Form of understanding in The Theory of Communicative Action

• Grant number: 21/00898-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: April 01, 2022
• End date: February 28, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Marcos Severino Nobre
• Grantee: Rafael Augusto Palazi
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 19/22387-0 - Crises of democracy: critical theory and the diagnosis of present time, AP.TEM
• Associated scholarship(s): 23/02385-9 - Reification and its Actualizations on Habermas Communicative Paradigm, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

This research has as general aim the analysis and comment of the concept "form of understanding" in the work Theory of Communicative Action (1981) by Jürgen Habermas. In this work, the author proposes that his concept of communicative action, a type of action oriented towards understanding, is the basis of a research program whose objective is to overcome the theoretical and practical impasses he diagnosed in Western Marxism, especially in the current which author joins, namely, Critical Theory. In fact, the concept proposed by Habermas is manifestly critical of Georg Lukács's model of Marxist interpretation of society of History and Class Consciousness (1923), for which the "form of objectivity" [Gegenständlichkeitsform] is the concept that best it explains the way of thinking and acting, as well as the form of domination generated by capitalism. There would be in the Lukács transformation of Marx's commodity fetishism thesis through a thesis of the constitution of the formally unitary structure of consciousness, specific to the capitalist mode of production. It is the interpretation of reification as a reification of conscience, a social form of domination that is established for the society as a whole, that means, "form of objectivity". The hypothesis that will guide our research is that the concept of communicative action can only offer a reformulation in the face of Lukács' diagnosis about the reification of conscience, notably in the formulation of the Habermasian diagnosis of the colonization of the system over the lifeworld, through the explanatory category "form of understanding". Therefore, we understand that the theoretical basis for the communicative action that Habermas finds in the "form of understanding" is necessary for his criticism of instrumental reason, proposing the reformulation of the reification concept.