The lifeworld is a key concept from Edmund Husserl’s late work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936). It denotes the pre-scientific, qualitative, meaningful world of everyday experience — the world in which we live before we objectify it scientifically.
Significance for phenomenology
The lifeworld is the starting point of every phenomenological analysis. Husserl shows that modern natural science tacitly presupposes the lifeworld but methodically screens it out: it replaces the lived world of colors, sounds, meanings, and values with a mathematized ideal world — and thereby forgets that this idealization is itself an achievement of the experiencing subject.
The phenomenological method returns to the lifeworld in order to lay bare the foundations on which all science rests. Not the abstract formula, but concrete experience is the primary datum.
Lifeworld and personhood
For personal ontology, the lifeworld is the space in which personhood shows itself: in the encounter with other persons, in the experience of dignity, reverence, and affirmation. The person meets us not as a measurable object, but as a counterpart in the lifeworld — as someone, not as something.
Scientism passes over the lifeworld by admitting only what can be quantified and measured. Husserl’s diagnosis of the crisis is therefore a philosophical preliminary stage of the critique of the oblivion of the person: whoever forgets the lifeworld also forgets the person.
Ontological classification
Ontological relations:
- is the starting point of: phenomenological method
- is displaced by: scientism
Chapter assignment: Chapter 2: Method (German)
See also
- Phenomenological method
- Natural science
- Scientism
- Oblivion of the person
- Archphenomenon
- Someone
- Reverence
- Edmund Husserl
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Husserl, Edmund: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, transl. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970 (orig. 1936, Husserliana vol. VI, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1954).