The Lifeworld​

“Adorno maintains that epistemology is, or at least ought to be, the effort to do justice to reality; that is, to find the appropriate structures that will allow us to articulate what has been suppressed or neglected by traditional epistemological models...The commitment to rationality is identical with the commitment to ‘doing justice.’”—(Adorno's Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality, Brian O'Connor,Loc. 613-614).

Earlier, I introduced the Husserlian concept of "lifeworld," and Heidegger's concept of “being-in-the-world” to describe Dasein’s consciousness. “lifeworld” is a useful concept when trying to understanding questions of economics, religion, psychology, sociology, and ethics. When a system consumes, or colonizes the lifeworld, society then develops pathologies of nihilism, alienation, and neurosis.

Edmund Husserl is the first to use this concept, "lifeworld.” I could paraphrase another author’s description of the lifeworld, but James Finlayson has given a particularly good summary.

"The lifeworld is a concept for the everyday world we share with others. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938 ), the German philosopher who invented phenomenology and taught Martin Heidegger, first used this term in order to contrast the natural, pre-theoretical attitude of ordinary people to the world with the theoretical, objectifying, and mathematicizing perspective of natural science. Habermas does something similar. The lifeworld is his name for the informal and unmarketized domains of social life: family and household, culture, political life outside of organized parties, mass media, voluntary organizations, and so on.

…The phenomenological metaphor of the horizon is instructive. A horizon designates the limit of a human being’s field of vision under normal conditions… A horizon is also perspectival: the boundary shifts, albeit little by little, when we move. The boundary of a geometrical figure, by contrast, or of a piece of ground, is fixed and measurable.

…. Otto Neurath (1882–1945), the Vienna School philosopher of language, came up with a memorably vivid image of our linguistic situation. We are in a boat on the open sea. We cannot take the whole boat into dry dock and inspect it from outside, but we can individually replace any rotten plank of the boat and still stay afloat. The same holds for the lifeworld”(Finlayson, James Gordon ,2005-04-26, Habermas: A Very Short Introduction, OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition., 52-53)

The later Edmond Husserl came to appreciate the importance that society, and culture has in shaping consciousness. The lifeworld is Husserl’s way of recognizing the social totality and the importance of historical context for understanding consciousness within existence. Husserl acknowledges classifying science as a great achievement in human thought; however, this classificatory thinking, which is coherent for science and technology, is appointing itself as the sole judge of what is recognized as a valid experience and what is real. The totalizing philosophy of empirical-scientific reductionism has infiltrated all spheres of life resulting in the dehumanization of society and disenchantment with modernity. Husserl is not asserting that positivistic empirical science is invalid, but rather causal mechanical thinking must be integrated with human values. Our current challenge today is to restore the subject as human being. The elimination of the subject from science, history, philosophy, logic--and even the science of psychology, of all disciplines--is the hallmark of our historical epoch and leads to an era of dehumanization. This is the crisis of science. The division between the humanities and science is completely artificial resulting from a too narrow view of scientific methodologies.

Husserl set forth his concept of the lifeworld in his book, “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology(1936) which later became a profound influence on later sociologists and formed a new school known as the sociology of knowledge:

”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”(Ibid., p. 108-109).