Lifeworld (or life-world) (German: Lebenswelt) may be conceived as a universe of what is self-evident or given,[1] a world that subjects may experience together. The concept was popularized by Edmund Husserl, who emphasized its role as the ground of all knowledge in lived experience. It has its origin in biology and cultural Protestantism.[2][3]
The lifeworld concept is used in philosophy and in some social sciences, particularly sociology and anthropology. The concept emphasizes a state of affairs in which the world is experienced, the world is lived (German erlebt). The lifeworld is a pre-epistemological stepping stone for phenomenological analysis in the Husserlian tradition.
In whatever way we may be conscious of the world as universal horizon, as coherent universe of existing objects, we, each "I-the-man" and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this 'living together.' We, as living in wakeful world-consciousness, are constantly active on the basis of our passive having of the world... Obviously this is true not only for me, the individual ego; rather we, in living together, have the world pre-given in this together, belong, the world as world for all, pre-given with this ontic meaning... The we-subjectivity... [is] constantly functioning.[4]
This collective inter-subjective pool of perceiving, Husserl explains, is both universally present and, for humanity's purposes, capable of arriving at 'objective truth,' or at least as close to objectivity as possible.[5] The 'lifeworld' is a grand theatre of objects variously arranged in space and time relative to perceiving subjects, is already-always there, and is the "ground" for all shared human experience.[6] Husserl's formulation of the lifeworld was also influenced by Wilhelm Dilthey's "life-nexus" (German Lebenszusammenhang) and Martin Heidegger's Being-in-the-world[citation needed] (German In-der-Welt-Sein). The concept was further developed by students of Husserl such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jan Patočka, and Alfred Schütz. The lifeworld can be thought of as the horizon of all our experiences, in the sense that it is that background on which all things appear as themselves and meaningful. The lifeworld cannot, however, be understood in a purely static manner; it isn't an unchangeable background, but rather a dynamic horizon in which we live, and which "lives with us" in the sense that nothing can appear in our lifeworld except as lived.
The concept represented a turning point in Husserl's phenomenology from the tradition of Descartes and Kant. Up until then, Husserl had been focused on finding, elucidating, and explaining an absolute foundation of philosophy in consciousness, without any presuppositions except what can be found through the reflective analysis of consciousness and what is immediately present to it. Originally, all judgments of the real were to be "bracketed" or suspended, and then analyzed to bring to light the role of consciousness in constituting or constructing them. With the concept of the lifeworld, however, Husserl embarked on a different path, which recognizes that, even at its deepest level, consciousness is already embedded in and operating in a world of meanings and pre-judgements that are socially, culturally, and historically constituted. Phenomenology thereby became the study not just of the pure consciousness and meanings of a transcendental ego, as in Husserl's earlier work, but of consciousness and meaning in context. The lifeworld is one of the more complicated concepts in phenomenology, mainly because of its status as both personal and intersubjective.
Even if a person's historicity is intimately tied up with his lifeworld, and each person thus has a lifeworld, this doesn't necessarily mean that the lifeworld is a purely individual phenomenon. In keeping with the phenomenological notion of intersubjectivity, the lifeworld can be intersubjective even though each individual necessarily carries his own "personal" lifeworld ("homeworld"); meaning is intersubjectively accessible, and can be communicated (shared by one's "homecomrades"). However, a homeworld is also always limited by an alienworld. The internal "meanings" of this alienworld can be communicated, but can never be apprehended as alien; the alien can only be appropriated or assimilated into the lifeworld, and only understood on the background of the lifeworld.
Sociology
The Husserlian elucidation of lifeworld provided a starting point for the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schütz, who tried to synthesize Husserl's phenomenology of consciousness, meaning, and the life-world with Max Weber's sociology and its focus on subjectively meaningful action. Jürgen Habermas has further developed the concept of the lifeworld in his social theory. For Habermas, the lifeworld is more or less the "background" environment of competences, practices, and attitudes representable in terms of one's cognitive horizon. Compared to Husserl with his focus on consciousness, however, Habermas, whose social theory is grounded in communication, focuses on the lifeworld as consisting of socially and culturally sedimented linguistic meanings. It is the lived realm of informal, culturally-grounded understandings and mutual accommodations. Rationalization and colonization of the lifeworld by the instrumental rationality of bureaucracies and market-forces is a primary concern of Habermas's two-volume Theory of Communicative Action.
