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The notion of lifeworld emerged from Edmund Husserl s attempts to lay bare the essential nature and actions of pure consciousness. Consciousness, he argued, entails ”intentionality – the directedness of action to (and creation of) an object – and an inter subjectively shared lifeworld. Together, they unconsciously shape how people go about the world. Through ”phenomenological reduction, one brackets ”the natural attitude to examine pure acts of consciousness.
Formulating a transcendental phenomenological critique of Weber s conception of subjective meaning and the verstehende Ansatz (interpretive position), Husserl’s student, Alfred Schutz, recognized transcendental phenomenology s limitations for a phenomenology of the social world. Schutz then focused more intensively on the lifeworld: ”The sciences that would interpret and explain human action and thought must begin with a description of the foundational structures of what is prescientific, the reality which seems self-evident to men remaining within the natural attitude. This reality is the everyday life-world” (Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 3-4). The lifeworld is intersubjective from the outset, existing ”as a subjective meaning-context that people master according to their particular interests and projects. The lifeworld is inhabited by ”bodies endowed with consciousness whose acts, like ours, are ”imbedded in meaning contexts, ”subjectively motivated and proceed according to actors particular interests and ”what is feasible for them” (p. 15). People assume they can continue on ”until proven otherwise.
Exploring the lifeworld s scope, complexities, problems and contradictions, Schutz and Luckmann’s (1973) Structures of the Life-World is the foundation for contemporary social constructionist theories and analyses.
Bibliography:
- Husserl, E. (1999) [1905] Idea of Phenomenology, trans. L. Hardy. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, MA.
- Schutz, A. & Luckmann, T. (1973; 1989) The Structures of the Life- World, Vols. 1—2. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL.
- Schutz, A. (1962, 1964, 1966) Collected Papers, vols. 1-3. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague.
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