Kierkegaard and Nietzsche both talked about the possibility of experiencing something beyond normal concepts. For them, life consisted firstly in creating oneself, but also in living through others. Their philosophies were essentially atheistic, focusing on the individual rather than on society and government.
In contrast, Edmund Husserl thought that the philosophical tradition had taken the wrong turn by trying to answer the question of whether there was an objective reality beyond the phenomenal world. Instead, he proposed focusing on what could be known in this world. So he introduced the term ‘phenomena’ to describe everything that we can ever think or perceive. He then asked us to bracket the question of whether those phenomena really existed, and instead to concentrate on the meaning of our experiences. By doing this, we could start to understand ourselves and the world around us. What we were experiencing was always changing, so he called this the Lebensereignen (‘life world’) – the realm of lived experience.