For Habermas, communicative action is governed by practical rationality—ideas of social importance are mediated through the process of linguistic communication according to the rules of practical rationality. By contrast, technical rationality governs systems of instrumentality, like industries, or on a larger scale, the capitalist economy or the democratic political government. Ideas of instrumental importance to a system are mediated according to the rules of that system (the most obvious example is the capitalist economy's use of currency). Self-deception, and thus systematically distorted communication, is possible only when the lifeworld has been 'colonized' by instrumental rationality, so some social norm comes into existence and enjoys legitimate power even though it is not justifiable. This occurs when means of mediating instrumental ideas gains communicative power—as when someone pays a group of people to stay quiet during a public debate, or if financial or administrative resources are used to advertise some social viewpoint. When people take the resulting consensus as normatively relevant, the lifeworld has been colonized and communication has been systematically distorted. The 'colonization' metaphor is used because the use of steering media to arrive at social consensus is not native to the lifeworld—the decision-making processes of the systems world must encroach on the lifeworld in a way that is in a sense imperialistic:
When stripped of their ideological veils, the imperatives of autonomous subsystems make their way into the lifeworld from the outside—like colonial masters coming into a tribal society—and force a process of assimilation upon it. The diffused perspectives of the local culture cannot be sufficiently coordinated to permit the play of the metropolis and the world market to be grasped from the periphery.[7]
The fragmentation of consciousness associated with the two Marxist concepts of alienation and false consciousness illustrate why, in Habermas' perspective, they are merely special cases of the more general phenomenon of lifeworld colonization.
Social coordination and systemic regulation occur by means of shared practices, beliefs, values, and structures of communicative interaction, which may be institutionally based. We are inevitably lifeworldly, such that individuals and interactions draw from custom and cultural traditions to construct identities, define situations, coordinate action, and create social solidarity. Ideally this occurs by communicatively coming to understanding (German Verstehen), but it also occurs through pragmatic negotiations (compare: Seidman, 1997:197).
In the course of recent constructivist discourses a discussion about the lifeworld term took place as well. Björn Kraus'relational-constructivist[8] version of the lifeworld term considers its phenomenological roots (Husserl and Schütz), but expands it within the range of epistemological constructivist theory building.[9] In consequence, a new approach is created, which is not only focusing on the individual perspective upon the lifeworld term, but is also taking account of social and material environmental conditions and their relevance as emphasized for example by Habermas. Essential therefore is Kraus' basic assumption that cognitive development depends on two determining factors. On the one hand a person's own reality is her subjective construct. On the other hand this construct—in spite of all subjectivity—is not random: Since a person is still linked to her environment, her own reality is influenced by the conditions of this environment (German Grundsätzliche Doppelbindung menschlicher Strukturentwicklung).[10]
Building up on this point of view, a separation of individual perception and the social and material environmental conditions is made possible. Kraus accordingly picks up the lifeworld term, adds the term "life conditions" (German Lebenslage[11]) and opposes the two terms to each other.
By this means, lifeworld describes a person's subjectively experienced world, whereas life conditions describe the person's actual circumstances in life. Accordingly, it could be said that a person's lifeworld is built depending on their particular life conditions. More precisely, the life conditions include the material and immaterial living circumstances as for example employment situation, availability of material resources, housing conditions, social environment (friends, foes, acquaintances, relatives, etc.) as well as the persons physical condition (fat/thin, tall/small, female/male, healthy/sick, etc.). The lifeworld, in contrast, describes the subjective perception of these conditions.[12]
Kraus uses the epistemological distinction between subjective reality and objective reality. Thus, a person's lifeworld correlates with the person's life conditions in the same way than subjective reality correlates with objective reality. The one is the insurmountable, subjective construct built depending on the other one's conditions.[13]
Kraus defined lifeworld and life conditions as follows:
"Life conditions mean a person's material and immaterial circumstances of life.
