Cosler- The Life World

We have examined the role that human-imposed concepts play in the epistemic and cultural traditions of various societies. In comparison of oral and literate cultures, we have seen how certain foundational structures of human cognition can widely differ in societies with different modes of communication technology. These structures are composed of certain assumptions and beliefs about the world that serve to contextualize and organize all new beliefs and experience. For the phenomenologist, the world of pure pre-conceptual objects is the objective world. Upon interaction with a thinking consciousness, this objective world is rationalized and process by the subject, and is constituted as that individual's Life World. The Life World, then, is both individual and social. On the level of the individual, the Life World functions to organize all the disparate qualia received from direct sense experience and organizes them into discrete structures. The level of the life world is more abstract than the pure Lockean sense experience, yet it still precedes consciousness itself. While the Life World operates on the level of the individual, it is primarily a social phenomenon. A given society's cultural knowledge and belief inform and reflect the Life World's of its constituents.

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