The Concept of Lebenswelt in European Culture

Abstract

Husserl’s concept of Lebenswelt has had such a widespread and profound effect on European culture that it has become the background and the inevitable, though frequently concealed, reference point of every form of discourse, not merely philosophical. It spurred the intellectual horizon towards a second decisive breakthrough in thought with respect to its own production, considered in its entirety. The first decisive change had received an impulse from the Logical Investigations, whose publication significantly coincided with the dawn of the new century. Michel Foucault noted the coincidence with the publication of Sigmund Freud’s Traumdeutung: “Double effort de l’homme pour ressaisir ses signification et se ressaisir lui-meme dans sa signification”.¹ The opening of a new approach is also highlighted in another field of thought. K. O. Apel considered phenomenology as the driving force which had renewed the entire intellectual sphere from its very foundations, from the Prima philosophia to specific sciences.²