Oppressive Forms of Life

ABSTRACT

Rahel Jaeggi argues that forms of life ought to be the main reference point for a critical theory of society because the internal normative structure of life forms allows for immanent critique. In this article, I extend her model by systematically considering the possibility of oppressive forms of life. Oppressive forms of life are clusters of practices in which subordinated groups are systematically excluded or disabled from participating in the social processes of interpretation through which the values and purposes of those very practices are determined. The possibility of oppressive forms of life poses a challenge to the method of immanent critique because it seems that any such critique must rely on immanent norms that are at least partly constituted by interpretations and that can therefore be distorted by oppression. I argue that Jaeggi’s model of immanent critique can be extended to respond to that challenge, either by recovering a constitutive form of freedom within all forms of life or by consciously adopting a partisan stance in favour of oppressed and marginalised self-understandings.

KEYWORDS:

• Rahael Jaeggi
• forms of life
• immanent critique
• critical theory

Introduction

If we want to criticise social arrangements, it matters how we describe them. This is because we can only justify our criticism to those to whom it is directed if we employ a vocabulary that makes visible those particular features of their social life that support our critical assessment. In Critique of Forms of Life (2018), Rahel Jaeggi provides an impressive and convincing argument that critical theories of society should assign the notion of “forms of life” a central role in their vocabulary. On her account, forms of life – such as those of the nuclear family, the white-collar professional, and the flexibilized labour-market – are clusters of social practices that are integrated by an ethical self-understanding and that can succeed or fail in responding to internal and external challenges by revising that self-understanding. According to Jaeggi, we can only correctly understand and diagnose the ethical and functional failures of social arrangements, that is, their failure to realise the specific purposes that their members attribute to them if we consider them forms of life with a specific internal normative structure. Such ethical failures are not well characterised in the dominant liberal vocabulary of “rights” or “justice”. The task of social critique is therefore not only to apply such independent moral standards to forms of life but also to ask whether life forms live up to their own standards. In other words, we can only adequately criticise a distinctive and important set of social pathologies if we subject them not only to external, but also to immanent critique.

In this article, I want to take up Jaeggi’s proposal and to extend it by considering a subset of forms of life that I want to call “oppressive forms of life". Oppressive forms of life, like other forms of life, are governed by a set of internal values and ethical purposes, based on the shared interpretations of their members. In contrast to other forms of life, however, they exclude and subordinate a subset of those who live in them by denying them full participation in the collective, interpretive process of determining their purposes.

Arguably, in current societies, many forms of life are deeply shaped by white supremacy, sexism, the exclusion of non-traditional gender identities, and class differences and will thus count, to a greater or lesser degree, as oppressive in this sense. This raises a worrying possibility. It is possible that oppressive forms of life “work well” in the sense that they live up to the ethical self-understanding that governs them, but only because that understanding emerged from a practice in which the interests and perspectives of marginalised members were not taken into account. This possibility, I will argue, poses a challenge to immanent critique, insofar as immanent critique can no longer, in such cases, refer to an (implicit or explicit) shared understanding of what constitutes the “good functioning” of the relevant form of life as an unproblematic standard. Fortunately, there are a number of strategies available for a theory of forms of life that preserve the possibility of immanent critique. By incorporating these strategies and the acknowledgment of the potentials for oppression in the internal material and epistemic structure of forms of life, the theory of forms of life can strengthen its commitment to the strategy of immanent critique.

The paper will proceed as follows. In section 2, I will briefly examine the main claims of Jaeggi’s theory and the specific method of immanent critique that a theory of forms of life makes available. In section 3, I will then introduce the possibility of oppressive forms of life and argue that this possibility generates a challenge for the strategy of immanent critique. Section 4 identifies a number of mechanisms through which forms of life can become oppressive. In section 5, I identify strategies for safeguarding the possibility of critique under oppressive conditions. I conclude by arguing that immanent critique must either include a reference to an anticipated liberated state of affairs in the justification of its normative claims, or give up any pretense of social neutrality and adopt a partisan stance in favour of the oppressed.

Critical Theory and Immanent Critique of Forms of Life

Before examining the idea of an “oppressive form of life”, it is necessary to clarify the significance of the methodological commitments that underlie the project of a critique of forms of life. I will do so in this section in two steps. First, I will argue that the self-ascribed advantage of critical theory over the method that it sees as defining contemporary liberalism is centrally connected to the possibility of “immanent critique". In a second step, I then recapitulate how the introduction of the idea of forms of life as normatively constituted social entities secures that possibility by providing a reference point for immanent critique.

Critical Theory of Society and Immanent Critique

The project of critiquing of forms of life, as Jaeggi presents it, is motivated by the suspicion that contemporary liberal accounts of critique are too restricted in their scope because they adopt a neutral stance towards so-called questions of the “good life". While such a stance has been endorsed by liberal authors from Rawls to Habermas, often based on the idea that there are no universally justifiable answers to ethical questions given the “burdens of judgments”, Jaeggi argues that ethical questions are not only unavoidable in modern societies that force their citizens to make collective decisions that inevitably affect issues of the “good life”.¹ Ethical assessments of social practices are also necessary for fully capturing the significance of phenomena such as commodification and alienation, and specific problems in areas like childcare, and the role of work.² In all these areas, distinctive kinds of problems emerge which are not problems of justice or rights violations but are rather best described as “social pathologies” that undermine the possibility of people leading a successful life.

