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The Pluralistic Concept of the Life-World and the Various Fields of the Phenomenology of the Life-World in Husserl

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Abstract

The life-world is a central topic of Husserl’s phenomenology. He addresses this issue in some of the works published during his lifetime and attempts to analyze the life-world extensively in many of his works and posthumously published research manuscripts. The life-world is one of the topics that have been discussed most extensively in phenomenology. However, there are many misunderstandings of Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world. One misunderstanding concerns the variety of concepts of the life-world in Husserl and the possibility of developing various fields of the phenomenology of the life-world. It is the aim of this paper to show that Husserl has a pluralistic concept of the life-world, which makes it possible to develop various fields of the phenomenology of the life-world. I will introduce the monistic view and the pluralistic view of the concept of the life-world in Husserl and will clarify what the life-world is, thereby showing that the monistic view of the concept of the life-world in Husserl is not legitimate. However, even though Husserl has a pluralistic concept of the life-world, nowhere does he systematically clarify the various concepts of the life-world. Hence I will sort out and clarify various concepts of the life-world such as the narrower concept and the wider concept, the general concept and the particular concept, the natural concept and the transcendental concept, and the empirical concept and the eidetic concept. Based on the discussion of the various concepts of the life-world in Husserl, I will assess the monistic view and the pluralistic view of Husserl’s concept of the life-world so that we can better understand his various concepts of the life-world.

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Notes

  1. On Husserl’s works dealing with the issue of the life-world, on the historical background of his concept of the life-world, and on the development of his phenomenology of the life-world, see R. Sowa’s introduction in Hua XXXIX, pp. xxv–lix.

  2. There is much secondary literature on the phenomenology of the life-world, and in the last ten years several volumes discussing Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world have been published—see, e.g., Gethmann 2011; Luft 2011; Held 2012; Moran 2012.

  3. See Carr 1977, p. 210, where he claims that “the scientific level constitutes a tertiary stratum built on the second or cultural level.”

  4. What Strasser calls the world is the life-world, and in this paper, we use “world” and “life-world” as interchangeable concepts.

  5. Husserl makes a distinction between static phenomenology as a phenomenology that deals with validity-foundation and genetic phenomenology as a phenomenology that deals with genesis-foundation in Hua XV, pp. 613 ff.

  6. In a manuscript from 1935 that has the title “Das Kind. Die erste Einfühlung,” Husserl touches upon the problem of the genesis of the life-world for the newborn baby, and writes: “Der erste Aktus—was ist seine ‘Unterlage’? Das Ich hat schon den ‘Welthorizont’—den uranfänglichen Horizont, in dem der menschliche Welthorizont implizit geboren wird” (Hua XV, p. 604).

  7. Here a “scientific world” means a “natural-scientific world.”

  8. As R. Sowa points out in his introduction to Hua XXXIX, pp. xlvii–xlviii, Husserl employs life-world (Lebenswelt) and surrounding world (Umwelt) as two interchangeable terms; in addition, he sometimes uses the term “Lebensumwelt” to designate the life-world.

  9. On the life-world in the historical sciences, see, e.g., Lerche 2009; Esch 2014; Auffarth 2016.

  10. Schutz 1974; Schutz 1976; Schutz/Luckmann 1979; Schutz/Luckmann 1984.

  11. See, for example, Eberle 2000; Dreher 2003; Eberle 2012; Ruggerone 2013.

  12. See, for example, Hick 1999; Johanson/Ekebergh/Dahlberg 2009; Fuchs 2011; Mertens 2011; Stolzenberg 2011; Thorgersen 2011; Bengtsson 2013; Honer/Hitzler 2015; Hardesty/Sheredos 2019.

  13. One can find a detailed analysis of the natural concept of the world in Bermes (2004, pp. 114–128).

  14. In this respect, C. Bermes makes a distinction between “einer positiv-empirischen Deskription” und “eine apriorische Deskription” (Bermes 2004, p. 127) of the life-world, and R. Sowa points out “dass Husserl seine Wissenschaft von der Lebenswelt als eine zweistufige Wissenschaft entworfen hat, die eine empirische Unterstufe und eine nicht-empirische (eidetische) Oberstufe hat” (Sowa 2010, p. 49).

  15. For Husserl, ontology and eidetic science are interchangeable terms. There are different kinds of ontologies as eidetic sciences, such as formal ontology, regional ontology (Hua III/1, pp. 23 ff./Husserl 1982, pp. 18 ff.; see also Hua XIII, pp. 125 ff.), and the transcendental eidetic phenomenology that Husserl calls “absolute und universale Ontologie” (Hua VIII, p. 219/Husserl 2019, p. 459). The eidetic phenomenology of the life-world is also a kind of ontology.

  16. For example, dealing with the ambiguity of the concept of the life-world in Husserl, U. Claesges takes it for granted that the ontology of the life-world is identical to the natural ontology of life that is developed in the natural attitude. See Claesges 1972, pp. 97 ff.

  17.  In dealing with the possibility of developing an empirical transcendental phenomenology of the life-world, S. Luft writes: “Was so verbleibt, ist eine transzendentale Phänomenologie, die als Thema das menschliche Subjekt in seiner Lebenswelt in notwendiger Korrelation hat, also eine transzendental-phänomenologische Anthropologie, die sich in ihrer Forschung empirischer Untersuchungen zu bedienen hat, ohne die genuin ‘transzendentale Perspektive’ aufzugeben” (Luft 2015, p. 64). It should be noted that what Luft attempts to develop is specifically the particular (not the general) empirical transcendental phenomenology of the life-world.

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Acknowledgements

This paper was presented at the meeting of the German Society for Phenomenological Research that took place on September 18–21, 2019 at the University of Vienna in Austria. I thank Professor Christian Bermes and Professor Georg Stenger for their kind invitation to the conference. An earlier Korean version was presented at the seventh conference of the International Center for Applied Phenomenology (ICAP) that took place on August 24, 2019 at Seoul National University in South Korea. I will also present this paper at a colloquium to take place on November 15, 2019, at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. I thank Professor Wei Zhang for his kind invitation to the colloquium. This work was supported by the Global Research Network program through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2017S1A2A2039388).

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Lee, NI. The Pluralistic Concept of the Life-World and the Various Fields of the Phenomenology of the Life-World in Husserl. Husserl Stud 36, 47–68 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-019-09254-6

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