Essay I, lifeworld

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.