Everydayness, historicity and the world of science

Husserl's life-world reconsidered

Dermot Moran

pp. 107-131

in: L'ubica Učník, Ivan Chvatík, Anita Williams (eds), The phenomenological critique of mathematisation and the question of responsibility, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

Husserl is credited with introducing the term "life-world ' ( Lebenswelt ) into twentieth-century philosophy. Many European philosophers – including Jan Patočka , Jürgen Habermas , Niklas Luhmann, and Hans Blumenberg – have embraced Husserl 's conception and have integrated it into their own thinking, albeit interpreted in different ways. Husserl introduces the life-world in his Crisis of European Sciences Section 9 (1936) as the "forgotten meaning fundament of natural science" and goes on, in the course of that work, to characterise the life-world in not entirely compatible ways. Despite the large literature on Husserl 's conception written since then, in many ways the concept remains deeply problematic. In this paper, I trace the main contours of Husserl 's concept and I argue that the life-world as the ultimate context and horizon of human experience must be thought of not just as the counterpart of the scientific world, but as the inherently communal world, the world "for others', the world available "for everyone' (für jedermann), the historical world.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund

Patočka Jan

Habermas Jürgen

Blumenberg Hans

Luhmann Niklas