The lifeworld stays pre-conscious, so cultural progress can never simply replace naivety with rationality.

Evidence

It is based on the narrow limitations of the ability to process experience consciously. One cannot regard cultural progress, the increase in technical or normative conditions, dependencies or regimentations, or a phenomenological programme for refurbishing all meaningful achievements of creative subjectivity as if they were a process of gradually converting the unconscious into the conscious, of gradually substituting rationality for naivety. Neither development nor enlightenment can be understood as the simple substitution of better for worse. The lifeworld remains pre-conscious, as having the status of a horizon of non-actualized possibilities. Improvements in capacities for order are thus only possible as improvements in the formulated and non-formulated, problematized and non-problematized, premises of meaning in social communication. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 722

Categorization

• DEFINE: Operationalizes Husserl’s lifeworld as a ‘horizon of non-actualized possibilities’ — a key Luhmann concept for the reader’s thesis.
• XREF: Directly relevant to Giddens’s ‘faceless commitments’: expert systems operate on the lifeworld’s unproblematized horizon that ordinary agents take for granted.