on our fundamental bio-psychological functional capacities (in themselves developing in horizontal interactions with the world). These elementary life skills are constitutive for our higher order life projects and life skills. Top-down, our higher order life projects and life skills organize these constitutive elements to function together in the emergent way of the higher life projects and life skills (Bertelsen, 2005; Emmeche et al., 1997, 1998). Accordingly, the corresponding life tasks are interconnected vertically. Bottom-up, fundamental objects, structures, and organisms in the world make up our elementary life fundament. Top-down, our personal and coexistential social, cultural, and societal life tasks organize basic life constituents on which they are based in the emergent shape of our life tasks.
In sum, there is both a vertical and a horizontal dimension in our generic and general human life task/life skill units, and accordingly there are two dimensions in the taxonomic construction: hierarchical levels and horizontal domains.
Taxonomic levels of life task/life skill units
Hierarchical taxonomies are found, for example, in epistemology (e.g., Maturana & Varela, 1992), educational theory (e.g., J. W. Bloom, 2004), and in organizational theory (e.g., Argyris & Schön, 1978). This approach can be traced back to Bateson’s (1972, 1979) cybernetic theory of levels, among others.
Bateson’s theory is about active and dynamic connectivity, that is, an entity’s way of acting in feedback loops, acting on and reacting to surrounding reactions to its activities, and vice versa. Thus, level 1 connectivity is about an entity’s immediate actions on challenges, possibilities, and conditions of the surrounding world. With respect to human life, level 1 connectivity is about people’s responsive development of life skills through which they handle changes, developments, and challenges related to basic life tasks that they are facing. Level 2 connectivity is about emergent dynamic patterns based on level 1 connectivity. Thus, human life, in the words of Bateson, is punctuated into a personally reflected and personally chosen variety of differently directed interests and a feeling of sense. Level 3 connectivity is about emergent “patterns of patterns” of connectivity; in human life, this is about reflections on patterns of connectivity. At this level, people in a critical/innovative way relate to and (re)organize the social, cultural, and societal systems of which they are part and furthermore reflect critically on the discourse through which such systems should be understood, explained, legitimized, and managed. At this level, human connectivity is not only about establishing personally senseful connectivity but also about socially significant, that is, common, meaningful ways of establishing, sustaining, and developing common human life conditions and coexistence.
As can be seen from these considerations, different levels are mutually interconnected. Higher level connectivities emerge (bottom-up) from, or are constituted by, lower level connectivities, but at the same time they contain emergent connectivities that top-down organize the lower level connectivities in respect to how they shall be orchestrated to constitute these higher levels (Bertelsen, 2005). However, as Bateson points out, this is not a developmental stage theory starting with level 1, then moving on to level 2 and level 3 (see also Bredo, 1989). Even small children are connected to their surroundings on all three levels. The connectivity levels are therefore to be understood or scaled according to age. For example, learning in 5-year-old children is different from the “level 2 learning” at the age of 15, which is again different from this kind of learning in a 75-year-old person. This point is important in the following definitions of skill-task unit levels. Even if defined in terms of adult connectivity, the descriptions can be scaled down accordingly when applied to working with children in primary school (Skibsted & Bertelsen, 2016).
Moreover, according to Bateson, there is no privileged stage. The ability to be totally absorbed in a piece of music (level 1) is just as meaningful as being able to analyze it according to genre (level 2) or to reflect on types of art experiences (level 3), yet the experience may differ on the various levels.
Taxonomic domains of life task/life skill units
Following the above considerations, we assume that prospective life projects are ultimately based on coexistential activities directed at/by natural, social, cultural, and societal surroundings. Thus, the first domain in which to identify basic life task/life skill units is defined by the life task category of participation in one’s own and in common life. Participation means taking a position from which one can engage in creating, maintaining, and developing one’s own and common life. Participation may be either manifest or latent and may be at play in different spheres (Ekman & Amnå, 2012). People may participate in relation to each other, fulfilling belongingness and attachment in relation to their own interests and personal projects, as well as in relation to shared projects of communities. Without this domain of basic participative life task/life skill units, no human coexistence exists and as a result, there exists no human life worth having or worth sharing.