As Axel Honneth has argued, the diagnosis and critique of such social pathologies is one of the core tasks of social philosophy (in contrast to political philosophy) and, in particular, of critical theories of society.³ For this reason, critical theory cannot be satisfied with liberal “abstinence” towards questions of the good life. At the same time, however, critical theories also cannot ignore the fact that, in modern societies, there is no universal commitment to one particular conception of the good life. For many contemporary critical theorists, the solution to this dilemma lies in the notion of “immanent critique", which refers to a form of critique of social pathologies that criticises social arrangements for failures to fullfill the standards that are institutionalised within them without having to presuppose the truth of any particular ethical doctrine. To understand this theoretical move, one has to draw on the distinction between external, internal, and immanent critique that has become increasingly accepted within critical theory.⁴ Put briefly, external critique is a form of social critique the purported normative force of which does not depend on any social facts about its audience. Internal critique, by contrast, is a form of critique that derives its normative force from a mismatch between what the social facts in any given situation are and the shared beliefs or attitudes of the addressees about how they ought to be. Whereas the classic case of external critique is moral critique that draws on practice-independent moral standards, the classic case of internal critique is the condemnation of a group for violating its own professed values.

If external and internal critique were the only two available strategies, this would circumscribe the field of possible forms of social critique quite narrowly. On the one hand, external critique has to establish standards that are independent of the commitments and practices of its addressees. This will restrict it to only a minimal morality that is context-transcending and does not offer any resources for the criticism of social pathologies. On the other hand, internal critique must rely on a contradiction between professed values and behaviour. This limits its application to cases where values and behaviour come apart, and does not allow for the critical rejection of both values and behaviour not in spite of, but precisely because of, their consistency.

To speak of immanent critique is to claim that this alternative is not exhaustive: We can criticise social practices and larger social arrangements not only from the perspective of universal norms or the professed values of their participants, but also from the perspectives of norms and purposes that are, independently of what their participants believe, instituted in them. As Jaeggi explains, immanent critique, like internal critique, is “based on standards that are already contained in this object [the social arrangements, TS] itself”.⁵ Unlike internal critique, however, it does not restrict itself to shared beliefs. In particular, the strategy of immanent critique assumes that social arrangements can become “contradictory” in the sense that the norms that are constitutive for them can turn out to be self-undermining once they prescribe behaviour that prevents practices from realising goals that are equally constitutive for them.⁶

Immanent critique therefore differs from external critique because it is contextualist in the sense that it proceeds from non-universal presuppositions that are specific to the criticised object. It differs from internal critique because it does not depend on shared beliefs, or indeed any beliefs at all, on the part of its addressees. Furthermore, by taking up social contradictions, it not only aims to restore consistency between behaviour and attitudes but, importantly, reveals the necessity of transforming the constitutive norms of practices so as to abolish their internal tensions.

Immanent Critique and the Social Ontology of Forms of Life

In the previous subsection, I characterised the strategy of immanent critique. In contrast to the strategies of external and internal critique, which need only take on very minimal social ontological commitments, this strategy seems to presuppose much more ambitious social ontological claims. In particular, it must make four assumptions:

1. the social arrangements in question are characterised by constitutive norms,

2. these norms are at least to some degree independent of people’s beliefs,

3. the arrangements are characterised by internal goals or functions that can be undermined by their actual development whereby the possibility of dysfunctionality and practical contradiction emerges, and

4. members of these arrangements can reflexively become aware of the norms that drive their social interaction and evaluate social reality according to those norms.

If the method of immanent critique of social pathologies is indeed at the core of the strategy of a critical theory, this means that such a theory must show that there is some phenomenon in social reality that can be subject to social pathologies and that indeed has these key features: constitutive norms, belief-independent normativity, functional structure, and potential reflexivity. As I understand it, the core aim of Jaeggi’s theory of forms of life is to show that forms of life do, in fact, have these features and are thus an appropriate reference point for critical theory.

