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Gadamer, H.-G. (1976) The Phenomenological Movement, pp. 13081 in H.-G. Gadamer,
Philosophical Hermeneutics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Heidegger, M. (1971) The Origin of the Work of Art, pp. 1588 in M. Heidegger, Poetry, Language,
Thought. New York: Harper and Row.
Husserl, E. (1991) On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Scott Lash is Professor of Sociology and Director for the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His most recent books are Critique of Information
(Sage, 2002) and Another Modernity, A Different Rationality (Blackwell, 1999).

Lifeworld
Austin Harrington
Keywords globalization, humanism, life, lifeworld, post-humanism, social theory

ifeworld entered the vocabulary of 20thcentury philosophy and social theory with
the publication of Edmund Husserls The
Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology in 1936, although Alfred Schtz
earlier adopted the term following correspondence
with Husserl in the early 1930s in his Der
sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt of 1932 (translated in English in 1967 as The Phenomenology of
the Social World) (see Srubar, 1988). By the lifeworld, Husserl meant the tissue of intersubjective
background understandings that first makes scientific objectifying knowledge meaningful. In
Husserls thesis, the lifeworld had become
occluded under the impact of the norms of naturalistic positive science set down by Galileo and
Descartes in the 17th century and enshrined in
Leibnizs project of mathesis universalis. This
threatened to fuel the general disaffection from all
rational critical inquiry unleashed by fascism in
Europe in the 1930s.
For Schtz the lifeworld was the takenfor-granted common-sense reality of the social
world as it is lived by ordinary individuals. In the
daily course of their lives individuals produce typifying constructs of their fellows actions which,
though frequently faulty or short-sighted, are the
only legitimate basis on which social scientists can
advance toward what Max Weber called genuinely
meaningfully adequate explanatory accounts of
social action and belief.
The concept of the lifeworld returned in later
20th-century social theory in Jrgen Habermass
uneasy fusion of phenomenological philosophy and

Parsonian functionalist theory in The Theory of

Communicative Action of 1981. The lifeworld
then became the world of everyday communicative interaction which gradually differentiates
over the course of processes of social evolution
into distinct rationally articulated spheres of
cultural validity. When the spheres of moralpractical and aesthetic-expressive communication
start to become narrowed down by the sphere of
science and technology under conditions of
advanced capitalist administration, the lifeworld is
threatened with colonization by the system.
Instrumental, purpose-rational imperatives and
expedients operative in the institutions of the
market, the state, the juridical system and other
expert apparatuses invade and disfigure that space
of social antagonism whose only sources of legitimate resolution lie in inclusive uncoerced dialogue
in the public sphere.
Today we are invited to raise numerous questions about the currency of this conception of the
lifeworld. In what sense is the concept a transcendental one, as Husserl held, or a quasi-transcendental one, as Habermas sometimes writes? Does
transcendental imply universal, i.e. invariance
across cultures? How is the life of the lifeworld to
be rethought after the biotechnological revolutions
of our present age? How is the world of the lifeworld to be rethought after globalization? Can
phenomenological philosophy address a virtualized
world of near-ubiquitous digitalized information
systems? Is the notion now a redundant old
European naivety after post-structuralism, postmodernism, post-colonialism, post-humanism? Or
could the notion in fact gesture in some way
toward the ultimate question to which all these
issues seem to return: the possibility of life and the
possibility of world?
European vitalist philosophers of the turn of