Prospective life projects must be in accordance with the actual conditions and possibilities of the surrounding world, that is, they must possess the quality of realism (Wiggins, 2001). The next domain in which to identify basic life task/life skill units is therefore defined by the life task category of realistic attunement, that is, being directed by the fundamental laws and conditions of the real world as such, as well as by the unfolding principles and affordances of the actual situation in which one is embedded here-and-now, and to which one’s activities must continually adjust. It also means that the activities through which one realizes one’s prospective life projects must pragmatically adjust to practical opportunities and obstacles and one must regulate activities according to norms and values of the surrounding world. Without this domain of basic life task/life skill units, one’s life projects will be mere idiosyncratic endeavors without the enrichment of being informed and empowered by the surrounding world.
Finally, prospective life projects must be realized in and based on the complexity and liquidity of multirelational, multicultural, and global societal perspectives on life (Bauman, 2000, 2001). The third domain, therefore, is given by the life task category of navigation in and among multiple perspectives on life, that is, on life on perceptual, relational, and societal levels, taking into perspective others’—and introspectively one’s own—perspectives. Without this domain of basic life task/life skill units, one’s prospective life projects may come down to mere solipsistic–individualistic or even personality-disordered or social-disordered agency.
An outline of the two dimensions of the taxonomical model is presented in Table 1. As such, the model is composed as a 3 × 3 matrix defining a set of subcategories, one for each life task/life skill unit.
A Taxonomical Model of the Basic Generic and General Human Life Task/Life Skill Units Defined as Subcategories in a 3 × 3 Matrix of Three Levels and Three Domains.
Note. There are actually 10 subcategories because the second-level perspective-taking domain is divided into two subcategories (see explanation in the next section).
As mentioned above, there is no privileged stage. Each level/domain makes up its own meaningful grip on life in any given situation, but this does not mean that life task/life skill levels and domains are detached from each other; they are, by definition, related in mutual constitutive/organizational connectivities. For example, the mentalization activity of taking another person’s life project into perspective is, on the one hand (constituted bottom-up), implicitly informed by perception of nonverbal cues and sensations. On the other hand (organized top-down), it is likewise tacitly informed by the total of cultural and societal discourses (knowledge, policies, fate).
If not sufficiently codirected by the lower and/or higher levels, the life task/life skill unit may be dense and uninformed. For example, the interpretation of another person’s life project may be either a mere idiosyncratic understanding, uninformed by cultural knowledge, and/or mere projection uninformed by the other’s factual behavioral cues.
Table 2 outlines the vertical interconnections inside each of the three domains. In general, all the units are interconnected across the three domains in any combination of two or more units. For example, level 2 self-understanding in the domain of perspective taking detached from level 3 norms and values in the domain of realistic attunement would lack pronounced ethics and at best be based on some (in worst case, false) truism (see text below).
The Life Task/life Skill Units Mutually Constituted and Organized.
Note. This table outlines the consequences and qualities of life task/life skill units being insufficiently vertically constituted/organized inside each domain.
However, regarding the above, it remains impossible to outline the approximately 103 simple combinations. Furthermore, taking into account the changing situations inherent to real life, as well as human differences and that some units are more salient than others (i.e., any possible sequence of two or more life task/life skill units), the combinations amount to approximately 107, which can hardly be called a limited set.
The lifeworld content of the general life task/life skill units
As stated above, the taxonomic subcategories of life task/life skill units are general, which means that they give no indication of specific personal characteristics. For example, the life task/life skill unit of building, maintaining, and advancing close relationships may take place in almost infinite formations according to culture, age, personality, and socioeconomic position. On the surface, close relations may seem quite different when looking at how they unfold between two herdspeople on the Serengeti plain and at a table in front of a café in Paris. They may also look quite different when watching the social life in a kindergarten class versus that of a nursing home. Furthermore, one person may like to have a couple of friends while another seeks out a larger circle of friends. Thus, the content may vary but in any case, close relation building is a general human task. Similarly, norms and values may vary from culture to culture, even from situation to situation, but that we must comprehend and handle the basic task of navigating according to norms and values is a universal task of human coexistence.
