Life-world

Lifeworld (German: Lebenswelt) or life-world is a concept used in philosophy and in some social sciences, meaning the world "as lived" prior to reflective re-presentation or analysis. Edmund Husserl introduced the concept of the life-world in his Crisis of European Sciences (1936), following Martin Heidegger's analysis of Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-Sein) in Being and Time. The concept was further developed by his student Jan Patočka, Alfred Schütz, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jürgen Habermas, Harold Garfinkel, and others.

Husserl conceived and developed phenomenology as a philosophical discipline to analyze consciousness or mental life, that is, the correlates of functions of mind ("noesis") such as perceiving, thinking, feeling, believing, willing, hoping and others and objects of these mental acts ("noema"). Husserl, however, gradually encountered a difficulty of this initial endeavor and realized the element of the existence of everyday world where one lives in prior to reflective analysis. Husserl turned his attention to the studies of the life-world at later stage of his career. Life-world is a social, political, historical, and cultural environments where human beings interpret, communicate, and socially engaged in multiple communal spheres. The problematic of life-world opened up a series of questions: intersubjectivity, embodiment, hermeneutics, historicity, and others. Heidegger, Alfred Schütz, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jürgen Habermas, Harold Garfinkel, and others developed their own phenomenological studies out of the problematic of the life-world, which Husserl left without solving.

Husserl

Husserl developed phenomenology out of his critique to dominant tendencies of psychologism and historicism, which, in Husserl’s view, attempted to reduce philosophical knowledge to factual knowledge of sciences. For Husserl, philosophy needs to pursue and discover indubitable knowledge in contradistinction to “knowledge of matters of facts.” “Knowledge of matters of fact” or factual knowledge can always be other than what they are and there is no reason why facts cannot be otherwise. Husserl conceived the idea of phenomenology as apodictically certain, whose denial is inconceivable, and a science which grounds all other empirical and formal sciences including logic and mathematics. Husserl had a background of mathematics, studied under Karl Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker, earned Ph.D. with the work Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung ("Contributions to the Calculus of Variations"), and he was once an assistant to Weierstrass. For Husserl, phenomenology was a philosophy that can clarify the origin and give a justification for all sciences including logic and mathematics, which were considered to be certain knowledge.

Husserl found the clue to develop phenomenology in Descartes’ methodic doubt, which was a way Descartes developed in order to find the indubitable starting point of this thought. Husserl developed phenomenology as the analyses of the consciousness whose primary characteristic was, in his view, intentionality. Husserl conceived consciousness as the field where the world and a variety of beings in the world are constituted by our mind. Accordingly, he developed phenomenology as a philosophical discipline that analyses the relationships between mental acts (“noesis”) such as perceiving, thinking, believing, hoping, imagining and others, and objects of mental acts (“noema”). Husserl thought how the world we live in could be shown through analyses of consciousness. Husserl’s earlier works such as Ideas (German: Ideen) were published from this perspective.

Husserl, however, encountered a number of problems such as “inter-subjectivity,” “time consciousness,” “embodiment” (mind is embodied in human body), and “passive synthesis,” which he could not explain by his initial framework. He realized that: human consciousness lives in its body; consciousness is not solipsistic isolated individual one but has a communal or shared element; consciousness has unconscious activities, and others. Husserl conceptualized a series of problematic under the concept of life-world. Phenomenology of life-world became the central focus of his later careers, and he wrote Crisis of European Sciences (1936) from this new perspective.

Husserl realized that there is a world of our everyday life prior to scientific and philosophical reflective analyses. We already live in this social, historical, political, and cultural world. Husserl conceptualized the totality of this everyday life and the world we live in as life-world.

Husserl had the concept of life-world as early as 1910s but he did not thematically pursue it until the middle of 1920s. It was considered that perspectives of Richard Avenarius (1843 – 1896), a German-Swiss philosopher, gave impacts on Husserl who was trying to find a new perspective to his phenomenology. Avenarius presented the concept of the natural world as the source of all knowledge, which he conceived as an experiential world prior to all conceptual divisions and categorizations. Avenarius argued that categories such as substance, causality, subject-object, mind-body and others are not pre-existing reality of the world but the outcome of our acts of categorizations. He argued for the existence of “pure experience” of the “natural world” prior to conceptualization as the ultimate source of knowledge. Husserl integrated Avenarius’ analyses into his concept of life-world.

