Preface

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 premiere—all are considered
public events. Other events of overwhelming public significance,
such as childrearing, factory work, and watching
television within one's 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, suc-
cessful, 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 Jürgen Habermas, what are probably the two most influential
positions in contemporary political philosophy propose, referring to the ir-
reducible 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 one's life and confines itself to the
problem of how, when faced with the multitude of incommensurable no-
tions 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 one’s 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 thesis—indeed 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 one’s 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 society—where this is understood following Hegel as the “immense power which draws everything to itself”— that the evaluation of forms of life cannot be relegated to the preserve of particular preferences and ineluctable ties.
This becomes particularly apparent in situations of social conflict and upheaval. Thus, there are situations in which technological innovations—think, for example, of genetic engineering—suddenly open hitherto unquestioned ethical principles up to debate. But also confrontations with other forms of life can give rise to conflicts, crises, and acute disruptions of our self-understanding in which the contents and basic orientations of our own and the other form of life themselves are exposed to scrutiny and established social practices become questionable. Here one need not immediately think of the conflicts that are often mistakenly hypostatized into “clashes of cultures” or of crises in the foundations of our moral systems of reference. Quite commonplace controversies over the design of urban space¹ or public support for childcare;² over the marketization of goods such as health, education, or housing; or over our society’s 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, then—according to the thesis defended here—public 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 one’s conditions of life and making them one’s own. Criticism of forms of life—or better: a *critical theory of criticism of forms of life*—as 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 *emancipation processes*.

This perspective also differs from the dreaded “moral dictatorship” in that it is part of a quest whose starting point is not the insistence on the single right form of life, but instead the insight into the many shortcomings
of our own forms of life and of those of others. As Hilary Putnam puts it: "Our problem is not that we must choose from among an already fixed and defined number of optimal ways of life; our problem is that *we don't know of even one optimal way of life.*"³ But if we do not know a single good form of life, then we would first have to develop it in processes in which the notion of ineluctable identities and the associated conceptions of the good are already disintegrating. The boundary between the "inside" and the "outside" of a form of life on which notions of their ineluctability in some respects rest thereby becomes porous, as does the collective "we" appealed to here. Then the difference between conflicts within and conflicts between cultures, too, loses much of its importance. Whether we argue (interculturally) about arranged marriages or (intraculturally) about gay marriage is not a categorical difference—if one tries to obstruct the separation between inside and outside in the perspective adopted here—but at most a question of sensitivity to the specificity of contexts. Forms of life, in this understanding, are not only the *object* but also the *result* of disputes.

My study starts from the assumption not only that we *can* criticize forms of life but also that we *should* criticize them (and thus ourselves in the conduct of our lives) and that we also *always already do this*, implicitly or explicitly. To evaluate and to criticize—and this holds especially for the so-called post traditional societies—is part of what it means to share a form of life and (in doing so) to be confronted with other forms of life. The claim I will explore in the following investigation is therefore that one can argue about forms of life, and one can do so *with reasons*. Forms of life imply validity claims that cannot be bracketed without consequences, even if here it is not a matter of ultimately justifiable (and in this sense compelling) reasons. Mediated by the question of their criticizability, therefore, what is at stake is also the specific *rationality of forms of life*.

The subject of my book is thus the question of the *possibility* of criticism of forms of life. Its goal is to elaborate a certain conception of criticism and to defend it with arguments, not to provide a social-critical diagnosis of a specific form of life.

It is no accident that I pose the question of the success [*Gelingen*]⁴ of forms of life from the perspective of criticism. My intention is not to develop the general conception of a right form of life in the abstract, because in my view such inclusive ethical designs are neither desirable nor prom-
ising. I will focus instead in a negativistic sense on the specific ways in
which forms of life can *fail*, on the crises to which they succumb, and on
the problems they may encounter—hence, on the respects in which some-
thing can be “wrong” with forms of life and in which as a result they ex-
pose themselves to criticism.

Moreover, the fact that I am concerned here with the structure and dy-
namics of *forms of life* (and accordingly take the concept of a form of life
employed in the debate seriously) instead of approaching the problem from
the angle of the justifiability of ethical values is not merely rooted in how
language is used in a special philosophical discussion.⁵ The perspective of
the success of forms of life—conceived, as I propose, as ensembles of social
practices—enables us to develop criteria of evaluation that take their orien-
tation from the normative conditions of the success of these practices.

