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Gadamer, H.-G. (1976) The Phenomenological Movement, pp. 13081 in H.-G. Gadamer,Philosophical Hermeneutics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Heidegger, M. (1971) The Origin of the Work of Art, pp. 1588 in M. Heidegger, Poetry, Language,Thought. New York: Harper and Row.

Husserl, E. (1991) On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Scott Lash is Professor of Sociology and Director for the Centre for Cultural Studies at Gold-smiths College, University of London. His most recent books are Critique of Information(Sage, 2002) and Another Modernity, A Different Rationality (Blackwell, 1999).

LifeworldAustin Harrington

Lifeworld entered the vocabulary of 20th-century philosophy and social theory withthe publication of Edmund Husserls TheCrisis of the European Sciences and Transcenden-tal Phenomenology in 1936, although Alfred Schtzearlier adopted the term following correspondencewith Husserl in the early 1930s in his Dersinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt of 1932 (trans-lated in English in 1967 as The Phenomenology ofthe Social World) (see Srubar, 1988). By the life-world, Husserl meant the tissue of intersubjectivebackground understandings that first makes scien-tific objectifying knowledge meaningful. InHusserls thesis, the lifeworld had becomeoccluded under the impact of the norms of natu-ralistic positive science set down by Galileo andDescartes in the 17th century and enshrined inLeibnizs project of mathesis universalis. Thisthreatened to fuel the general disaffection from allrational critical inquiry unleashed by fascism inEurope in the 1930s.

For Schtz the lifeworld was the taken-for-granted common-sense reality of the socialworld as it is lived by ordinary individuals. In thedaily course of their lives individuals produce typi-fying constructs of their fellows actions which,though frequently faulty or short-sighted, are theonly legitimate basis on which social scientists canadvance toward what Max Weber called genuinelymeaningfully adequate explanatory accounts ofsocial action and belief.

The concept of the lifeworld returned in later20th-century social theory in Jrgen Habermassuneasy fusion of phenomenological philosophy and

Parsonian functionalist theory in The Theory ofCommunicative Action of 1981. The lifeworldthen became the world of everyday communi-cative interaction which gradually differentiatesover the course of processes of social evolutioninto distinct rationally articulated spheres ofcultural validity. When the spheres of moral-practical and aesthetic-expressive communicationstart to become narrowed down by the sphere ofscience and technology under conditions ofadvanced capitalist administration, the lifeworld isthreatened with colonization by the system.Instrumental, purpose-rational imperatives andexpedients operative in the institutions of themarket, the state, the juridical system and otherexpert apparatuses invade and disfigure that spaceof social antagonism whose only sources of legiti-mate resolution lie in inclusive uncoerced dialoguein the public sphere.

Today we are invited to raise numerous ques-tions about the currency of this conception of thelifeworld. In what sense is the concept a transcen-dental one, as Husserl held, or a quasi-transcen-dental one, as Habermas sometimes writes? Doestranscendental imply universal, i.e. invarianceacross cultures? How is the life of the lifeworld tobe rethought after the biotechnological revolutionsof our present age? How is the world of the life-world to be rethought after globalization? Canphenomenological philosophy address a virtualizedworld of near-ubiquitous digitalized informationsystems? Is the notion now a redundant oldEuropean naivety after post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-colonialism, post-humanism? Orcould the notion in fact gesture in some waytoward the ultimate question to which all theseissues seem to return: the possibility of life and thepossibility of world?

European vitalist philosophers of the turn of

Keywords globalization, humanism, life, life-world, post-humanism, social theory

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the 19th century thought of life as the a priorihorizon of all conscious experience. Not Kantsconcepts and categories of the Understanding butlife made all experience of the world and all world-hood possible. For Nietzsche, Dilthey, Simmel andBergson, the world was given to the ego only in theflow of life and its temporal historical continuum.But today we must ask: whose world, and whoseego? What happens when the cognizer moves fromone (transcendental) lifeworld to many (quasi-or semi-transcendental) lifeworlds from ourlifeworld to their lifeworld, and back? How cana lifeworld be both empirical object and transcen-dental precondition of our ability to cognize it?And how is the lifeworld given in a world mediatedby writing, television, the Internet and a dozenother means of electronic simulation? What mightbe the lifeworld, say, of the Amazonian tribesper-son who lives from the fruits of the forest, uses amobile phone and accesses the Internet? Derridasworries about Lvi-Strausss worries about lostoriginarity in the Tristes Tropiques here seem morepertinent than ever (see Derrida, 1967).

