Key Arguments

• Husserl asserts that ‘Everyone, as a matter of apriori necessity, lives in the same Nature, a Nature moreover that, with the necessary communalization of his life and the lives of others, he has fashioned into a cultural world in his individual and communalized living and doing’, grounding a universal natural world and a universally culturalized world in a priori structures.
• He immediately adds that this ‘does not exclude, either a priori or de facto, the truth that men belonging to one and the same world live in a loose cultural community — or even none at all — and accordingly constitute different surrounding worlds of culture, as concrete life-worlds in which the relatively or absolutely separate communities live their passive and active lives’, showing that cultural communities and their surrounding worlds can be multiple and relatively autonomous even within one shared Nature.
• He describes these different surrounding worlds of culture as ‘concrete life-worlds’, emphasizing their status as lived, practical worlds in which communities ‘live their passive and active lives’ rather than as merely theoretical constructs.

Source Quotes

In this respect it is manifestly different from that absolutely unconditional accessibility to everyone which belongs essentially to the constitutional sense of Nature, of the animate organism, and therefore of the psychophysical man (understood with a certain generality). To be sure, the following is also included in the sphere of unconditional universality which is the correlate of the essential form of world constitution: Everyone, as a matter of apriori necessity, lives in the same Nature, a Nature moreover that, with the necessary communalization of his life and the lives of others, he has fashioned into a cultural world in his individual and communalized living and doing — a world having human significances, even if it belongs to an extremely low cultural level. But this, after all, does not exclude, either a priori or de facto, the truth that men belonging to one and the same world live in a loose cultural community — or even none at all — and accordingly constitute different surrounding worlds of culture, as concrete life-worlds in which the relatively or absolutely separate communities live their passive and active lives.

To be sure, the following is also included in the sphere of unconditional universality which is the correlate of the essential form of world constitution: Everyone, as a matter of apriori necessity, lives in the same Nature, a Nature moreover that, with the necessary communalization of his life and the lives of others, he has fashioned into a cultural world in his individual and communalized living and doing — a world having human significances, even if it belongs to an extremely low cultural level. But this, after all, does not exclude, either a priori or de facto, the truth that men belonging to one and the same world live in a loose cultural community — or even none at all — and accordingly constitute different surrounding worlds of culture, as concrete life-worlds in which the relatively or absolutely separate communities live their passive and active lives. Each man understands first of all, in respect of a core and as having its unrevealed horizon, his concrete surrounding world or his culture; and he does so precisely as a man who belongs to the community fashioning it historically.

Key Concepts

• Everyone, as a matter of apriori necessity, lives in the same Nature, a Nature moreover that, with the necessary communalization of his life and the lives of others, he has fashioned into a cultural world in his individual and communalized living and doing — a world having human significances, even if it belongs to an extremely low cultural level.
• this, after all, does not exclude, either a priori or de facto, the truth that men belonging to one and the same world live in a loose cultural community — or even none at all — and accordingly constitute different surrounding worlds of culture, as concrete life-worlds in which the relatively or absolutely separate communities live their passive and active lives.

Context

Middle of §58, where Husserl refines the relation between the universal natural world and the plurality of cultural life‑worlds constituted by different, more or less connected communities.