Abstract

BIALAKOWSKY, Alejandro. Meaning as lifeworld: indecision in relation to its social dimension in Habermas. Intersticios sociales [online]. 2021, n.21, pp.45-70.  Epub Aug 30, 2021. ISSN 2007-4964.

This article analyzes the problem of meaning in the perspective of Habermas based on the concept of lifeworld as it is developed in his key work on sociological theory, The Theory of Communicative Action. This unproblematic background of meaning, as the “condition of possibility” of the social, through its communicative rationalization, becomes “parceled” into culture, society, and personality. Thus, his study involves a series of equivalences and mediations among, for example, types of action, speech acts, and claims to validity. This specific historical form of meaning in modernity points, moreover, to two key processes with pathological characteristics; that is, the “colonization” and the “desertification” of the lifeworld. It is in this context that the article traces Habermas’ theoretical “enigma” concerning the relationship between meaning and its social dimension, and outlines three possible answers to this enigma, which Habermas discusses but does not resolve in his The Theory of Communicative Action: one “culturalist” in nature, one “aesthetic”, and one “legal”.

Keywords : contemporary sociological theory; problem of meaning; modernity; social pathologies; theoretical mediations.