Notion of life-world in husserl’s crisis: an Overview

Abstract

Phenomenology, which started as a movement is mostly identified with the name of Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl. Many famous thinkers were influenced by Husserl’s thoughts. These thinkers are Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur and others. Husserl’s books, Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy and Cartesian Meditations, are both subtitled ‘An introduction to phenomenology’. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology is one of the most complicated works of Husserl. The book Crisis also serves as an introduction to phenomenology. However, Husserl’s final significant book, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology is unquestionably a different introduction to his phenomenology. One of the fundamental notions in Husserl’s phenomenology is known as the concept of ‘Lebenswelt’, which means ‘life-world’. In his book Crisis, Husserl elaborates on the concept of the life-world. The main goal of this paper is to comprehend the Husserlian interpretation of the notion of the life-world and its connectedness with the transcendental phenomenological project. This paper affords particular focus to the life-world, the epochē of objective science and transcendental reduction. This paper also offers a systematic interpretation of the relationship between the epochē of objective science and transcendental reduction. Husserl’s phenomenology’s major themes include - the structure of intentionality, natural world thesis, method of reduction, transcendental subjectivity, empathy, embodiment, time-consciousness, the notion of historicity, and intersubjectivity. In general, one does not provide a comprehensive interpretation of the idea of the life-world and its relationship with the transcendental project. This is why the main question we would like to answer in this paper is: Is life-world phenomenology compatible with transcendental phenomenology?