well-being and public policy: lifeworld and system

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April 19 — 7:30 pm

Thinking about the relationship of well-being and public policy has become very important in a lot of venues, I believe. One might hope that if social philosophy has any usefulness, it contributes to progressing the relationship between well-being and public policy. So, thinking about lifeworld and system relative to the real world might be well exemplified by applying that to a real context. Outgrowing contexts of decades past doesn’t change the importance of conceptual issues for real issues of the present, if the conceptual resources are really important.

looking back: Habermas and “lifeworld”

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A practical way to get to the heart of the matter with Jürgen Habermas (hereafter: JH) is the short number of philosophical pages on lifeworld in Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (PDM): pp. 341-346; 359-366. There, he draws directly from Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2 (TCA-2) to provide a synoptic of how he understands lifeworld, as a matter of rationalization for the sake of theorizing public communicative action. Lifeworld itself is a “resource” for his interest in political action. But through this PDM discussion, he’s also evocative about understanding the lifeworld itself. PDM is a good context (4+ years after TCA) to get at his philosophical interest. 

about lifeworldliness

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I wrote quickly in a recent posting that “there’s no prima facie incommensurability between regarding integrated symbolic life and economic activity,” but I failed to express my point well, which had in mind a surmise about regarding symbolic life and economic activity as integrated.

pragmatic 3-fold of the lifeworld

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to be discussed:

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