CHAPTER XII
FROM ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT TO
HUMAN DEVELOPMENT:
HABERMAS’S RATIONALIZATION OF
THE LIFEWORLD
MANUEL B. DY, Jr.
Modernization is not only about expanding the economy. . . . Modernization properly means people sharing a belief and commitment in how society should be ordered: for what purposes, and for whose benefit.
President Fidel F. Ramos
96th Independence Day Address
The task of this paper is to clarify in philosophical terms the problem of economic development in Asian countries and to propose a solution so that economic development may lead to human development. The 1994 Philippine Human Development Report called attention to the fact that the growing economies of Malaysia and Thailand have led many people to think that develop-ment is purely economic. Economic progress can exact a high price in the quality of life of the people, such as pollution and stress. The rise of the gross national product does not necessarily translate into an equitable distribution of wealth, decreasing the gap between the rich and the poor. Human development is much more than eco-nomic development.
The framework I shall be using is Jürgen Habermas’s reconstruction of Max Weber’s studies on modernization, in par-ticular his notion of the rationalization of the lifeworld which contains the component of culture. Philippine President Ramos in the speech quoted above also emphasized that "tradition and modernity do not necessarily contradict each other." To my mind, tradition and modernity can be harmonized in what Habermas calls the rationalization of the lifeworld.
THE PROBLEM
According to Habermas:
1In order to define the form of capitalist economic activity, bourgeois private law, and bureaucratic authority. Rationalization means, first of all, the extension of the areas of society subject to the criteria of rational decision. Second, social labor is industrialized, with the result that instru-mental action also penetrates into other areas of life (urbanization of the mode of life, technification of transport and communication). Both trends exemplify the type of purposive-rational action which refers to either the organization of means or the choice between alternatives.
The progressive "rationalization" of society is linked to the institutionalization of scientific and technical development. To the extent that techno-logy and science permeate social institutions and thus transform them, old legitimations are des-troyed. The secularization and "disenchantment" of action orienting worldview, of cultural tradition as a whole, is the obverse of the growing "ra-tionality" of social action.
In reconstructing Weber’s rationalization of society, Ha-bermas sees three levels of rationalization: 1) The magical-mythical worldview breaks down under the influence of world religions (Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam) in which the cosmos becomes a coherent meaningful whole, 2) Societal ra-tionalization takes place where the economy and administration are organized according to the criteria of formal, purposive rationality, 3) Cultural "value spheres" begin to have different inner logics resulting in conflicts such as between the ethic of brotherhood and the demands of capitalist economic life.
2 Habermas interprets Weber’s cultural spheres into three: science and technology, cor-responding to the natural world; morality and law, corresponding to the social world; and art and literature, corresponding to the subjective world.3 For Weber, the rationality that defines mo-dernity is at bottom a purposive or means/ends rationality whose aim is the mastery of the world. It dissolves traditional super-stitions, prejudices and errors, but does not replace traditional worldviews with anything that could fulfill the functions of giving meaning and unity to life. Weber challenged the Enlightenment’s faith in reason, that progress in science is necessarily accompanied by progress in morality. Values for him cannot be rationally grounded but only chosen; the mastery over nature is value-neutral for it can be harnessed from any value perspective. The progress of Western societies is the ascendancy of purpose rationality, of technique and calculation, of organization and administration, in the final analysis, of the triumph of bureaucracy.4When analyzing oriental societies, Weber did not believe modernization could ever come to oriental societies because of their deeply embedded religious worldviews, which Habermas interprets as having low rationalization potential. Weber could have been mistaken in his prediction regarding the modernization of Eastern societies, but from another point of view, from the reformulation by Habermas, he could have been right -- the rationa-lization of oriental societies is impossible without it also being pathological. The pathological here is understood as the loss of freedom and the loss of meaning.
5Habermas applies his theory of communicative actin to expand Weber’s notion of rationality:
6
The theory of communication can contribute to explaining how it is that in the modern period an economy organized in the form of markets is functionally intermeshed with a state that has a monopoly of power, how it gains autonomy as a piece of norm-free sociality over against the life-world, and how it opposes its own imperatives based on system maintenance to the rational im-peratives of the lifeworld.
