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.")

Related Concepts

• Everyday Life — the domain the life-world names; the life-world is its philosophical ground.
• 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.

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

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?