The lifeworld, the Crisis of European Sciences, and the Husserl-Heidegger break: does the late phenomenology recover the meaning-foundation of science, or is it a relapse into philosophical anthropology that Heidegger's existential analytic surpasses?

Edmund Husserl, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The crisis of European sciences is the loss of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) as the meaning- foundation of all scientific theorizing. The Galilean mathematization of nature substituted a mathematical-formal world of idealized objects for the experienced lifeworld from which it derives its sense, and over time came to be taken for the world itself — forgetting the lifeworld as the ground that gave the formalism its sense in the first place.1

The recovery of the lifeworld as transcendental ground is the late phenomenological task. The break with Heidegger: Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) substitutes a hermeneutic ontology of Dasein for the transcendental analysis, proceeding from existing Dasein without first carrying out the reduction; for transcendental phenomenology this is a sophisticated philosophical anthropology, not a development of phenomenology, and the marginal notes on Being and Time (translated in the Sheehan- Palmer volume) make the disagreement explicit.234

Sources

  1. It is not easy to achieve clarity about what kind of peculiar scientific and hence universal tasks are to be posed under the title "life-world" and about whether something philosophically significant will arise here. Even the first attempt to understand the peculiar ontic sense of the life-world, which can be taken now as a narrower, now as a broader one, causes difficulties.
    The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, p. 166
  2. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy Edmund Husserl Translated, with an Introduction, by David Carr NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS EVANSTON Contents Translator's Introduction PART I.
    The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, pp. 3–6
  3. Now though we must [further] make evident the fact that the life-world itself is a "structure," it is nevertheless not a "purposeful structure," even though to its being, which precedes all purpose, belong men, just as we encounter them and become acquainted with them as a matter of course with all their purposes and their works, which, as developed by men, henceforth also belong as a matter of course to the…
    The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, pp. 429–430
  4. Rather than spend our time here, we prefer to move on to a task which is much greater, as will soon be seen—one which in fact encompasses such a doctrine.
    The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, pp. 187–189

Where the argument is made

  • Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology §§9-15 on the Galilean mathematization of nature
  • §§28-34 on the lifeworld
  • §§38-43 on the various ways into the reduction
  • §§57-72 on the teleology of European reason
  • the 1935 Vienna Lecture and the Prague Lectures (Crisis Appendix and supplements)
  • Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (Sheehan and Palmer, 1997) — the EB Article drafts (1927-28), the Amsterdam Lectures (1928), Husserl's marginal notes on Being and Time, the 1931 Berlin lecture 'Phenomenology and Anthropology.'

How the argument was received

Crisis (drafted 1934-37, partially published 1936) is the unfinished last major work, concerned with the historical sense of European reason and the loss of the lifeworld. The Husserl-Heidegger break unfolds across the 1927-28 Encyclopedia Britannica article collaboration, the 1928 Amsterdam Lectures, and the 1931 Berlin lecture 'Phenomenology and Anthropology'; Husserl's marginal notes on Being and Time document the depth of the disagreement. The Habermasian use of the lifeworld concept (Theory of Communicative Action, 1981) is selective, foregrounding the intersubjective and communicative dimension at the expense of the transcendental. Patočka's Czech reception develops an asubjective phenomenology that diverges further from the transcendental project. Derrida's introduction to Origin of Geometry (1962) is the deconstructive engagement with the late reflection on history and ideality.