Communicative action, in contract to purposive-rational action of the economic system, is a principle of sociation, a medium for the reproduction of the lifeworld. The lifeworld is made up of three structural components and their corresponding reproduction pro-cesses based on different aspects of communicative action:
Components Processes Action
culture cultural reproduction understanding
society social integration coordination
personality socialization sociation
Culture is "the store of knowledge from which those engaged in communicative action draw interpretations susceptible of con-sensus as they come to an understanding about something in the world," thus serving the transmission and renewal of cultural knowledge. Society is "the legitimate orders from which those engaged in communicative action gather a solidarity based on be-longing to groups, as they enter into interpersonal relationships with one another." Personality is the "art for acquired com-petencies that render a subject capable of speech and action, and hence able to participate in processes of mutual understanding in a given context and to maintain his own identity in the shifting context of interaction."
7Habermas sees a twofold problem affecting modern society, steering problems having to do with system maintenance and problems of mutual understanding of social relations. The main problem, however, is the conflict between system imperatives and lifeworld imperatives, when system imperatives with their pur-posive-rational or success-oriented action encroach upon and dominate the lifeworld through the non-linguistic media of money and power. When communicative action is subordinated to pur-posive-rational action, and social integration to system imperatives, the result is a colonization of the lifeworld; the costs of this kind of modernization are reification and cultural impoverishment.
The colonization of the lifeworld happens with the de-coupling of system imperatives from the lifeworld through the medium of money. Money "makes possible not only specifically the deworlded forms of interaction, but the formation of a func-tionally specialized subsystem that articulates its relationship to the environment via money,"
8 and thus assimilates also the ad-ministrative structure (power). Increasingly, the moral-practical elements of the lifeworld are driven out of the private and public spheres, and "everyday life is increasingly `monetarized’ and `bureaucratized’",9 resulting in a norm-free sociality. A clash then exists between two principles of sociation: linguistic communication oriented to validity claims (norms and values) and the de-linguistified steering media (money and power).10 If the latter wins, the result is reification.Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann
11 define reification as:
The apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something else than human products -- such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will. Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own au-thorship of the human world, and further that the dialectic between man, the producer, and his pro-ducts is lost to consciousness. The reified world, is by definition, a dehumanized world.
Reification is the loss of freedom of lifeworld agents. We see this in oriental cities, in the rat-race for money and power. The market system has penetrated the domain of symbolic interactions such that interrelationships have become functional and frag-mentary, their meaning lost in the maze of efficiency. Statements like "I have to do this because of my position" have become com-mon. The original oriental cosmocentric view of nature has given way to a partial instrumentalistic view of the material universe. What used to be a natural organic outlook has become artificial and interventional. Nature is manipulated to serve material ends without respect for its internal rhythm, giving rise to problems of ecological imbalance and a growing disparity between urban and rural cultures. The oriental ideal of mastery of self is being sub-verted and made subservient to the mastery of things. We can see this in the proliferation (in learning institutions) of courses aimed at achieving skills and the large numbers of students enrolling in them, rather than in the liberal arts. Furthermore, students want instant, shortcut results. Youth go for what is newest in the market, imitating Western models in fashion, gadgets and music.
Gradually the communitarian humanism that once characterized the East is being replaced by Western humanism whose roots in capitalism is the ethic of individualism, possessiveness, and domination. What is being emphasized now is "my rights," rather than "my obligations." The family is no longer spared from this individualism of purposive rationalism and has become a func-tional imperative of the social system. Now, it is my family versus the others, with economic security as the prime motive for com-petition; this has crept into the political sphere in the form of cronyism. Family size is dictated by the demands of the economy. In short, relationships, whether private or public, have become commodified.
Together with the loss of freedom in reification there is the loss of meaning in cultural impoverishment. For Weber, this is the inevitable result of the disenchantment process, leading to se-cularization and the splitting up of life into different cultural spheres, each divorced from the others. For Habermas, however, what leads to cultural impoverishment is not the differentiation, but the "elitist splitting off of expert cultures from the contexts of everyday practice."
