Husserl's Problematic Concept of the Life-World

 

(in: Husserl. Expositions and appraisals. Editors, Frederick Elliston and Peter McCormick, University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana (Notre-Dame) / London,1977, pp.202-212

Reprinted with permission of the publisher and author from American Philosophical Quarterly, 7 (1970): 331-39.)

 

DAVID CARR

202

 

As Herbert Spiegelberg notes in his his­torical study of the phenomenological movement, "the most influential and suggestive idea that has come out of the study and edition of Husserl's unpublished manuscripts thus far is that of the Lebenswelt or world of lived experience." ¹ Because this fertile idea has in­spired so many original and insightful contributions to phenomenology since Husserl's death, notably in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz, and since the investigation of the life‑world seems firmly established as an important subject for philosophical con­cern, it may seem a matter of only histori­cal interest to return to Husserl's writings for a critical analysis of his own thoughts on the subject. But philosophy, as Husserl recognized and insisted at the end of his life, is like any other cultural activity in existing as a cumulative tradition; that is, it is able to proceed by being able to take its origins and its fundamental task for granted; it owes its ongoing mode of being to its capacity to move away from and in a certain sense forget its origins. But in exchange for this very capacity to move forward, it always runs the risk of not only forgetting but also being unable to reactivate and critically examine its origins. And if the origins are faulty, the heirs to the tradition may inherit such faults through too little critical awareness of what they owe to the past.

After working on a translation of The Crisis of European Sciences,² in which Husserl developed at length his notion of the Lebenswelt, I am convinced that there are many faults and confusions in his exposition which need to be sorted out and examined. This task seems especially important since I suspect that some of Husserl's confusions have been handed down to his successors along with his pro­foundest insights. This latter point is something I shall not try to establish here. But even the suspicion provides warrant enough for reopening the case, especially in this instance, since some have come to see the investigation of the life-world as either synonymous with phenomenology itself or as forming its most profound stratum. Husserl scholars point out, quite rightly, that the master himself did not see it this way, that he regarded this investi­gation of the Lebenswelt as merely a necessary preliminary stage on the way to transcendental subjectivity. "Original" phenomenologists reply, also quite rightly, that being true to Husserl is less important than being true to the "Sachen selbst," and it is precisely his move to transcendental idealism they object to. Nevertheless, they do credit Husserl with the discovery of the life-world and see [203] themselves as continuing in the exploration of the terrain to which he led the way.

 

  Husserl would have rejoiced in seeing himself thus characterized as a sort of Moses to the children of Thales, for he claimed the role for himself often enough. And he lived up to it all too well in one sense, as his readers know, at least in those works either published or meant for publication. He has a maddening tendency to describe in rough outline, as if discerned from the heights of Mount Nebo, the salient features of a new domain, confident that this will provide his successors with a reliable map with which to venture forth and fill in the details. More than any of his other books, the Crisis exhibits this character of outlining a program and issuing anticipatory directives. And this is true especially of the ninety‑page section devoted to the life-world. There is evidence, in fact, that this section was the very last thing to be inserted in the plan of the Crisis, forming an innovation even over the Prague lecture on which the work is based. It was apparently written during the very last year of Husserl's active life, a year of feverish activity interrupted again and again, and finally interrupted for good, by illness. Husserl never claimed that it was more than a rough outline, of course, but as such it needs to be reexamined. For as explorers know, a faulty map of the terrain to be explored can cause grave difficulties to the exploration itself, setting it off on wrong paths and disorienting it from the start.

 

  What I wish to argue in the following is that Husserl has assembled under one title a number of disparate and in some senses even incompatible concepts. Each of these concepts has some validity and importance, but Husserl does not seem to be fully aware of their separateness and thus does not concern himself with showing that or how they belong together. The question, then, is whether these notions can legitimately be combined under the title "life­world," and if so, whether the resulting clarified conception can play the role in phenomenology that Husserl thought it should play.

