dmariel, Habermas

During our Lyotard discussion in class, we covered some material about Habermas and his perception of expert knowledge, art as taste, and art as unity of experience. When reading Habermas directly, the part that most interested me that we had begun talking about in class last week was the idea that “life is splintered into independent specialties ruled by disciplinary experts”. Our culture has become fragmented, due to the frustration of people being unable to fit all the knowledge of the world into their heads. This is obviously impossible in our day and age; therefore we must break things down within our culture.
The Enlightenment period was a time in which people believed that science and reason would help explain everything around us, to bring us out of darkness and into the future. Habermas claims that the twentieth century has shattered this optimism. Consequently, “the differentiation of science, morality and art has come to mean the autonomy of the segments treated by the socialist and their separation from the hermeneutics of everyday communication. This splitting off is the problem that has given rise to efforts to ‘negate’ the culture of expertise” (103-104). Habermas questions whether or not we should still have faith in science and morality or shall we declare modernity a lost cause? This is an extremely controversial question, considering that the twentieth century has been shaped almost entirely by science and technology. I believe that we live in a culture full of neoconservatives, welcoming modern science to forward technical processes towards capitalist growth and rational administration. What hope would we have if it weren’t for science? I think our society would feel lost and surrendered without the amazing advances we have made in the past years. In conclusion, Habermas states “with the decisive confinement of science, morality and art to autonomous spheres separated from the life-world and administered by experts, what remains from the project of modernity is only what we would have if we were to five up the project of modernity altogether”.