TECHNICAL PROGRESS AND THE SOCIAL LIFE-WORLD BY JÜRGEN HABERMAS

Jürgen Habermas uses Aldous Huxley’s Literature and Science, to examine the relationship between science and literature and how science fits within the social life-world. Essentially, Huxley distinguishes the two cultures primarily according to the specific experiences with which they deal.

Literature makes statements mainly about private experiences, subjective, and makes statements that can’t be repeated by others. Literature deals with the subtle difference of a person’s world, all the things that occur from the moment of birth to the time of death. Science, on the other hand, is public, contains intersubjectively accessible experiences and can be expressed in a formal language that, through general definitions, can be made universally valid. Science doesn’t concern itself with the life world as literature does. It is not based on culture or ego. It’s not about the ordinary language of social groups and socialized individuals instead it looks at structures and regularities.

Through his separation of literature and science, Huxley put side by side with the social life world and the worldless universe of facts, and for Huxley, knowledge is the key to embed science and its information about the worldless universe into the life world of social groups. Knowledge is power and because science is true and exact, it is the knowledge which therefore wields a lot of control and power over people. For Huxley, the world would be better if literature assimilated scientific statements as such so that science can take on flesh and blood.

What Aldous Huxley fails to mention and Habermas does add is that the sciences enter the social life world through the technical exploitation of their information. For Habermas, only as technological knowledge (knowledge that would aid us in our power for technical control) can scientific knowledge infiltrate the action orienting self-understanding of social groups. When scientific knowledge is communicated as technological knowledge to the social life world, it can become a part of practical knowledge which gains expression in literature. However Habermas resisted such responsibility is placed at literature’s doorstep.  “Without mediation,” he claims, “the information content of the sciences cannot be relevant to that part of practical knowledge which gains expression in literature”. Rather, literature can only speak to the effect or use of technology in and amongst such social groups.  Habermas adds that “only when information is exploited for the development of productive or destructive forces, can its revolutionary practical results penetrate the literary consciousness of the life world: poems arise from consideration of and not from the elaboration of hypotheses about the transformation of mass into energy.

This brings us to a question posed by Habermas: “How is it possible to translate technically exploitable knowledge into the practical consciousness of a social life-world?”. However he explains where technology should evolve and the power that it holds. He sees technology as a whole new way of life, but it must be applied to the life world. This question sets Habermas to ask yet another question: “How can the relation between technical progress and the social life-world, which today is still clothed in a primitive, traditional, and unchosen form, be reflected upon and brought under the control of rational discussion?”.

And unlike before, where literature had to learn to infuse itself with science to become “flesh and blood,” now science must learned to integrate itself into a world in which “a rational discussion that is not focused exclusively either on technical means or on the application of traditional behavioral norms” are demanded. It seems, in essence, that science has to make concession to literature and realize the world is more complex than knowledge and application. This idea that scientific knowledge was a source of culture caused a separation between universities and technical schools because technical schools were not influenced by theoretical guidance.

Habermas sees this lack of merging science with the “practical life-world” shows a problem with “the relation of technology and democracy: how can the power of technical control be brought within the range of the consensus of acting and transacting citizens”.  Questions about technology fall within the realm of economics, politics, and administration which is “not a sufficient condition for realizing the associated material and intellectual productive forces in the interest of the enjoyment and freedom of an emancipated society”.  However, he disagrees with Fryer that “in the face of research, technology, the economy, and administration integrated as a system has become autonomous,” but the political influences have brought about “disposable techniques” that “in the end merely conceal preexisting, unreflected social interest and prescientific decisions”. As little as we can accept the optimistic convergence of technology and democracy, the pessimistic assertion that technology excludes democracy is just as untenable. The challenges facing us today are the social interests that decide the “direction of technical progress”.    As such, this challenged calls upon us to set “into motion a politically effective discussion that rationally brings the social potential constituted by technical knowledge and ability into a defined and controlled relation to our practical knowledge and will”.