German anthropological philosophers of themid-20th century saw the essence of human exist-ence as revolving around what they called world-openness. For Helmut Plessner (1950) therational human animal was an ex-centric animal,one capable of standing outside of its centredembodied being and comprehending other worldsfrom which it was physically absent. Logos impliedconsciousness, memory, imagination, creativity,linguistic inventiveness, freedom from simplestimulus-and-response all of what Wilhelm vonHumboldt called energeia or what Chomsky usedto call generative grammar: the childs ability tounderstand and to produce syntactic strings neverpreviously registered or uttered. Contemporarythinking encourages us to be sceptical of suchessentialism after the revolutions in neuroscienceand information technology and the practicalpenetration of a great many peoples everyday life-worlds by artificial intelligence, intelligent medicalprostheses and the possibility of genetic cloning.The interventions of philosophical anti-humanistsfrom Foucault and Deleuze to Luhmann, Harawayand Latour are now familiar articles of thisonslaught on what Charles Taylor (1989) calledthe expressivist model of the subject.

But still the issue nags, on a number of fronts,political as well as epistemological. According toGiorgio Agamben (1995), the Jews at Auschwitzdied before they reached the gas chambers becausewhat the camp stripped away from them beforethey entered the chambers was the possibility ofhaving and being in a world. With the removal ofworldhood went the removal of life. Or moreprecisely, with the removal of worldhood went thecollapse of life qua bios life lived in and with the

world into bare life qua zo. Though Agambengrossly distorts the historical specificity of theHolocaust by extending it metonymically to allmodernity tout court as do some other Holo-caust books such as Zygmunt Baumans still thequestion left unanswered in much of the anti-humanist ridiculing of old European technophobiais the one first raised by Husserl and Heidegger:how is it that we can find the fact of our existenceand our being-in-the-world a question for ourselves rather than spin around on a groove like automa-tons or like bare life awaiting extinction? Ifglobalization is about anything, it is about thepossibility of world, of having and being in a worldwhich is open to us and to which we can be open.Entweltlichung, or world-privation, was the termHannah Arendt (1958) took from Heidegger todescribe the closure or flattening out of the appar-ently open vista of infinite possibilities that wasmodern technical civilization. Today with Jean-LucNancy (2002) we can ask a similar question: ismondialization the extension of monde or thediminution of monde? For all the difficulties ofregarding globalization as homogenizing anddestructive of texture and diversity, one possibilitycannot be brushed aside: perhaps the more weextend the world beyond itself, the more wecollapse it within itself, and the more we raise thepower of life, the more we raise the life of power.

References

Agamben, G. (1995) Homo Sacer. Turin: Einaudi.Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition.

Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.Derrida, J. (1967) De la Grammatologie. Paris:

ditions de Minuit.Habermas, J. (1981) Die Theorie des

kommunikativen Handelns: Band 2, ZurKritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft.Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Husserl, E. (1991[1936]) Die Krisis dereuropischen Wissenschaften und dietranszendentale Phnomenologie. Dordrecht:Kluwer.

Nancy, J.-L. (2002) La cration du monde, ou, Lamondialisation. Paris: Galile.

Plessner, H. (1950) Lachen und Weinen: eineUntersuchung nach den Grenzen menschlichenVerhaltens. Munich: Lehnen.

Schtz, A. (1932) Der sinnhafte Aufbau dersozialen Welt: eine Einleitung in dieverstehende Soziologie. Vienna: Springer.

