Crisis and the Unconscious: Another Look at the Life-World

Abstract

In his last published work, the Crisis of the European Sciences, Husserl introduces the question of the ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt) in connection with his diagnosis of a crisis in the modern sciences and in opposition to the self-understanding these sciences have of the ‘world’ and also of consciousness. He then proposes a new ‘critique of reason. We contend that such critique has two sides, one ‘horizontal’ related to all the dimensions of reason (theoretical, axiological, and practical), and one ‘vertical’, which points to the foundation of reason in the lifeworld. We shall examine the role of the unconscious and dreams in this vertical dimension.