Lifeworld
Thirty years ago I made a journey with my wife across the USA in the Greyhound.
It was our first visit there, but of
course life in the USA was familiar to us from literature, films and TV news
and series, or so we thought. We stayed a few days in San Francisco and Los
Angeles (Hollywood) before starting our way back to New York. We had a couple
nights’ stop in Chicago including a tour around the city centre in a bus. The
guide showed the tourists the house in which Al Capone had his headquarters. We
were amused. Then we walked around to see famous places, the Sears Tower among
the first ones, without any problem. Later in the afternoon we ventured a few
blocks south of the city centre. A group of young men played basketball and
someone may have waved at us. Everything seemed peaceful, there was not much traffic
either. Then we, the innocents abroad, passed a police car and an officer leaning
on it, talking to a group of young coloured people without any argument. But in
the next corner a car turned just in front of us blocking our way. A plain
clothes police officer opened the side window and urged us to get into the car
immediately. They told us how dangerous it was for a tourist to be in the
neighbourhood. A couple of years ago a Canadian man was killed there, probably as
a result of a robbery. Well, we were somewhat shocked, and our interpretation
of the situation changed completely. Of course we had seen in the TV series
that the use of drugs and robberies made by the users are rather common in the
US, but after having walked around San Francisco and Hollywood without any
problem, our anticipations had changed. Obviously the threat of violence is
very local and our reading of the situations was not sensitive enough. We
thought that we were moving in a familiar culture, but this wasn’t the case. The
experience changed our way of seeing things, our lifeworld. The lifeworld is the totality of things we encounter and
understand as members of a human community.
In this essay I will analyse a starting point of our cognisance of the
world, our lifeworld. The term lifeworld comes from the German philosopher
Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, who coined the term in his book
The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (original
1936). “[Lifeworld] is pregiven to us quite naturally, as persons within the
horizon of our fellow men, ie., in every actual connection with others, as “the
world” common to us all” (p 122 in the English edition of 1970).
My purpose is not dive into philosophical discourse clothed in its
specialized jargon. However, for those interested it is proper to make a few comments
about the background. Perhaps the most crucial theme of philosophy is the question
of the grounds on which our knowledge is ultimately based. In the 1920’s and
1930’s advocates of logical empiricism saw the basis of knowledge in not yet
interpreted observations, sense data, while phenomenologists understood that
there are no uninterpreted observations. We always see things as something.
Logical empiricism was largely inspired by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The
followers of empiricists (the analytical school) moulded their views and
admitted that also observations are “theory-laden”. The first among them were
Hanson, Popper, and Toulmin; and again many of them were inspired by
Wittgenstein, now by his ideas in Philosophical Investigations and other later
work. Among Wittgenstein’s writings ‘On Certainty’ has a special status with
respect to the foundation of knowledge. “The reasonable man does not have
certain doubts.” Wittgenstein and Hanson used the expression ‘seeing as’.
Phenomenologists had recognized this intentionality of perceiving the world
around us decades before. Wittgenstein focused on the uses of language, while
Husserl’s starting-point was the Descartesian individual mind. One of the milestones
in phenomenology, Heidegger’s Being and Time (1928), with its characteristic
use of language, gives an extraordinary view into the ontology from the human
existential perspective. Heidegger’s lifeworld (he did not use the word) was an
archaic world of craftsmanship.
A lifeworld is the shared world view of the human society, which does
not mean that all people in the world share the same lifeworld in its totality. We cannot and need not describe a lifeworld
by compiling a list of things. It is in our way of seeing things, and behaving
in a way which other people understand. Because it is given to all of us,
everyone can be an expert in accounting for what the lifeworld means, but it
requires the ability to turn attention to seeing rather than solely to what we
see. This is a sort of opposite of the idea of ‘not looking at the finger but
what the finger is pointing to’. This means that we should look at our
pre-understanding of what there is, ie., ontology. So, in order to give a
description of happens in a restaurant, for example, I do not have to go to one
to make observations. I wouldn’t understand the staff’s or customers’ actions,
if I were not familiar with the situation from my own experience. Should I
describe it to a person from an alien culture, we must of course share some
common concepts.
In fact, no one can properly acquire a lifeworld by reading any
description. We must grow into it in order to feel at home in our lifeworld. You
cannot behave according to the norms of a society properly just by following
written instructions. You must learn to read signs of different situations and
react to them accordingly. The present situation in which societies try to
merge masses of immigrants into the culture in question shows the difficulty of
the task. Another example are persons with certain autistic traits of personality.
They often interpret what other people say too literally or follow given rules
too strictly. They lack so called tacit knowledge of human conduct. Of course,
this kind of separation from the mainstream can be deliberate, as with various
bohemian communities. But then they have their own subculture. Even the most
eccentric views find a home in groups of social media.
A shared lifeworld is a prerequisite for our understanding of fiction,
as well. This also reveals the fact that a description of the lifeworld does not
mean an explicit account of what is really going on in the world. We can read
or watch fiction and understand it as a possible series of events through
interpretation frameworks that we have acquired by growing to be members of human
society.
