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A Life-World of Disenchantment: Modernity, Ethnicity and Pluralism

The theme of my paper centers on the enigma of the human condition the world over. A life-world for a society is constituted by a set of elements drawn from history and from the existential determinants of the human situation. Just as his biography sums up for an individual the chronology of his body and consciousness, in the same way the notion of life-world philosophically represents changing configurations of the vital-existential and historical processes of society which shape its well being. No doubt, a life-world is by its very nature grounded in ideology. It is from ideology that the notion of societal well being is legitimized. Certain determinants of society, such as population, access to the means of livelihood, social stratification, and the distribution of power and wealth are ever in the process of transition due to forces internal and external to society. The temporal pattern of occurrence of these forces or the encounters with these forces constitute societal history. Disenchantment is a philosophical expression and also an ideological phenomenon. It links history with mythology. Indeed, demythologization, which has succeeded the worldview of supremacy of science and which had introduced the notion of modernity, is intimately connected with the process of disenchantment. Max Weber, who among the classical sociologists made disenchantment the central theme of his theory of rationalization, primarily based his analysis of the shift that was taking place in the worldview of traditional-prophetic societies towards the modern scientific worldview of contemporary societies. Traditional society had sanctified the revealed tradition, the principle of sacred hierarchy, as well as the transcendental sources of legitimization of values and cultural practices. In a modern society, not Prophecy but reason, not hierarchy but equality, not vocation or calling but Work, not sacred meanings but pragmatic instrumentalities and rational-legal rules govern the day-to-day life of the people. The laws of the universe even though probabilistic are comprehensible to a modern mind as they constitute a system of mathematical precision. This applies to systems that are not only orderly but even those which are chaotic in character. It is these normative shifts and rationalizations of the life-world and its cosmology which have defined the notion of modernity.