We live in the Life-world (everyday world) and are already familiar with it. The life-world is the background, horizon, and foundation of our cognitive activities. Various scientific views of the world are, Husserl argued, artificially constituted by giving logical and cognitive apparatus (idealizing; “Idealisierung” in German) to this pre-logical, pre-scientific life-world. We, however, tend to misconceive the objective pictures of the world science describes are the only authentic real ones. By presenting scientific pictures of the world as the “reality,” modern sciences concealed the life-world which was the origin of scientific representations. In his Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl argued that the crisis of European sciences was due to this concealment and urged our return to the analyses of life-world.

Problems of Life-world

Husserl argued for the existence of life-world as pre-reflective everyday world. Life-world is, however, not a pure, interpretation free world. It is a social, historical, and cultural world loaded with various interpretations and value perspectives. Scientific views constantly flow into the way we understand the everyday world. Contrary to Husserl’s initial expectations, life-world was in fact fluidic, historically changing one. Husserl’s attempt of grounding all knowledge by the analyses of life-world encountered a serious problem.

Developments after Husserl

Heidegger, a student of Husserl, whom Husserl expected to be his successor, gave up Husserlian phenomenology and re-conceived phenomenology as a philosophic hermeneutics.

If man is born to the world and lives in his social, cultural, and historical environments, he or she certainly interprets the world and the self within its contexts. The task of phenomenology, Heidegger argued, is not to develop a philosophical methodology to reach a kind of “pure” knowledge which is prior to scientific studies, but to develop a methodology of interpretation. There is no such knowledge which is free from interpretation. Heidegger placed phenomenology within the tradition of philosophic hermeneutics and developed hermeneutic phenomenology.

The concept of live-world was presented with an insight that human beings are inseparable connectedness with the world. Heidegger re-formulated man’s involvement to the world as “being-in-the-world” and developed phenomenology as ontology. He rejected psychological orientation of Husserl and developed his own philosophy.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French phenomenologist, pursued a number of questions, which Husserl left unanswered when he tried to develop the idea of life-world. Questions Merleau-Ponty attempted to solve include the issues of embodiment (human spirit or consciousness exists in a human body and these two realms are inseparable), human sexuality, and others.

Alfred Schütz (1899-1959), a sociologist and philosopher, conceived life-world as a social world and developed phenomenological sociology. Schütz’s studies gave impacts on Harold Garfinkel who developed Ethnomethodology.

Herbermas

For Jürgen Habermas, life-world is more or less the "background" environment of competences, practices, and attitudes representable in terms of one's cognitive horizon. It's the lived realm of informal, culturally-grounded understandings and mutual accommodations. Rationalization of the life-world is a keynote of Habermas's 2-volume Theory of Communicative Action. Penetration of lifeworld rationality by bureaucracy is analyzed by Habermas as 'colonization of the life-world'.

Social coordination and systemic regulation occur by means of shared practices, beliefs, values, and structures of interaction, which may be institutionally based. We are inevitably life-worldly, such that individuals and interactions draw from custom and cultural traditions to construct identities, define situations (at best, by coming to understandings, but also by negotiations), to coordinate action, and create social solidarity.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Garfinkel, Harold. 1984. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Malden MA: Polity Press/Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 0-7456-0005-0
• Gurwitsch, Aron, The Field of Consciousness, Duquesne University Press, 1964. 1976 reprint. ISBN 0820700436 ISBN 9780820700434
• Heidegger, Martin, and Joan Stambaugh. Being and Time: A Translation of Sein Und Zeit. SUNY series in contemporary continental philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996. ISBN 0791426777 ISBN 9780791426777 ISBN 0791426785 ISBN 9780791426784
• Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Northwestern UP, 1970. \ Rosen,
• Steven M. Topologies of the Flesh: A Multidimensional Exploration of the Lifeworld. Series in Continental thought, 33. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006. ISBN 0821416766 ISBN 9780821416761
• Schutz, Alfred. Collected Papers V.I: The Problem of Social Reality, Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague, 1962
• Sokolowski, Robert. Introduction to Phenomenology, Cambridge UP. 2000. ISBN 0521660998 ISBN 9780521660990 ISBN 0521667925 ISBN 9780521667920

External links

• Arthur W. Frank
• lifeworld and Habermas

General Philosophy Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Retrieved April 17, 2007.
• The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Retrieved April 17, 2007.
• Philosophy Sources on Internet EpistemeLinks Retrieved April 17, 2007.
• Guide to Philosophy on the Internet Retrieved April 17, 2007.
• Paideia Project Online Retrieved April 17, 2007.
• Project Gutenberg Retrieved April 17, 2007.

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• Life-world  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "Life-world"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.