In order to substantiate the first claim regarding their normative structure, Jaeggi first reconstructs forms of life as clusters of social practices.⁷ Social practices, in turn, are normatively constituted in two ways: They are characterised by both prescriptive and constitutive rules⁸, and they “posit and have purposes”⁹, which adds a functional dimension. However, while social practices have a variety of purposes, and while their participants can differ widely in terms of the purposes they ascribe to them, forms of life are more tightly integrated. They are ensembles of practices that are interwoven in a “functional nexus”.¹⁰ That is, they are defined by their function for their members. This function is not something that is externally given, as it might be in the case of an individual practice. Rather, forms of life in their entirety form a hermeneutical environment in which the function and purpose of their constituent practices is defined and made concrete. That means that forms of life themselves are amenable not only to functional justifications, but also to ethical justifications, insofar as they constitute standards for the pursuit of goods that are defined internally to them.¹¹ While this is sufficient to satisfy the first criterion described above, it has a number of consequences that are important for the discussion below. In particular, Jaeggi argues that the normative structure of forms of life can always be spelled out in terms of their problem-solving capacity, where the problems they set out to solve are themselves understood and identified with the resources of meaning that the life form supplies.¹² The second criterion is satisfied by the fact that the various hermeneutical circles which characterise the meaning of actions that forms of life allow us to speak of a dimension of meaning that is, at least in part, independent of people’s agency and not reducible to their individual beliefs.¹³

While the description of life forms that I have recounted thus far already makes a functional dimension available, satisfying the third criterion, this is not the dimension to which immanent critique refers, according to Jaeggi. It operates on a higher level.¹⁴ Put briefly, every form of life, by establishing criteria for the “good functioning” of its constituent practices¹⁵, also thereby makes a validity claim as to its own value.¹⁶ Such a validity claim can only be understood as the claim that the respective life form successfully solves a range of problems.¹⁷ However, an appropriate vocabulary for describing the relevant problem is itself part of what a given life form supplies to its participants and can thus change over time together with that life form.¹⁸ Therefore, the core of the validity claim cannot be that a life form successfully solves an externally defined problem, but rather that it incorporates a successful learning process through which it provides and updates, for a given domain of life, a vocabulary for describing what problems it encounters and a range of strategies for solving those very problems.¹⁹

Hence, immanent critique does not primarily consist in uncovering the tacit problem definitions that guide a form of life and then pointing out that it does not (optimally) solve these problems. According to Jaeggi, immanent critique instead focuses on the point at which a life form enters a crisis that comes about when two conditions are satisfied. First, there must be a second-order problem with the form of life, that is, a problem with the way it handles problems.²⁰ Second, there must be a practical contradiction, which means that the norms and value specifications that constitute a given form of life turn out to be unrealisable.²¹ When forms of life face a crisis experience of this sort, they can resolve the problem by engaging in a learning process through which they revise the norms of their practices, their self-understanding, the understanding of what counts as a problem, and the space of possible solutions.

The fourth criterion concerning reflexivity pertains to this dimension of potential crisis. Crises, Jaeggi argues, are never a mere matter of external causation. Forms of life enter into crises when problems challenge their self-understanding. As Jaeggi writes, “forms of life not only have problems […], they do so by reflecting back upon their own validity claims”²², and “crisis-triggering problems” in particular “exist only if the challenge that initially comes from external problems is accepted in some way by the corresponding form of life”.²³ This leads to the ultimate difference between successful, progressive and failing, regressive forms of life: Failing forms of life are characterised by “systematic blockages to learning”²⁴ that keep them from updating their norms so as to resolve their internal contradictions; failing forms of life fail to learn (appropriately) and instead become trapped in “collective self-deception or ideology”.²⁵ As I will examine in the next section, the reflexive dimension and the possibility of systematic learning blockages is precisely what makes oppressive forms of life a challenge for immanent critique.

Oppressive Forms of Life

Having examined the model of forms of life and its close link to the strategy of immanent critique, I will now consider a specific, empirically extensive, subclass of forms of life, oppressive forms of life, and propose that the existence of such forms of life poses a challenge to the possibility of immanent critique. The basic idea that I will defend is that forms of life can become oppressive if, first, they unjustly disadvantage some of their members, and second, they undermine the ability of these members to participate equally in the reflexive process of self-interpretation that guides the learning processes of such forms of life. By doing so, oppressive forms of life can avoid – at least for a certain amount of time – certain forms of crisis that would normally result from their failure to generate benefits for all of their members.

Considering the possibility of such oppressive forms of life is important for the project of critical theory. It is one of the standard objections to mainstream liberal ideal theorising from the side of critical theorists that many liberal theories presume an unrealistically idealistic social ontology that views social institutions as cooperative arrangements emerging from a preceding consensus and, consequently, treats oppression and domination as marginal phenomena.²⁶ It is therefore essential for critical theories to ensure that their own models do not contribute to such marginalisation and provide sufficient room for theorising oppression.

In this section, I will show that, if oppressive forms of life do in fact exist, this poses a challenge for the strategy of immanent critique. In the next section, I will propose a number of mechanisms by which forms of life can become oppressive, which establishes that the argument is relevant. In the following section, I will then show that the model of immanent critique can respond to this challenge.

To understand why the existence of oppressive forms of life poses a challenge for the idea of immanent critique, it is helpful to keep in mind the following premise which I assume to be generally accepted in contemporary critical theory:

The essential role of immanent critique in critical theory. The method of immanent critique is essential to critical theory because it allows critical theories to comprehensively criticize social pathologies that remain inaccessible to standard liberal models of critique.

