“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 experience possibly running contrary to our expectations.
The experience of the lifeworld is also spatially structured. Husserl distinguishes between “nearby space” (Nahraum), in which my bodily movements take...
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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 15 December 2025.]