In everyday life our pre-understanding may also show itself faulty, when
we get a better view or a new piece of information. In a dim forest what we
have at first seen as an elk may turn out to be a bush. Our interpretation is
changed. Nor can our ontology be complete so that we have a precise category
for everything we come across. The concepts in our command depend on our
training. An ornithologist can identify different species which for a layman
are just big birds or small birds. Our modern lifeworld has a number of layers,
and it has been divided into many specialized branches according to
occupational expertise and various hobbies. People who have an interest in
sailing, photography or any other endeavour demanding training have their own
jargon. The shared lifeworld, common to all people of the same community, is
not getting narrower, but the diversity of forms of life is expanding and
covering this common core. And now we more often than a hundred years ago meet different
cultural phenomena that we may be at risk to misinterpret.
We have a difficulty to distinguish true stories from untrue one,
moreover so, as many of those tales are purposeful lies. We may experience the
situation as threatening. We do not live any longer in the archaic village or
town in which life went on the same safe tracks. When people do not understand
their fellow citizens (and perhaps do not recognize them as such), they may resort
to hate speech and even violent behaviour towards others. There are clear
indications of emotional reactions which rise from stringent interpretations of
fundamental ideologies.
Our orientation towards the world is based on meanings in two ways: Our
interpretation of things is based on the conceptual structures of our world
view, and things are meaningful to us. We are concerned about our environment and
fellow people (at least most of us are, some are only concerned of their bank
account or where to get booze).
The achievements of science have affected our world view for centuries.
Although we use the expression “the sun rises”, hardly any educated person, not
even a child, has any doubt about the fact that “the movement” of the sun is
due to the rotation of the earth. Language still retains those primeval
notions. However, scientific approach to the world also causes a lot of bewilderment
for our lifeworld, because doubt is an essential starting point of all research,
but a disturbing element in the lifeworld. We can endure uncertainty of our
perceptions temporarily, but the core of the lifeworld consists of those facts which
we are sure of. In the modern world we have to learn to bear uncertainty more
than people did in those days when their world view was based on unconditional
beliefs. One of the challenges of
education is to teach everybody the basic principles of science, and research
communities ought to come to a better understanding about how scientific
argumentation must start with some common elements of knowledge, the shared
lifeworld. This was one of Husserl’s concerns.
In a similar manner our behaviour and moral judgment is based on
socially established norms and principles. They also develop when we get a better
understanding of how our acts affect other people and nature. In this respect
humankind is far behind the progress of science, at least, judging by the
abundance of prevailing unfairness and atrocities. It seems that the role of
the lifeworld as the basis of ethics has barely been recognized.
Various forms of art, sport and entertainment fill a large part of our
daily activities. As I consider entertainment and sports less problematic parts
of the lifeworld than arts, I will not discuss them in detail, but focus on how
our understanding of art is related to the lifeworld later. They all enrich our
life, but in my opinion among those three phenomena it is art that challenges
our present lifeworld, our preunderstanding of what we see, hear, read and
watch. That challenge seems to be a part of the definition of art, if we need
such a definition.
One challenge of modern globalized world is the vast amount of
documentary and fictive texts and pictures in media and social media. Encyclopaedic
endeavours try to put together essential parts of present knowledge, journals
and newspapers seek to popularize achievement of science, and chatting in
social media gives everybody the opportunity to say his or her view be it
grounded on something or not. Texts in various media define more and more our
lifeworld. Our own experience is only a small factor in the structuration of the
lifeworld. In fact, as was pointed out above, our lifeworld delineates what we
experience. So all kind of observations can strengthen religious beliefs, even
and especially those that we do not grasp, because an essential aspect of some
religions is that they explain the unexplainable through secret divine powers. Most of people’s prejudices rise from ideas of the surrounding community.
Now many people are afraid of immigrants, although they have not met any or
those they have met have not caused them any harm. The origin of the prejudices
is mainly in the hate speech in media and in the primitive fear of the
dissimilarity, but, of course, to some extent in individual violent incidents
that always gain a lot of publicity.
We have to tolerate different opinions, but we have also the right to
ask for grounds for them. Not all opinions are equal, truthfulness still has
bearing on the value of views. It is not an easy task to safeguard any kind of
knowledge and values common to all people in the world. A modest but at the
same time rather ambitious goal of these essays is to show that without the
shared lifeworld it is not possible to maintain an orderly and safe society. My
view is that we must rely on reason, because it is the only reasonable thing to
do, at least regarding knowledge and moral judgement. There is no eleventh
commandment saying that the use of reason is forbidden, and even if there were
such a statement in the Bible, well, I would ignore it.
Our lifeworld is in perpetual change. In the following essays, I will
discuss how scientific research, debate on moral values, new pieces of art and
technological development mould the lifeworld while at the same time they are always
grounded on the lifeworld. One essay is dedicated to the analysis of ideologies
that confine the interplay of these cultural phenomena with the lifeworld. A
future perspective is addressed through the idea of communicative rationality.