Srubar, I. (1988) Kosmion: die Genese derpragmatischen Lebenswelttheorie von AlfredSchtz und ihr anthropologischer Hintergrund.Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

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Austin Harrington is Research Fellow at the MaxWeber Centre for Advanced Study at theUniversity of Erfurt, Germany, and Reader inSociology at the University of Leeds, UK. Hisrecent publications include Art and Social Theory:Sociological Arguments in Aesthetics (Polity Press,

LebenJosef Bleicher

Leben (Life), together with Geist (Spirit),represent the core defining concepts inGerman philosophy in the 200 years of itsmost flourishing period, marked at either end bythe names of Kant and Heidegger. These conceptstogether define a shared ground that also helps tocharacterize German philosophy: concern withactivity, development, history, tension and resolu-tion, and a transcendental mode of inquiry. One ofthe difficulties of tackling Leben is that Life runscounter to form, yet somehow has to be capturedor described through form, which means there willnecessarily be a lack of clarity and precision. GeorgSimmel (18581918), one of the foremost ex-ponents of the Philosophie des Lebens, saw it as thethird stage of western philosophy. In the first placethere was Greek philosophy, resting on theconcept of Substance: a persisting substratum asthe core of all being and cognition. Secondly, therewas modern philosophy with its stress onmovement and mechanical form, which aimed touncover the laws that render it calculable and thuscomprehensible. More recently, the third stagesuggests a redirection in the form of a Verlebendi-gung, an enlivening of the conception of the worldand our knowledge of it. Leben is the metaphysicalprinciple that issues forth subject and object, andprovides their ontological and epistemologicalcommon ground (Simmel, 1912).

At its core, Leben serves as the antithesis tostatic conceptions and a one-sided focus onconsciousness or reflexivity. Formal constructsthemselves issue from Leben, and are itsexpressions. Leben throws up intellectual activity,and no amount of internal, self-oriented rumina-tions will gain any insight into the true groundingof this enterprise. The contrast between the calcu-lative reductionism found in the mechanistic

universe of Newton and Kant is developed bySimmel in his essay on Kant and Goethe. Thepantheistic reverence of Johann Wolfgang vonGoethe (17491832) for the ceaseless creativityof nature provides the grounds for his refusal towrite a conventionally philosophical account ofLeben. But during his life-time, the Verlebendigungof philosophy started to take root. ArthurSchopenhauer (17881860), an ardent admirer ofGoethe, is considered by Simmel the first Philoso-pher of Leben. He reflected on Leben as such,rather than enquiring about the meaning or valueof an aspect of Life. Leben as such is characterizedby a will to Life which engenders all manifesta-tions of the human and natural world. Yet, in itsurge to come into realization, it causes pain andsuffering, false hopes and disillusionment as itstimulates desire and striving. The higherdeveloped the species, and within humanity as theapex of creation the individual, the more sensi-tized, hence exposed to suffering, they will be.While art, as self-sufficient insight into Life, andin particular music, can provide genuine but briefrespite, the only lasting solution lies in renuncia-tion and the denial of the will and thus of Life.Schopenhauer is indebted to Indian philosophy inhis account of Leben as futile illusion and as suffer-ing, until the taming of the will through self-discipline, withdrawal from the world, and itsmeditative contemplation become effective.

Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900) responds tothe problematic of Leben in a diametricallyopposite way. Rather than renouncing Lifesquests, our task is to give full expression to them.As the stream of Life propels us forward, itsenergy should be drawn on also to move upwards,to transcend transgressively all conventionalizednormalcy with its Life-inhibiting norms andprecepts. This is the progression which Nietzschefamously encapsulated in the notion of the ber-mensch. For Nietzsche, all intellectual andaesthetic content and values are merely realiza-tions of the process of Leben, with the will to

Keywords Bergson, Dilthey, form, Geist, life,metaphysics, Nietzsche, Simmel

2004), Modern Social Theory: An Introduction(Oxford University Press, 2005; editor) andConcepts of Europe in Classical Sociology: GermanSocial Thinkers and the Fate of the West,19141945 (forthcoming).

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