Jaeggi’s model of social practices makes the following two arguments:

Crises as reference points: The reference point for immanent critique are crises and blockages of the learning processes of forms of life (that is, of bundles of practices that are linked through a functional nexus, and that respond to problems that they make epistemically accessible through their interpretive framework).

The reflexive nature of crises: Both what a problem is and when a contradiction within a practice becomes a crisis depends on the self-interpretation of the form of life, that is, the understanding of the situation that members acquire from within the hermeneutical framework that the form of life makes available to them.

Based on these premises, one can make the following argument:

1. The hermeneutical framework that allows us to understand a practical situation as a problem and the failure of a learning process as a crisis is ultimately a matter of practical norms that regulate the joint, discursive activities of members of that form of life. Consequently, any given form of life will have a set of discursive and hermeneutical norms that regulate and govern its internal processes of self-interpretation.

2. In almost all forms of life, these norms will (a) distribute opportunities for participation in the practice of self-interpretation in a more or less unequal way²⁷, and (b) determine how members are epistemically situated so as to acquire knowledge about the problems and internal shape of their life form.

3. It follows from (2) that it is possible that forms of life exist in which there is a privileged group that has both an advantage in terms of acquiring information and a larger influence on the process of defining what counts as a problem than other, subordinated groups.

4. If a form of life of the type described in (3) also unjustly excludes members of subordinated groups from the benefits it generates, such a form of life can be called oppressive.

5. It follows from (3) that whether an oppressive form of life is in a crisis or faces a blockage of learning is thus normally determined to at least a minimal extent by the privileged groups within it.

6. Consequently, an oppressive form of life may fail to experience crises and to adequately acknowledge its failure to solve its self-posed problems even if its ethical purpose remains unfulfilled for a subset of its members (by virtue of 5).

As already mentioned, in Jaeggi’s terms, we must describe such oppressive life forms as suffering from a “systematic blockage of learning”²⁸, with ideology being a prime example.²⁹ The question, however, is the extent to which these systematic learning blockages (when they amount not to a failure to find a solution but to a failure to generate awareness of problems) are still an appropriate object of immanent critique. Immanent critique, as I have defined it, takes up normative commitments instituted in social practices and uses them to criticise those very practices. Applied to forms of life, it seems that immanent critique of a regressive or failing form of life remains possible as long as that form of life is characterised by a self-understanding according to which it is in crisis, even if that very self-understanding keeps the form of life from resolving that problem through a learning process. The more worrying cases, however, are those oppressive forms of life in which dominant groups shape the very definition of the problems that are relevant to that life form, and, consequently, monopolise control over the hermeneutical resources that are necessary for identifying a crisis in the first place. In this latter case, the requirement that crises must be reflexively articulated to become crises seems to put the possibility of immanent critique of failing forms of life into question. If the most fundamental norms of a life form are at least partially determined by social interpretation, then these norms can be distorted by oppressive hermeneutical structures in such a way that no contradiction can be uncovered. Consequently, even if we want to claim that such a life form is “objectively” in a crisis, we cannot do so on the basis of its own implicit or explicit interpretation of what its norms are. This raises the following question: If we do not want to take up a purely external perspective from which to decide what people ought to consider a problem, and if we want to take the irreducibly self-defining character of forms of life seriously, how can we criticise oppressive forms of life on their own terms?

The Mechanisms of Oppression

In the last section, I examined a challenge to the theory of forms of life as a foundation for immanent critique that built on the assumption that oppressive forms of life exist. In this section, I will substantiate this assumption and outline a number of ways in which forms of life can be oppressive. For this purpose, I will first further clarify the concept of oppression, before introducing two mechanisms of oppression that are especially problematic for forms of life.

To call a social arrangement oppressive is not merely to call it unjust.³⁰ One can be treated unjustly by others without thereby being oppressed, especially if the injustice is incidental and isolated. An unjust social arrangement qualifies as oppressive only if, alongside its injustice, two further conditions are satisfied: First, the injustice in question must affect those subject to it via their membership in a social group (thus, for example, “as women", “as immigrants", or “as workers”).³¹ Second, the injustice in question must result from a social practice or institution that they cannot easily leave or change. As I have argued elsewhere, not only are these two conditions, taken together with the unjust effects of the practice in question, sufficient for making the practice into an instance of oppression, but they also capture essential claims of theories of gendered, racial, and economic oppression.³²

For the present purposes, the second of these conditions is especially important. What does it mean to say that one cannot “easily” leave or change a social practice or institution? This condition should not be understood to refer to subjective facts about how easy it “feels” to effect social change or to contingent, circumstantial facts about the probability of successfully changing social relations. Rather, we should say that it is typical of oppressive social arrangements that members of the groups that are subordinated in them face disproportionate social barriers to any attempt to either exit or change the oppressive arrangement. In this way, Marxists, for example, cite the workers’ lack of ownership of productive resources as a barrier that makes it essentially impossible for them to retreat from exploitative relationships; feminists point to cultural norms, ingrained economic structures, and the threat of gendered violence as factors that make it especially hard and risky for women to challenge sexist institutional arrangements. More generally, we should only call an institution or practice oppressive for a group if it incorporates a social relationship such that the institution or practice “systematically creates constraints that impose substantially higher costs on members of [that group] that attempt change [its] unjust structure […], compared to other practice members”.³³