The moment of dysfunction or *crisis* will turn out to be an important
moving force of what will be called “criticism” in my outline. If criticism
of forms of life, as I want to understand it here, begins where problems,
crises, or conflicts arise, then it is not conducted from an external, authori-
tarian standpoint but is, one could say, the ferment of a process in which
criticism and self-criticism are intertwined. To outline the respective op-
posed moments, therefore, the form of criticism at which I am aiming will
not be “ethically abstinent,” nor will it be paternalistic; it does not adopt a
relativistic stance on the validity claims of forms of life, but in spite of this
it should not have any antipluralist implications. And in the end it will
turn out that it is precisely the fact that forms of life can be understood as
historically developing learning processes endowed with normative claims
to validity that is the key to their evaluation.

The structure of my study is straightforward. In the Introduction, the
question and my approach are set forth in terms of the controversy with
the opposing position—that is, with the different variants of “ethical absti-
nence.” Then Part 1 raises the question of what constitutes a form of life—
understood as an ensemble of social practices. Part 2 develops the specific
normativity of forms of life and presents a concept of forms of life as en-
sembles of practices oriented to solving problems. Part 3 deals with forms
of criticism and develops the concept of a “strong” version of immanent
criticism inspired by the critique of ideology. Finally, Part 4 develops the
idea of a normative social learning process. In this way, the question of
when a form of life is deficient or successful is transformed into the question of the criteria for the success or failure [*Gelingen oder Nichtgelingen*] of such a process as a rational learning process.

## Acknowledgments

This book is an extensively revised version of my postdoctoral thesis, with which I acquired the professorial qualification in early 2009 in the department of philosophy of Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main.

Also, this book would have been inconceivable without the support of Axel Honneth. I am indebted to our almost fifteen-year collaboration for philosophical inspiration and encouragement, but also for the model of an approach to philosophizing that does not shirk big questions but, notwithstanding its seriousness, does not succumb to the pathologies of self-conceit. It is also difficult to overestimate the importance of my philosophical exchange and friendship with Fred Neuhouser. This book owes more to the impulses I have received from him than may be apparent at first sight.

I would not have been able to withstand the pressure in the crowded months prior to completing the habilitation without the support of a whole team of friends and colleagues who discussed the project continually with me and provided detailed comments on the text as it took shape. For this cooperation, in the very best sense of the term, I would like to thank Robin Celikates, Gustav Falke, Martin Saar, and Titus Stahl. They know how important and momentous their support was for me during this crucial phase and how much the longstanding cooperation and friendship—and the diverse interests, experiences, and projects we share—have taught me to understand philosophy also as a shared form of life. I would like to thank Rainer Forst and Stefan Gosepath for their long-standing collegiality, friendship, and philosophical inspiration—“notwithstanding all reasonable disagreement.” To Martin Seel and Karl-Heinz Kohl I am indebted for their willingness to participate in the habilitation process as reviewers. I would like to thank Regina Kreide for her constant encouragement and for our weekly late-night discussions in Frankfurt. Daniel Loick, whose understanding of the political and lifeworld subtext of the topics discussed here is unsurpassed, provided helpful commentary on the work and encouraged me in every conceivable way to advance the project.
In this case, as so often, a long path remained to be traveled between submitting the academic thesis and the finished book manuscript. Lukas Kübler certainly had the most important influence on the final product. His deep hermeneutical intuition meant that at times he understood my project better than I did myself, edited the text with an amazing grasp of the problems and unimpeachable integrity, and enriched it with innumerable suggestions. At crucial moments Eva von Recker provided not only a final “sanity check” but also the necessary confirmation. In addition, at various times Georg Brunner, Margarete Stokowski, and Dana Sindermann were involved in the final proofreading of the manuscript, and at the very end Frank Lachmann, Lea Prix, and Selana Tzschiesche made decisive contributions. I owe them all a major debt of gratitude. With her dedicated and considerate remarks on the German text, Eva Gilmer showed me for the first time what professional editing can actually achieve. I am sincerely grateful to her for this and for her unflagging indulgence with a tardy author. Finally, I would like to thank Carina Nagel for her assistance in editing the text of the translation.

I would also like to express my gratitude to the employees of the Staats-bibliothek at Potsdamer Platz. As in the case of previous publications (in fact, of all of my previous publications), the library provided me with a stimulating public space where I was able to work undisturbed.

The entire period of work on this project coincided with the first years in the life of my son Jakob, my smallest, greatest happiness. That the first sentence of this study was written on the first day of the parental leave of my husband, Andreas Fischer, is no accident. Without his infinite patience, trust, and support it would not have been possible to realize this seemingly endless project. To both of you I dedicate this book—even if it is not a “proper book”!
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