Abstract

The importance of Edmund Husserl's concept of the lifeworld, especially as it appears in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, is widely acknowledged. Yet there is also wide agreement among Husserl scholars that his treatment of the lifeworld is marred by deep faults. When you find and tap these faults Husserl's presentation of the lifeworld falls to pieces, thereby revealing distinct, incommensurable concepts. The main thrust of my dissertation is to challenge this commonly held opinion. Limiting my analysis to the Crisis alone, I argue that Husserl's treatment of the lifeworld is consistent and coherent. In order to make this argument, as well as to understand it, it is imperative that one pay special attention to the contexts in which Husserl discusses the theme of the lifeworld. The failure to do this accounts for much of the confusion about the lifeworld found in the secondary literature. Therefore I try to bring order and clarity to the theme by offering a careful exposition of the contexts of Husserl's discussions of the lifeworld. ;To make sense of Husserl's treatment of the lifeworld in the Crisis it is imperative to understand the "problem of the lifeworld" in Part III A as the apex of the argument for the necessity of a transcendental-phenomenology reorientation of philosophy. The lifeworld is meant to appear riddled with paradoxes at this stage. Only the properly executed transcendental epoche and reduction makes possible a science of the lifeworld that resolves these paradoxes. The lifeworld is a transcendental phenomenon, i.e., the system of object-poles of intentionality, which itself is nothing other than transcendental subjectivity. The lifeworld is the pregiven-given, passive-active, particular-universal, familiar-unfamiliar, known-unknown, actual-potential, determinate-indeterminate, individual-communal, spatiotemporal-spiritual, lifeless-living, intuitive-unintuitive, one-many, unchanging-changing intersubjective-relative totality of things in their world-horizon