If we apply this model to the case of forms of life, we see that some forms of life have unjust effects on their own terms. This is the case when their internal self-understanding is such that it ascribes to them a function that is to generate and fairly distribute some benefit but where that benefit is in fact unequally distributed on the basis of morally arbitrary considerations. The form of life of the traditional family might thus be understood as being guided by an internal understanding that it secures emotional and material support for all family members and organises the performance of reproductive labour according to their needs. It is unjust insofar as these benefits accrue to a much higher extent to male family members independently of whether they need them more. Not all forms of life that are unjust in this sense are thereby also oppressive, since we might expect that in some forms of life the injustice of the distribution of benefits and burdens will become acknowledged as a problem in the shared interpretation of the members. Such a problem can become a crisis, following Jaeggi, if the life form is unable to adequately respond to it by revising its own norms and if that inability becomes acknowledged as a problem. An unjust life form can consequently be challenged by members who point out that it is in crisis, and this can lead to changes to its normative structure. As long as subordinated members are capable of mounting such challenges, they will suffer from injustice but not oppression.

A life form becomes oppressive, by contrast, when it is structured in such a way that such challenges are not possible. In these cases, the injustices do not trigger a learning process (if the oppressive structure amounts to a systematic blockage of learning), and the absence of such a learning process consequently does not lead to a crisis for the life form. Such a structure is typical (in Jaeggi’s terms) of ideological and regressive forms of life. In such forms of life, the social processes through which the self-understanding inherent in the life form is determined (that is, the “practical-hermeneutical circle”³⁴), is distorted by relations of domination and exclusion. There are two major mechanisms that can result in such distortions: In the first kind of case, the life form is experienced by individual members of the groups that are subordinated within it as failing its function and perhaps even as illegitimate, but, due to mechanisms of hermeneutical exclusion, these experiences are not taken up by the collective processes of self-interpretation. The life form consequently does not experience a crisis (or the crisis remains “latent” in the sense that we only expect it to become actualised once the processes of self-interpretation are freed from blockades). In the second kind of case, the oppressive social relations have even more profound effects insofar as they establish epistemic and hermeneutical barriers that deprive the subordinated groups of either a complete understanding of the actual effects of the life form or of the hermeneutical resources they need to adequately conceptualise the injustice to which they are subject. In both cases, these are mechanisms that keep a range of problems that people have with a form of life from becoming problems for that form of life.

The first kind of mechanism is best analyzed as a form of exclusion from the administration of the hermeneutical resources of a life form, that is, from the social processes by which its collectively binding self-understanding is determined. There are various ways in which forms of life can be exclusionary in this sense. The most obvious are forms of violence or economic deprivation that make it de facto impossible for people to participate in joint processes of interpretation. For example, there might be a form of life that prohibits women from speaking up in the presence of men by threat of violence or that deprives members of subordinated groups of the resources necessary for engaging in intellectual pursuits. Exclusion can also take more subtle and structural forms, however. Members of subordinated groups can face constraints on participation because they are subject to “testimonial injustice", that is, exclusion from collective epistemic processes based on identity prejudices that lead people to attribute lower credibility to their contributions than is justified³⁵, or that result in the systematic dismissal of their contributions to epistemic processes.³⁶ Such structural constraints are most likely to occur in larger-scale life forms. One can imagine, for example, that the answer to the question whether an economic system or an order of social recognition is in crisis will often be influenced by the way in which testimony from members of subordinated groups about the empirical effects of these arrangements is treated. Elites can easily keep potential problems out of the “official” understanding that dominates a life form by dismissing the testimony of members of subordinated groups as unreliable. Similarly, members of subordinated groups will often have difficulty establishing that their complaints pertain to genuinely collective problems within the life form (rather than to merely personal problems) if they lack opportunities for collective deliberation.³⁷ Atomisation and isolation are therefore also barriers to full participation insofar as they make it more difficult to establish collective agency. Finally, in the history of critical theory, there is also the claim that some social arrangements make it difficult for subordinated groups to establish that a life form is in crisis by putting up generalised barriers to social reflexivity (which constrain everyone but especially affect those groups that have reason to challenge the social order). This is the subject matter of theories of the reification and colonisation of the lifeworld. Whereas the classic theory of reification (if it is not taken as a purely epistemic theory) is best taken to argue that capitalism as a social arrangement shapes social relations so as to make them inaccessible to discursive challenge³⁸, theories of colonisation draw attention to the deformation of linguistically mediated forms of sociality that undermine the conditions for collective deliberation.³⁹

It is important to note that this first kind of mechanism concerns the extent to which of subordinated groups have an opportunity to bring their personal experiences of the life form’s failure to achieve its ascribed purposes into collective consciousness. Even if subordinated groups face serious constraints in this respect, this will not preclude the development of an individual or subcultural consciousness of crisis. It may even be the case that subordinated groups merely pretend to sincerely participate in the relevant life form to secure the benefits of conformity, whereas the privileged groups remain fully committed to a life form they falsely assume to be more encompassing.⁴⁰ That a form of life is regressive does not entail that there is no progressive consciousness within it. In the next section, I will explore whether there is a form of immanent critique that draws upon such forms of oppositional consciousness.

