Lifeworld

The lifeworld, or the world of everyday life and commonsense realities, is a concept that comes from the work of phenomenologist Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), and has been developed for sociology by the phenomenological sociologist Alfred Schütz (1899–1959). Schütz was concerned with the domain (the world of everyday life, the commonsense world) in which individuals grapple with the consciousness of others while living in their own stream of consciousness. The lifeworld to Schütz represented an intersubjective terrain in which people both created their social realities and were simultaneously constrained by those social and cultural structures already in place. It was in existence long before our birth, but we do have the power to act back upon it. Furthermore, each of us has our own individual lifeworld, although many of the same elements are common to all actors.

In this domain, people operate with what he calls the “natural attitude.” That is, they take the world around them for granted. They do not doubt its reality or existence until such time as a problematic situation arises. It is only then that they cease to rely on “recipes” for handling routine situations and must develop creative ways of handling the problems they encounter.

There are six basic characteristics of the lifeworld. First, it involves what Schütz labeled as “wide-awakeness” (1973:213), or the state of consciousness during which actors devote all of their resources and attention to living life. Second, the actors accept without question the existence of the lifeworld. Third, and most important to Schütz's definition of what characterizes the lifeworld, actors do work. Work here is considered any nonphenomenological action taken by the actor with the intent of causing something to happen by virtue of that action. Fourth, the self understood through the work one does comes to be experienced as the total self. Fifth, the lifeworld involves [Page 450]social actions and interactions that occur in the shared world of communication and social action. Sixth, the timelines of actors intersect with the overarching timeline of society.

Another important social theorist concerned with the concept of the lifeworld is Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929). Although Habermas is focally concerned with free and open communication and communicative action more generally, he has also contributed greatly to the concept of the lifeworld. Habermas contrasts the lifeworld, seen as the world from the perspective of the subject acting within it, with the system, or the world from the perspective of an uninvolved observer. Although two different concepts, Habermas does contend that there is only one society, and that the system and the lifeworld are simply different ways of looking at that singular society.

The lifeworld is where speaker and hearer meet (Habermas is especially interested in communication) and where it is possible for them to reach agreement or under-standing. There is a wide range of unspoken presuppositions and mutual understandings that must exist and be mutually understood for such communication to take place.

A major concern for Habermas is what he termed “the colonization of the life-world” (1987). This implies that the system and its (formally) rationalized imperatives are increasingly coming to dominate and do violence to the lifeworld. This “violence” against the lifeworld by the system is most clearly evident in the ways in which communication is restricted and increasingly less directed toward a goal of consensus. In turn, this violence also produces a series of “pathologies” and crises within the lifeworld that cause serious social problems.

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