The life task/life skill units through which prospection and life projects are realized are described as being general, whereas personal characteristics are derived from the lifeworld emerging from people’s everyday lives. According to Husserl, the term lifeworld defines the world as it is perceived by humans in an immediate way in the lived life (Husserl, 1936/1989), which marks a break with Kantian philosophy. Kant distinguished between the world-in-itself, that is, the world we will never be able to recognize, and the world-for-us, that is, the world to which we have access and that we understand by means of our limited human cognition. The lifeworld concept is a break with such a way of thinking. Truly, the world is too complex for us to be able to comprehend and explain, yet the world is never hidden from us; it is present in all its diversity, but always in a way perceived by us, that is, as the world in which we live, namely, our lifeworld. To Husserl, the lifeworld is not only a personal (solipsistic) lifeworld but represents a shared, realistic lifeworld as it appears to us in our common way of dealing with the world and life. However, Husserl did refrain from accounting for the origins and emergence of the lifeworld experience. To Heidegger (1967), the answer to the origins of the lifeworld lies in the fact that we do not passively experience the world but are agents who act in relation to the world around us. We use it, transform it, and nurse it (as well as abuse it) through our ever-evolving actions, technology, science, and art (Bengtsson, 2013; Biesta, 2014). In other words, the concrete forms of human lifeworlds vary endlessly in accordance with an indefinite variation in, and development of, human activities.
The construction of the taxonomical model and its subcategories is indeed abstract, proposed as culturally and societally invariant, yet the content of the life task/life skill units may vary endlessly according to the personal, social, cultural, and societal forms in which general human life tasks may appear.
The theoretical foundation and definitions of the basic life task/life skill units
The next step in the formal construction of the taxonomical model is to demonstrate the nonarbitrariness of life task/life skill unit categories by way of defining the units as rooted in social and psychological science.
Obviously, one cannot expect each one of the categories emerging from a theoretically constructed taxonomical model (in contrast to a systematic review on existing empirical findings) to be supported by a large body of empirical evidence. Even more crucial, given the aim of this article, one can hardly expect to find 1:1 theories for each life task/life skill unit, simply because the categories are general constructs. For example, no single theory exists on which the general notion of self-esteem may be established. This section will demonstrate the nonarbitrariness of the taxonomical model by rooting its categories in domains across theories from various disciplines dealing with the same fundamental questions—domains which therefore cannot be defined by any singular theory but rather must be identified by exemplifying theories.
Domain of participation
The first domain of the taxonomical model, social participation, can prototypically be identified by theories on social relations; on distributed activities according to interest-specific division of labor; and on communities. Obviously, many other theories might be added, but those chosen here should be sufficient to denote the domain based on which level-specific participative life task/life skill units can be defined.
People strive to belong to and participate in social, cultural, and societal relations and communities. Based on an intensive review of theoretical as well as empirical studies, Baumeister and Leary (1995) found that belongingness is a fundamental human motive. In social psychology, this is supported by theories of fundamental group-building principles (Tajfel, 1978; Tajfel et al., 1971) and in a developmental perspective by attachment theory (Bowlby, 1989) and self-development theories (Kohut, 1977; Stern, 1998).
On a higher relationship level, people build communities and societies and, according to Bauman (2001) and Tönnies (1963), one should note the difference between community and society. Human communities are grounded in a basic sense of togetherness based on family, groups of friends, and neighborhood. There is no explicit purpose of living in a community besides the mere experience of being together, fulfilling the need to belong and to share everyday life, whereas interests form the purpose of living in a society. Society may be defined as an association of people formed by division of labor and co-operation aimed at cultivating certain interests and realizing goals and projects (cultural, economic, or political).
As proposed by Bakan (1966) and by McAdams (2009) and installed as a basic idea in personality psychology, human life and human thriving are based on being included in community and society and on being invited to participate in, maintain, and advance them. This inclusive participation takes place on all levels, from the personal and private to the public sphere (Brodie et al., 2011). Participation can be authentic as well as inauthentic when engaged in handling common life tasks (Baumeister & Bushman, 2011; Taylor, 1991; Wojtyła, 1979). While the basic life task/life skill unit of relation forms activities centered on a singular relation or group, the higher order life task/life skill units are directed at/by community and society chosen out of personal interests and possibilities—in other words, distribution of life activities spreading out to different everyday tasks, projects, employments, and leisure activities, given by division of labor framed by the necessary objects, tools, structures, and priorities.
Regarding societies characterized by modern democracy on the societal level, the task of deliberative activity is salient (Diamond, 1999; Habermas, 1984, 1989; Held, 2005; Kymlica, 2002; Young, 2002). Consequently, such societies are built and maintained by citizens not only capable of taking on centered and decentered life activities, but also of engaging in communal and societal life in a personal or individuated (not to be confused by individualistic) manner (Ekman & Amnå, 2012). It is therefore crucial that democratic societies facilitate and empower life skills through which such participation may take place. Exclusion of larger segments of citizens, or large groups of citizens unwilling to or incapable of displaying basic general human life skills regarding relationship, community, and society, may prove fatal.