This possibility of oppositional consciousness marks a major difference from a second kind of mechanism that can lead to the emergence of oppressive forms of life and that is best called a form of hermeneutical disadvantage suffered by the oppressed in understanding their own oppression. In this second case, a form of life becomes oppressive either because subordinated groups lack epistemic opportunities to gain knowledge about how the life form is failing to realise its ascribed purposes or because, as members of subordinated groups, they lack the hermeneutical resources to conceptualise the fact that this is the case as a sufficient reason for critique. This is the case where they lack either the factual knowledge or the requisite normative framework for understanding the failure of their life form, and consequently also the ability to put forward sufficient grounds for classifying it as being in crisis. In the simplest case, this can result from the fact that dominant groups systematically deny knowledge about social facts to subordinate groups, but typically it will also involve epistemic disadvantages that subordinated groups face regarding access to the theoretical tools they need to develop adequate causal explanations of their own oppression.⁴¹ Alongside these forms of exclusion which concern the availability of knowledge, critical theories have traditionally highlighted the role that ideological mechanisms play in domination. Ideology, in this sense, concerns not (or not only) the direct availability of factual information about the social world but a distorted perception and interpretation of social facts⁴². More recently, scholars have also focused their theoretical attention on processes by which subordinate groups can be excluded from the construction of collective hermeneutical resources.⁴³ Such exclusion makes it more difficult for them to construct an adequate moral understanding of the nature of their disadvantage and its wrongness by treating it, for example, as a purely individual problem.

This second kind of mechanism will make it comparatively harder for subordinate groups to develop an explicit awareness of injustice or an oppositional consciousness since they will lack access to necessary hermeneutical resources. It is very likely, however, that even in the presence of these forms of hermeneutical disadvantage, there will be at least an unarticulated sense of injustice or social suffering that, even if implicit, provides evidence for a critical diagnosis of injustice.

Both mechanisms affect the way in which groups can participate in the hermeneutical processes through which a life form either identifies or does not identify problems as constituting a crisis. The question: “Whose problems? Whose crisis?” is therefore one that the analysis of life forms cannot avoid. As Miranda Fricker argues.

With the possibility of such a question, we confront the disunity of the “we” who agree in form of life. If the different “we”s within a form of life stand to one another in relations of advantage and disadvantage, power and powerlessness, then this inequality is likely to be reiterated in interpretive practice.⁴⁴

It is not only inequality in the process of defining what counts as a problem or a crisis that matters, however. What matters is also the possibility that by being excluded and marginalised, subordinate social perspectives can fail to make what may be called, from an external perspective, a crisis of the life form a crisis for the life form. If immanent critique, by necessity, depends on the self-interpretation of the life-form as a whole, then it runs the risk of contributing to such marginalisation.

Criticising Oppressive Forms of Life

In the last two sections, I have outlined the oppression challenge and substantiated the idea of oppressive forms of life by examining mechanisms through which forms of life can become oppressive. I will now turn to the question of the extent to which the model of immanent critique that drives the research agenda of theories of forms of life must be adapted to be able to respond to it. To do so, and to avoid potential confusion, I will first briefly describe an inadequate response that tries to establish that there is no need for an immanent critique of oppressive forms of life. Subsequently, I will turn to more promising responses to the challenge of oppression.

I have introduced the strategy of immanent critique by way of criticising liberal theories of justice for their overly narrow focus on principles that can be justified without reference to the practices to which they are applied. Immanent critique can thus be understood not as replacing the liberal critique of injustice but as extending and deepening it by also taking aim at social pathologies. As I have defined oppressive forms of life in part in terms of the unjust distribution of benefits and burdens, one might object that such forms of life, qua being unjust, can be rejected on the grounds of their violation of liberal, externally justifiable principles and that immanent critique is therefore unnecessary. But to say that the critique of social pathologies is merely an addendum to the standard liberal critique of injustice undermines two central claims which are distinctive for critical theories. First, critical theories traditionally assume that there are forms of oppression that are inadequately conceptualised by liberal theories. It would therefore be surprising, to say the least, if the forms of critique that are distinctive for critical theories would only apply to phenomena below the threshold of oppression and only complement liberal theories by providing a normative analysis of less severe forms of injustice. Second, most defenses of immanent critique in the critical theory tradition proceed from the assumption that we not only can criticise oppressive practices based on an immanent methodology, but that we also must do so. This is because it is assumed that “external” liberal critique both has a problem of justification (ultimately turning out to be less universal and more ethically loaded than it pretends to be) and is less informative in diagnosing what is going wrong in a society than the critique of social pathologies. Therefore, even if oppressive forms of life could be characterised as unjust in liberal terms alone, critical theories must be interested in preserving the possibility of an independent form of critique that is based on an immanent methodology.

