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Ensembles Practices and Cultural Forms of Life

The paper presents the tenets of a hermeneutic theory of social practices. At stake is the ontological distinctiveness of properly arranged practices. The claim is defended that an ensemble of such practices is capable of disclosing and articulating an authentic cultural lifeform. This ensemble is distinguished by autonomy, but it does not have an actual (static) presence. Properly arranged practices that disclose a cultural lifeform are ontologically characterized by hermeneutic circularity and potentiality-for-being. It is argued that practices project their being upon a horizon of possible contextual configurations. Since this horizon is constantly shifting, there is ongoing interplay of practices and possibilities. A single practice within an ensemble of such practices has a dual way of being. It can partly be described in terms of strongly located – and determined by agency – entity, and partly as something dispersed over the changing configurations of practices. In other words, a given single practice is capable of exhibiting under the conditions of its intrinsic teleological organization the features of locality and self-sufficiency, and under the conditions of the interplay of practices and possibilities the features of indeterminacy and nonlocality. Because of this duality, the use of a proper principle of complementarity in constructing practice theory proves to be indispensable.