Lifeworld as an Embodiment of Spiritual Meaning: The Constitutive Dynamics of Activity and Passivity in Husserl

Abstract

In this chapter I explore a less well known part of Husserl’s theory of embodiment: the idea that subjective life is not embodied in the world merely in “lived bodies” but is rather, in a specific sense, spread all over the lifeworld penetrating all aspects of its givenness. In Husserl’s terms the experienced world is given as something that always harbors within itself “a kind of inner life” by “embodying” various types of higher “spiritual”, “cultural” or “subjective-relative” meaning, i.e. meaningfulness that refers to different dimensions of human communal life. I will first explicate the structure and mode of givenness of this subjective meaningfulness of the environment and then focus on its formation in the constitutive dynamics of activity and passivity. I will argue that the key to understanding the constitution of spiritual meaning lies in the often overlooked “secondary passivity”, which results from the interplay of two fundamental structures of passivity, namely habituality and association.