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the 19th century thought of life as the a priori
horizon of all conscious experience. Not Kants
concepts and categories of the Understanding but
life made all experience of the world and all worldhood possible. For Nietzsche, Dilthey, Simmel and
Bergson, the world was given to the ego only in the
flow of life and its temporal historical continuum.
But today we must ask: whose world, and whose
ego? What happens when the cognizer moves from
one (transcendental) lifeworld to many (quasi-
or semi-transcendental) lifeworlds from our
lifeworld to their lifeworld, and back? How can
a lifeworld be both empirical object and transcendental precondition of our ability to cognize it?
And how is the lifeworld given in a world mediated
by writing, television, the Internet and a dozen
other means of electronic simulation? What might
be the lifeworld, say, of the Amazonian tribesperson who lives from the fruits of the forest, uses a
mobile phone and accesses the Internet? Derridas
worries about Lvi-Strausss worries about lost
originarity in the Tristes Tropiques here seem more
pertinent than ever (see Derrida, 1967).
German anthropological philosophers of the
mid-20th century saw the essence of human existence as revolving around what they called worldopenness. For Helmut Plessner (1950) the
rational human animal was an ex-centric animal,
one capable of standing outside of its centred
embodied being and comprehending other worlds
from which it was physically absent. Logos implied
consciousness, memory, imagination, creativity,
linguistic inventiveness, freedom from simple
stimulus-and-response all of what Wilhelm von
Humboldt called energeia or what Chomsky used
to call generative grammar: the childs ability to
understand and to produce syntactic strings never
previously registered or uttered. Contemporary
thinking encourages us to be sceptical of such
essentialism after the revolutions in neuroscience
and information technology and the practical
penetration of a great many peoples everyday lifeworlds by artificial intelligence, intelligent medical
prostheses and the possibility of genetic cloning.
The interventions of philosophical anti-humanists
from Foucault and Deleuze to Luhmann, Haraway
and Latour are now familiar articles of this
onslaught on what Charles Taylor (1989) called
the expressivist model of the subject.
But still the issue nags, on a number of fronts,
political as well as epistemological. According to
Giorgio Agamben (1995), the Jews at Auschwitz
died before they reached the gas chambers because
what the camp stripped away from them before
they entered the chambers was the possibility of
having and being in a world. With the removal of
worldhood went the removal of life. Or more
precisely, with the removal of worldhood went the
collapse of life qua bios life lived in and with the

world into bare life qua zo. Though Agamben

grossly distorts the historical specificity of the
Holocaust by extending it metonymically to all
modernity tout court as do some other Holocaust books such as Zygmunt Baumans still the
question left unanswered in much of the antihumanist ridiculing of old European technophobia
is the one first raised by Husserl and Heidegger:
how is it that we can find the fact of our existence
and our being-in-the-world a question for ourselves
rather than spin around on a groove like automatons or like bare life awaiting extinction? If
globalization is about anything, it is about the
possibility of world, of having and being in a world
which is open to us and to which we can be open.
Entweltlichung, or world-privation, was the term
Hannah Arendt (1958) took from Heidegger to
describe the closure or flattening out of the apparently open vista of infinite possibilities that was
modern technical civilization. Today with Jean-Luc
Nancy (2002) we can ask a similar question: is
mondialization the extension of monde or the
diminution of monde? For all the difficulties of
regarding globalization as homogenizing and
destructive of texture and diversity, one possibility
cannot be brushed aside: perhaps the more we
extend the world beyond itself, the more we
collapse it within itself, and the more we raise the
power of life, the more we raise the life of power.

References
Agamben, G. (1995) Homo Sacer. Turin: Einaudi.
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition.
Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Derrida, J. (1967) De la Grammatologie. Paris:
ditions de Minuit.
Habermas, J. (1981) Die Theorie des
kommunikativen Handelns: Band 2, Zur
Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft.
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Husserl, E. (1991[1936]) Die Krisis der
europischen Wissenschaften und die
transzendentale Phnomenologie. Dordrecht:
Kluwer.
Nancy, J.-L. (2002) La cration du monde, ou, La
mondialisation. Paris: Galile.
Plessner, H. (1950) Lachen und Weinen: eine
Untersuchung nach den Grenzen menschlichen
Verhaltens. Munich: Lehnen.
Schtz, A. (1932) Der sinnhafte Aufbau der
sozialen Welt: eine Einleitung in die
verstehende Soziologie. Vienna: Springer.
Srubar, I. (1988) Kosmion: die Genese der
pragmatischen Lebenswelttheorie von Alfred
Schtz und ihr anthropologischer Hintergrund.
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

