The Lebensform as organism: Clarifying the limits of immanent critique

Kantian discovery and attempted resolution of the antinomy of teleological judgement

Part II of Kant’s Critique of Judgement deals with the issue of teleological judgement as it concerns natural things, and more broadly the concept of life. For Kant, it seems as if it would be impossible to understand natural things, like the hollowness of a bird’s bones, without invoking the notion of a purposiveness in nature. The intelligibility of the hollow bones requires reference to the purpose of a bird to fly, and for Kant, this seems to be a case of a teleological end being necessary for the understanding of (natural) objects of experience – flying is the reason for the bone as such. However, such things as the bird bones (and indeed all the other parts of a bird that require the purpose of flight to understand) are the observable product of nature, which by definition is entirely explicable in terms of mechanistic, rather than teleological, causality – ‘nature, considered as mere mechanism, could have structured itself differently in a thousand ways without hitting on precisely the unity in terms of a principle of purposes, and so we cannot hope to find a priori the slightest basis for that unity unless we seek it beyond the concept of nature rather than in it’. ¹¹ The unity of an organism and the principle of natural mechanism appear irreconcilable, producing Kant’s antinomy of teleological judgement. Because mechanism could only produce wholes in terms of aggregates of prior existing things, the purpose of the whole is not actually necessary for the being of the parts that compose the aggregative whole. Yet we nonetheless cannot understand bird bones, trees or the human body without reference to some purposiveness in nature. The determinative judgement of a thing as a natural thing that exhibits purposes – life as a concept – is both necessary and impossible. ¹²

Kant tries to resolve this antinomy in a way that would go on to frustrate the later German Idealists. Opening the section titled ‘On the Character Peculiar to Things [Considered] as Natural Purposes’, Kant notes that ‘to say that a thing is possible only as a purpose is to say that the causality that gave rise to it must be sought, not in the mechanism of nature, but in a cause whose ability to act is determined by concepts’. ¹³ Kant goes on in this section to distinguish things necessarily understood as being a natural purpose ‘if it is both cause and effect of itself’. ¹⁴ Explaining via the example of a tree, Kant shows that a natural thing is the cause of itself in that it produces itself in the growth from acorn to sprout to fully grown tree, producing the material that goes on to compose its increased size, and reproduces itself at the level of the species, in that it is only trees which make trees, and its various organs are in mutual dependence, like the roots, trunk and leaves. ¹⁵ In all these ways, the tree-ness of the thing, its concept, is required in order to make sense of leaves (as the photosynthetic organs of a tree) or the roots (as the nutrient-absorbing organs of a tree) – they are purposive in that they are the necessary causal conditions of the existing tree, and obviously were not themselves existing prior to the tree itself. Likewise, the tree does not precede the species of tree, although there is no species prior to its instantiation; the individual tree and the species are causes of each other, that is, of themselves.

In order to make sense of how purposiveness can possibly be conceptualized in terms of the tree, Kant introduces the distinction of internal and external purposiveness. In short, external purposiveness is the kind of purposiveness that is ascribable to human artefacts: the purpose of a hammer is to hit certain kinds of things with a force, because some agent constructed and intended it to be used as such. The purpose of a house is to offer shelter. There is nothing about the thing itself which asserts or implies these purposes, other than by reference to some rational being that intends or acts upon it. The purpose is external. In contrast, something like a tree has an internal or natural purpose. It is in the relation of the parts to the whole, their mutual dependence and functional arrangement, that is, their organization, that asserts or implies the purpose of the tree, without reference to human agents. The leaf’s purpose refers to the tree, the tree to the leaf as well as to its species in reproduction, and the species to its instances. Contrast this to a watch: though we might call a watch organized, not all the gears are efficient causes of each other. As Kant puts it, ‘the cause that produced the watch and its form does not lie in nature (the nature of this [watch] material), but lies outside nature and in a being who can act…one gear in the watch does not produce another; still less does one watch produce other watches…a machine has only motive force. But an organized being has within it formative force’. ¹⁶