Participation always takes place based on a position taken by oneself as well as a position assigned by the surrounding world. A position is the point in the social, communal, and societal network from which one experiences the world and acts in it (Davies & Harré, 1990; Harré et al., 2009; Harré & van Langenhove, 1999a, 1999b; Howie & Peters, 1996; Jones, 1999; Linehan & McCarthy, 2000).
Overall, our fundamental first-level participation is based on close relations. On the second level, our engagements and life projects are distributed into vast numbers of different projects framed by personal interests. Such projects should not be confused with individualistic or ego-centric projects. They may degenerate into such forms but will normally be organized and therefore also implicitly directed at/by higher order community principles. On the third level, our life project emerges as activities explicitly directed at/by community, participating in building, maintaining, and developing aspects of society in a personal and individuated (not individualistic) manner.
Based on these prototypical domain specifications, we may now define the three level-specific subcategories of participation.
First-order participative life skills: Close relation
This basic life skill/life task unit enables one to participate—in a group-centered manner—in creating, maintaining, and developing significant close social relationships.
As a general, recurring example for this skill as well as the subsequent skills, we may choose a young student who has just started high school but who considers dropping out due to feeling lonely. A crucial precondition for her to feel comfortable and for her to thrive in school is that she manages to make some close friends in her class.
Life projects having this participative life task/life skill as a most salient part are first and foremost directed at/by building close relationships that fulfill one’s need to belong and to experiencing understanding, affection, and sympathy—on one hand by reaching out and relating to others and on the other by being receptive/amenable to contact initiatives.
Second-order participative life skills: Frames
This basic life skill/life task unit enables one in a socially and societally decentered manner to participate in creating, maintaining, and developing the basic frames and structures of a personal grip on life and projects according to one’s own personal interests.
In the recurring example, the young student tries to get an overview of things needed to attend school (such as computer, bag, bus tickets) and of how to prioritize among the many everyday interests and engagements (school, family, friends), for example, by constructing a realistic weekly schedule. Furthermore, she must make agreements, keep promises, and join common projects to co-ordinate her own interests to the surroundings.
Framing life projects are primarily directed at/by one’s own choice of engagements, but they may also form part of co-operative projects or contribute to common prosperity. Still, the vitalizing element is one’s personal interests.
Third-order participative life skills: Community
This basic life skill/life task unit enables one in an individuated way to participate in creating, maintaining, and developing social, cultural, and societal communities.
The young student attends a class that has the joint project of keeping a mutually respectful communicative culture when discussing controversial topics regarding politics, religion, or climate. In her own way, she tries to make a good example by listening and making calm statements. The vital point here is that she is, in an unselfish yet personal manner, trying to make a difference for the class community.
Here, the life projects are primarily directed at/by the welfare of community and society, either by some minor act or via larger forms of activities, activism, and mobilization (such as sports, environmental interest groups, and politics).
Domain of realistic attunement
The second domain of the taxonomical model, realistic attunement, can prototypically be defined by theories of activity, self-efficacy in planning, and moral navigation.
Realistic attunement to nature, other people, culture, and society is a central quality of human life activities (Bertelsen, 1993, 2005; Leontev, 1978). For example, a young father takes his child to kindergarten via bicycle, then leaves the child so that he can spend the day at his workplace, which is far away. This is a situated project that can only be understood by taking into consideration the father’s overall life project of fitting in, in relation to the life conditions in modern Western society. This overarching life project will organize his other situated life projects in domains of family life, for example, being together with friends or being a football coach.
To further elaborate on the above example, consider the same young father performing the action of taking his child to kindergarten class where the father must, among other things, put his left foot on one pedal, push off the ground with his right foot, mount the bike, and then press down on the other pedal. These are altogether bio-psychological functions which, bottom-up, are the basic operations by which this action is realized, but the operations will only function in this way if they are top-down orchestrated by the situated project and ultimately by the life project at large.
Therefore, on the first-order level, the basic life task is to be realistically attuned to the basic and, in the last resort, natural and physical conditions of the surrounding world, for example, the gyro forces of the wheels, the conditions of the road, cross wind, and attention to the most important aspects of the situation. Performed well, this orchestration of basic operations may be characterized by being fully absorbed in the conduct, a quality of activity termed by Csikszentmihalyi (1998) as flow.
