The Problems and the Limitations of the Theories of Everyday Life

Abstract

“Philosophy is grey, but life is green, ” whispered Mephistopheles to Dr. Faust. Any “theory” cannot provide total understanding or detailed explanations for everyday life of each individual or for social chains of everyday life. Life is too complicated and too full of absurdite.
In spite of the fact that both sociology and the image of society are made up of fragments of human experience, they may finally be only illusions and may also be a kind of useful divertissement at the same time.
This paper consists of the following four parts :
I) The trialectic relations and differences found among personal experience, common-sense knowledge and general theory.
II) The multi-dimentional dynamism of everyday life.
III) The revival of “individuality” and “subjectivity” in recent “everyday life sociologies” and their limitations.
IV) The distance between the present state of sociology and the possibility of sociological contributions expected from my proposition of “everyday life anthropology” based on dynamism and social chains of daily behaviors.
My standpoint in undertaking the above arguments is basically critical of or even disapprovative of i) theoretical abstraction and generalization not based on concrete researches, ii) exaggeration of “social order” in micro-sociology and iii) lack of “dynamique sociale”.