From: "Ali Rizvi" <ali_m_rizvi-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: HAB: Habermas' conception of lifeworld [Stefan]
Date: Wed, 05 Feb 2003 05:07:17 +0000


Stefen,

Thanks for your enlightening remarks. I am gratful for your time. What I say 
below is not in order to contradict what you say but to try to develop my 
own understanding of the issue in the light of your comments.

1)Transcendental is by definition undetermined. It is true that Habermas 
clearly believes that lifeworld is determined and thematized. But he also 
recognises that lifeworld cannot be completely determined and thematized. 
There is always a ‘portion’ of lifeworld that escapes this determination so 
to speak. And I guess this double character of lifeworld as being immanent 
and yet always receding backward is what makes possible what Habermas calls 
transcendence from within and I also assume that this is what Habermas keeps 
calling detranscendnetalisation of the Kantian themes (although this 
involves other things as well).

2)I do agree with you that lifeworld, as a transcendental site is not a 
place. However I do believe that such a notion would involve commitment to a 
particular ontology. I also agree with you that lifeworld is an 
idealisation. But this is not the only sense of lifeworld. A particular form 
of lifeworld is an idealisation and not lifeworld as such. Lifeworld has 
both regulative and constitutive sense and these senses need to be separated 
as they have different context.

3)I also realise that the concept of lifeworld can be approached from 
different angles and with different intents and epistemo-ontological 
approach is not the only approach. The sociological concept of lifeworld 
with practical intent is a legitimate use of the concept and I guess you are 
more interested in the latter.

4)My own interest in Habermas is predominately in his defence of Western 
Rationalism and its implications. But I would be last to assume that this is 
the only legitimate and fruitful approach to Habermas.

5)Stefan when I was raising the possibility of more than one concepts of 
lifeworld working in Habermas, I was making a contradiction apparent but not 
in order to succumb to it. I do believe that there is a solution to this and 
had raised the question in order to understand the possibility of linking 
them. In fact in my first point above I do suggest a possible answer.

6)I think Bill is right. Unless we think lifeworld as prior to communicative 
action and solidarity we would end up reducing it to the present and 
immanent and lose it as the unending reservoir of the possibility of 
communication, meaning, solidarity and understanding. However this should 
not amount to denying that communicative action and solidarity are always 
already implicated in lifeworld.

7)I do concur with your comments on the resistance potential of lifeworld 
and its being characteristic tendency of Western folk culture. But that in a 
sense takes you beyond Habermas to Foucault and other postmodernist 
tendencies. But anyhow this is to take your comments too lightly. I think 
they deserve separate attention as your remarks about lifeworld and Foucault 
and visuality. But that would take me well beyond Habermas so may be on 
another more appropriate occasion.

best regards

ali




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