A first, more convincing response questions an assumption behind the oppression challenge. This is the assumption that oppressive forms of life will be less prone to crises on the long run because they can avoid challenges to their legitimacy. One can object to this assumption by arguing that oppressive life forms may actually be less stable than their non-oppressive counterparts because their internal epistemic structure makes it unlikely that they will reflexively become aware of their contradictions. In addition, oppressive life forms might be less capable of handling unforeseen crises, since they cannot effectively make use of a large part of the socially available knowledge that subordinated groups have. Another reason is that an oppressive life form may be able to maintain its legitimacy only at the cost of causing either a motivation crisis or actual collective resistance on the part of those members who, at some point, can no longer sincerely believe in its ethical self-definition. This will then constitute a largely interpretation-independent “objective problem” for the life form, even from the point of view of the dominant groups. On its own, however, this response is still relatively weak, since it makes the possibility of critique depend on empirical social developments that are far from guaranteed. If immanent critique is only possible once such a problem becomes part of the life form’s collective consciousness, then some oppressive forms of life may remain beyond the reach of immanent critique for a long period of time.

A second response is one that is more congenial to the Hegelian project. It takes as its starting point the observation that all particular forms of life are always embedded in larger forms of life.⁴⁵ For the cases that are of interest to critical theories, historically speaking, the most general level of this recursive formation might be called the “life form of modern Western liberal capitalism". It is one of the central theses of both Hegel’s account of ethical life and its successor projects that the central integrating value of this life form is a commitment to individual freedom.⁴⁶ If that is true, however, then immanent critique always has a point of entry.⁴⁷ Even if a given, more particular life form adopts a distorted ethical conception, because of its embeddedness in a larger context, there will always be a commitment to a more substantial form of freedom available – a commitment to which subordinated members can appeal and which dominant groups cannot completely ignore without risking the loss of social integration more generally. Because all particular modern life forms have to justify their ethical self-definition in terms of its contribution to the overall realisation of freedom, so this response argues, there is a form of critique to which even oppressive forms of life are vulnerable: a critique that is external to any particular life form but that is still immanent in the life form of society as a whole.

A third response argues from a claim about the very structure of the normativity of forms of life. If forms of life are essentially normative social phenomena, and if normativity must always incorporate, to a minimal extent, a shared understanding of how norms are to be applied in any given case, then a completely one-sided distribution of interpretive authority regarding the norms in question is impossible.⁴⁸ If a dominant group has sole authority to determine the purpose of the life form to which it belongs, other groups cannot relate to this understanding as a norm (because it would no longer be possible for the dominant group to be mistaken about any application of that norm). In other words, if a form of life can only exist if there is a shared understanding of its ethical purpose is, this requires that all members attribute to each other, at least to a minimal degree, reciprocal authority to challenge other’s interpretations of what that purpose is. This minimal reciprocity seems incompatible with a life form’s complete isolation from challenges by subordinated groups, however. If that is the case, then any form of life can in principle face challenges from subordinated members that all other members must take seriously, and if they do not have a good response to these challenges, this can lead to a crisis of the life form’s self-understanding. This response refers not to a historically contingent value but to the transcendental pragmatics, so to speak, of a particular way of instituting social norms.

These three responses all undermine various assumptions underlying the challenge that oppressive forms of life pose for immanent critique. Even taken collectively, however, they are not yet strong enough to respond to the uneasiness that comes along with acknowledging that oppressive forms of life often seem unproblematic from the perspective of their self-interpretation. Neither their possible instability, nor their integration into overarching liberal forms of life, nor the egalitarian foundations of social normativity seem to be strong enough to support a critique of oppression that is as powerful as critical theories want it to be.

Therefore, defenders of an immanent critique of forms of life must choose between two strategies, one that emphasises the standpoint-dependence of immanent critique and one that avoids such standpoint-dependence by drawing on challenges that subordinated groups would rationally mount against the domination interpretations under idealised circumstances where their hermeneutical position was less marginal.

The first option comes down to giving up the idea that social criticism must always aim at convincing those responsible for the continued existence of social pathologies. Immanent critique might alternatively take up forms of oppositional self-understanding (if such forms are present in social reality) or aim at analyzing the causes of social suffering and developing new understandings of injustice that contribute to the hermeneutical resources of subordinated groups, offering them new ways to make sense of an initially unarticulated sense of social injustice. These functions can be performed by immanent critique even under conditions where there is no consistent self-understanding of the ethical point of a practice.⁴⁹ Instead of reconstructing such a self-understanding, immanent critique can consist in the reconstruction (or construction) of an oppositional ethical consciousness of a form of life and in offering an analysis of how this self-understanding has been marginalised and excluded from the construction of hermeneutical resources. Such immanent critique from the margins will still be immanent because it draws on normative resources from within that life form, but it will not speak in the name of that life form in its entirety.

