Husserl’s doctrine of the Lebenswelt argues for the primacy of the natural human experience of the world of things that show itself to us. This world is the pre-scientific world and thereby the foundation on which scientific theories are built. This Husserlian account of modern science as founded on a more original mode of comportment (e.g. Krisis § 34) has been widely accepted among his students and successors. However, they have also widely agreed that Husserl failed to account for the ground of the Lebenswelt’s natural meaningfulness to us.
In this paper I will look at three proposals for a reinterpretation of Husserl’s Lebenswelt along these lines. The first is Heidegger’s Geviert, in which the meaning of Being gives itself to us through a poetic vision of the whole. The second is Jan Patočka’s characterisation of the natural world as mythic world in which meaning is simply accepted as given, and which is decisively transformed by the emergence of two forms of active questioning—philosophy and politics. The third is Leo Strauss’s characterisation thereof as a world ruled by the Law, a term fundamental for both revealed religions and (in the form of the physis–nomos distinction) philosophy.
Patočka and Strauss agree that Heidegger was insufficiently attentive to the inherently political nature of human existence, as well as in their centring of the importance of philosophic questioning for a genuinely human life. Philosophy stands for both of them in a situation of political dependence on as well as opposition to the naïve, natural attitude. The relation of philosophy to the political community—or the relation of naïve meaning to the philosophic questioning thereof—thus is for both of them a central phenomenon of the “natural”, pre-scientific world.