The Lifeworld
We were asked to read short sections of The Crisis of European Sciences.
The book took a while to get published; it was part of his famous Vienna lectures, given after he lost his license to teach due to his Jewish background. This specific lecture was given in 1935 in Vienna, in 1936 in Prague (on the invitation of Jan Patočka). At this time, his work already couldn’t be published in Germany for the same reason he lost his license, hence, only parts of the work were published in 1936 in Belgrade. Only in 1954 was this published in its entirety, of which we have an English translation.
It is not to say that there is no physical body or space or time. Rather, the Lifeworld challenges the notion that physical things are all that exists; it even argues that things that are mind-independent are actually secondary, as we do not see these things themselves.
It’s part of the view that there is a primacy to the way in which the world is lived, and it is therefrom that sciences ultimately derive their understanding.
The mistake is not engaging in scientific practice - it’s also a form of truth-finding - the error is rather the reductionist move that all there is, without questioning it, is the physical, objective world.
“One is not woman, but is always becoming woman” ← it is true of all consciousness(es, human or not), and consciousness is necessarily historical.
Crisis developed as part of transcendental phenomenology; we have to leave the natural attitude to discover the Lifeworld in the first place. ← Epoche.
The world understood not as the totality of objects, but as the largest nexus of meaning.
Worlds in the plural
Cultures have their own Lifeworlds. These Lifeworlds are also moments of a shared world. Husserl thinks this is part of our experience.
- Familiarity and Ease: where one knows how to live, what is true and valuable, etc.
- Naivety: the unquestioned (“ready-to-hand”), normal, absolute
- Social and cultural: shared world built upon common traditions, language, collective values, and a shared history belonging to a family, community, etc.
- Correlated with the Alienworld: understood in relation to its counterpart, the alienworld as what is foreign, unfamiliar, or outside the established norms of home.
There’s always a kind of duality at play.
It doesn’t make sense to think of “perspectives” if you’re not talking about perspectives on something.
Homeworld and Alienworld are inextricable and inseparable. A Homeworld involves a kind of familiarity, is what comes most naturally, where you feel comfortable and ‘just do what is done.’
As part of this Homeworld (this is highly problematic, in the sense that we should be aware of the kinds of problematics inherent to it, rather than that we should reject the concept entirely); this enables us to talk about the normal, as opposed to the alien and abnormal. This, of course, opens the ethical and political can of worms about distinctions between what is normal and abnormal.
We can have a descriptive notion of normal, but that often slides into a prescriptive notion of normal. ← Having burnt your finger, and having a blister; when you then touch things, that is abnormal. It’s not a ‘familiar’ way of touching things. That is a normalcy that is not in itself problematic.
That kind of distinction is fine and irremovable.
But of course xenophobia is also a thing; sometimes we mistake the normal for the true or the optimal.
Knowing the alienworld by projection.
Homeworld/Alienworld ← Internal Dynamic Differentiations
Internal to the Lifeworld, dynamic in their mutual dependence, and dependence on the context, history, scope of attention… We cannot simply say which kinds of objects or region of the world is ‘home’ and what is outside of it. Always an internal articulation, where both inside and outside are created by certain experiences and assertions.
we can have irreducible differences in our experiences while still sharing the same lifeworld (Rodemeyer, 90)
Homeworld does not arise as a sense on its own, in other words; rather, we recognize our own styles and types as particular to our own culture when we experience other cultures whose styles are distinct from our own. Only then, through the recognition of variances in styles and types, can we see our homeworld as “home”. (Rodemeyer, 95)
← The Umwelt is a tacit, pre-reflective near-world in this context; it’s what immediately surrounds me (Um-welt, surrounding-world).
Naively, we’re just ‘in a world’ - this is just my surrounding world, my neighbors, family, coworkers, street that I usually walk along, tree in front of my window, my environment, … -I don’t think of these things as a ‘home’, it doesn’t have the sense of a Homeworld unless this dynamic is in play.
There isn’t just a culture shock, but also a reverse culture shock; when it’s weird when you return home. Something within you has changed when you were gone. And this homeworld has changed with it.
The Homeworld is infiltrated, has something alien mixed into it; the borders of the Homeworld are porous in a sense.
Homeworld and Alienworld are inextricably linked, and we are (as individuals) never just on one side of that. Not everybody who leaves home does so voluntarily.
Non-foundationalist account:
‘historical a priori’ of Husserl/Foucault, ‘groundless ground’ of Heidegger.
Jacques Derrida (terrorist)
He desconstructs the non-foundationalist idea that distinctions create insides and outside. There is no inside and outside, and these boundaries are never fixed, pure, or self-contained.
The ethical idea of infinite hospitality, an unconditional welcome to the stranger without asking for a name, nationality, or papers depends on a host who possesses a home (with walls, property lines, and sovereign laws). The very act of drawing a border to define “home” creates a condition of exclusion, turning the border into a mechanism of filtering, power, and biopolitics.
Worlding in the Lifeworld
through the places, objects, and people with which/whom we relate, so that where we are and the things and people surrounding us are all essential to our sense of home (Rodemeyer, 99)
Belonging, not-belonging, being homeless, being in-between worlds, ‘infiltration’ of the ‘porous’ home (Heidegger: ‘uncanny’ - un-heimlich, un-homely)
When that leafblower outside.
Attempts to understand life in refugee camps
Home becomes at once a fractured, yet lived, experience: It is invested with the alien, and yet I look for (and hopefully find) moments or aspects that preserve something of home. In this way, the balance of home and alien is both troubled and maintained. Home becomes undermined, but as I regroup my sense of home, I regain some sense of stability. (Rodemeyer, 100)