APPROACHES TO THE CONCEPT OF WORLD IN HUSSERL

Abstract

The world is a difficult concept to interpret in Husserl’s phenomenology. On the one hand, such a concept is characterized as the life-world or the world of culture in their fullest sense (Husserl, 2008a, 288; HUA VI, 191). This world can be thought in plural although, however, it exhibits at the same time, both, a horizontal manner of being and an A Priori nature, which, in sum, makes the world possess a progression and unity in front of which “the plural makes no sense” (Husserl, 2008a, 185; HUA VI, 146). On the other hand, the world is also characterized as a subjective acquisition and, for that reason, it implies a dynamic constitutional network which comes to be what it is from the progression from a pre-world [Vorwelt] to a world [Welt] (Walton, 2015; Bower, 2015). Therefore, Husserl’s world appears under different determinations that may even seem contradictory (Carr, 1970). In this work, using a differentiation made by Walton (2015) between constitutional and given, I propose that it is possible to reconstruct the concept of world and, thereby, to clarify its “problematic” (Carr, 1970). Thus, I will show that this problematic arises due to the lack of differentiation between the diverse stratum of the world’s constitution, which articulates themselves into genetic and
generative investigations that express different levels of analysis of that concept. I will conclude that without making this distinction, which leads to different analysis levels, we will obtain an insufficient comprehension of the concept, such as Husserl developed it throughout different moments of his work.