We live in a paradox. Our world is built on a foundation of incredible scientific achievement and technical rationality. We can calculate, predict, and control our environment with a precision unimaginable to previous generations. And yet, for many, the Modern society feels fragmented, meaningless, and governed by forces that are anything but rational. We have more tools for reason than ever, but our shared social life often seems to be falling apart. The “Age of Artificial Reason” is witnessing the disintegration of lifeworld for symbolic money and imaginative power. Fraternal bond is being replaced by a relationship of hierarchy and domination. Our world is fragmented into various values spheres, namely epistemic, moral, and aesthetic, each of them demands different actions and convictions and in particular the individual life seems to be at odds with social cohesion, our knowledge is meant to produce skills for the fulfillment of material life, our goal is to have “appetite for appetite” (Arindam Chakrabarti, 2025).
The great German social theorist Jürgen Habermas dedicated his life in untangling the paradoxes of Modernity. His work, though dense, offers one of the most powerful interpretations for understanding the deep structures of the Modern world. His masterwork, The Theory of Communicative Action, diagnoses the hyper-rationalized society producing irrational outcomes. Habermas begins with a fundamental distinction that challenges the cynical view that all human interaction is a power game. He argues that we engage in two radically different types of action, namely Strategic Action and Communicative Action. The first one is oriented towards success. In this mode, we treat other people as features of our environment, as means or obstacles to achieving our own private goals. It is the logic of the marketplace or the battlefield, based on “egocentric calculations of utility” and influencing an opponent’s decisions to get what we want. The second one is an action oriented to reaching mutual understanding. Here, the goal is not personal success but a shared agreement. We use language not to manipulate others but to genuinely coordinate our actions by finding a common ground. The aim is to arrive at a consensus based on shared reasons and a cooperative definition of the situation. This distinction is crucial because it posits that the foundational purpose of language is not manipulation but mutual understanding. While we often act strategically, the potential for genuine, reason-based agreement is built into the very structure of our ability to speak. This fundamental distinction between getting your way and getting along does not just describe individual conversations. Habermas argues that it forms the very basis for the two-part structure of Modern society: the “System” and the “Lifeworld”.
Concept of social action is distinguished by how they specify this coordination among the goal-directed actions of different participants-as the interlacing of egocentric calculations of utility, as a socially integrating consensus about norms and values instilled through cultural tradition and socialization, or as reaching understanding in the sense of a cooperative process of interpretation.
The Modern society tends to equate “rationality” with one thing: being efficient, scientific, and calculating. Habermas argues that this is a dangerously narrow definition, what he calls “cognitive-instrumental rationality”. He proposes an expanded concept of “communicative rationality”, which is rooted not in solitary calculation but in the social practice of giving and defending reasons. Under this broader view, rationality takes different forms depending on the claim being made. Cognitive-Instrumental Rationality is the familiar type, concerned with facts and effective achievement of purposes or goals. It asks, is this statement true? Is this action efficient? Moral-Practical Rationality is concerned with justifying actions in relation to shared social norms. It asks, is this action right or just in our community? Aesthetic-Practical Rationality relates to the authentic expression of our inner, subjective world and the justification of our personal tastes and values. It asks, is this expression of feeling sincere? Is this evaluation of taste authentic and defensible?
This is a powerful idea because it rescues large domains of human life from the charge of being “irrational”. An argument about morality or an expression of authentic feeling are not failures of reason; they are appeals to different, but equally important, forms of reason. These different forms of rationality are not just abstract categories; they are activated every time we speak. To see how, we must examine the implicit bets we make in every genuine conversation. The rationality inherent in this practice is seen in the fact that a communicatively achieved agreement must be based in the end on reasons. And the rationality of those who participate in this communicative practice is determined by whether, if necessary, they could, under suitable circumstances, provide reasons for their expressions. According to Habermas, whenever we speak with the genuine intention of reaching an understanding, we are implicitly making a high-stakes bet. For our utterance to be accepted, the listener must agree to three simultaneous “validity claims”. These claims relate to the three “worlds” a speaker simultaneously inhabits, namely, truth, rightness, and sincerity. These three claims are the practical bedrock for the different forms of rationality. When we challenge a truth claim, we engage our cognitive-instrumental rationality. When we challenge normative rightness, we appeal to moral-practical rationality. And when we question sincerity, we are using our aesthetic-practical rationality to evaluate an authentic expression. A single utterance can be challenged on any of these three grounds. To see how this works, consider the simple example of a professor asking a student in a seminar, “Please bring me a glass of water”. The student could reject the request by challenging any of the three claims: (a) “No, you can not treat me like one of your employees” (Rightness); (b) “No, you really only want to put me in a bad light” (Sincerity); and (c) “No, the next water tap is so far away that I could not get back before the end of the session” (Truth).