Lifeworld means a person's subjective construction of reality, which he or she forms under the condition of his or her life circumstances."[14]
This contrasting comparison provides a conceptual specification, enabling in the first step the distinction between a subjectively experienced world and its material and social conditions and allowing in the second step to focus on these conditions' relevance for the subjective construction of reality.
With this in mind, Manfred Ferdinand, who is reviewing the lifeworld terms used by Alfred Schütz, Edmund Husserl, Björn Kraus and Ludwig Wittgenstein, concludes: Kraus' "thoughts on a constructivist comprehension of lifeworlds contours the integration of micro-, meso- and macroscopic approaches, as it is demanded by Invernizzi and Butterwege: This integration is not only necessary in order to relate the subjective perspectives and the objective frame conditions to each other but also because the objective frame conditions obtain their relevance for the subjective lifeworlds not before they are perceived and assessed."[15]
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was an Austrian-German philosopher and mathematician who established the school of phenomenology.
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, politics, religion, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, nature, and history. He was the lead editor of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine he established with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945.
The sociology of knowledge is the study of the relationship between human thought, the social context within which it arises, and the effects that prevailing ideas have on societies. It is not a specialized area of sociology. Instead, it deals with broad fundamental questions about the extent and limits of social influences on individuals' lives and the social-cultural basis of our knowledge about the world. The sociology of knowledge has a subclass and a complement. Its subclass is Sociology of scientific knowledge. Its complement is the sociology of ignorance.
Phenomenology is the philosophical study of objectivity – and reality more generally – as subjectively lived and experienced.
Alfred Schutz was an Austrian philosopher and social phenomenologist whose work bridged sociological and phenomenological traditions. Schutz is gradually being recognized as one of the 20th century's leading philosophers of social science. He related Edmund Husserl's work to the social sciences, using it to develop the philosophical foundations of Max Weber's sociology, in his major work Phenomenology of the Social World. However, much of his influence arose from the publication of his Collected Papers in the 1960s.
Constructivism is a view in the philosophy of science that maintains that scientific knowledge is constructed by the scientific community, which seeks to measure and construct models of the natural world. According to the constructivist, natural science, therefore, consists of mental constructs that aim to explain sensory experience and measurements.
Universal pragmatics (UP), more recently placed under the heading of formal pragmatics, is the philosophical study of the necessary conditions for reaching an understanding through communication. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas coined the term in his essay "What is Universal Pragmatics?" where he suggests that human competition, conflict, and strategic action are attempts to achieve understanding that have failed because of modal confusions. The implication is that coming to terms with how people understand or misunderstand one another could lead to a reduction of social conflict.
In philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, intersubjectivity is the relation or intersection between people's cognitive perspectives.
In sociology, communicative action is cooperative action undertaken by individuals based upon mutual deliberation and argumentation. The term was developed by German philosopher-sociologist Jürgen Habermas in his work The Theory of Communicative Action.
The Theory of Communicative Action is a two-volume 1981 book by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in which the author continues his project of finding a way to ground "the social sciences in a theory of language", which had been set out in On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967). The two volumes are Reason and the Rationalization of Society, in which Habermas establishes a concept of communicative rationality, and Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, in which Habermas creates the two level concept of society and lays out the critical theory for modernity.
Phenomenology or phenomenological psychology, a sub-discipline of psychology, is the scientific study of subjective experiences. It is an approach to psychological subject matter that attempts to explain experiences from the point of view of the subject via the analysis of their written or spoken words. The approach has its roots in the phenomenological philosophical work of Edmund Husserl.
Dan Zahavi is a Danish philosopher. He is currently a professor of philosophy at University of Copenhagen.
Phenomenology within sociology, or phenomenological sociology, examines the concept of social reality as a product of intersubjectivity. Phenomenology analyzes social reality to explain the formation and nature of social institutions. The application of phenomenological ideas in sociology is distinct from other social science applications of social science applications.
Egalitarian dialogue is a dialogue in which contributions are considered according to the validity of their reasoning, instead of according to the status or position of power of those who make them. Although previously used widely in the social sciences and in reference to the Bakhtinian philosophy of dialogue, it was first systematically applied to dialogical education by Ramón Flecha in his 2000 work Sharing Words. Theory and Practice of Dialogic Learning.