Kant’s solution to the antinomy is to describe the organic via the notion of internal purposiveness. However, internal purposiveness remains something beyond experience, rather being a product of reasoning – ‘the concept of a thing as a natural purpose cannot be proved by reason’ – because the teleological causality that defines the concept is foreign to experience. ¹⁷ To judge something to be naturally purposive is to make a determinative judgement, a subsumption of experience to a concept that itself is not of objective reality. The claim of something as internally purposive thus requires a reference to something ‘supersensible’, as Kant puts it, so as to ground it. The purpose of the bird or the tree is not explicable via experience, but only via God. And as Kant admits, even if we had some kind of proof of the natural things as the ‘products of divine art’, such a designation would no longer make it a ‘natural’ thing, an organism. ¹⁸ Regardless, teleological judgements about natural things are required for natural investigations, and thus we require the concept in some capacity, but we ought not to fool ourselves into believing this is any more than a heuristic that, if taken to its full extent, proceeds into the realm of transcendent judgements. ¹⁹ Thus, Kant’s ultimate reaction to the problem of understanding natural things or organisms as subjects of judgements is to cite human limitation: the concept of internal purposiveness is helpful, but we can never know that such a concept is actually true of the world, because of this dependence on the supersensible. For the Kantian, life is only a sceptical posit.

Schelling’s modification of internal purposiveness

Following this elaboration of Kant’s articulation of and response to the antinomy of teleological judgement, we could note a few issues a reader might take up with Kant’s argument. The one I most wish to highlight, and which I see Schelling most effectively responding to, is Kant’s implicit reduction of internal purposiveness to external purposiveness. The artisan–artefact model of purposiveness that Kant explicates as external purposiveness seems to still be assumed for the idea of purposiveness in general once we consider internal purposiveness. The purpose of the bird or the tree, by the end of Kant’s deliberation, is found to require the divine to give them their purpose: the purpose of the bird is to fly, but this is only explicable as the purpose given to it by its divine artisan and it as the divine artefact. Even though he has drawn our attention to the way the organization of complex things like plants and animals, in a way, express their purpose and require reference to that purpose to be objects of judgement, he nonetheless falls into the problem of setting up sceptical barriers to this purposiveness because he lacked an imagination for how we might say that the purposiveness is truly internal and in fact explicable solely in terms of the self-generating and self-reproducing thing, without analogy to the artisan–artefact model. Schelling attempted to articulate such a concept of the living organism that is fully explicable in terms of itself, and in a way that tried to resolve Kant’s antinomy without resorting to scepticism. ²⁰

For Schelling, the organism ought not to be understood in the same mode as we normally think of mechanistic causality, but this is not to say that the organism thus participates in some extra-material, spiritual or divine form of causality. The issue is the usage of different concepts, especially the notions of organs, complexity, environment, and most centrally, activity and receptivity. Nature ought not to be principally conceived of as products, as Kant can be described as doing, but as productive, which can be broadly described as the general theme of Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism. ²¹ His ‘Deduction of the Organic’ in the middle of the text is an interesting section, for here Schelling appears to hold up the organism as a vital concept for his ambitious systematizing program: ‘One might say that organic nature furnishes the most obvious proof of transcendental idealism, for every plant is a symbol of the intelligence’. ²² This is because, like Kant, the defining feature of the organic is that it is cause and effect of itself; unlike Kant, this description also applies to the way in which cognition arises, for just as the plant incorporates into itself its environment, so does the intelligent self. For Schelling, the self posits a boundary between itself and its environment, eventually recognizes that the condition for the possibility of such a posited boundary requires that it itself is also that on the other side of the boundary, and thus appropriates the other side and delimits itself again, in an endless series of self-development and appropriative growth, wherein the self eventually comes to recognize itself in the whole of the universe. ²³ Thus, in a key equivocation that would go on to influence Hegel, Schelling can easily term the intelligence ‘organic’, insofar as it is a growing, self-determining unity that dynamically interacts and incorporates into itself its environment. And in Schelling’s terms, the succession of the organic intelligence/thing/universe, objectifying itself as its own cause and effect, appears as its organization. ²⁴

