Rahel Jaeggi - Critique of Forms of Life

The critical theory of society, on the other hand, has for its object men as producers of their own historical form of life in its totality. Each datum depends not on nature alone but also on the power man has over it.

Max Horkheimer

Federal elections, Olympic ceremonies, the actions of a commando unit, a theater premiereall are considered public events. Other events of overwhelming public significance, such as childrearing, factory work, and watching television within ones own four walls are considered private. The real social experiences of human beings, produced in everyday life and work, cut across such divisions.

Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge

Can forms of life be criticized? Can forms of life be said to be good, successful, or even rational as forms of life? Since Kant, it has been considered a foregone conclusion that happiness or the good life, in contrast to the morally right life, cannot be specified in philosophical terms. And with John Rawls and Jrgen Habermas, what are probably the two most influential positions in contemporary political philosophy propose, referring to the irreducible ethical pluralism of modern societies, to abstain from discussing the ethical content of forms of life. With this, philosophy withdraws from the Socratic question of how to live ones life and confines itself to the problem of how, when faced with the multitude of incommensurable notions of the good life, a just cohabitation can be ensured in which different forms of life exist alongside each other. The political order of the liberal constitutional state is represented accordingly as an attempt to organize this cohabitation so that it remains neutral between forms of life. But when the central concern is no longer to realize the right shared form of life and becomes instead to ensure that the coexistence of the different forms of life is as free from conflict as possible, then questions of how we conduct our lives become displaced into the realm of private preferences. Then there can be no arguing about forms of life, just as there can be no arguing about matters of taste. Forms of life become an inaccessible black box; at most their effects can be criticized with reasons.

As it happens, there are obvious reasons for such a position. Not only is it doubtful whether an agreement would be so easy to reach among individuals who differ fundamentally in their conceptions of the world and their ethical beliefs. In addition, the aversion to being dictated to by (philosophical) moralizers concerning how to shape ones life is one of the ineluctable components of our modern self-understanding. This is why the liberal black box may seem to be one of the conditions of possibility of modern self-determination and what first creates the free space in which different ways of life can develop (or maintain themselves) undisturbed.

The guiding assumption of the present study is that there is something wrong with this thesisindeed that, in certain respects, things are precisely the reverse. If we abandon the internal constitution of our social practices and forms of life to extra-philosophical darkness, as Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has put it, we are in danger of accepting them in an inappropriate way as given. To do so would be to declare something that has public significance over hastily to be an ineluctable question of personal identity and thereby to insulate thematic domains that should remain within the catchment area of democratic collective self-determination against rational argumentation. Perhaps the burden of proof should be reversed: it is no easy matter to exclude the ethical question of how to live ones life from processes of individual or collective decision-making. It has always already been answered, implicitly or explicitly, in every social formation. This also holds for the form of social organization that embraces the pluralism of forms of life. But then to ask whether forms of life can be criticized is, in a certain sense, to ask the wrong question. It is not in spite of but precisely because of the situation of modern societywhere this is understood following Hegel as the immense power which draws everything to itselfthat the evaluation of forms of life cannot be relegated to the preserve of particular preferences and ineluctable ties.

This becomes particularly over the marketization of goods such as health, education, or housing; or over our societys understanding of itself as a work-oriented society can also be understood as conflicts over the integrity and constitution of forms of life.

Criticism of forms of life, therefore, is not concerned with icing on the cake questions of the good life (in the sense of a luxurious philosophy of the art of living)that is, with questions that would only be worth posing after basic problems of social organization had been solved. What is at stake is the internal constitution of those institutions and supraindividual connections that lend our lives a certain form and within which our possibilities for acting and shaping practices first arise. But if the project of modernity, the claim of individuals to live their own lives, is not simply a matter of being free from the interference of others, thenaccording to the thesis defended herepublic as well as philosophical reflection concerning forms of life is less a problematic intervention in residues of individual or collective identity that must not be questioned than the condition of the possibility of transforming ones conditions of life and making them ones own. Criticism of forms of lifeor better: a critical theory of criticism of forms of lifeas I understand it here, therefore, is not intended as advocacy of a relapse into premodern paternalism, but instead as an exploration of the conditions of what can be conceived in the tradition of critical theory as a ferment of individual and collective