 

I

  It is not actually in the Crisis that the term Lebenswelt makes its first appearance in Husserl's vocabulary; in fact, it appears in a manuscript meant as a supplementary text to Ideas, volume 2, dated by the Louvain archivists at 1917.³ It appears there closely related to a term that is familiar to readers of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: natürlicher Weltbegriff, natural world-­concept,⁴ and it is linked to the investigations of part 3 of Ideen II concerning the construction of the personal, spiritual, or cultural world as opposed to the scientific or natural world. A comparison would reveal that many of the themes and descriptions of Ideen II and the Crisis are similar on this point, and that Husserl's later writings on the subject were thus able to draw on reflections initiated at a much earlier date. Nevertheless, it is only in the Crisis (1936) that Husserl self-consciously uses the term Lebenswelt with emphasis, employing it in the title of a major section of the projected book and according to the elaboration of the notion a decisive position in the phenomenological program. After a brief introductory section on "The Crisis of the Sciences as Expression of the Radical Life‑Crisis of European Humanity" (part 1) and a longer historical section devoted to "The Clarification of the Origin of the Modern Opposition between Physicalistic Objectivism and Transcendental Subjectivism" (part 2), Husserl turns to the lengthy third part, "The Clarification of the Transcendental Problem, and the Related Function of Psychology," which was to be the central section of the projected but unfinished five-part works.⁵ The first half of this third part bears the subheading "The Way into Phenomenological Transcendental Philosophy by Inquiring Back from the Pre­given Life-World," and it constitutes the longest single division of the book as it stands.

 

 But by the time Husserl begins this section he has already prepared the way for the concept of the life-world; in fact the [204] notion is introduced gradually in the framework of the historical discussions of part 2, beginning with the long section devoted to Galileo. If we look closely at the conception that emerges there, we shall be able to see clearly one of the several themes which are interwoven, as I claim rather confusedly, into the notion of the life‑world later on.

According to Husserl, Galileo's great accomplishment, to which modern sci­ence owes its success, was the mathematization of nature. Husserl asks: "What is the meaning of this mathemati­zation of nature?" and he rephrases the question as: "How do we reconstruct the train of thought which motivated it?” ⁶ This question sets the tone for the long, quasi‑historical inquiry which follows, and Husserl's answer is prefigured in the next paragraph.

"Prescientifically, in every-day sense experience, the world is given in a subjec­tively relative way. Each of us has his own appearances," Husserl says, and points out that these may be at variance with one another, a fact with which we are all familiar. "But we do not think," he goes on, "that, because of this, there are many worlds. Necessarily, we believe in the world whose things only appear to us differently but are the same. [Now] have we nothing more than the empty, neces­sary idea of things which exist objectively in themselves? Is there not, in the ap­pearances themselves, a content we must ascribe to true nature? Surely this in­cludes everything which pure geometry, and in general the mathematics of the pure form of space-time, teaches us, with the self-evidence of absolute universal validity, about the pure shapes it can construct idealiter - and here I am describing," Husserl notes, "without taking a position, what was `obvious' to Galileo and motivated his thinking."⁷

Here Husserl has described in a few words both the brilliant insight upon which modern science rests and the fate­ful mistake which has consistently misled the various attempts at its philosophical interpretation. Galileo inherits "pure geometry" from the Greeks as a science which affords exact, intersubjectively valid knowledge for its domain of objects. In our encounters with the real world we have the problem of the subjective rela­tivity of what appears, and it is the task of a science of the world to overcome this relativity. Now pure geometry is not un­related to the world; in fact, as a science it can be seen as originally arising out of the practical needs of accurately surveying land and the like, and its theoretical for­mulation has always found application back to the real world. Galileo sees that this is because the real world as it pre­sents itself to us in experience contains, somehow embedded in it, examples of what is dealt with so successfully in geometry. Galileo's proposal is that exact and intersubjectively valid knowledge of the real world can be attained by treating everything about this world as an exam­ple of a geometrical object or relation­ship. If every physical shape, trajectory, vibration, etc., is seen, after being mea­sured as accurately as possible, as a ver­sion of a pure geometrical shape, geomet­rical statements about the properties and relationships among these pure shapes will turn out to provide us with informa­tion about nature which shares in the exactness and universality of pure geometry. This leaves untouched, of course, certain properties which do not seem directly measurable in geometrical terms: color, warmth, weight, tone, smell, etc. Galileo notes, however, that changes in some of these properties cor­respond exactly to measurable changes in geometrical properties‑even the Greeks had known of the relationship between the pitch of a tone emitted by a vibrating string and its length, thickness, and ten­sion. In his boldest move of all, Galileo proposes to treat all such "secondary qualities," as they were later called, ex­clusively in terms of their measurable geometrical correlates with the idea that all will be accounted for thereby.