On the second-order level, these operations emerge as an ideally well-planned act pragmatically attuned to the optimal way to reach a situated goal (Chelimsky, 1997; Dewey, 1938; Locke & Latham, 2013). Such pragmatically effective and planned acts are closely connected to self-efficacy, that is, a prospective grip on the situation and the goal based on positive expectations of how this situated project will succeed (Bandura, 1997). One is in control of the situated action insofar as one reaches the planned-for goal (Bukowski et al., 2017; Fiske, 2004).
On the third-order level, the ultimate life task is to comprehend and manage one’s everyday life tasks and activities in a way that is realistically attuned to the overall coexistential organizing principles of the good righteous life that is attuned to one’s own and common values. Values are activity-directing notions that are crucial for one’s own and common life projects (Bertelsen, 2009, 2012; Schwartz, 1992). As Bandura (2002), associated with Festinger’s (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance, has pointed out, it is no easy task for people to reconcile personal ruptures of basic values. Such disruptions may lead people to legitimation strategies summarized in what Bandura terms moral disengagement. But why are norms and values so vulnerable that they may be disregarded in the first place? According to Maio and colleagues (Maio & Olson, 1998; Maio et al., 2001), this may occur when one has no explicit/clear notion of one’s own and common norms and values and if these merely exist as truisms, that is, as tacit/not reflected upon and taken as a given. The opposite is to make more explicit the values in one’s prospective life projects, that is, being able to state some reason for why they may be good to have and to sustain and how they should direct and educate one’s activities. In this way, one’s own and common values will be cognitively robust and far more difficult to disrupt and detach oneself from.
By denoting these theories, I have specified the domain and levels of realistic attunement by which I can now define the three level-specific subcategories of realistic attunement.
First-order realistic attunement life skill: Attentiveness
This basic life skill/life task unit enables one, in a realistic way, to attune one’s activity, engagement, focus, and presence to the basic affordances of the actual situation.
The female student in the recurring example finds it difficult to concentrate in class due to noise, chatter, and social media notifications. Also, she finds it a challenge to maintain focus when exposed to one small but assertive group in class expressing the opinion that it is uncool to be engaged in class activities and learning. Her counselor has advised her to practice focusing on the curriculum in each lesson and to not let herself be distracted by nonconstructive opinions.
Life projects having this realistic attunement life task/life skill unit as the weighty part are primarily directed at/by the concrete situation and continuing adjustment of one’s activities to the conditions, possibilities, and contingent changes in this situation.
Second-order realistic attunement life skill: Planning
This basic life skill/life task unit enables one in a realistic way to attune one’s pragmatic planning to the reality of conditions, possibilities, and obstacles of the surrounding world.
To avoid dropping out of high school, the young student decides to make a study plan for each class she is attending. How much energy will she prioritize for each subject? How should she work on these subjects in class/at home? She also decides to regularly evaluate whether all of her different life projects sustain the life project of completing high school with the best possible outcomes.
With this basic life task/life skill unit, one is realistically attuned to/by the practical possibilities of everyday life. One evaluates and adjusts actions, goals, and intermediate aims according to conditions, obstacles, and contingencies.
Third-order realistic attunement life skills: Norms and values
This basic life skill/life task unit enables one to attune one’s own norms and values to the reality of the morals and ethics of the surrounding world.
The young student is preoccupied with getting on with her social life, reflecting on her norms and values in comparison to the norms and values of her surroundings in general and to her peers at school in particular. She wants to be compliant, but not at any price, so she is considering whether the norms and values that she usually takes for granted as her own are alienating products of social persuasion and nonreflective assimilation.
Life projects of this kind are primarily directed at/by normative and moral aspects of the overall social, cultural, and societal lifeworld. On this level, one’s prospective life projects are not only adjusted to concrete conditions and pragmatic possibilities but also will be marked by progressively critical-constructive adjustment between one’s own and surrounding ethics.
Domain of perspective taking
The third domain of the taxonomical model, perspective taking, is prototypically denoted by theories of perception, mentalization, and navigation in larger systems.
To live and thrive in the human lifeworld demands the ability to identify its qualities. In a famous example, Frege (1975) stated that many people think of the Morning Star and the Evening Star as two different objects, even though in astronomical terms these phenomena refer to the same object, namely the planet Venus. Frege suggests that we use the notions of sense and meaning to explain the phenomena. Due to the methods by which they identify the object (observation in the evening vs. in the morning), different people may perceive the very same object differently. At the same time, the phenomena may have the same scientific meaning based on reliable and valid observation methods.
