Lifeworld (Lebenswelt)

Abstract

As a concept, presents an important precedent in the expression «natural world», as commonly used by some authors of empiriocriticist positivism (Ernst Mach, Richard Avenarius). Husserl uses for the first time in an annex to § 64 of Ideen II, although is not since the work of the 20s when the concept starts to play a larger role than the contrast between the attitude in which there are theories and the situation prior to the formation of any theory. The most complete exhibition can be found in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936). It is
a commonly accepted convention among the interpreters (and with support in Husserl’s own text) to distinguish between «provisional concepts» of lifeworld (we prefer to call them simply «pre-transcendental») and «transcendental concepts» of lifeworld, although the main difference between both senses plays the turn of attitude toward the phenomenon of the world. With the concept of «lifeworld» Husserl tries to capture the area in which human beings are always already moving and living, before the most rudimentary forms of theory, intellectual construction, ideology, etc. . On
this level it is intended, therefore, through transcendental phenomenology, an act that constitutes a reflexive theory of how the world gives to us before all theory. The status of the place in which this «theory about the lifeworld above all theory» is made is, then, full of difficulties conceived phenomenology as a science.

Keywords: Substruction, Confluence, Horizon, Ground, Foundation, Objectivity, Ontology, Eidetics, Gift, Body.