Thus is accomplished, according to Husserl, the mathematization of nature, and such is the origin of mathematical physics. It can be broken down into two steps, actually: Galileo's geometrization [205] of nature, and the arithmetization of geometry accomplished by Descartes and Leibniz. Nature becomes a mathematical manifold and mathematical techniques provide the key to its inner workings. In mathematics we have access to an infinite domain, and if nature is identified with that domain we have access not only to what lies beyond the scope of our im­mediate experience, but to everything that could ever be experienced in nature, i.e., to nature as an infinite domain.

It is by contrast to the Galilean concep­tion of nature that Husserl's first charac­terization of the life-world emerges. The philosophical interpretation of Galileo's mathematization becomes involved in a series of equivocations. To overcome the vagueness and relativity of ordinary ex­perience, science performs a set of abstractions and interpretations upon the world as it originally presents itself. First it focuses upon the shape-aspect of the world, to the exclusion of so-called sec­ondary qualities; then it interprets these shapes as pure geometrical shapes in order to deal with them in geometrical terms. But it forgets that its first move is an abstraction from something and its second an interpretation of something. Its first move is an abstraction because, no matter how successful we may be in correlating secondary with primary qualities, the world we are trying to explain still presents itself to us as having both kinds of properties, one of which we sys­tematically ignore or declare "merely subjective." Its second move is an in­terpretation because, to treat the spatial relationships of the world with geometri­cal exactness, it must consider these rela­tionships as the ideal ones with which pure geometry deals, whereas the real shape-aspect of the world, no matter how accurately measured, can never present us with anything but approximations to these ideal relationships.

Having forgotten the abstractive and idealizing role of scientific thought, the philosophical interpretation comes up with an ontological claim: to be is to be measurable in ideal terms as a geometri­cally determined configuration. Thus it happens, says Husserl, "that we take for true being what is actually a method."⁸ Mathematical science is a method which considers the world as if it were exclu­sively a manifold of idealized shape-­occurrences; the ontological interpreta­tion simply states that it is such a man­ifold. The ontological claim then gives rise--and such is the course of modern philosophy--to a sequence of epistemological absurdities, the mathematical realism of the rationalists and the sub­jectivism and ultimately the skepticism of the empiricists. Rationalism treats the scientific method as if it were a kind of instrument, like the microscope, which allows us to see the world as it actually is, which pulls back the curtain of appear­ances and puts us into contact with real­ity. Empiricism recognizes that all we ever see is the causal effects of the real world upon the mind, and it raises the ultimately insoluble question of whether what we see accurately informs us of what is. The curtain of appearance is thus lowered again for good.

Husserl's critique is directed not so much against Galileo's methodical inno­vations as against those ontological and epistemological consequences drawn from it. The scientific method is not an instrument for improving our sight, something invented during the Renais­sance which enables us once and for all to put aside the world of appearances. It was and remains an abstraction from and in­terpretation of what is seen, and what is seen remains ever the same whether or not we are scientists who operate with the method. This is the "world of sense ex­perience,"⁹ the "intuitively given sur­rounding world (Umwelt),"¹⁰ as Husserl first calls it, or finally, the "prescientific life-world."¹¹ It is that from which sci­ence abstracts and of which it is the in­terpretation, the world of objects pos­sessing both primary and secondary qual­ities, the world of spatial aspects belong­ing to vague and approximate types and not a world of geometrical idealities. On the other hand it is a world and not a mental representation of the world. It is "subjectively relative" by comparison to [206] the intersubjective agreement the scientific interpretation affords, but it is not "merely subjective" in the sense that it belongs to the mind.¹² And most important, the life-world is the "meaning fundament,"¹³ as Husserl says, of natural science, if natural science is correctly understood; for as an abstraction-interpretation, science would have no meaning, make no sense, without reference to that of which it is the abstraction-interpretation.

 

II

When he begins the section devoted directly to the notion of the life-­world, Husserl picks up many of the themes that emerged from his critique of modern science and philosophy. Science operates with abstractions, the life-world is the concrete fullness from which this abstraction is derived; science constructs, the life‑world provides the materials out of which the construction arises; the ideal character of scientific entities precludes their availability to sense intuition, while the life-world is the field of intuition itself, the "universe of what is intuitable in principle," the "realm of original self-evidence"¹⁴ to which the scientist must return to verify his theories. Science interprets and explains what is given, the life-world is the locus of all givenness. The emphasis here is on the immediacy of life-world experience in contrast to the mediated character of scientific entities. The life-world is prior to science, prior to theory, not only historically but also epistemologically, even after the advent and rich development of the scientific tradition in the West.