As pointed out by Wittgenstein (1953/2009), the methodological core by which we identify the objects surrounding us is that in one way or another we make use of these objects in concrete activities. Things (in the widest sense: words, tools, art, social institutions) are equally meaningful to us when we use them in a similar way, and this makes sense because the object, for example, a sofa, reveals how to use it merely by its form and construction. The same may be said about the institution of marriage. It has a common meaning because, based on its social construction, it can be put to use in common ways. However, to one person the sofa may be a fancy collector’s item; to another, it may be merely a relaxation tool. Similarly, marriage certainly means different things to different couples.
According to Gibson (1979), we are able to relate to things, to make use of them, and to identify their sense and meaning because we pick up real qualities and cues from the things themselves, that is, a perceptual connectivity, termed by Gibson as affordance. Norman (1988) has elaborated Gibson’s affordance notion in a Wittgensteinian manner: based on our human capacity of taking the things into use, they respond with certain use-specific cues that are immediately understandable, senseful, and meaningful to us.
Likewise, we are able to focus on the sensations in our own body as essential to introspection (Gendlin, 1962). Termed by Stern (2010), these sensations have the quality of vitality affects, such as a bodily sense of tension, relaxation, heaviness, lightness, surging, fading, accelerating, and decelerating. Advancing to the cognitive level, introspection is the capability to think about one’s thoughts, feelings, and wishes, that is, metacognition (Wells, 2011; Wells & Purdon, 1999), and to consider the emotional and caring quality of self-acceptance and commitment in life (Hayes et al., 2012).
As to taking other people into perspective, empathy is the capability of comprehending the senseful and meaningful affordance in other people’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations. According to Rogers (1959), empathy is the capability to understand in an accurate way the emotional and meaningful content in the other person’s experience, as if it were one’s own but without losing the “as if.” Kohut (1959, 1977) emphasizes the intimate correlation between introspection and empathy. The following basic connection has been elaborated by Fonagy and colleagues based on the Theory of Mind (Baron-Cohen, 1991; Premack & Woodruff, 1978) and Attachment Theory (Bowlby, 1989): mentalization is the capability to understand the correlation between what one thinks, feels, or wants oneself and what others think, feel, and want (Allen & Fonagy, 2006; Bateman & Fonagy, 2006).
Recently, the role of empathy as the ultimate interpersonal way of understanding and responding to human affairs has been challenged (P. Bloom, 2016; Singer, 2016). According to this discussion, empathy is a force only powerful in concrete relations. We display understanding and compassion to concrete others to whom we are in close contact. However, empathy is an insufficient capability when it comes to navigating morally and politically in large and/or distant systems regarding people with whom we are not in close contact (e.g., people at the other end of town or in foreign countries, other segments of citizens, refugees, or workers in other companies). The reason for this is that when based solely on empathy, our opinions, judgments, and activities run the risk of in-group bias, us/them polarization, and prioritizing personal sense before societal meaning. To understand and navigate in a multicultural and global world and in social constructions of societal systems and discourses in general, we need extra capabilities of understanding the general human meaning and intentionality inherent in a large-scale, man-made world of institutions, rules, laws, and discourses (Berger & Luchmann, 1967; Mead, 2015).
Nonetheless, for two reasons, the capability of understanding systems cannot do without introspection and empathy as constitutional elements: first, it makes us able to understand human intentionality and second, as demonstrated by Damasio (2005, 2018), without said capability, we would not be inclined to, and in fact would be unable to, navigate in a reasonable way both morally and politically in any human situation.
The above theories should be sufficient to denote the domain of perspective taking by which we can define the four level-specific subcategories of perspective taking.
First-order skill of taking into perspective: Awareness
This basic life skill/life task unit enables one to take into perspective the perception of bodily sensations and affects, cues in others’ nonverbal communication, and basic qualities and affordances of the surrounding world.
To be able to navigate in the class community, for example in heated discussions, our young student needs to grasp the basic cues both in the behavior (a high-pitched voice) of her classmate and in her own bodily sensations (the sensed feeling of heaviness on her shoulders). In order to sense her feeling of being in the world, she must open up to the cues of any situation in which she is positioned: the sounds of nature and the city here-and-now; the wind, the rain, and the lighting; the temperature of the water in the stream; the lines constituting the facial expression of the one to whom she is talking; and the vitality of her body.
