lifeworldLebenswelt

Lifeworld, or Lebenswelt in German, is a central term in phenomenology describing the pre-theoretical, taken-for-granted world of everyday lived experience that serves as the background for all knowledge, perception, and action. For Edmund Husserl, the lifeworld is the immediate world of sense experience and practical coping from which scientific theories emerge and to which they must ultimately be answerable. It includes perception, language, practical skills, social norms, and cultural meanings that structure how things appear to us.

In Husserl's later work the lifeworld becomes the ground of the sciences and a source of the presuppositions that make inquiry intelligible. It is not a private mental life but an intersubjective field constituted by shared practices, rituals, and forms of life.

In sociology and social philosophy, Schutz and Luckmann extended the idea to describe the social world as a lifeworld: a common stock of knowledge and a set of typifications that render actions and communications meaningful in everyday life.

Heidegger's related notion of being-in-the-world (Dasein) shifts focus to existence structured by practical involvement with the world, but it remains informed by Husserlian phenomenology. The concept has influenced contemporary phenomenology, hermeneutics, anthropology, and cognitive science, where researchers study how cultural, linguistic, and historical contexts shape perception, interpretation, and institutions and how scientific rationality itself is embedded in ordinary life.

Critics argue that the notion can be imprecise or idealized; nonetheless, the lifeworld remains a foundational concept for analyzing the preconditions of experience and knowledge.