 

  It must be said that in the context we have been describing, the Crisis offers us little that is new. Much of Husserl's actual description of the life­world at this point is simply a recapitulation of the phenomenology of perception with which readers of the Ideas and the Cartesian Meditations are familiar. The life-world is primarily a world of perceived "things," "bodies." He speaks of the perspectival character of perception, of outer and inner horizons, placing more emphasis than before, perhaps, on the role of the living body and its kinesthetic functions and on the oriented character of the field of perception around the body. His descriptions correspond to those centered around the concept of the "world of pure experience" in the Phenomenological Psychology,¹⁵ the analyses of passive synthesis and pre-predicative experience found in Erfahrung and Urteil.¹⁶ The critique of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, in which Husserl follows Berkeley, is of course not new, nor is his insistence on the ideal character of pure geometrical structures in opposition to the realities of the experienced world. Husserl's greatest innovation in this context, in fact, concerns not so much his characterization of the lifeworld as his assessment of the status of science. Mathematization is seen not merely as one interpretative way of dealing with the world, but as a historical phenomenon which involves an original establishment and a handed‑down tradition. Galileo inherits the tradition of Greek geometry and combines it in a fruitful way with the need for a science of the world. His successors, in turn, take for granted his way of interpreting the world-- which Husserl regards as a kind of methodological proposal or hypothesis¹⁷ --and go on to make great discoveries and theoretical refinements. Philosophers, also taking for granted Galileo's proposal, absolutize it into an ontological claim which then makes experience and knowledge incomprehensible. It is to this historically determined, modern scientific view of the world that Husserl wishes to oppose the world as it really presents itself, the pre­scientific life-world in which we always live but to which our theoretical reflection has been blinded by our scientific prejudices. This historical characterization of scientific thought does reflect, by contrast, on the concept of the life-world, for it implies that the life‑world is not historically relative phenomenon but the constant underlying ground of all such phenomena, the world from which the scientific interpretation [207] takes its start and which it con­stantly presupposes.

 

III

It is against this background of explicit and implied characterizations of the life‑world that many of Husserl's remarks appear puzzling and, in my view, point to a second notion of the life-world which differs radically from the first. Very early in the life-world section, attacking Kant for taking the world as the scientific world and ignoring the role of the life-world in scientific experience, Husserl writes: "Naturally, from the very start in the Kantian manner of posing questions, the everyday surrounding world of life is pre­supposed as existing--the surrounding world in which all of us (even I who am now philosophizing) consciously have our existence; and here are also the sci­ences, as cultural facts in this world, with their scientists and theories."¹⁸ The sci­ences as theories, then, together with the scientists as creators of the theories, are part of the life-world. Again and again, but almost always in passing, Husserl re­fers to the sciences as cultural facts which belong, presumably along with other cul­tural facts, to the life-world. As they arise, he says, they "flow into"¹⁹ the life‑world, "add themselves to its own composition,”²⁰ and enrich its content.

At first Husserl might seem to be in­volved in a flat contradiction here, since he previously distinguished the life-world from the world of science and now seems to be putting them back together. Husserl is aware of this seeming contradiction when he writes: "the concrete life-world, then, is the grounding soil (der gründende Boden) of the ‘scientifically true’ world and at the same time encompasses it in its own universal concreteness. How is this to be understood? How are we to do jus­tice systematically--that is, with appro­priate scientific discipline--to the all­encompassing, so paradoxically demand­ing manner of being of the life-world? "²¹ But Husserl seems to regard this particu­lar paradox, at any rate, as being easily resolved. For it is not quite true that the scientific world and the life-world, pre­viously distinguished with great care, are now being merged.