12 Increasingly, specialized forms of argumentation become the guarded preserve of experts, losing contact with the majority of people. For example, science and technology have been removed from the world of the average citizen. The pro-fessionalization demanded by modernization has separated the development of cultures from the communicative structures of everyday life. What has happened in many oriental cities is the relegation of traditional art to the museum and the theatre on special occasions, resulting in the drying up of nature-like tradi-tions. Thus a cleavage exists between the processes of mutual understanding and the cultural resources.13 Everyday the citizen is bombarded with information, but this knowledge is robbed of its synthesizing power; it becomes fragmented."14 With fragmentation and alienation, the person no longer has a sense of identity and meaning.15
RATIONALIZATION OF THE LIFEWORLD
The solution Habermas proposes to these pathologies is a rationalization of the lifeworld. The rationalization of the lifeworld is constituted by a structural differentiation of three dimensions: (1) Culture as "a condition allowing for continual revision of tradi-tions which have become unhardened and reflexive." (2) Society as "a condition allowing for the dependency of legitimate orders on formal procedures on justification of norms." (3) Personality as "a condition allowing for the continually self-steered stabilization of a highly abstract ego-identity."
16 The rationalization of the life-world, first of all, involves what Habermas calls "linguistification of the sacred," and since the moral authority of social norms has its root in the sacred (Emile Durkheim), rationalization of the life-world would mean rationalization of worldviews:17
Basic religious consensus, the structure of action oriented to understanding becomes more and more effective in cultural reproduction, social integration, and personality formation. The authority of tradition is increasingly open to discursive ques-tioning; the range of applicability of norms ex-pands while the latitude for reasoned justification increases.
Here "the `pre-judgmental power’ of the lifeworld pro-gressively diminishes, in the sense that communicative actors in-creasingly owe their mutual understanding to their own inter-pretive accomplishments, to their own yes/no positions on criticizable validity claims."
18 The rationalization of the lifeworld calls for a reinterpretation of traditional culture in the face of mo-dernization. This reinterpretation must be coupled with an en-lightened self-criticism, a critique of the values of one’s culture in view of an open communication.For Habermas, the rationalization of the lifeworld paves the way for the development of a modern lifeworld with an expanded notion of rationality beyond the purposive-rational. The direction is towards "the abstraction of universal lifeworld structures from the particular configurations of totalities of forms of life that arise only as plural."
19 On the cultural level, this means that the tra-ditional nuclei separate off from the concrete contents of mythical worldviews. On the society level, this means that the general prin-ciples crystallize out of particular contexts. On the personality level, the cognitive structures dissociate from the contents of cultural knowledge. On all these levels, there is a separation of form and content, and the different validity claims (of science and technology, of morality and law, and of art and literature) are discussed and agreed upon in mutual understanding.An example of the above is the reinterpretation of the Golden Rule or shu in the light of modern day realities. There is a point to Kant’s objection to the Golden Rule as being hypothetical ("If you do not want this to be done to you, do not do it to others."): it is based on one’s nature or situation. The benevolent government of Mencius is based too on the innate natural goodness of human na-ture, one that is endowed by Heaven. There is thus something sacred in the Golden Rule. The linguistification of the Golden Rule would mean reformulating it according to the logic of practical dis-course of Habermas: the claim to what is right is justified in terms of the principles of universalizability.
20 What is right is what can be universalized. Here the focal point is not just the individual "I" but the person that every human being is.The rationalization proper to the lifeworld is the "expansion of the areas in which action is coordinated by way of com-municatively achieved agreement."
