Jurgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Etherealization

We are starved to death, fed on the eternal sodom-apples of thought-forms. What we want is complete imaginative experience, which goes through the whole soul and body. Even at the expense of reason we want imagidative experience. For reason is certainly not the final judge of life. Though, if we pause to think about it, we shall realize that it is not Reason herself whom we have to defy, it is her myrmidons, our accepted ideas and thought-forms. Reason can adjust herself to almost anything, if we will only free her from her crinoline and powdered wig, with which she was invested in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish. D.H. Lawrence 1978: 297 Jiirgen Habermas fervently believes that through rational argumentation a just society can be created and sustained, and his two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (TCA) is a massive compendium which explicates these beliefs by squeezing a vast array of high-powered theories into its brief one thousand or so pages. Habermas’s intentions are grand: his theory of communicative action is at once an attempt to develop a socially-based theory of action as an alternative to the subjectivist and individualist underpinnings of much of social theory, a “two-level concept of society that connects the ‘lifeworld ’ and ‘system ’ paradigms, ” a critical theory of modernity which retains the enlightenment ideal of rationally-grounded societies, and a theory of meaning rooted in a developmental logic of world-historical rationality. Habermas seeks to find a via media between totalitarian closure and relativism, to show why the modernist project of a universal reason is still viable, and t