From lifeworld to surrounding world: Husserl, Uexküll and the insufficiency of a completely objective science

Abstract

We seek to analyze a series of overlapping coincidences found both in the concepts of Jakob von Uexküll´s surrounding world (Umwelt) and Edmund Husserl´s lifeworld (Lebenswelt) to make a critique to the exercise of an all-objective science. With the Lifeworld Husserl aimed to discuss the forgetting of the subjective dimension in science, not only in its methods, but also in its consequences for everyday human life. To Uexküll, the study of surrounding worlds reveals the need for a science that recognizes itself as a human endeavor and that is under constant revision. As a biologist, Uexküll makes emphasis on the arising of a life scale that does not consider the rest of living beings at the moment of taking action. Thus, we think that exists in both authors a strong fight against a reductionist and atomist way of conceiving existence as a given phenomenon.