ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates in detail how technology can be approached within the theory of communicative action and which unexploited resources for a theory of technology, if any, exist within this theory. It summarizes the most important results from the critique of the subject-object theory in the preceding, which may be useful for a theory of technology. Herbert Schnadelbach wishes to go no further than a purely action-theoretic distinction between lifeworld and system. Jurgen Habermas distinguishes between impoverishment of the lifeworld via rationalization, and pathologies which develop as a result of its colonization. Habermas develops his own concept of the lifeworld through a confrontation with the theory proposed by the phenomenological sociology, an expression he uses to describe the tradition from Schiitz, and later Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger. Internal problems within systems theory can be dealt with more effectively if the systems theory is applied to phenomena that have first been identified by means of action theory.
