Lifeworld

What is the lifeworld?

In the morning we say "the sun is rising". Astronomically the sun does not rise; the earth turns. Yet in the world we actually live in, the sun comes up in the east and the ground stands firmly still. A cup is a thing to drink from, a spoon a thing to eat with, a chair a thing to sit on. We trust and use these things without questioning them. This world, given as self-evident before any scientific theory and lived through the body, is called the lifeworld (Lebenswelt).

The lifeworld is not a private world. It is also shaped by history and culture: a world of long traditions and sedimented meaning in which we, as bodily beings, are rooted and socialized. What is self-evident differs from one lifeworld to another, as rice-cake soup at the New Year is "obvious" to Koreans.

Where does the word come from?

The word first appears in the mid-nineteenth century; Heinrich Heine used it in his Florentine Nights in 1836. It was then used in biology and botany before entering philosophy by way of the "philosophy of life" of Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel. Martin Heidegger used it in his early lectures, but in Being and Time (1927) he replaced it with "being-in-the-world" as the "basic constitution of Dasein". The person who put the concept at the centre of philosophy was Edmund Husserl.

Why did Husserl speak of a "crisis of the sciences"?

Husserl lectured in Prague and Vienna in 1935. The lectures grew into The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, part of which appeared in Belgrade in 1936. The book remained unfinished, and the full version appeared only after his death, in 1954. It is now regarded as Husserl's most influential work and the culmination of his thought.

Husserl's diagnosis ran as follows. In the second half of the nineteenth century the positive sciences dazzled people with the economic and technical prosperity they brought. Around the turn of the century, however, criticism grew that science had turned its back on actual life. Husserl renders the mood like this:

"In our vital need – so we are told – this science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle precisely the questions that are most burning for human beings, abandoned in our unhappy times to the most fateful upheavals: the questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of this whole human existence."

Husserl saw the cause of the crisis in a forgetting: that all science is grounded in the lifeworld. The lifeworld is the self-evident, unquestioned ground of all everyday action and thought, and of all scientific theorizing and philosophizing. However refined its arguments, science cannot help presupposing many of the meanings and validities it inherits from the lifeworld.

What did Galileo forget?

Husserl traces this forgetting back to Galileo Galilei, whose great achievement was the "mathematizing reinterpretation of nature". Mathematics became the key to the inner workings of nature. But this method of measuring and quantifying soon turned into reality itself: to be came to mean to be measurable. In Husserl's words, people began to "take for true being what is actually a method".

An everyday example: when the thermometer reads 36.5 degrees we relax because it is "normal", and the shivering, aching feeling is easily dismissed as "subjective". For Husserl numbers are a method made to organize lifeworld experience, and when the method is raised above experience as more "true", things are upside down. Distrust of whatever cannot be quantified led to the view that the perceived world itself is a subjective illusion, a misleading picture of the physical world. As a result science became alienated from human experience and unable to address questions of value, meaning and existence. That is what Husserl called the crisis of modern science.

Why is Husserl's lifeworld ambiguous?

Husserl used the word in two senses. One is the universal ground of the human relation to the world across ages and cultures, the "universe of the self-evident". The other is the practical, intuitive lifeworld that changes in concrete history. The lifeworld therefore stretches between the universal and the concrete, the ahistorical and the historically changing. Because of this double meaning it becomes both a standard for criticizing science and itself an object of enlightenment.

How did sociology take up the concept?

The sociologist Alfred Schütz brought Husserl's concept into sociology as a tool of analysis. For Schütz the lifeworld is everyday life, the world of "everyman": the "paramount reality" in which everyone lives, thinks, acts and communicates. The everyday world is from the start a cultural world shared by many, in which all facts are always already interpreted facts. Schütz called this everyday way of understanding "common sense", life in the "natural attitude".

Husserl's student Jan Patočka took up the same theme in The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem (1936), the first systematic phenomenological study in Czech.

How did Habermas rewrite the lifeworld?

Jürgen Habermas took over Husserl's concept but rewrote it. He criticized the phenomenological lifeworld for remaining tied to an "egological consciousness" and so prolonging the philosophy that starts from an isolated subject. By interpreting the lifeworld in terms of a theory of communication, Habermas wanted to bring out a paradigm shift from monological subjectivity to dialogical intersubjectivity.

According to Habermas, when a speaker and a hearer try to reach understanding about something, the lifeworld stays "at their backs" as an intuitively known, unproblematic and indivisible background, which they cannot make into a theme while they are talking. When two people plan a weekend hike, they presuppose countless things such as "weekends are for rest" and "promises are kept", which come to light only when someone questions them.

Habermas sees three aspects of the lifeworld. "Culture" is the stock of knowledge from which participants draw interpretations when they reach understanding. "Society" is the legitimate orders through which they regulate their membership in groups and secure solidarity. "Personality" is the competences that make a person able to speak and act. Communicative action reproduces all three: through conversation cultural knowledge is handed on and renewed, social integration and solidarity are produced, and the growing generation forms its personality.

How does the system encroach on the lifeworld?

In The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) Habermas set this lifeworld against the "system", the domains such as the market and state administration that run on money and power. As modernization proceeds, the system detaches itself from the lifeworld and follows a logic of its own, and money and power impose on people a logic of action cut loose from shared values and norms. Habermas called the system's encroachment on the lifeworld the "colonization of the lifeworld". The details are in the entry on the theory of communicative action.

Marxist critics objected to this picture. Marx's aim of overcoming capitalism, they argued, shrinks in Habermas to "protecting" the lifeworld from the system's incursions, at the risk of accepting the constraints of the market and the administration in practice.

How is it used today?

The lifeworld remains widely used in sociology, education and social work. Constructivist philosophers such as Jürgen Mittelstraß reinterpreted it as a "lifeworld a priori" that precedes all exact science. The German social pedagogue Hans Thiersch built an approach of "lifeworld orientation". Borrowing Karel Kosík's concept, he described the everyday lifeworld people live in as "pseudo-concrete", a world whose surface does not reveal reality, yet saw in that same everyday life the possibility of the subject's liberation from its constraints.