John Wild

Is There a World of Ordinary Language

Having recently spent seven months on the continent of Europe and having conversed with philosophers in five different countries there, I was surprised to find, under wide diversities and sharp disagreements, a well-marked current moving in a single direction. Apart from members of traditional schools, the living thinkers of Western Europe are basically concerned with the human life-world, or Lebenswelt, as Husserl called it in his last published work, Die Krisis der Europaischen Wissenschaften. I am not suggesting that most European thinkers are now committed to any of the special methods and doctrines which Husserl defended at different stages of his long and constantly self-critical career. This is not true. Nevertheless his concern to achieve an accurate description of the concrete phenomena of the Lebenswelt, as they are experienced and expressed in ordinary language, is a constant theme of all his writings. And in this broad sense the influence of phenomenology has spread far and wide. There are, no doubt, other sources for this contemporary interest in the Lebenswelt. But Husserl is perhaps the focal center of this new empiricism and his influence the most widely recognized.