Lifeworld
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lifeworld (German: Lebenswelt) is a concept used in philosophy and in some social sciences, particularly sociology. It means the world "as lived" (German: erlebt) prior to reflective re-presentation or theoretical analysis.
Edmund Husserl introduced the concept of the lifeworld in his Crisis of European Sciences (1936). Influences on Husserl's formulation of the lifeworld include Wilhelm Dilthey's "life-nexus" (German: Lebenszusammenhang) and Martin Heidegger's Being-in-the-world (German: In-der-Welt-Sein). The concept was further developed by students of Husserl such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jan Patočka, and Alfred Schütz.
Jürgen Habermas has further developed the concept 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. 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.
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).
The lifeworld is related to further concepts such as Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus and to the sociological notion of everyday life.
