World, Intergenerational Relationships, and Generativity

Abstract

The paper aims to present a reflection about intergenerational generative relationships as transmission of the world. The concept of generativity is defined as the desire to leave a positive legacy and related activities that raise outcomes for future generations (Erikson, 1950; McAdams, de St. Aubin, Logan, 1993). A phenomenological pedagogy reflection on generativity helps us to clarify some aspects of intergenerational transmission. Husserl used the term generativity (Generativität) or the generative (das Generative) to refer to various issues: generating, legacy, historical and social transmission. Generativity for Husserl concerns historical and intersubjective becoming (Steinbock, 1995). Nowadays sustaining the future has been identified as a key factor in the welfare of future generations and the desire to leave a positive legacy (Hauser et al., 2014) helps young adult to cope with the challenges of the transition to adulthood in contemporary life. However, interdisciplinary theoretical insight suggests that generativity as a targeted midlife task may no longer be sufficient for explaining a life course pattern of generative concerns, commitment, and actions (Kim et al., 2017). Some scholars in the symbolic-relational area interpret generativity as an essentially relational construct: the value of the relationship between the generations (Scabini, Rossi, 2012). The analysis underlines how the intergenerational dimension is at the origin of family generativity (Dollahite et al., 1998) as it develops and grows thanks to the donative sources within family systems. Family generativity involves care for the rising generation on the part of the previous generations, including the grandparent generation, not simply as individuals but also as the extended family group that makes up the ‘older generation’. This care between the generations is a legacy of meaning that helps the younger generations to search for their own meaning of the world and in the world. In particular, the theme of a transmission between generations as a legacy of meaning (Arentd, 1954), can help new generations to learn to inhabit the world, to participate and change it, but also to find a specific care of the world (Housset, 1997). Today there is a priority to educate adults to take and rewrite their generative role in an intergenerational exchange that cannot and must not be interrupted, but that has to turn into a current, social, cultural and economic scenario. The idea proposed in this paper is precisely to deepen the educational potential of intergenerational education that is based on the ability to intercept new educational resources in a creative way, bringing out implicit potentials. This means extending parental generativity to social contexts, and therefore really investing in new forms of social generativity (the community for Stein and the responsibility for Jonas seem to connect to social generativity). In this perspective, the concept of social generativity becomes the framework for educating communities capable of guiding the new generations to read, interpret, and cure the world.