The Face in the Lifeworld

What Husserl, Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas Can Teach Us About Helping Without Taking Over

The woman sits at the kitchen table, her hand wrapped around her coffee cup. The municipal care worker has put forward a proposal for more help in the mornings. There has been a fall, and the daughter is worried. She has said that she sleeps poorly and listens for the telephone at night.

“I want to prepare my own breakfast,” the woman says. “This is my time of day.”

The care worker looks down at the form. There are boxes for nutrition, functional ability and support needs. She has not written anything yet.

Good care requires us to try to understand the other person’s lifeworld. Emmanuel Levinas makes this demand more exacting: responsibility remains even when understanding fails us, when the other person rejects our efforts, and when we cannot find a solution both can accept. A person does not lose their claim to care because the conversation becomes difficult.

More is therefore at stake at the kitchen table than a workable morning routine. The woman wants to preserve something of her own. The daughter needs to be able to live without constant anxiety. The care worker must attend to safety while ensuring that the woman retains a say in how her life is organised.

When the Description Falls Short

For Husserl, the lifeworld is the world we already inhabit, from which scientific descriptions derive their meaning. In The Crisis of European Sciences, he examines how scientific idealisations can lead us to forget this experiential ground. Models come to stand as reality itself, while the life they were meant to help us understand recedes into the background.

Breakfast can be described as nutritional intake. The woman’s movements can be assessed in terms of functional ability. The fall can be recorded as a risk. All of this may be necessary knowledge. Yet these descriptions tell us little about what it means to begin the day at her own table, choose what to put on her bread, and do something without first having to ask someone.

A case note stating that “she declines help” condenses the situation into a formulation the service can act upon. At the same time, it may conceal the difference between rejecting all assistance and objecting to the way that assistance is organised. Husserl’s critique becomes practically relevant at precisely this point: the professional simplification must remain answerable to the experience on which it rests.

Levinas gives us another concept for what can happen: totality. Here, the problem goes beyond a description that leaves out details. It arises when the other person is allowed to have meaning only within an order I already command. The woman’s responses are interpreted as cooperation or resistance, insight or lack of insight. Whatever she says confirms the categories.

A form is not, in itself, such a totality. The danger arises when it has the final word, depriving the woman of the possibility of questioning the framework through which she is understood.

What Levinas Learned from Husserl

Levinas came to Freiburg in 1928 to study with Husserl, where he also encountered Heidegger’s thought. His engagement with Husserl was extensive. In 1930, he published his dissertation on the theory of intuition in Husserl’s phenomenology. The following year saw the publication of the French translation of Cartesian Meditations, on which he had worked with Gabrielle Peiffer. He thus helped introduce phenomenology to a French readership.

In Husserl, he found a way of examining experience without immediately replacing it with explanations imposed from outside. Consciousness is directed towards something; it perceives, remembers, anticipates and understands. What we encounter appears within these contexts of meaning. Levinas learned to work in this way, including when he later challenged his teacher.

His early studies of Husserl preceded the publication of The Crisis. We should therefore be cautious about presenting him as a thinker who simply adopted the fully developed concept of the lifeworld. Their affinity lies particularly in their attention to concrete experience and their willingness to investigate how meaning arises.

Yet a decisive disagreement emerges in the encounter with the other. In the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl begins with my own ego and lived body to explain the experience of another ego. The other is experienced through an analogical association with myself. This is not a conscious inference, and Husserl emphasises that the other person’s experience never becomes mine.

Nevertheless, Levinas’s objection concerns the starting point itself: has my own ego already been granted too much authority when the other is to be understood on the basis of myself? The other also encounters me as someone who challenges this authority, someone to whom I must answer before I have found a place for them within my understanding.

Being Able to Carry On with One’s Own Life

Heidegger helps us see another dimension of the kitchen. In Being and Time, he describes human beings as already involved in a world of activities, relationships and possibilities. The cup is for drinking, the knife for spreading, the chair the place where the woman usually sits. This familiarity lies in what she does, often without giving it much thought.

Taking over breakfast may therefore affect her way of being at home. What the service regards as a task to be completed may, for her, be one of the remaining opportunities to initiate something herself.

In §26, Heidegger distinguishes between two possibilities of caring for others. One, einspringende Fürsorge, steps in and takes over the other person’s concerns. It can relieve a burden, but it can also create dependency. The other, vorausspringende Fürsorge, helps the other person take up their own possibilities. Here we find an important philosophical basis for the idea of helping without taking over.

