Alltagswelt

Alltagswelt, literally the “everyday world,” is a term used in philosophy and sociology to denote the world as experienced in daily life. It refers to the taken-for-granted background of meanings, practices, and social norms that guide ordinary perception, interpretation, and action.

In phenomenology the Alltagswelt is closely linked to the concept of Lebenswelt or lifeworld, the pre-scientific horizon that underpins all inquiry. The Alltagswelt encompasses routines, practical knowledge (know-how), common-sense interpretations, and the shared background against which people experience and make sense of their surroundings. It is the world of ordinary experiences before theory or science reorganizes them.

Key figures include Edmund Husserl, who emphasized the lifeworld as the ground of the sciences, and Alfred Schutz, who analyzed how the social world is produced and made intelligible within everyday life through typifications, stocks of knowledge, and intersubjective understanding. The term is widely used to describe how people navigate work, family, and other everyday contexts without explicit theoretical reflection.

Characteristics of the Alltagswelt include taken-for-grantedness, intersubjectivity, routine repetition, and a practical orientation. It is culturally specific and historically situated, continually shaped by language, institutions, and social practices. Because it forms the background for action and interpretation, the Alltagswelt is central to analyses of everyday life, social interaction, and the ways meaning is produced outside formal theories and institutions.

In contemporary scholarship the concept remains a useful lens for examining how people balance personal experience with social expectations, how modernity alters daily life, and how ordinary reasoning sustains social stability.