21 Here, self-consciousness in culture becomes reflexive, there is self-determination in gene-ralized values and norms, and self-realization in an advanced indi-viduation of socialized subjects. This growth in reflexivity, in universalism, and in individuation "takes place under conditions of an evermore extensive and evermore finely woven net of lin-guistically generated intersubjectivity.22 There is both differentiation and condensation at once, a thickening of the web of inter-subjective threads that hold together culture, society, and the person. Continuity of tradition is secured through critique, and the potential for negation in the process of reaching agreement in language is necessary. To the degree that the lifeworld is ra-tionalized, the expenditure of understanding borne by communicative agents increases. Of course, this also increases the risk of dissent (negation) in communication, but the consensus reached will generate a greater bonding effect.23 "Socialization takes place in the same proportion as individuation, just as, inversely, indi-viduals are constituted socially."24In the concrete, a communicatively rationalized lifeworld must develop institutions that would set limits to material re-production and subordinate it to decisions arrived at in an un-constrained communication. These institutions would protect the private and public spheres from the reifying dynamics of economic and administrative subsystems, provide feedback relations between a differentiated modern culture and an impoverished everyday practice, allowing practical questions of general interest to be submitted to public discussion and decided on the basis of discursively achieved agreement.
25 In the public sphere, com-munication must be free of domination, and equal consideration must be given to the interests of each individual in order to arrive at common consciousness of greater clarity. Technologies of communication such as book publishing, radio, press, television, provide such network of public sphere.26 In self-organized public spheres, a prudent combination of power and intelligent self-restraint is needed to sensitize the self-steering mechanisms of the state and the economy.27All these partial public spheres, however, "point to a comprehensive public sphere in which society as a whole fashions a knowledge of itself."
28 This is where philosophy plays an im-portant role, for in the words of Habermas:29
from the resources of largely rationalized life-worlds. This holds true especially for culture, that is to say, for science’s and philosophy’s potential for interpretations of self and world, for the enlightenment potential of strictly universalistic legal and moral representations, and not last, for the radical experiential contents of aesthetic mo-dernity.
Philosophy in the tradition of Socrates and Confucius is needed in the comprehensive public sphere for the rationalization of the lifeworld, for philosophy is reflexive, critical and dialogical. Only when the lifeworld is rationalized can economic development pave the way for human development.
NOTES
1. Jürgen Habermas, "Technology and Science as Ideology" Towards a Rational Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 81.
2. Stephen White, The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 93-94.
3. Ibid., p. 95.
4. Thomas McCarthy, "Introduction" to Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. xviii.
5. Stephen White, op.cit., p. 103.
6. Jürgen Habermas, "The Normative Content of Modernity", The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), p. 349.
7. Ibid., p. 343.
8. Ibid., p. 351.
9. Thomas McCarthy, op.cit., p. xxxii.
10. Stephen White, op.cit, p. 101.
11. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Anchor Books, 1967). Quoted by Jürgen Habermas, op.cit., pp. 77-78.
12. Stephen White, op.cit., p. 116.
13. Thomas McCarthy, op.cit., p. xxxii.
14. Stephen White, op.cit., p. 99.
15. See Appendix for table of different pathologies. Stephen White, op.cit., p. 117.
16. Stephen White, op.cit., p. 99.
17. Thomas McCarthy, op.cit., pp. xxii-xxiii.
18. Ibid., p. xxv.
19. Jürgen Habermas, "Normative Content", op.cit., p. 344.
20. Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Thoughts of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1978), p. 313.
21. Ibid., p. xxxvii.
22. Jürgen Habermas, "Normative Content", p. 345-346.
23. Ibid., p. 30.
24. Ibid., p. 347.
25. Thomas McCarthy, p. xxxvii.
26. Jürgen Habermas, "Normative Content", p. 359.
27. Ibid., p. 365.
28. Ibid., p. 360.
29. Ibid., p. 365.
APPENDIX
Crisis phenomena connected with disturbances in reproduction
Structural components
Disturbances in
the domain of Culture Society Person Evaluative dimension
Cultural reproduction 1. Loss of meaning 4. Withdrawal 7. Crisis inorientation Rationality of and education knowledge
Social integration 2. Insecurity 5. Anomie 8. Alienation Solidarity of members
collective identity
Socialization 3. Breakdown of 6. Withdrawal 9.Psychopathologies Accountability of
tradition of motivation the person
a creative society, but under different socio-economic forms which imply that the female has a specific experience. During economically primitive times women held a higher position as authorities of families and society, but were not self aware in this regard. In agricultural economies, women’s authority collapsed and they lost their whole personality, manifesting thereby the antinomy which can exist between the development of the economy and of women’s personality. The development of the industrial economy and the establishment of the system of democracy awoke and helped evolve women’s personality. However, backwardness of thought regarding the development of the economy and consequent male behavior created difficulties for women’s personality development. A modernized economy will enrich the female subject’s personality and open the possibilities for women to rediscover their self and improve their personality.
