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Habermas and Hermeneutics: From Verstehen to Lebenswelt
Richard Wolin
2019, 39 (2):
145-155.
Throughout his career, Habermas sought to remain faithful to the idea of a non-dogmatic and reflexive Marxism – Marxism as "critique." Although Habermas never adopted the framework of social phenomenology per se, by the same token, his reception of the later Husserl's notion of the lifeworld would play a central methodological role in his later work, enabling him to parry the well-entrenched scientistic biases of philosophy and social science. In "Knowledge and Human Interests" (1965), his inaugural lecture at University of Frankfurt, Habermas embraced Husserl's critique of modern science's misguided "mathematicization of nature." Yet his systematic employment of Husserl would not occur until Theory of Communicative Action (1981). There, the notion of the "Lifeworld" (Lebenswelt) as an inexhaustible repository of non-thetic, implicit meanings signifies a reservoir of semantic resistance vis-à-vis the predatory subsystems of "money" and "power" (Geld und Macht) that, under late capitalism, increasingly assume hegemony. Habermas coined the phrase, the "colonization of the lifeworld," to describe the process whereby informal spheres of human interaction are increasingly subjected to regulation and control by superordinate economic and bureaucratic structures. For Habermas, the discourse of social phenomenology, as it derived from the later Husserl, ultimately supplanted the role that "hermeneutics" had formerly played in his work – that is, as a methodological alternative to the objectivating approach that the social sciences. For Habermas, the attempt to remedy philosophy's positivistic self-misunderstanding was more than an abstract, theoretical concern. At stake was the growing "scientific-technical organization of the lifeworld," whose expansion had begun to threaten to the normative self-understanding of the West, which, in Habermas's view, revolved around the mutually complementary ideals of individual autonomy and democratic self-determination. In this respect, Habermas' constructive encounter with the later Husserl was wholly consistent with his overall project of developing a "Critical Theory with a practical intent."
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