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Austin Harrington is Research Fellow at the Max
Weber Centre for Advanced Study at the
University of Erfurt, Germany, and Reader in
Sociology at the University of Leeds, UK. His
recent publications include Art and Social Theory:
Sociological Arguments in Aesthetics (Polity Press,

2004), Modern Social Theory: An Introduction

(Oxford University Press, 2005; editor) and
Concepts of Europe in Classical Sociology: German
Social Thinkers and the Fate of the West,
19141945 (forthcoming).

Leben
Josef Bleicher
Keywords Bergson, Dilthey, form, Geist, life,
metaphysics, Nietzsche, Simmel

eben (Life), together with Geist (Spirit),

represent the core defining concepts in
German philosophy in the 200 years of its
most flourishing period, marked at either end by
the names of Kant and Heidegger. These concepts
together define a shared ground that also helps to
characterize German philosophy: concern with
activity, development, history, tension and resolution, and a transcendental mode of inquiry. One of
the difficulties of tackling Leben is that Life runs
counter to form, yet somehow has to be captured
or described through form, which means there will
necessarily be a lack of clarity and precision. Georg
Simmel (18581918), one of the foremost exponents of the Philosophie des Lebens, saw it as the
third stage of western philosophy. In the first place
there was Greek philosophy, resting on the
concept of Substance: a persisting substratum as
the core of all being and cognition. Secondly, there
was modern philosophy with its stress on
movement and mechanical form, which aimed to
uncover the laws that render it calculable and thus
comprehensible. More recently, the third stage
suggests a redirection in the form of a Verlebendigung, an enlivening of the conception of the world
and our knowledge of it. Leben is the metaphysical
principle that issues forth subject and object, and
provides their ontological and epistemological
common ground (Simmel, 1912).
At its core, Leben serves as the antithesis to
static conceptions and a one-sided focus on
consciousness or reflexivity. Formal constructs
themselves issue from Leben, and are its
expressions. Leben throws up intellectual activity,
and no amount of internal, self-oriented ruminations will gain any insight into the true grounding
of this enterprise. The contrast between the calculative reductionism found in the mechanistic

universe of Newton and Kant is developed by

Simmel in his essay on Kant and Goethe. The
pantheistic reverence of Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe (17491832) for the ceaseless creativity
of nature provides the grounds for his refusal to
write a conventionally philosophical account of
Leben. But during his life-time, the Verlebendigung
of philosophy started to take root. Arthur
Schopenhauer (17881860), an ardent admirer of
Goethe, is considered by Simmel the first Philosopher of Leben. He reflected on Leben as such,
rather than enquiring about the meaning or value
of an aspect of Life. Leben as such is characterized
by a will to Life which engenders all manifestations of the human and natural world. Yet, in its
urge to come into realization, it causes pain and
suffering, false hopes and disillusionment as it
stimulates desire and striving. The higher
developed the species, and within humanity as the
apex of creation the individual, the more sensitized, hence exposed to suffering, they will be.
While art, as self-sufficient insight into Life, and
in particular music, can provide genuine but brief
respite, the only lasting solution lies in renunciation and the denial of the will and thus of Life.
Schopenhauer is indebted to Indian philosophy in
his account of Leben as futile illusion and as suffering, until the taming of the will through selfdiscipline, withdrawal from the world, and its
meditative contemplation become effective.
Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900) responds to
the problematic of Leben in a diametrically
opposite way. Rather than renouncing Lifes
quests, our task is to give full expression to them.
As the stream of Life propels us forward, its
energy should be drawn on also to move upwards,
to transcend transgressively all conventionalized
normalcy with its Life-inhibiting norms and
precepts. This is the progression which Nietzsche
famously encapsulated in the notion of the bermensch. For Nietzsche, all intellectual and
aesthetic content and values are merely realizations of the process of Leben, with the will to

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