THE PRIMITIVE ECONOMY AND THE FEMALE’S POSITION OF AUTHORITY
Almost every nation has undergone a time when they worshiped female goddesses and had beautiful legends concerning their authority. Female goddesses could not only repair heaven and make the earth, but could also create and multiply human beings. The worship of female goddesses reflects the authoritive position of female in material things and in producing human beings during primitive economic times. With respect to material production, their level then was very low. Women collected natural fruit, while men hunted for animals, but because of poor instruments men often came back with nothing, whereas the collection of fruit by women was the main source of food. In their state of group marriage, everyone knew his or her mother without knowing the father; child bearing was considered the business of women alone. In both material and human production women occupied a dominant position and were respected by everybody. With men they worked hard for the development of humankind, but did not ride roughshod over people by means of their position. Hence, their personalities were sound and beneficial. In such a time women had both position and personality, but they could not be said to have had independent individual personalities. They were conscious of a heavy dependence upon nature and human beings; there was no place for a sense of independent personality.
AGRICULTURAL ECONOMY AND THE LOSS OF FEMALE PERSONALITY
Progress in productive tools changed the natural division of labor. The rise of agriculture and livestock provided a new productive force. In addition, individual marriage replaced group marriage so that people knew their own parents. Child bearing was no longer a holy affair, but a burden binding women in the family. Men came to occupy the authoritive position in society originally held by women. With the establishment of the system of private property, women no longer had an independent personality, but became an exploited and oppressed part of men’s property.
The development of economy and the progress of the marriage relation need not have led to the loss of women’s personality, but the fact is just the contrary. We have seen several antinomies above: first, women invented primitive agriculture, contributed to the invention of fire and livestock farming, and helped to bring about the development of the economy and progress in history. At the same time, women showed themselves less competent than men in such productive activities as agriculture and livestock farming, which made them subordinate to men; second, women contributed to the continuation of the human race, but child bearing bound them in families and deprived them of the opportunity to take part in social activities; third, males created the culture and value system and made themselves subjects of the society, while treating females as object and tools. Although these are historical antinomies, they were inevitable for human beings in their efforts to free themselves for the bonds of nature. In a society of low productive power, it is an axiom that the weak are prey to the strong. The backwardness of production and its corresponding feudal system and culture could not provide room for an equality of both sexes. Therefore, for the progress of the economy it was unavoidable that women’s personality would be sacrificed. In the dark ages in China as well as in the West women could not participate in politics and the praiseworthy characters of the female were also distorted: women become jealous due to living together with their husband’s concubines; they became self effacing due to being subject to maltreatment; and they became narrow-minded through living for a long time in the boudoir without going out. In the meantime, the distortion of the male personality was manifested in another way. Many men were subordinate to other men due to the social system which gave primary to the father’s rights so that they had no personality of their own. In the family, marriage for the sole purpose of child bearing and expression of the sexual impulse without love alienated the human essence of males.
THE INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY AND THE AWAKENING AND VARIATION OF WOMEN’S PERSONALITY
The industrial economy destroyed the natural sense of the family as the basic unit. Great quantities of labor were needed by large industry. This created opportunities for women to enter social life, to participate in economic activities, to earn salaries, and hence no longer to be the property of others. This provided a good basis for their positions as social subjects. In addition, the democratic system, corresponding to the industrial economy, promoted such ideas as "all are equal in terms of money"; "all are equal before the law", "all are equal before God". This gave rise to public opinion favorable to the independence of women as regards their personality. All this was helpful in awakening women’s personalities as subjects. In industrial society women actively fulfilled their obligations while seeking their legitimate rights and interests in activities which constantly improve their personality. However, the following elements in industrial society frustrated the development of women’s personality or even subjected it to certain deviations.
