World, Praxis, and Reason

Abstract

One of the the later Husserl’s most fruitful themes is the life-world (Lebenswelt) understood as the prepredicative and prejudicative substratum on which the whole process of idealization is made possible.1 By submitting the empirical sciences and their objective world to phenomenological epoche there appears before us a previous field to which these sciences and their world should be related.2 By means of this epoche, the life-world is drawn out of its anonymity and found to be the only real world — the lived world, experienced in and able to be experienced by perception — that had been concealed by the procedure of the sciences even though they had to presuppose it if they sought to have any validity. The life-world is then discovered as the living and worldly horizon (Welthorizon) of all possible experience3 — being (because of this) something more than the simple sum of the diverse experiences that must have it as a frame. As this horizon, this lived world precedes all reflection and must be understood as that which gives meaning to all other possible experiential horizons that take place within it.