ABSTRACT
Everybody is born into a social environment and so, in one sense, we are never free from our life-world. Perhaps, more significantly, even in the womb we are exposed to outside pressures that are not only of a biological nature. I well remember teaching a class on human learning at the University of Alaska when a young lady from the First Nation people exclaimed, ‘My people teach us to talk to the baby in the womb.’ We are exposed to our significant others before birth. Total individuality may be a myth of our own making. From our birth, we are socialised (learn to adopt) into the culture of our life-world and learn to live in harmony with it, learning the language, symbols and behaviour patterns appropriate to our position in it. Indeed, we can often reach a state within our life-world where we are so much in harmony with the culture of our life-world that we take it for granted.
I trust the world that has been known by me up until now will continue further and that consequently the stock of knowledge obtained from my fellow men and formed from my own experiences will continue to preserve its fundamental validity … From this assumption follows the further and fundamental one: that I can repeat my past successful acts. So long as the structure of the world can be taken as constant, as long as my previous experience is valid, my ability to operate on the world in this and that manner remains in principle preserved.
(Schutz and Luckmann 1974: 7)