Life projects on this level of taking basic cues into perspective as salient life task/life skill units enable one to sense the basic affordances in the world in general and in one’s own body and others’ nonverbal behavior in particular.
Second-order skill of taking into perspective (a): Understanding self in the self/other system
This basic life skill/life task unit enables one to take into perspective one’s own thoughts, feelings, and motivations in a given situation and in general to take into perspective one’s own perspective on life.
In the above example, our student has difficulty finding her own position regarding the next level of education after high school. Which direction should she go? What are her feelings regarding different types of education? Which proactive directedness is part of her prospection? Most importantly, is her motivation intrinsic?
Life projects having this introspective level of taking into perspective as salient life task/life skill unit enable one to understand one’s own thoughts, feelings, and motivations as well as one’s own life projects.
Second-order skill of taking into perspective (b): Understanding the other in the self/other system
This basic life skill/life task unit enables one to take into perspective other people’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations in a given situation and ultimately one’s perspective on one’s own life and our common lives.
When discussions get heated and classmates express strong opinions, our young student attempts to keep in mind how important it is to understand that behind such contentious or strange-sounding points of view are the other person’s attempts to get a grip on life. Not that she must agree, but she thinks it necessary to understand the underlying life project as a precondition of an appropriate and constructive response.
Life projects of this kind are directed at/by the life skill of understanding others and enable one to take into perspective the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of others and their view on life in general.
Third-order skill of taking into perspective: Understanding systems
This basic life skill/life task unit enables one to take into perspective the human intentionality inherited in the human-made world and the fundamental human life projects through which the forms and artifacts of culture and society are expressed (administrative systems, rules, law, institutions, arts, faiths, explanations). Furthermore, this life task/life skill unit enables members of groups, agents in institutions, and citizens of societies to comply with and deliberate critically and innovatively on the transaction among different lifeworlds, cultures, societies, and discourses of faith and science.
Our student must comprehend the many rules and administrative systems at the school she attends. Furthermore, to navigate on an advanced level, she must understand the larger political systems that form her education and the possible synergy originating from the multicultural student population. Then again, not that she must agree to the rules and discourses characterizing the school and her education, but she must first understand the human intentions originally inherited in the systems forming her everyday life at school as an adequate and decent point of departure for participation in a critical–constructive way.
With this basic life task/life skill unit directing one’s life projects, one is directed at/by the incarnated intentionality and fundamental human life projects basically forming human-made reality.
Implementation: Essentialist colonization or empowerment
A basic feature of the proposed taxonomical model of basic generic and general human life task/life skill units is that being operationalized in concrete activities may contribute to the empowerment and education of prospective life projects. Therefore, the model can be operationalized into a system of tools in education, counseling, mentoring, and social psychiatric interventions used to teach and educate a personal grip on life, as well as to inform and empower the choice of life trajectories. This practical use of the taxonomy combined with a prospective and solution-focused approach is demonstrated in Bertelsen (2010, 2018), Bertelsen et al. (2020), and Skibsted (2020).
In general, empowerment is the process by which people gain mastery over their lives (Rappaport, 1984). In this context, this definition can be elaborated based on the concept of life skills: empowerment refers to the enhancing of people’s life skills, through which they are better able to comprehend and manage general human life tasks in a personal senseful and common meaningful way; in other words, empowerment can be facilitated by means of interventions aiming at the development and education of general human life skills.
However, applying these kinds of tools runs the risk of alienating governmentality (Foucault, 1991), or what Habermas (1984) has termed the System’s colonization of the lifeworld.
The System consists of political, economic, judicial, and technocratic structures created by us for the purpose of dealing with the human conditions of coexistence by means of co-operation and division of labor. However, according to Habermas, the System tends to develop its own legal–economic system values as “faster,” “bigger,” “more efficient,” “value-increasing,” “simplifying,” “digitizable,” and “statistically evaluable.”
