Knowledge Engagement: The Hermeneutics of Creative Life

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Curativity Center

6 min readAug 22, 2023

The Spiral of Creative Work

From Jan 2023 to April 2023, I read Ping-keung Lui’s 2017 book Gaze, Actions, and the Social World and wrote 228-page notes. I reflected on the following three projects while replaying Lui’s journey of theory development.

The Knowledge Engagement Project
The Creative Life Framework
The Theme of “Value Circle”

I also developed several new frameworks which form the Creative Life Theory (v2.0). One of these frameworks is called the Hermeneutics of Creative Life. See the diagram below.

This article aims to introduce the above diagram and related ideas.

Paul Ricoeur: Action as Text

The Hermeneutics of Creative Life was born in the process of reading Chapter 1 of Ping-keung Lui’s 2017 book Gaze, Actions, and the Social World. Let’s see the contents of the chapter:

Chapter 1: Gaze and Action
Introduction
Alfred Schutz’s Phenomenological Sociology
Paul Ricoeur: Practical Reason and Social Action
Paul Ricoeur: Action as Text
The Semiotic System of Sociology
Harold Garfinkel and Talcott Parsons: Two Perspectives of Social Action
The Temporal Structure of Gaze: The Parsons-Garfinkel Duality
The Habitat of Social Action
Conclusion

According to Lui, Ricoeur’s creative idea is making a distinction between the Write-Read Situation between the Listen-Speak Situation. The former only requires a text as a mediation between a writer and a reader while the latter requires face-to-face communication. In this way, Ricoeur claimed that the Truth of Social Science comes from the Write-Read Situation because it only relies on the Objectivity of Text.

Where does the Objectivity of Text come from? Ricoeur pointed out the following four reasons:

Text frames the meaning of discourse
The meaning of Text escapes from its author’s intention
Text represents an independent world that doesn’t reference the context of the Writing situation
Text opens itself to universal readers

As an existence, Text exists in the semiotic domain permanently and autonomously. The Read Situation is a dialectical process of moving between an Explanation of the text’s meaning and an Understanding of the personal situation.

Ricoeur further expanded his theory of text to social action because social action is part of the semiotic domain.

Ping-keung Lui argued that Text is not Action because we can’t naturally find the Objectivity of Action. There is no obvious structure and boundary of social action. He suggested a new approach to building the Semiotic System of Sociology for researchers.

Lui’s discussion inspired me to reflect on my recent project: the Knowledge Engagement project and the Creative Life framework.

In order to give structure and boundary to Creative Life, I used the “Work—Project” association to expand the “Text—Action” association. A project has its temporal boundary and its structure such as end and means. For example, an author finished a project about writing a book. The work is the final product: the book. See the diagram below.

The next step is expanding the above diagram to a new unit of analysis: the life course. I coined a new term called “Meta-text” in order to build the “Meta-text — Life Course” association which matches the “Text — Action” association.

From the perspective of Project Engagement, a creator’s creative life can be understood as a series of projects. A biography of the creator is the meta-text of his/her life course.

I didn’t directly use “Biography” for this framework because “Meta-text” refers to an abstract concept. Even if a person doesn’t have a real biography, we still can apply the concept of “Meta-text” to discuss his/her creative life.

For the Knowledge Engagement project, I pay attention to the knowledge creators. The next step is adding “Knowledge” and “Creator” to the diagram.

A significant aspect of the Creative Life Framework is the transformation between life experience and life achievement. In order to highlight this aspect, I added “Copy — Experience” to the above diagram.

Once an action is done, it becomes a life experience. However, if we don’t make any record of our life experience, it can’t be an object. I used the term “Copy” to refer to the outcome of the Objectification of Experience.

In Nov 2022, I edited a book (draft) titled Creative Life Curation: Turning Experiences into Meaningful Achievements. The core idea of the book is a Semiotic System Diagram which was designed with the following basic structure.

The content of the diagram is formed with three parts:

Subjectivity: Turning potential action opportunities into actual actions
Subjectification: Turning the world into a person’s experience
Objectification: Turning the person’s experience into artifacts for the world

I also use five units of analysis for the Creative Life Curation framework. I also made a distinction between Creators and Curators. “Action” and “Project” are related to Creators. These two Units of Analysis are necessary for Creators. However, “Journey”, “Landscape”, and “Lifescope” are only useful to Curators, they are not necessary for Creators.

The third part of the diagram is Objectification which is about turning life experience into material objects.

I only use the above three types of objectification as a reference frame. In fact, there are four rows in the body of the Objectification part. See the diagram below.

The above discussion connects the Hermeneutics of Creative Life with the Creative Life Curation framework.

I also connect it with the Themes of Practice approach by adding “Theme” and “Practice” to the diagram. For a knowledge creator, the themes of his/her work are part of his/her life themes. His/her practice of running creative projects is part of his/her creative life.

It’s clear that knowledge creators’ creative life is a special case of the Themes of Practice approach because they have works that represent their life themes and creative themes.

Finally, I found a Spiral of Creative Work in the Hermeneutics of Creative Life. See the diagram below. In the center of the diagram, we see a flow of “Action > Experience > Copy > Text”.