Easy and complex world — concepts from the Typology of Life Worlds.
Is there stress, and if so, in what form? In the difficult and simple world of life, stress arises from the difficulties of the external world, preventing here-and-now satisfaction. But this situation is not critical for a creature adapted to a difficult world, due to the development of its mechanisms of patience and hope. In a light and complex world, the realization of the desire for here-and-now satisfaction is always guaranteed (this is, in fact, «lightness»). And yet this life is not without stress. In order to understand the specifics of stress in this life world, it is necessary to pay attention to the fact that, in addition to the first mode, the desire for here-and-now satisfaction, which has been mainly discussed up to now, the integral infantile attitude also contains the second — the desire of each life relationship to be the only and eternal (the chronotope «this is always»). This mode of infantile attitude, passing from one relationship to the whole «I», gives rise to many affective phenomena.
Thus, the feelings of exclusivity and uniqueness as an object of love, characteristic of many neurotic personalities, or, on the contrary, the tragic thought “no one has ever loved me” clearly originate from this attitude, and not from a realistic view of life. Such powerful feelings as envy and jealousy are fed from the same source. Satisfying a need is not all that an infantile being needs; he would also like to secure his privileges for the sole possession of a thing, ability, social position or another person. Jealous or envious, a person suffers not so much from the dissatisfaction of desire, but from the inability to come to terms with the right of another to possess something valuable, because this right hurts his sense of exclusivity.
In the conditions of a complex world, such a desire is constantly infringed by consciously-value hierarchizations of life relations that take into account “this” and “that” (and therefore do not satisfy the claims of any relation to uniqueness), distribute them in the temporal aspect into “first — then” ( thereby not satisfying the claims of the given relation to the entire temporal whole — «always» — of life). This is how stress is generated in an easy and complex world.
The subject of this world has its own mechanisms of coping with stress: this is a) a value reduction in the significance of the actualized life attitude and b) switching to another life attitude. The first of them correlates with the corresponding mechanism of the realistic life world — patience, since both of them are aimed at an unrealized life attitude, trying to influence it, the second — with hope, since both are focused on implementation. It is no coincidence that in everyday life it is these four mechanisms that are most often used by adults to provide psychological support to a child: a) a decrease in significance (“it’s okay”); b) switching to another (“oh, look, what a ball!”); c) patience (“be patient, it will pass soon”); d) hope (“next time you win!”).
As long as the mechanisms a) and b) are sufficient to subdue the affects caused by the unrealized claims of life relations to exclusivity, the subject experiences stress. But stress here represents the strenuous complexity of life, not the impossibility; is not a critical situation.
Does frustration exist in the easy and complex life world? It is clear that the easy external world cannot be a source of frustration. But can not the complexity of the inner world give rise to frustration in addition to stress? To answer this question, we need to consider two variants of internal subordination of various life relations. In the first case, consciousness gives a value preference to one relationship over another, which is expressed in the time frame by the ratio “first-then” (as in the “difficult” world of childhood the teacher instructs: “First the lessons, then go for a walk!”). However, in the easy world, such subordination does not at all frustrate the activity postponed “for later” (after all, lessons are learned instantly here), but only determines its rank in the value hierarchy.
In the second case, some vital attitude is fundamentally rejected and the personality refuses to realize it at all (“never again!”). As long as the rejected attitude does not bother the “I” from its exile (regardless of the reasons for this humility — whether it has been transformed internally, whether it has admitted its defeat, or is secretly preparing an uprising), there is no question of frustration. When the rejected relation appears again in the face of the «I» with demands for realization, the already completed struggle of motives can resume — then a situation of conflict sets in. And finally, if the rejected attitude manages to win in this struggle, the “I” becomes obsessed with this attitude, begins to look at the world from the standpoint of its interests, then the entire previous structure of the personality, which condemned and rejected the current winner, will be perceived by the latter as external, not completely destroyed barriers that prevent the fullness of power and embodiment. In such a state, the “I” can indeed experience frustration with inevitable aggressiveness against the defeated motives and values, in which the tacit rejection of the new power in its very essence is rightly seen. But this very state of identification of the «I» with a separate relation, strictly speaking, takes it beyond the limits of the complex life world. So, in this case, we are dealing with a temporary (or final) regression of a complex world to a simple one. Consequently, the situation of frustration is not familiar to the most complex and easy world in its purity.
Just as in the second type of life-world frustration coincides with crisis, so in the third type under discussion the situation of conflict coincides with crisis. The transformation of the conflict into a crisis is due to two reasons. Firstly, under the conditions of value existence, even a private conflict of two needs acts as a violation of the entire internal unity of consciousness, and it is precisely this that is the main vital necessity of a subject living in this world. In a complex life world, the conflict of two needs cannot be resolved within the framework of bilateral relations between them. What is required here is an appeal to the entire integrity of consciousness or to the value that represents this potential integrity. Secondly, the very lightness of the world contributes to the crisis. A difficult world, in which life is divided into a series of successive situations, sometimes gives the subject the opportunity to get out of a situation where he suffered from duality, into another, where he can again feel wholeness and self-identity. In the case of moral collisions, a difficult world gives the individual the opportunity, in sacrificial labor, in a redemptive feat, to really feel a new wholeness, which has yet to be found in the future. The light world is devoid of “other situations” and “future”, the being of this world has no “there” and “then”. His life is compressed into a here-and-now point, which is surrounded by a nowhere-and-never chronotope: if not here, then nowhere, if not now, then never. Since the wholeness is not achieved at this point, phenomenologically it is «forever». It is clear that such a state is a crisis. Thus, the insoluble contradiction of life relations (conflict) in the conditions of an easy and complex world turns into a crisis.
In real life, a person often makes temporary, draft decisions: “For now, we’ll see.” In the conditions of an easy world, such a solution to the internal contradiction will almost inevitably lead to a crisis. The reason is that the unity of consciousness established at the moment is instantly realized (“here-and-now”), becoming the unity of life. And if the resolution of the conflict was even marginally false, did not take into account the fullness of the consequences, then this little lie of consciousness, in conditions of ease of implementation, turns into a lie of all life, its inauthenticity. There is a need for a value judgment over all life, criticism and revision of its deep foundations, that is, a situation of crisis. «It is not for nothing that the word ‘crisis’ means ‘judgment’ and is related to the word ‘criticism’» [1, p. 237]. So, the absence in the light and complex world of external experience of implementing decisions of consciousness, successive trials, errors and corrections, slow personal forging in sacrificial labor and suffering, the one-time nature of all life transformations, when the subject does not go up the stairs of the ladder of value growth, but must here and -now guess life in advance, lead to that; that not only the conflict itself, but almost any solution to it, can very easily give rise to a crisis. Therefore, all existence in the easy and complex world is predominantly of a crisis nature.