The Concept of “Lifestyle” in the Social Sciences and Humanities

“Lifestyle” is a concept that intuitively means everything and nothing at the same time. For philosophical work, this becomes a big problem when the concept used by various social sciences and humanities does not have a clear definition. Therefore, this article is aimed at exploring the problem of the concept of “lifestyle”. For a deeper understanding of the concept, in the first part of the article, “lifestyle” is examined through the prism of various social sciences and humanities. This helps us isolate the possible elements that a concept may include. The second and third parts of the article are aimed not only at analyzing research on the concept of “lifestyle”, but also at identifying different approaches to working with it, which correspond to two traditions: analytic and continental. Thus, the second part of the article analyzes the works of two researchers (M. Sobel, A. Veal) of “lifestyle”, in which the authors work with the concept in the analytic tradition. Both researchers come to the conclusion that the concept of “lifestyle” inevitably raises questions related to choice, integrity, value, the problem of human identity, etc., but they fail to fully close these issues. The third part of the article analyzes the work of P. Bourdieu, which differs markedly from the works of the previous two researchers. Bourdieu works with the concept of “lifestyle” in the tradition of continental philosophy. He embeds the “lifestyle” into his concept of habitus, which not only gives us an understanding of what a “lifestyle” is, but also gives the concept a logical and complete form. Bourdieu also focuses on problematic issues related to “lifestyle”, but he manages to provide answers to them. Bourdieu sees the emerging issue of choice, and in some cases its absence, not as a problem and an obstacle to the existence of a person’s lifestyle, but as an opportunity to understand the lifestyle as such.