Jürgen Habermas

A of my themes of interest in this semester has been the total theory of society of Jurgen Habermas (1929-until live). Jurgen Habermas is a german philosopher and sociologist. He is participe in Frankfurt school, a famous school of though, amose whose thinkers are Theodor Adorno, Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Marcuse, big philosofers of the 20th century. This thinkers point out that the modern society moves under the logic of instrumental reason (interested action). However, Jurgen Habermas tries go to further and for he proposed that society (analytically) is: Lifeworld and System. 

Lifeworld is the world of the social relations, where the subjects' life their cotidianity through communicative action and they try to generate "Undertanding" to achieve agreements. This world is composed by comunicative situations, as for example conversation. A conversation is a comunicative situation. In a comunicative situation the subjects have a scheme of reference composed for three "worlds": social world (social regulations), subjetive world (interior world: myself) and objects world (phisical objects, for example: house, dog, computer).

Nevertheles, this is a culturalist concept of Lifeworld, reason why Habermas added the daily concept of Lifeworld. Lifeworld is culture, society and personality, that is to say, the socio-cultural reproduction field. 

System is the material reproduction field (in the other words, the object of study of Karl Marx). System can be: kinship relations, State or economy. Habermas pointed out that the system colonizes to the lifeworld, this meaning that the lifeworld is dominated for the system and lifeworld stops being the space of comunicative reason and converts it into instrumental reason (Habermas returned to Th. Adorno, Horkheimer or Marcuse). 

Oh! This society is dominated by intrumental reason.