This reveals a profound, universal structure hidden within our most mundane interactions. This hidden structure of our conversations provides the foundation for social cooperation. But what happens when this foundation is systematically bypassed? To understand that, we must see how Habermas splits society into two distinct realms. Habermas argues that to understand the Modern society, we need a two-level model that distinguishes between the “Lifeworld” and the “System”. The Lifeworld (Lebenswelt) is the vast, taken-for-granted background of our social lives. It is the reservoir of shared cultural knowledge, group solidarities, and personal identities that we draw upon to communicate. The lifeworld is the realm of communicative action; it is reproduced through the process of reaching mutual understanding. The System consists of spheres of action that have become functionally independent. In the Modern society, the two primary examples are the capitalist economy and the Modern State administration. These spheres are the designated home of strategic action. They are not coordinated by communicative understanding but by what Habermas calls “steering media”. Money steers the economic system, coordinating action through prices and utility calculations, not through shared norms or values. And power steers the administrative system, coordinating action through commands and bureaucratic rules. These media “uncouple” action from the lifeworld. They allow for the coordination of millions of people over vast distances without anyone ever needing to stop and agree on anything. This two-level model of a communicative “Lifeworld” and an instrumental “System” is a powerful analytical tool. But for Habermas, it is also the key to diagnosing the central sickness of the Modern life. The pathology of the Modern life is the “internal colonization of the lifeworld”. This is the process by which the System, with its logic of money and power, penetrates and distorts domains of life that should only be coordinated through communicative action. Spheres like family life, education, and public political debate, which depend on mutual understanding for their health, are increasingly subordinated to economic and administrative imperatives. Habermas’s classic example is the “juridification” (Verrechtlichung) of the social-welfare State. While welfare policies are intended to help, they do so by turning citizens into bureaucratic “clients”. Complex life problems get redefined in the administrative language of the System, as cases to be managed and problems to be solved with monetary compensation. This process, while well-intentioned, can erode the very social bonds and forms of mutual support it is meant to sustain. For example, Social Media colonizes the lifeworld sphere of friendship. The communicative act of building relationships is displaced by the systemic logics of money, advertising-driven engagement metrics, and power through algorithmic control. Friendship becomes a performance measured in followers and likes, and authentic self-expression is replaced by strategic brand management. Education is colonized when the systemic demand for quantifiable outcomes, such as, standardized testing, performance metrics, override the communicative process of mentorship and genuine learning. The rich, unscripted dialogue between teacher and student is subordinated to the instrumental goal of optimizing test scores. Dating Apps colonize courtship by imposing the market logic of money and utility. The communicative search for a partner, a process of mutual self-disclosure and understanding, is transformed into a strategic game of profile optimization and efficient matching, treating potential partners as commodities in a catalog. For Habermas, this colonization is the source of many distinctly Modern social maladies, viz., a widespread loss of meaning, anomie, a sense of normlessness, social alienation, and a cynical withdrawal from public life. This diagnosis allows Habermas to pinpoint the source of Modern alienation. But it also sets him against a more pessimistic critique of Modernity, leading to his most hopeful and challenging conclusion. Rather, these new conflicts arise in areas of cultural reproduction, of social integration and of socialization. It is not primarily a question of compensations that the social-welfare State can provide, but of protecting and restoring endangered ways of life or of establishing reformed ways of life. In short, the new conflicts do not flare up around problems of distribution but around questions concerning the grammar of forms of life. The Problem is not the reason itself, but a reason that has gone wild.
Many critics of the Modernity, most famously Habermas’s predecessors at the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, argued that Enlightenment rationality was itself the problem. They saw "instrumental reason”, the drive to calculate and control, as a force that would inevitably lead to domination. Habermas offers a more nuanced and ultimately more hopeful diagnosis. The problem, he argues, is not rationalization as such, but a one-sided and imbalanced rationalization. The Modern society has enthusiastically developed and institutionalized one form of reason, the cognitive-instrumental rationality that powers the economic and administrative Systems. However, it has failed to equally develop the institutions that could support and protect the moral-practical and aesthetic-practical rationality of the lifeworld. The logic of the System has been allowed to become autonomous and dominate the logic of the lifeworld. The solution, for Habermas, is not to abandon the project of reason. It is to complete it. This requires “decolonizing the lifeworld” by building and strengthening institutions, like a vibrant and critical public sphere, that allow communicative rationality to flourish. Such institutions could set limits on the steering media of money and power, subordinating them to decisions reached through open and unconstrained communication. Habermas’s argument presents a grand narrative: the very foundation of a healthy and humane society is our capacity to talk to one another and reach mutual understanding. This foundation, which is the substance of our lifeworld, is being systematically eroded by powerful, non-communicative forces of money and power that do not need to persuade, only to calculate. The Enlightenment’s promise of a life informed by reason remains unfulfilled, not because reason is flawed, but because we have only institutionalized a fraction of its potential. The question Jürgen Habermas leaves us with is a practical one: How can we build institutions in our own lives and communities that subordinate the demands of money and power to the decisions we reach through unconstrained, open communication?
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