The second option assumes that we can anticipate of a possible future state of affairs where marginalisation and exclusion will no longer distort the hermeneutical self-constitution of that life form, and we can, from the standpoint of that future, idealised state of affairs, supply a description of why subordinated groups in the present rationally ought to reject their subordination. Of course, any argument regarding how people would interpret the functioning of their life-form under ideal circumstances is bound to be circular in some respect, since the question of what counts as a distortion presupposes the normative standpoint that it aims to justify. It also only avoids the perspectival character of a standpoint theory by assigning to the critical theorist the task of serving as a stand-in for the idealised perspective of the subordinated. It preserves, however, the idea that even if critical theory cannot always draw on social grounds for its claims in the present, it can justify our hoping that such grounds might – under favourable circumstances – emerge.⁵⁰

Of course, both options do not preclude making use of the resources on which the other responses to the oppression challenge draw. Rather, my argument illustrates that this challenge only affects one particular understanding of immanent critique, which is not without alternatives.

Conclusion

Oppression is often treated by political theorists as a problem that concerns unjust constraints on the freedom of individuals and groups. Examining oppression as a feature of forms of life offers another perspective. From this perspective, we can understand how oppression not only negatively affects individuals and their interests but also undermines the ethical value of entire forms of life. For this reason, the analysis of oppressive forms of life is of central importance to critical theories of society. While the effects of oppression on the internal self-understanding of a life form make the task of critical theory harder, at least as long as it wants to remain faithful to its distinctive commitment to the method of immanent critique, this by no means renders this goal impossible. While we must not take the self-conception of oppressive forms of life at face value, critical theories can draw on oppositional forms of self-understanding – either in the present or as reconstructed as part of an idealised future – that these life forms systematically marginalise.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Rahel Jaeggi for helpful comments on a draft of this article and to Carolyn Benson for help with preparing the manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Jaeggi Critique of Forms of Life. Cambridge (MA): Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2018, 15.

2 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, xi.

3 Honneth, “Pathologies of the Social: The Past and Present of Social Philosophy,” 3–48.

4 See Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life; Stahl, Immanent Critique, 14–32; Iser, Empörung und Fortschritt. Grundlagen einer kritischen Theorie der Gesellschaft, 23–51.

5 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 190.

6 For two models of practical contradictions, see Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 262; Stahl, Immanent Critique, 251–2.

7 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 55.

8 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 57.

9 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 59.

10 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 64.

11 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 111.

12 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 142–44.

13 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 82.

14 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 249.

15 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 113.

16 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 117.

17 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 133.

18 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 143.

19 , Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 249.

20 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 284.

21 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 270.

22 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 259.

23 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 269.

24 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 284.

25 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 285.

26 For versions of this critique, see Mills, “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology,” 165–84; also Brännmark, “Institutions, Ideology, and Nonideal Social Ontology,” 137–59; for an application to critical theory itself, see Ng, “Social Freedom as Ideology,” 795–818.

27 Fricker, “Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Privilege,” 207.

28 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 284.

29 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 285.

30 Cudd, “Oppression.”

31 For the group-specific nature of oppression, see Cudd, “Oppression,” 23; also Haslanger, “Oppressions: Racial and Other,” 99.

32 Stahl, “Collective Responsibility for Oppression,” 473–501.

33 Stahl, “Collective Responsibility for Oppression,” 481.

34 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 66.

35 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, 28.

36 Dotson, “A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression,” 24–47.

37 Honneth, “Moral Consciousness and Class Domination,” 80–95, 89.

38 Stahl, “Verdinglichung als Pathologie zweiter Ordnung,” 731–46.

39 Jütten, “The Colonization Thesis: Habermas on Reification,” 701–27.

40 Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, 91.

41 Jugov and Ypi, “Structural Injustice, Epistemic Opacity, and the Responsibilities of the Oppressed,” 7–27; Langton, “Feminism in Epistemology: Exclusion and Objectification,” 272; Narayan, “Working Together Across Difference: Some Considerations on Emotions and Political Practice.,” 35–36.

42 Shelby, “Ideology, Racism, and Critical Social Theory,” 178.

43 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, 155.

44 Fricker, “Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Privilege,” 207; for a similar argument, see Saar, “Macht und Lebensform,” 147.

45 Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 52.

46 Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory; Honneth, Freedom’s Right. The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, 64.

47 Stahl, “Verdinglichung als Pathologie zweiter Ordnung,” 743; Stahl, “Recognition, Constitutive Domination, and Emancipation,” 161–90.

48 For the general character of this claim as a Hegelian extension of the Kantian notion of autonomy, see Brandom, Reason in Philosophy. Animating Ideas, 68–70; for the application to critical theory, see Stahl, Immanent Critique, 198-202; and Honneth, “Is There an Emancipatory Interest?,” 914.

49 Stahl, Immanent Critique, 243, 248.

50 Stahl, “Collective Responsibility for Oppression,” 456.