The Phenomenological Critique of Mathematisation and the Question of Responsibility by Ľubica Učník Ivan Chvatík & Anita Williams

Author:Ľubica Učník, Ivan Chvatík & Anita Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

In 1992, other important research manuscripts broadly associated with the Crisis – including the text of Husserl ’s Prague lectures of November 1935 – were published in German as Husserliana Volume XXIX with many new texts on Husserl ’s concept of life-world (Husserl 1992). A further large volume of writings on the ‘life-world ’ ( Lebenswelt ), yielding a huge amount of new information, appeared as Husserliana Volume XXXIX in 2008 (Husserl 2008). These texts add greatly to our understanding of the life-world as Husserl came to understand it, but do not resolve the problems associated with it.

Of course, Husserl did not invent the term ‘life-world ’ ( Lebenswelt ), and in this regard Hans-Georg Gadamer is simply wrong to claim that he did. The German term ‘ Lebenswelt ’ was already in use well before him. Indeed, the term has a pre-history in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century in, for instance, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Deutsche Wörterbuch of 1885 (see Husserl 1992: xlvi), where a reference is found to the use of the term by Ehrenberg in 1847. Somewhat later, in the early twentieth century, the poet Hugo von Hoffmansthal (around 1907/1908) and the life-philosophers Georg Simmel (in a work from 1913) and Rudolf Eucken also employed the word ‘ Lebenswelt ’ in their writings. Another very similar word, ‘Lebewelt’ (world of living things), is to be found among geologists and palaeontologists (e.g., Karl Diener, 1862–1928) to refer to the world of flora and fauna (the living world), and, indeed, Husserl himself uses both ‘Lebewelt’ and ‘ Lebenswelt ’ (Orth 2000). Thus, for example, Husserl himself already employs the word ‘living world’, or what one might call the ‘organosphere’ (Lebewelt), in Ideas I (Husserl 1983: 115 – it appears in all three editions published during his life). To complicate matters, the late editor of the Husserliana edition, Karl Schuhmann, replaced this term Lebewelt, which he assumed was a misprint, with the word ‘Lebewesen’, based on a similar context in which that latter word appears in Crisis (Husserl 1970: §69, 239 [242]); which is, to my mind, an odd kind of reasoning. Why should an occurrence of a word in a later text be used to correct the occurrence of another word in an earlier text? It is actually more probable that the term is not a typographical error and that Husserl himself wanted to talk about the ‘Lebewelt’.

It is not clear whether Husserl knew of the occurrence of the term ‘ Lebenswelt ’ as used by Georg Simmel and others. Presumably it was a term that was simply gaining currency at that time; it appears for instance in Martin Heidegger ’s early lecture courses from his Freiburg period (1919). As previously mentioned, the proximate source for Husserl ’s conception of life-world is actually Richard Avenarius’s conception of the ‘natural world ’, to which Husserl adverts in many of his writings, including the Basic Problems of Phenomenology lecture course of 1910/1911 (Husserl 2006: esp. §§8–10, 12–28 [122–138] and Appendix III, 107–111 [196–199]).

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