On Some Different Usages of “Lifeworld” and their Schemes to Study Society

Abstract

A concept, “lifeworld”, has been introduced and often used in the sphere of social sciences. Now we should ask what new scheme to study society has been, or can be, made up by using that concept. To answer this question, we must examine the meanings of that concept first. For there have been some different versions in using “lifeworld”, which have not been distinguished so closely and consciously. We point out the differences among three influential authors' usages. Alfred Schutz used it as the subjective constructions in everyday commonsense world. The inter-subjective communication process, which reproduces the everyday world, is the meaning of “lifeworld” to Jurgen Habermas. And Edmund Husserl exposed the world of self-evidence located under the construction or communication world and supporting them fundamentally. This is his “lifeworld”. Secondly we examine the ranges of schemes extending from “lifeworld” toward “society”. Schutz discribed the scenes in which “society” enters “lifeworld”, that is everyday process. Habermas theorized the conflicts between social system and “lifeworld”. These can be said to be novel results of their “lifeworld” schemes. However, their schemes, pursuing to locate “lifeworld” into “society”, cannot be extended fully enough, compared with Husserl's scheme to grasp “society” as a formation out of the fundamental strata of “lifeworld”. It can be said that this scheme aims at the original phase of “society”. Although this direction of extending scheme is quite hard one, we should try to make it a drastically new strategy to re-grasp “society” from the viewpoint of “lifeworld”.