What Husserl is adding to the life­-world is not the world as described by scientific theories but rather the scientific theories themselves; and when he refers to them in this way he always adds: "as cultural facts" or "as spiritual (intellectual) accomplishments (geistige Leistungen)."²² "[Science's] theories," he writes, "the logical constructs, are of course not things in the life-world like stones, houses, or trees. They are logical wholes and logical parts made up of ulti­mate logical elements .... But this­... ideality does not change in the least the fact that they are human formations, essentially related to human actualities and potentialities, and thus belong to this concrete unity of the life-world, whose concreteness thus extends further than that of `things'."²³ There is a difference between engaging in science, i.e., inter­preting the world according to its methods, and living in a cultural world of which science is a part. "If we cease being immersed in our scientific thinking," Husserl writes, "we become aware that we scientists are, after all, human beings and as such are among the compo­nents of the life-world which always exists for us, ever pre-given; and thus all of science is pulled, along with us, into the-- merely 'subjective-relative'-- life­world.”²⁴ Here Husserl has accom­plished a brilliant reversal. The scientist sees himself as overcoming the relativity of our "merely subjective" pictures of the world by finding the objective world, the world as it really is. Husserl shows that the scientist can just as easily be seen, by a shift in perspective, as a man who himself has a particular sort of pic­ture of the world, and that as such both he and his picture belong within the "real" world, which Husserl calls the life-world.

Now with this Husserl may have re­solved one paradox about the life-world, but he has left us with another. For in describing the life-world as a cultural world which can contain scientific theories as well as stones, houses, and [208] trees, Husserl has moved into what by his own account is a very different phenomenological domain. As Husserl says, scientific theories are not things, and, what counts most for the phenomenologist, they are not given as things are; they are not objects of percep­tion, they are not given in perspective, they are not, strictly speaking, even spatio-temporal. And the same thing is obviously true of other elements of the cultural world: institutions, such as the state, the university, the church, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, do not stand before us simply as objects to be per­ceived; nor do works of literature, protest movements, the generation gap. Elaborate and many-level constitutive analyses must be devoted to these phenomena if this world is to be understood, as Husserl himself insisted in Ideen, volume 2; and above all the role of language in structur­ing both the community and its world must be appreciated. How is this to be squared with the "world of immediate experience"? This cultural world may in­deed be described as pre-theoretical, in the sense that it does not need to number among its constitutive elements a scien­tific theory of the world, much less the particular sort of mathematical-scientific theory developed in the modern West. But such terms as "pre-predicative," "immediate," "intuitively given" are clearly out of place. Least of all can the cultural world be described as historically and sociologically nonrelative, i.e., as something which does not change with the times and circumstances. How can the term "life-world" be used for such disparate concepts ?²⁵

Husserl is not unaware of one aspect of the paradox just described and seems to think he has taken it into account: this is the historical and possibly sociological relativity of the life-world considered as cultural world. In spite of the "subjective relativity" of the life-world by contrast to the objective scientific world, Husserl writes, "normally, in our experience and in the social group united with us in the community of life, we arrive at `secure' facts; within a certain range this occurs of its own accord, that is, undisturbed by any noticeable disagreement .... But when we are thrown into an alien social sphere, that of the Negroes in the Congo, Chinese peasants, etc., we discover that their truths, the facts that for them are fixed, generally verged or verifiable, are by no means the same as ours.” ²⁶ It is in this connection that Husserl often uses the term "life-world" in the plural, such that different historical periods and social groupings have different life-worlds. One way to overcome this "cultural relativity," of course, is to go the way of objec­tive science itself, leaving the life-world behind to reach objective, i.e., mathemat­ically determined truth. Husserl then asks if we are left with nothing else to say about the life-world other than that it is culturally relative. "But this embarassment disappears immediately," he writes, "when we consider that the life­world does have, in all its relative fea­tures, a general structure. This general structure, to which everything that exists relatively is bound, is not itself relative. We can regard it in its generality and, with sufficient care, fix it once and for all in a way equally accessible to all.” ²⁷ This structure is what Husserl calls the a priori of the life‑world, the essence shared by all particular life-worlds, whatever their content, which makes them what they are.

