LIFE-WORLD

German Lebenswelt, in Phenomenology, the world as immediately or directly experienced in the subjectivity of everyday life, as sharply distinguished from the objective worlds of the sciences, which employ the methods of the mathematical sciences of nature; although these sciences originate in the life-world, they are not those of everyday life. The life-world includes individual, social, perceptual, and practical experiences. The objectivism of science obscures both its origin in the subjective perceptions of the life-world and the life-world itself. In analyzing and describing the life-world, Phenomenology attempts to show how the world of theory and science originates from the life-world, strives to discover the mundane phenomena of the life-world itself, and attempts to show how the experience of the life-world is possible by analyzing time, space, body, and the very givenness or presentation of experience.