Abstract
Edmund Husserl’s discovery of the lifeworld was a decisive step toward a radicalization of the project of transcendental phenomenology. At first glance, transcendental philosophy attempts to define objective structures of a timeless ego and by doing so, justify ultimate knowledge. According to Husserl, however, to understand the constitutive force of subjectivity one needs to introduce a more rudimentary milieu – the lifeworld – which conditions one’s understanding of intentional activity. To be precise, the lifeworld is the source of meaning, and – mutatis mutandis – of knowledge. The lifeworld, then, is a strictly subjective phenomenon, and transcendental phenomenology has to be a strict subjective science of this phenomenon. But are the subjective science and knowledge about the lifeworld possible at all? How can we know something about the non-objective? I argue that, by posing these questions, one connects the theory of horizons and Normalität, both of which describe doxa as a common knowledge. Phenomenological theory highlights human essential connections with the lifeworld, and it expresses the subjective roots of all knowledge.
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Notes
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I do not claim, however, that all phenomenology is a kind of theory of knowledge, because this is a serious oversimplification, or – from a certain point of view – simply false. By claiming that phenomenology is first and foremost theory of knowledge, I mean that for some pedagogical reasons (that I cannot discuss here) it is better to introduce phenomenology in the domain of theory of knowledge.
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All abbreviations that refer to Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, Husserliana: Materialien, Husserliana: Dokumente and Husserliana: Collected Works book series, I list in the Bibliography.
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As Husserl writes in the Crisis, transcendental inquiries into the lifeworld “would have required a fundamentally and essentially different regressive method from that of Kant, which rests on those unquestioned assumptions: not a mythically, constructively inferring [schliessende] method, but a thoroughly intuitively disclosing [erschliessende] method, intuitive in its point of departure and in everything it discloses – even though the concept of intuitiveness may have to undergo a considerable expansion in comparison to the Kantian one, and indeed even though intuition, here, may lose its usual sense altogether through a new attitude, taking on only the general sense of original self-exhibition, but precisely only within the new sphere of being” (Husserl 1970, 115–116).
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It is misleading, however, to understand this call as a call for a natural approach to knowledge. In the field of the phenomenological-transcendental analysis of knowledge, it is sometimes claimed that any natural question about knowledge, i.e., a question that presupposes the view of cognition as a matter of fact, falls into petitio principii. Husserl denies any meaningful chance for building a natural theory of knowledge. Here lies the most striking difference between Husserl and contemporary epistemologists who undertook the program of ‘natural epistemology.’ Cf. Rinofner-Kreidl 2004; Zhongwei 2010; cf. also Hua Mat III, 77. Following Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “[a] transcendental inquiry into the truth content of knowledge is not to be imagined as the limit of a factual inquiry into the actual genesis of knowledge as the precision and reliability of this inquiry approaches the infinite. In other words: the quid juris is not the limit of a quid facti, since a question of right can never be given the same type of answer as a question of fact-that is, the ‘ought-to-be’ is not reducible to the ‘it is’” (Dupuy 1999, 541).
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In this context, there arises also an important consequence: “What finds itself already at work in the world is not the Cartesian cogito” (Gallagher 2008, 166).
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Acknowledgments
The project is financed by the National Science Centre (no. DEC-2011/01/D/HS1/00594). I am especially grateful to Michael Gubser for revising the language of the article.
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Płotka, W. (2016). Knowledge and the Lifeworld: Phenomenological-Transcendental Investigations. In: Tymieniecka, AT., Trutty-Coohill, P. (eds) The Cosmos and the Creative Imagination. Analecta Husserliana, vol 119. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21792-5_11
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