Postformal operations and postmetaphysicality continued

Some more info from our historical archive to provide context for this latest tangent.This post quotes Habermas on the lifeworld from Postmetaphysical Thinking (MIT Press, 1992):

"This background...constitutes a totality that is implicit and that comes along prereflexively--one that crumbles the moment it is thematized; it remains a totality only in the form of implicit, intuitively presupposed background knowledge. Taking the unity of the lifeworld, which is known only subconsciously, and projecting it in an objectifying manner onto the level of explicit knowledge is the operation that has been responsible for mythological, religious and also of course metaphysical worldviews" (142-3).

And this one from Martin Morris, “Between deliberation and deconstruction” in The Derrida-Habermas Reader, U of Chicago Press, 2006, 231-53.

“The lifeworld reveals only a portion of itself in any dialogue because it exists as a phenomenological ‘background’ of pre-theoretical, pre-interpreted contexts of meaning and relevance….the vast proportion of lifeworld convictions always remain in the background during any discussion…. The lifeworld itself cannot be the proper them of communicative utterances, for as a totality it provides the space in or ground upon which such utterances occur, even those that name it explicitly….it remains indeterminate” (235-6).

Speaking for the lifeworld as if one could step outside of it and know it directly inevitably leads one to “invoke a cosmology,” a “metaphysics of the thing-in-itself” (239).