Now these considerations, I maintain, important as they are, do not dispel the discrepancy described earlier between life-world as cultural world and life-world as world of immediate experience. It is quite correct to speak of the different "worlds" of different peoples and histor­ical periods, and it is also quite correct, in my opinion, to seek the general or a priori structures belonging to any such world purely as such. But we should be clear on the fact that, in undertaking the latter task, we are seeking the general struc­tures of the cultural world and not neces­sarily of the world of immediate experi­ence. Several differences between the two types of inquiries suggest themselves immediately. First, phenomenological analysis of the cultural world will have to [209] deal, and in fact must deal primarily, with the constitution of precisely those cul­tural entities whose mode of givenness was contrasted earlier with that of the perceptual world. Its first subject of con­cern must be the ontological status of the community as such and the conditions of the possibility of such phenomena as in­stitutions, political organizations, litera­ture, religion, and mores, whatever par­ticular forms they may take. This is the farthest thing from a phenomenology of perception. Second, since the "life­world" in this cultural sense can change historically, its phenomenology must deal with the eidetic structures of such change, the essential conditions of any and all cultural transformations. The phenomenology of perception, at least on Husserl's own account, need not concern itself with such transformations, since perceptual structures do not change. Fi­nally, the investigation of the cultural world must appreciate the structuring role of language and the communication based on it, while the world of immediate experience, according to Husserl, is dis­tinguished by being pre-linguistic or pre­predicative in character.

Now this is not to say that the phenomenology of the cultural world is totally unrelated to the phenomenology of the perceived or immediately experienced world. In fact, it is of the utmost importance to show the dependence of the cultural world upon the perceived world for its constitution, and this again according to Hussed himself. The cultural community is not something per­ceived, like a thing or a body, but neither is it given to us independently of per­ceived bodies; we know the community because we perceive other persons as members, representatives, or authorities of the community and because we per­ceive physical objects such as tools and books, factories and monuments, as its artifacts and documents. But the cultural world is precisely dependent for its sense upon the perceived world and is not iden­tical with it. It represents a higher and distinct level of constitution, just as, to go back to the first of the Logical Investigations, reading and understanding a sen­tence represents a higher level than sim­ply perceiving the words as physical con­figurations on the page.²⁸ The former is founded upon the latter, as Husserl would say, but is by no means reducible to it. What is needed is a stratified constitutive analysis like the one in the fifth Cartesian Meditation leading from straightforward perception to the experience of persons and, from there, to the much more com­plicated constitution of the community.²⁹

But notice that we have now placed the cultural world in the same position, rela­tive to the so-called world of immediate experience, as the scientifically con­structed world of mathematical physics. That is, the cultural world is a domain of entities and structures whose givenness is mediated by and founded on the spatio-temporal world of perception. No less than the scientific world, the cultural world has its meaning-fundament in the world of perception as the domain through which its structures are always mediated, in which its truths are always directly "verified" in our experience. To be sure, the character of the mediation and the mode of being of the entities that make up the two "worlds" are quite dif­ferent. It could be said that the two types of "mediated" experience focus on dif­ferent aspects of the concrete world. Both are historical in that a coherent development and transformation of truths about the world is essential to both. But the character of the historical develop­ment is different; as Husserl points out, especially in these later writings, the his­torical development of science is cu­mulative, at least ideally; our concept of what is true does not simply change from one time to the next but grows in a con­stant progression, with each new stage building upon the ones before it. In spite of these differences, however, the paral­lels are obvious: surely our degree of re­moval from the gold crisis, for example, or the "Establishment," is as great as our degree of removal from the electron, and our access to these two sorts of entities is in many ways similar, in any case neces­sitating simple perception at some stage.

 

210         

IV

The argument I have developed thus far points to a serious ambiguity in Husserl's notion of the life-world and to a resulting structural mistake regarding its position on the phenomenological map. He begins by distinguishing the world of post-Galilean mathematical science from the world of everyday life or life-world. He tries to show the priority of the life­world, the way in which the scientific world is dependent on the life-world for its sense. But the phenomena ranged by Husserl under the term "life-world" turn out, as we have seen, to fall into two distinct strata, one of which is indeed prior to the scientific domain (the "world of immediate experience") but the other of which seems to be on the same phenomenological level as the scientific domain, in spite of its differences--that is, in respect to its derivative or mediated character. From this perspective it is con­fusing at best to use a single name for the two different concepts I have been discussing.

But we might ask how Husserl was able to fall prey to this confusion. Or, to put the question in a more flattering way: Do the world of immediate experience and the cultural world have something in common, something of which Husserl was aware in placing them together under one term? This question can be answered affirmatively in a way which partly jus­tifies Husserl's use of the term "life-­world" even though it does not exonerate him from the error of using it in a confus­ing way. But it complicates matters further, supporting my statement earlier in this paper that Husserl's term "life­world" involves not just two but several different concepts at once. A brief exam­ination of how this is so reveals the great multiplicity of interests and directions of inquiry which motivate Husserl in The Crisis of European Sciences.

