From: MSalter1-AT-aol.com
Date: Wed, 5 Mar 1997 03:33:26 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: HAB: Horizon concept in TCA


Concerning Debbie's statement re horizon

Habermas is clearly borrowing heavily from Husserl's later work (Crisis of
European Science) on the life-world both directly and via his reading of
Schutz, Schutz and Luckmann and Berger and Luckmann. I would agree with your
characterisation apart from one reading of youre styatement that it is not
context dependent. I think this is too strong. The lifeworld provides the
interpretative scheme and resources which "opens up" particular aspects of
different context in specific ways without itself ever being fully opened up,
thematised, made wholly transparent (at least not all at once etc. Yet only
at the most formal/structural level (what in Husserl would be seen as
structural or eidetic analysis that abstracts from all content) can we refer
to THE horizon of THE lifeworld. Outside of such analytical abstraction,
which is of course valuable in its own right as self-clarification),
lifeworld horizons are clearly multiple, contextually specific in their
ever-variable contents. Again perhaps it is a case of avoiding any stark
either/or oppositions here, and needing to mediate between particularistic
context-specific content, elements of the content which transcendend some
(but not all) concrete contexts, and doing the same re the lifeworld forms
(some of which such as the horizonal aspect of the how the world "takes
shape" are invariant in that all cultural understanding that we seem aware of
to date does take shape in and through a specific "horizon". 

All the best

Michael Salter








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