The transcendence and non-discursivity of the lifeworld

This paper points to two little-discussed interrelated features-among sociologists-about the nature of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt): that the experience of transcendence is an essential component of human actions, and that lived experience (Erlebnis) is founded on the non-discursivity of the lifeworld, i.e., the pre-predicative background expectancies from which the discursive arises. I examine the intellectual route of Alfred Schutz who developed his mundane lifeworld theory from appropriating Edmund Husserl's notions of appresentation and apperception. Harold Garfinkel later extended Schutz's concept of lifeworld to the empirical investigations of constitutive social orders. By way of conclusion, I warn against a strain of constructionism in sociology, which tends to ignore the two said features of lived experience and inaccurately conceives social realities as essentially the actor's discursive accomplishments. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.