Three considerations point to elements that are common to the two types of world we found involved in Husserl's "life-world." First, we must remember that the touchstone of the Crisis, and the point to which it returns again and again, is modern mathematical science, and, in general, the problem of the theoretical science of nature. Now something which emerges, not so much from the Crisis as from the important short paper on the "Origin of Geometry,”³⁰ is Husserl's claim that theoretical science depends for its possibility not only on the world of immediate experience, the perceived world, but also on the cultural and lin­guistic community and its world. To exist and construct its mathematically deter­mined world, science must have at its disposal not only a whole system of lan­guage but also a system of culture in which certain truths can be shared and taken for granted as a basis for continued work. The cultural world and the world of immediate experience, then, whatever their differences, are alike in constituting the preconditions for the existence of science. This means that the phe­nomenological stratification de­veloped earlier must be somewhat re­vised. It is not as if the world of im­mediate experience made up a primary level supporting a secondary level which can take the form either of culture or of the scientific domain. Rather, the scien­tific level constitutes a tertiary stratum built on the second or cultural level. This does not invalidate our point about the important differences between the first two levels, but it does justify their sharing the designation "pre-scientific" in the sense that together they form the founda­tion for the mathematized world.

A second point in Husserl's favor cen­ters around a term that is used repeatedly in connection with the life‑world, namely "pre‑given" (vorgegeben): The pre­given is what is there in advance, that which is taken for granted, which is passively received by consciousness and forms the background for its activity in relation to the world and itself. In keeping with his growing emphasis on the cultural world in his later writings, Husserl in the Crisis and other late texts sees it as con­tributing to what is always and necessar­ily pre‑given to consciousness. It is not only the world of pure experience, the a priori of the life-world in this sense, that consciousness takes for granted in its [211] dealings with the world; it is also the cul­tural world and whatever prejudices and interpretations may derive from it. In conscious life, man may be without scien­tific upbringing and thus lack the scien­tific interpretation of the world. But he is never, Husserl means to say, without cul­ture, and thus never without some view of the world which goes beyond its im­mediate givenness to perception. Thus the cultural world, like the world of pure experience, is a necessary ground (Boden) of conscious life; it is pre-given not only for the theoretical activity of the sci­entist but for any activity whatever.

Finally, cultural world and perceived world are united in the very important conception of the pre-theoretical. This is a slightly different point from the first in this series, which pointed to the priority of the life-world over the scientific world; for in using the term "pre-theoretical" Husserl refers primarily to consciousness and the different sorts of attitudes it can assume. He had come to stress much more than in his earlier writings that con­scious life is not exclusively, not even primarily, a quest for objective truths about the world which could be combined into a coherent world theory. The "natural" attitude in this later period is rather different from the "natural attitude" of the Ideas which, when closely examined, turns out to be the philosophical theory of naive realism. "Original natural life," as Husserl calls it in the Vienna Lecture,³¹ for example, is not theoretical at all, but rather practical. For consciousness at this level, the world is the domain of ends to be attained, proj­ects to be carried out, materials to be used in carrying them out. It is not a mathemat­ical manifold of entities to be known with theoretical exactness, but a pre-given horizon of the useful and the useless, the significant and the insignificant, the rele­vant and the irrelevant. There is no deny­ing the Heideggerian flavor in these later considerations of Husserl, and the ques­tion of influence is properly raised. But in any case we can see that both the cultural world, with its instruments and socially determined projects, and the world of immediate experience must be seen as the milieu in which the pre-theoretical, prac­tical life of consciousness runs its course. In much of what Husserl says about the perceived world here, one is reminded of Merleau-Ponty's warning that perception must not be analyzed as if it were an "in­cipient science." The orientation of the perceived world around the lived body is a practical orientation of movement and accomplishment, not a theoretical orien­tation. Similarly, culture does not essen­tially present us with a "theory" of the world, but envelopes us in a domain ar­ticulated according to spheres of action, providing norms and directives for get­ting around. The cultural world may con­tain a scientific theory among its ele­ments, but is not exhausted in the stock of objective truths the theory provides. Not that the concept of truth has no relevance here, for hand in hand with Husserl's new descriptions of consciousness and the world goes a new concept of truth. Here he refers to "situational" or "practical" truth,³² which is properly characterized as "merely relative"-- i.e., relative to the subject or the community, relative to the project under consideration-- only by contrast to the notion of "objective" truth, truth-in-itself about the world-in­itself.

