Cultural Lichtung

In this chapter, we will return to the question of inter-practical interaction. While the methodological strategy used in previous chapters consists of emphasizing how meaningfulness is dependent upon its generation in various incommensurable fields and the intra-contextual interactivity of their possibilities, in this chapter we investigate how various practices belong together and interact with one another. First, we will discuss instrumental practices, which are practices that are pursued not for the sake of themselves and depend on the meaningfulness of other practices. In the course of our discussion, we will argue that phenomenological pragmatism should be seen as a counter-instrumental pragmatism (Sect. 5.1). In the second section (Sect. 5.2), we will investigate the integrative practices that interact with many further practices and compress them into what we will call cultural Lichtung, a cross-overlapping practical space where particular practices complement one another and presuppose a certain convertibility of possibilities among them.