Lebenswelt [Lifeworld]

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Roy Elveton (Carleton College)
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“Lifeworld”, a concept originating in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), is best understood as a way of emphasizing the centrality of perception for human experience. This experience is multi-dimensional and includes the experience of individual things and their contextual/perceptual fields, the embodied nature of perceiving consciousness, and the intersubjective nature of the world as it is perceived, especially our knowledge of other subjects, their actions and shared cultural structures. The most encompassing correlate for this richly textured experience is the

world-horizon

, manifested in the harmoniously continuing experience of the world. The world-horizon is open-ended and temporal: the world-as-perceived is inexhaustible and unpredictable, individual patterns of…

346 words

Citation: Elveton, Roy. "Lebenswelt [Lifeworld]". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 April 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1539, accessed 19 March 2024.]

1539 Lebenswelt [Lifeworld] 2 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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