Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 10:09:26 -0800 (PST)
Subject: HAB: Rapport of the Lifeworld (re: Unknowable Lifeworld [Matt, #81])


M> I wonder how you would react to the following quibbling
point over Habermas's depiction of his Lifeworld concept….
If the life-world dissolves once it is thematized how can
we possibly know it is there? 

JH: "...Members of a social collective normally share a
life-world. In communication, but also in processes of
cognition, this only exists in the distinctive,
pre-reflexive form of background assumptions, background
receptivities or background relations. The life-world is
that remarkable thing which dissolves and disappears before
our eyes as soon as we try to take it up piece by piece...

G: I see no problem with what he says in the interview
passage you quote. The showing or efficacy of a habit or
know-how (a "piece" of the lifeworld) is very different
from a representation of it (knowing-that).  Also,
methodization of a facility --lecturing well, writing well,
composing-- will probably occlude the dimension of rapport
or comportment that gives the facility its
constructiveness. Lingustic categorization doesn't
formulate the rapport of conversation between persons who
"know" their shared language. 

Habermas, you know, focuses extensively and carefully on
the notion of lifeworld in TCA and elsewhere, so comments
in an interview should be taken as supplemental. Questions
of what he is committing himself to, in an interview,
shouldn't be addressed only within that context. So, I
would ask: Where in TCA is he writing about backgroundNESS
of "the" lifeworld? In light of this, I would pursue
questions raised  tacitly ("begged") by brief comment. 

JH: "...The life-world functions in relation to processes
of communication as a resource for what goes into explicit
expression. But the moment this background knowledge enters
communicative expression, where it becomes explicit
knowledge and thereby subject to criticism, it loses
precisely those characteristics which life-world structures
always have for those who belong to them: certainty,
background character, impossibility of being gone behind."
_A & S _, 1992: 109-10

G: Habermas isn't saying that, as you put it, "the
lifeworld dissolves once it is thematized." Rather, its
efficacy as "a resource" eludes explicitness. Its
"character" AS background is occluded by de-backgrounding
it.  A grammer is not a competence. 

On a train a few days ago, I watched a Latino boy listening
to his Spanish grandfather (evidently) with complete
understanding of a language I don't understand, and he was
translating into English for someone else on the train. My
ignorance of Spanish gave me a sense of amazement at the
boy's inexplicit facility. I was reminded of how so-called
"learning" a first language is so unlike what we thematize
as the learning process for language education. It's better
to say that the child *absorbs* the language into his
language organ (Chomsky would say). You wouldn't ask of
him: "How do you know it's there?"  Ask him in French, and
he would give you a quizical look, of course. But ask him
in *Spanish*, and he would give you a quizical look of
another sort: He *knows* Spanish because he lives it, not
because he can represent his competence to speak. 

Let us remember Gadamer's distinction between truth and
method, as we honor the centurian's long *life* in the face
of his passage away, in terms of what he lived in his
interpretive practices.

Regards,


Gary






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