Research methodology based on intersubjective dialogue and an egalitarian relationship between the research team and those being researched .Current societies are characterized for using dialogue in different domains, seeing it as necessary for social progress and for avoiding different social conflicts. Critical communicative methodology is characterized for its dialogic orientation in different aspects of the research.
Ferdinand Fellmann was a German philosopher. After the expulsion of his family in 1946 out of Hirschberg Fellmann grew up in Hameln/Weser (Germany).
The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy is an unfinished 1936 book by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl.
Björn Kraus is a German philosopher, who unfolds epistemological theories for social work. He therefore picks up on the doubt about the possibilities of human perception, a topic that has been emphasized over and over in occidental philosophy. He thus stands in tradition of a skepticism as for example defined by Immanuel Kant and Ernst von Glasersfeld.
In Marxist philosophy, reification is the "conversion of the subject to an object, as when the worker becomes a commodity", or the process by which human social relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them, or attributes of some product of the relation, such as a traded commodity.
Relational constructivism can be perceived as a relational consequence of radical constructivism. In contrary to social constructivism, it picks up the epistemological threads and maintains the radical constructivist idea that humans cannot overcome their limited conditions of reception. Therefore, humans are not able to come to objective conclusions about the world.
↑ See Björn Kraus: Erkennen und Entscheiden. Grundlagen und Konsequenzen eines erkenntnistheoretischen Konstruktivismus für die Soziale Arbeit. Beltz Juventa, Weinheim/Basel 2013. P. 145 ff.
↑ See Björn Kraus: Erkennen und Entscheiden. Grundlagen und Konsequenzen eines erkenntnistheoretischen Konstruktivismus für die Soziale Arbeit. Beltz Juventa, Weinheim/Basel 2013. P. 66.
↑ See Neurath 1931 /Weisser 1956 in Björn Kraus: Lebenswelt und Lebensweltorientierung – eine begriffliche Revision als Angebot an eine systemisch-konstruktivistische Sozialarbeitswissenschaft. Kontext. Zeitschrift für Systemische Therapie und Familientherapie. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht. Heft 37/02, 2006 p.116–129. Also available online: http://www.webnetwork-nordwest.de/sowi/article.php?sid=92 2004, p. 7. See also Björn Kraus 2013, p. 143 ff.
↑ See Björn Kraus: Erkennen und Entscheiden. Grundlagen und Konsequenzen eines erkenntnistheoretischen Konstruktivismus für die Soziale Arbeit. Beltz Juventa, Weinheim/Basel 2013. P. 152 f.
↑ See Björn Kraus: The Life We Live and the Life We Experience: Introducing the Epistemological Difference between “Lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) and “Life Conditions” (Lebenslage) Social Work and Society. International Online Journal. Vol. 13, No. 2 2015, http://www.socwork.net/sws/article/view/438; Björn Kraus: Erkennen und Entscheiden.. Beltz Juventa, Weinheim/Basel 2013. P. 152.
↑ See Björn Kraus: The Life We Live and the Life We Experience: Introducing the Epistemological Difference between "Lifeworld" (Lebenswelt) and "Life Conditions" (Lebenslage) Social Work and Society. International Online Journal. Vol. 13, No. 2 2015, P. 4. http://www.socwork.net/sws/article/view/438
↑ See Manfred Ferdinand: Lebenswelten - Lebensschnüre. Heidelberger Studien zur praktischen Theologie.: Lit Verlag: Münster 2014, S. 31.
Further reading
Eden, T. (2004). Lebenswelt. in Ebner, K., & Kadi, U. (2004). Wörterbuch der phänomenologischen Begriffe. Hamburg: Meiner.
Treitel, C. (2000). The culture of knowledge in the metropolis of science, spiritualism and liberalism in fin-de-siècle Berlin. in * Goschler, C. (ed.). Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit in Berlin, 1870-1930 (pp.127–155). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.
Steinbock, A. J. (1995). Home and Beyond, Generative Phenomenology After Husserl. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.
Grathoff, R. (1989). Milieu und Lebenswelt. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp
External links
The dictionary definition of lifeworld at Wiktionary
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