Husserl and Wittgenstein on Lebenswelt and Lebensform: A Cross-examination

Abstract

I compare Edmund Husserl’s notion of Lebenswelt with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of Lebensform. Their philosophical projects an be viewed as complementary, but, at the same time, divergent attempts at providing descriptions of general structures, dynamisms, and contents of human belief systems and, hence, of human life as a whole. I argue that they share a polemical radiographic” conception of philosophy that might be regarded as a very peculiar cultural enterprise. Ludwig Wittgenstein has proposed some ideas that are far more detailed and revealing of the structure and dynamisms of our form of life than Edmund Husserl’s ideas. However, generative phenomenology provides a much more detailed analysis of the historicity of human achievements as historically constituted by the complex layers of sense of different intersubjective activities.