First, industrial production places the machine at the center; it aims at producing material objects and is determined by the investment of human power and other resources; it emphasizes physical labor and operational technology, and the proportion of physical labor is much greater than that of mental work. This situation is unfavorable to women; they suffer sexual discrimination in seeking a job, which hinders the establishment of women’s personalties as subjects.
Second, due to the backwardness of ideas in comparison to the progress of the economy, certain feudal ideas such as "the male has dignity while the female is humble" and "a woman should be subordinate to a man" still fetter women, and influence social expectations regarding their role and value. This gives rise to certain dilemmas for women in seeking their rights and fulfilling their obligations. Many women feel a tension between their role in society and in their family, and in seeking a position in social life while feeling a sense of obligation to be a good wife and mother.
Third, the male culture inclines women to be masculine: as society has long been dominated by men the behavior of successful men in social life is taken as the pattern for all people. As women have not created their own pattern of behavior, they must conform to the pattern of man’s behavior so that their role in social life will more easily be accepted. This stage cannot be surmounted until women fully participate as subjects in society. Although the slogans such as "equality for both sexes" play a great role in freeing women from the fetters of family to become subjects in society, they are harmful to the maintenance of the distinctively female personality. In China, a trend toward the masculinization of women was strong after the 1950s, and reach its height in the 1970s. The "Iron Young Woman" in the 1950s was very similar to the male physique; in the 1970s the dress, even the style of women’s hair, was masculinized. Coming into 1980s, people exclaimed with surprising that "there are no woman in this country"; they began to doubt whether the "strong woman" was perfect in personality. Women refused to be masculinized.
However, people have no answer to the question what is the ideal personality for women? They sink into puzzlement and inertia. Men are afraid of their wives being "strong women", and women themselves fear being "strong women". In order to be thought of as tender, many women do not dare to show their talent, but then they worry about being too feminine; they do not know how to mould their personalities. The solution to the problem requires further development in the economy as well as constant progress in ideology; one is complementary to the other.
THE MODERN ECONOMY AS HELPFUL TO MOLDING THE IDEAL FEMALE PERSONALITY
The modernized economy is a great revolution over the traditional one and will bring about change in all facets of society. The female personality will be developed and improved in the process of the modernization of society and its ideal will be realized.
First, the productive mode of the modernized economy helps manifest the personality of women as subjects. In modern industry, what determines the production is no longer physical human strength, but the application of a high level of technology, which increases the proportion of mental work. Now in some developed countries, the proportion of mental work versus physical labor approximates 1:1, while the value created by the former far exceeds that created by the latter. Therefore, the application of high level technology will reduce or eliminate the physical inferiority of women in production, and enable women to give play to their superiority in patience, carefulness and nimbleness. This is obviously indicated in developed countries: in the U.K. women have more job opportunities than men.
Second, the operational mode of a modernized economy enables women to choose the job suited to them. The open, dynamic pattern of the economy enables women to find positions of their own in a wider range of social activity. In developed countries, women are exploring molding ideal personalities. They are not the traditional good mothers and wives who sacrifice themselves in a closed family context, nor are they the so-called strong women of industrial times. They develop their own standard and hope to get a valuable job with flexible hours and a good location; they hope to take account of both family and career. Some women give up work and become housewives while bring up their children, but their return to the family is for the purpose of educating their children and giving their children the natural love of a mother so that the children can grow soundly. In the meantime, they engage in further studies to give play to their potentialities or to develop their interests, so that they will be more competitive when they take up a career after their children have grown up. Such exploration is praiseworthy under the conditions of a modernized economy; it advances the civilization of the whole society.
Third, the high educational level of society, the high degree of democracy and the modernization and socialization of house work due to the modernization of the economy will enable women to elevate their quality as human beings, to demonstrate their personality, to strengthen their competitive power in social life, and to realize a sound personality. There will be a day when we need no longer emphasize that the male and the female differ and recognize that there is something common to both sexes. Then the peculiar and varied beauty of the character and personality of the female will demonstrate itself naturally in the world.
Of course, molding the female personality depends not merely on the progress of economy and is not merely a matter for women alone. It depends on the consistent efforts of the whole society; this requires theoretical work by scholars to find the incompatibilities and in time eliminate them.