Life-World

Definition

The life-world (Lebenswelt) is Edmund Husserl's concept of the pre-scientific, intersubjective world of ordinary experience that grounds all objective knowledge. "Each of us has its own life world, which is thought of as a world for all" (Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 1936). The life-world is "given to us in ordinary experience and is the basis of all objective knowledge" — the unnoticed, taken-for-granted horizon within which all scientific and theoretical activity takes place. Developed by Alfred Schütz into a social theory of the "world of everyday life" and the multiplicity of realities ("subuniverses"), and carried into ethnomethodology by Harold Garfinkel (where the life-world's background expectations become the object of breaching experiments), the concept is the philosophical foundation for the study of everyday life.

Key Thinkers

• Edmund Husserl — originated the concept in late work (The Crisis of European Sciences, 1936) as the forgotten foundation of science.
• Harold Garfinkel — operationalized the life-world through ethnomethodology: background expectations as the "natural facts of life."
• (Related, not yet paged: Alfred Schütz — extended the life-world into a social theory of multiple realities and intersubjectivity; Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann — the life-world as "paramount reality.")
• Agnes Heller — the principal internal critic: everyday life "is not identical with the 'life world'" and is not an attitude at all but "the objective fundament of every social action, institution, of human social life in general" — a polemic developed independently (she only learned of Schütz after drafting the book) and aimed at the Schützian solution's drift toward "a positivistic systems-theory."

Related Concepts

• Everyday Life — the domain the life-world names; the life-world is its philosophical ground. But see Heller: the everyday is not the life-world — the everyday can encompass the natural attitude and the reflective-theoretical attitude alike.
• Background Expectations — Garfinkel's operationalization of the life-world's taken-for-granted interpretive schemes.
• Being-in-the-World — Heidegger's parallel concept, though Husserl's life-world emphasizes intersubjective constitution rather than existential ontology.
• Dwelling — the existential being-at-home the life-world presumes; Norberg-Schulz's phenomenology of architecture draws on both Husserl and Heidegger.
• Doxa and Epistémē — Heller's account of the natural attitude's knowledge: doxa, verified only in practical action.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Daily Life as a Phenomenon of Modern Philosophical Discourse
• Sociology of Everyday Life
• Everyday Practices and Practical Formalization
• Everyday Life (Heller 1970) — the distinction of everyday life from the life-world (preface, pp. xi–xii): everyday life "encompasses… different attitudes, including reflective-theoretical attitudes"; closer "to the so-called 'critical theory' than to Schütz."
• Thing-Shapes (Dubbeldam 2002/2006) — the life-world put to generative work: Husserl's "horizon-exposition" as "departures from the historical in which the activity of free variation runs through the conceivable possibilities of the life-world, giving rise to a general set of elements that go through all the variants of spatiotemporal shapes" (p. 97) — the life-world's variation method converted into a design algorithm for architecture ("architecture has to become generative," p. 97). A technological afterlife of the concept: the life-world not as the ground of science but as the possibility-space of smart surfaces (see thing-shapes, interactive-architecture).
• Home: Territory and Identity (Wise 2000/2006) — the life-world's Deleuzian-radiance register, the concept's redefinition from taken-for-granted ground to resonant field: "As practised, our life-world is flooded by the variant radiance of the milieus. Each milieu opens up onto others" (p. 392) — the life-world not as Husserl's unnoticed horizon but as the whole flooded by milieu-radiance, "always multidimensional, resonant and open to other spaces" (p. 393). Where Husserl's life-world is the unnoticed condition of objectivity, Wise's is the flooded, singing, car-shaped field of everyday practice — the concept's practice-side ground. See milieu, everyday-life.

Open Questions

• Is the life-world a universal structure of human experience, or is it historically and culturally specific — and if the latter, what happens to it under conditions of globalized, digitally mediated experience?
• How does Husserl's life-world (founded in transcendental subjectivity) relate to Heidegger's being-in-the-world (founded in existential ontology) — are they compatible, or does the phenomenological tradition split here?