Communication and Life-World, rationality and aesthetic experience: an interdisciplinary discussion from a pragmatist perspective

Abstract

The following article discusses the triad of communication, rationality and aesthetic experience, essential for the social character of man and his culture, in the light of the Life-World. Whereas rationality has been a topic of philosophical inquiry since Greek antiquity – and the Latin term ratio translates, together with oratio, the Greek λόγος (lógos) -, the attention given to communication and aesthetic experience, as by Alfred Schütz and William James, is more recent, as also is the notion of communicative rationality developed by Jürgen Habermas. The text intends to line up shared characteristics and propose a discussion along these authors and others like John Dewey, Ernst Cassirer and Vilém Flusser, based on a pragmatist and phenomenological viewpoint of the Life-World, understood as a net sustained by symbolic exchange and communication.