The cultural and the perceived worlds combined, then, form the horizon of "natural" or primordial conscious life with its pre-theoretical attitude. And as such they form the pre-given ground from which the theoretical attitude arises, the pre-scientific world underlying the scien­tific. As I have said, these considerations go some distance toward clearing up the confusions built into the celebrated con­cept of the life‑world and offer some jus­tification for Husserl's rather broad use of the term. But at the same time they indicate that much more work needs to be done. Moreover, I think that if taken se­riously they raise profound problems for the whole phenomenological enterprise, at least as its founder originally conceived it. In any case we should be warned that Husserl's concept of the life-world is not something that phenomenologists can simply take for granted.³³

 

 

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NOTES

 

1. Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (The Hague, Nijhoff, 1960), I: 159.

2. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1970).

3. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie and phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch (Husserliana, vol. 4), ed. Marly Biemel (The Hague: Nijhoff,1952), p. 375. See the "textkritische Anmerkungen," p. 423.

4. This term apparently derives from Richard Avenarius' book Der menschliche Weltbegriff (first published in 1891; 3d ed.; Leipzig: O.R. Reisland, 1912), where it is the title of the first section. Heidegger implies that his Sein and Zeit (1927) provides the first adequate elaboration of this concept (8th ed.; Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1957 [p. 52]), but it was also discussed in detail by Husserl, not only in the manuscript mentioned but also, for example, in the Phänomenologische Psychologie lectures of 1925 (Husserliana, vol. 9, ed. Walter Biemel [The Hague: Nühoff, 1962], p. 87). It is often claimed that the Crisis (1936) was influenced by Heidegger's book, and in some respects this is true. But it seems clear that Husserl's concern with the natürlicher Weltbegriff is at least as old as Heidegger's. See Merleau‑Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. i.

5. Crisis, p. 397ff.

6. Ibid., p. 23.

7. Ibid., p. 23f.

8. Ibid., p. 51.

9. Ibid., p. 24.

10. Ibid., p. 25.

11. Ibid., p. 43.

12. Ibid., p. 125.

13. Ibid., p. 48.

14. Ibid., p. 127.

15. Phänomenologische Psychologie, pp. 55ff.

16. Experience and Judgment, rev. and ed. Ludwig Landgrebe, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 71 ff.

17. Crisis, p. 38f.

18. Ibid., p. 104.

19. Ibid., p. 113.

20. Ibid., p. 131.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., p. 130.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., p. 130f.

25. I cannot agree with Kockelmans' claim that there is "a perfect correspondence" between the "life-world" of the Crisis and the "world of immediate experience" in Phänomenologische Psychologie, and that the Crisis formulation is simply "more comprehensive and desirable" (Edmund Husserl's Phenomenological Psychology: A Historico-Critical Study (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1967) [p. 288]). It is true that the 1925 1ectures deal with "the appearance of das Geistige in the world of experience" (Phänomenologische Psychologie, p. 110) and even refer to "die Erfahrungswelt als Kulturwelt" at one point (p. 113). But Husserl is quite clear that cultural objects and even persons, though they are "perceived" in a broad sense (p. 115), are not given in sense experience strictly speaking. Thus he finally proposes a reduction to the world of (strictly) perceived "things": "Offenbar ist diese Dingwelt gegenüber der Kulturwelt das an sich Frühere. Kultur setzt Menschen and Tiere voraus, wie diese ihrerseits Körperlichkeit voraussetzen" (p. 119). Actually the Psychologie is more "desirable" since it contains many of the distinctions so badly needed in the Crisis.

26. Crisis, p.138f.

27. Ibid., p.139.

28. Logical Investigations 11, trans. J. N. Findlay, pp. 299ff.

29. Cartesian Meditations, pp. 120ff.

30. This paper appears as one of the appendices to Crisis, pp. 353ff.

31. Crisis, p. 281. The Vienna Lecture ("Die Krisis des europäischen Menschentums and die Philosophie") in another of the appendices, pp. 269 ff.

32. Crisis, p. 132.

33. For a more extensive treatment of the problems discussed in this paper, see "Ambiguities in the Concept of the Life-World," in David Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl's Transcendental Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp. 190-211.