Subject: HAB: The Unknowable Lifeworld
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 08:31:50 


Gary,

A posting to acknowledge your response. Thanks for your explication of the 
issues I raised re-Lifeworld & oppression. In particular these points make 
sense:

>G: Here, oppression is distinguishable from the background
>lifeworld that embodies it; and "ingrained" is an empirical
>issue (It's not engrained in many lives). One can't
>anticipate (or work toward) having a particular life
>without oppression unless one generally understands "the"
>lifeworld without that oppression. I (via JH's work) can
>*say* what a life without masking of conflict is, e.g., in
>terms of openness to reflective problem-solving and
>interactive "reflections" with others.
__________________________________________________________

Changing tack Gary to a slightly less serious issue; I wonder how you would 
react to the following quibbling point over Habermas's depiction of his 
Lifeworld concept. Reading the following statement by Habermas I am given to 
recall a criticism of Herbert Spencer's postulation of the *Unknowable* by 
someone whom I can't recall who said of Spencer's *Unknowable* that if it's 
so *unknowable* how do you know that it is there?

"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. 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

If the life-world dissolves once it is thematized how can we possibly know 
it is there? Where is Habermas's version of Kant's transcendental deduction?

best regards,

MattP

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