Levinas’s objection is not that Heidegger lacks a language for relationships with others. He asks whether understanding human existence and its possibilities takes precedence over responsibility for this particular person. At the kitchen table, the difference becomes apparent when the care worker has explored the woman’s habits, listened to her wishes and proposed an arrangement intended to support her independence—and the woman still says no.

Bread and the Face

In Levinas, everyday life also acquires a sensuous fullness. In Totality and Infinity, he describes how we live from the world. We eat, warm ourselves, rest and enjoy. Bread provides nourishment, but its taste and the quiet of the meal also belong to the enjoyment of living. A home offers shelter and a place to withdraw.

This enjoyment is not a moral failing. Having something of our own also makes it possible to share and to welcome others. The woman need not, therefore, justify her breakfast routine by saying that it maintains her functional ability. It may have value because she enjoys it.

Yet responsibility for her cannot depend on the care worker discovering such a value and succeeding in recognising it. This is where Levinas’s concept of the face enters.

The face signifies more than visible features. It is the other person’s way of encountering me as someone over whom I do not have unlimited power. The other may be vulnerable and dependent, while their very presence calls my freedom to act into question. I cannot treat them as though only my intentions matter.

This presupposes neither eye contact, the ability to speak, nor an expression I can readily understand. Responsibility remains when the woman turns away or offers no explanation I can use. The face is no recipe for becoming better at reading people.

When Levinas calls ethics first philosophy, he gives this responsibility a foundational place. My knowledge must be answerable to the other. This does not mean that I always know what to do. It means that uncertainty does not release me from the obligation to respond.

The Daughter, Too, Is a Person in This Situation

The daughter is not sitting at the table this morning. Nevertheless, she is present in the conversation. She was the one who found her mother after the fall. She has begun calling more often and dropping by when she was supposed to be somewhere else.

It would be easy to make her the representative of control and safety, while allowing her mother to represent freedom. But the daughter also has a life that can be pushed aside. Her concern cannot simply be dismissed as a failure to respect her mother’s self-determination.

Here, Levinas’s concept of “the third party” acquires concrete significance. The person I encounter is already connected to others who also have claims upon my consideration. Responsibility for one must therefore be weighed alongside responsibility for others. Justice requires judgement, comparison and institutions.

The woman’s wishes cannot automatically make her daughter responsible for everything that remains. Nor does the daughter’s anxiety confer an unlimited right to decide on her mother’s behalf. The care worker must keep both concerns in view without pretending that they can necessarily be reconciled.

This is a task for practical judgement. It requires knowledge of risks, possibilities and available support. But it also requires the ability to accept that a defensible decision may leave concern and disagreement unresolved.

When the Conversation Does Not Resolve Anything

The care worker puts down her pen.

“What is it about the morning that you particularly want to keep?”

The woman draws her hand back.

“I’ve told you. I want to be left alone.”

The care worker suggests that they might find an arrangement in which the woman still prepares breakfast herself. Perhaps someone could simply call in briefly.

“No.”

Silence follows. The refrigerator hums softly. The bread knife lies beside the plate.

“Your daughter is frightened after the fall,” the care worker says.

“She worries too much.”

The words offer no way forward. The care worker feels irritation rising. She has listened, explained and tried to adapt the help. It is tempting now to write that the woman refuses the proposed support and consider the matter settled.

It is at this moment that Levinas contributes something that better understanding alone cannot provide. The woman remains someone towards whom the care worker bears responsibility. The daughter’s anxiety remains, too. Neither has become easier to help.

“I hear that you’re saying no,” she says at last. “I’m still worried about how you’ll manage in the mornings. I haven’t found a solution yet.”

The woman does not reply.

The care worker cannot decide her way out of the difficulty merely by calling her decision care. Nor can she place the entire responsibility back on the woman or assume that the daughter will take care of things. She must carry the unresolved situation forward, discuss the possibilities and preserve the distinction between what she knows and what she does not yet understand.

In the case notes, she writes: “She wishes to prepare breakfast herself and declines the proposed visit. Concerns following the fall remain unresolved. Her daughter’s burden also requires follow-up.”

She reads the sentences once more. They do not bring the matter to a close.

The woman is still sitting at the table. The care worker has not yet found out how best to help her. Responsibility remains.