Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckmann are social scientists, probably well-known to everyone with interest in humanities and social sciences. I was just reading their book The Structures of the Life-World, that would be one on the theoretical grounds in my PhD. Their book is about forming social spaces through communication (a very rough description) and was written, technically, by Luckmann after Schütz’s death, based on Schütz’s notes and with the assistance of his widow.
Fantasying or Planning Triglav?
In the Volume II there is a chapter on fantasying and planning, where the essential difference between the two concepts is in modo potentiali. Planning is according to them fantasying in the framework of the possible. And Luckmann – probably just he – explains this difference with an example about planning to climb the popular Slovenian mountain Triglav:
“I Imagine that in one hundred years, dressed in shirt and trousers and tennis shoes, I will climb the Triglav in winter by its north face. Now, it is wirtually impossible that I will still be alive in one hundred years . . . Next, I envision that next year, after intensive training and conditioning and successful climbing lessons with experienced alpinists, I will climb the north face of the Triglav in summer . . . I do not want to climb the Triglav via the north face, nor are climbing lessons absolutely recommendable at my age. But to go to the top of the Triglav comfortably in two days, staying over night in the Kredarica chalet, by the usually safe route, that is an idea that is easily practicable not only as a project, but I am already toying with the idea of making it into a decision.”
(Schütz and Luckmann, Structures of the Life-World, Volume II, 1989/1983: 22-3)
Reading this example on when projecting becomes planning and when it is stuck in the field of fantasy made me wonder, why the Triglav was mentioned, that is just an average normal mountain in Julian Alps. It is certainly nothing so special, that the people worldwide would find it so important to build any example case for their scientific writing on it.
Tomaž Luckmann
Well, thanks to the Interwebs, I did my homework and found out, that Luckmann was actually born in Slovenian Jesenice as Tomaž Luckmann to Slovenian mother and Austrian father. That probably made him use Triglav, the Slovenian national symbol, in his example.
At the end of the World War II he emigrated together with his family to Austria. He studied in Vienna, Innsbruck and New York, then worked in Constance, Germany and cooperated with another famous German sociology guy Peter L. Berger.
Somewhere on his vivid life-path he was recognized from his motherland and became member of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Whoa, Tomaž, that were some simpatico facts about you! #didntknow