Colonization means that System values penetrate and eliminate the free actions, co-operation between people, and the life values by which the lifeworld is created, maintained, and advanced (characterized by “meaningfulness,” “shared participation,” “moral,” “aesthetics,” “caring,” “solidarity,” and “acknowledgment”). The colonization of the lifeworld is alienating because it implies that individual and common life activities are no longer defined by creation and collaboration based on autonomy and intrinsic motivation but instead by administrative rules based on regulations, power, and financial incentives. However, we clearly need the System to understand, explain, organize, and manage a complex world and complex coexistence. Only when detached from the lifeworld does the System become a colonizing evil, developing its own governmental values and logic independent of the realities and values of the actual lived lifeworld.
Løvlie (2013) points to the danger of such colonization when tools designed only to promote System values are implemented in schools. Constructed in a detached system perspective, such implementation is alienating because it deems as irrelevant the teachers’ knowledge about the students’ development and education and the students’ own perspectives on life and their lifeworlds. The teachers may be forced to enhance learning and development based solely on System terms (such as rapid implementation, test score maximization, and international ranking).
We need the System to be constituted bottom-up by our lifeworld, which should be organized by such a nondetached System. The System and its organizational principles must be embedded in our lifeworld, never the other way around.
If a model of life task/life skill units is to be implemented as an educational tool contributing to the empowering of individual and common life projects, it must make personal sense to the individual based on lifeworld tasks and challenges. Furthermore, if this educational, counseling, or mentoring intervention shall be directed at/by social, cultural, and societal coexistence, it must be formatted in accordance with shared meaning inherited in a nondetached System. The overall aim is not merely to assist the individual in handling their own life, but also to develop their ability to relate to, participate in, and contribute to the formation, maintenance, and development of the common life. Klafki (2007) defines this double-sided aim (of personal sense and common meaning) as “categorial education” (Kategoriale Bildung), which builds on mastering a certain type of comprehension and behavior in order to critically engage in community and society. However, categorial education must also be based on what is relevant in relation to a person’s own experience and wishes in life, that is, one’s personal lifeworld.
This is exactly how the proposed taxonomical model of generic and general human life task/life skill units may be transformed into empowering intervention and educational methods. On the one hand, the taxonomical model provides a set of coexistentially meaningful and general life-task sensitive categories by which we can educate and co-ordinate our life projects and prospectively form our life trajectories interwoven with others. On the other hand, the model’s content is always directed at/by a personal senseful lifeworld task as well as challenges.
However, not necessarily running the risk of System colonization, we must take into consideration the risk of reducing the human lifeworld by basing it on a delimited set of generic life task/life skill units. Since, as agents in the community, we are constantly able to develop our positions, procedures, sociocultural perceptions, and ways of scientific explanation, we thus have the ability to develop our interactions with the world and thus gain access to still deeper layers and still more expanded domains of the world’s complexity. In this way, our understanding of the world—and our lifeworld—has changed throughout history. The lifeworld is dynamic and constantly evolving and appears in an ever-changing, vibrant diversity. Therefore, talking about key patterns of the lifeworld and categories of life tasks and life skills obviously runs the risk of reductionism and ignorance of cultural historical change (Rogoff, 2003).
To handle the risk of historical ignorance, we may turn to the theory of evolution. In dealing with the history of nature, we all face the same risk of essentialism because we are dealing with species, habitats, and econiches in constant development. However, a species is not only something transitory, but something we can identify, categorize, and study over time. One solution is, therefore, to think about a species as a developmental unit (Juul-Jensen, 1998) developing over time that can thus be identified as a dynamic process (as opposed to an essence) that may be studied over time. The same applies to patterns of our basic life conditions and life challenges understood as dynamic developmental units of cultural history. In other words, the lifeworld consists of ever-changing development units of cultural history, which we, in a particular cultural–historical epoch, may identify as basic patterns in the general human life conditions. These developmental units form the basis of a categorial education and general development in a given cultural–historical epoch.
Conclusion
The aim of this article is to contribute to the theoretical domain of prospection and life projects that lack explanation about how, and through which capabilities, people—for themselves and in deliberative collaboration—may perform activities that lead them to hoped-for personal senseful and common meaningful future-life trajectories. This theoretical contribution consists of an outlined taxonomical model of generic and general human life task/life skill units through which individual and common lifeworld formatting activities may be generated.
Because these life task/life skill units are derived from categorical patterns of fundamental tasks and challenges in the common human lifeworld, and because they must be given a personal content coming from the personal lived life, the proposed taxonomical model may avoid the pitfalls of ontological reduction, System colonization, and essentialism. Operationalizing these life task/life skill units into acts may contribute to empowering personal senseful and common meaningful lifeworld activities.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
