The real world and the lifeworld, & Husserl’s phenomenology

“All ideas are socially constructed. This is an insight that’s probably arisen many times, but I first encountered it in Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Husserl was an early twentieth-century philosopher who thought that we could make progress against skepticism by delving into how our consciousness actually experiences the world (a process he called “phenomenology”). In his final book, he applied this process to the concept of science. And he made a basic point: Science doesn’t create the real world. Science doesn’t underpin the real world. Science is something that human beings have derived from the real world. Science is something you learn from books, or something engineers use to make predictions about how substances will act or react. Husserl made a distinction between the scientific idea of the “real world” and the world we actually experience, which he called the “lifeworld” or the “pregiven world.” “The real world” is an abstract plane you hold in your head to allow for the fact that you and I and the city of Istanbul all exist at the same time. And if there’s an earthquake in Istanbul, you know that a bunch of buildings have fallen down in the real world and that this disaster has affected a group of real people who aren’t essentially different from you and me. But in your lifeworld, the earthquake exists as a newspaper story. It exists as tweets and photographs. Everything you know about the real world is mediated through the lifeworld. People in the humanities tend to love this concept, because the lifeworld is, essentially, the domain of the humanities. Human beings in their aggregate—that’s part of the social sciences. But human beings as individuals and how we individually experience the world—that’s the humanities.” — What's So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) by Naomi Kanakia