In Kabeshkin’s extended treatment of Schelling’s understanding of organism, this prioritization of dynamic, rather than fixed, entities raises the real question: How do organisms preserve themselves in the unalloyed flux of mechanistic causation, without referencing something like a supersensible vital force that creates unity? As Kabeshkin puts it, Schelling’s solution is that such preservation ‘is possible only through the act of opposition of that individual to the rest of nature and through its constant struggle against external nature’. ²⁵ The productivity of the organism, like intelligence generally, is not to merely develop outwards in a slow continuous growth, but to be active, to act upon its environment, not just react. The organism, to be an individual, has to determine its environment, rather than be determined by it, because otherwise, its unity will be destroyed by the flux of external mechanistic forces. But Schelling is not here making organism a mere mechanism, nor explaining organism via some vital force – at no point does Schelling’s explanation resort to anything beyond the laws of nature. ²⁶ In short, Schelling’s explanation of life is to note the properties of organization: an organism is composed of organs, which have various specialized systems and properties, by the fact of their composition and material. Upon interaction with the environment, like the oxygen in the air around it, the organ of the lungs reacts, in a purely mechanical way, to redirect/react to the properties of that external thing in such a way that produces a different effect upon some other organ, like the exertion of a certain pressure on the heart and the feeding of that oxygen into the bloodstream. ²⁷ Then, in reaction to this external cause, an opposing activity directed towards the external world can be exerted, like the compression of the lungs to exhale. In the organization of the body, the actual existence of such an organism is premised on its arrangement actually being successful in ‘struggling’ against the environment in a way that preserves its organization – a unity is preserved within a flux, and thus intrinsic to the organism ‘is a distinction between inner and outer’. ²⁸ This is all in contrast to inanimate or dead matter, a static structure, which will dissolve as a unity within an environment: a bridge, eventually, will collapse without externally imposed maintenance and a rock is eroded into particles. The organic is in dynamic interaction with its environment, unlike the nonorganic.

In addition to the properties of organization and unity within an environment, Schelling notes that self-reproduction is intrinsic to the organic, which is another way of viewing the maintenance of unity. Part of this organism–environment interaction is the ‘being-reproduced’ of the organism indirectly by the external causes of the environment: the obstruction of the soil, the wind and the rain are all destructive of a bridge, but vital both to the growth of a tree and its reproduction of its unity in seeding further instances of the species. In Schelling’s wider picture, this creates greater unity in the universe/environment than before. ²⁹ This reproduction of an individualized order, on the model of some species and within a flux of an environment, is the purposiveness of anything properly regarded as an organism: the purpose is self-stabilization and reproduction of the organic system itself. For the sake of succinctness and to indicate what I see as Schelling anticipating biological theories of the late 20th century, I will refer to this as the autopoietic property of the organism. ³⁰

What the Schellingian modifications of internal purposiveness achieves is a secularization of life. Rather than conceiving of purpose on the model of the artisan–actor model, one can, through a reconceptualization of how mechanism and the complex organization of an organism actually interact, conceive of a purpose for an organism that is genuinely internal, namely autopoiesis. The purpose of an organism is to reproduce itself, to exert and maintain its current structure and identity within an environment. Importantly for our purposes, it can be seen that for Schelling, the concept of the organism was crucial for the kind of systematic account of thought that Hegel too would embark upon in the Phenomenology and Logic, and familiarity with Schelling’s response to Kant enables a clear apprehending of Hegel’s conception of purposiveness and the organic.

The organicism of Hegel’s concept and its normative content

Hegel’s development of judgement, the concept of life and the normativity of the concept can all be plausibly read as his reflections upon Kant and Schelling’s work as recapitulated above. The method of my present exegesis will be to highlight key moments of the Logic as they relate to the demonstration of the normativity of the concept that Jaeggi quotes in her development of immanent critique, so as to show the centrality of the organic for Hegel’s concept for such critique.

As mentioned above, in the course of his section on judgement, ³¹ Hegel praises Kant’s distinction of internal and external purposiveness and the recognition of the antinomy of teleological judgement. ³² In opposition to the Kantian scepticism about natural purposes, Hegel defends the notion of a teleological judgement. Passing over the details, it is enough for me to note that in the discussion closing the section on teleological judgement, Hegel’s dialectical overcoming of external purposiveness as a realized purpose resolves itself into the notion of internal purposiveness as objective in the self-subsistence of the object of a concept – the perishable artefact of the arts cannot be a purpose made truly objective. Such an objective purpose could only be exemplified by an internally purposive object. ³³ As he concludes the chapter on teleology and the wider section on judgement, the movement of purpose in the concept resolves itself into the notion of ‘the idea’. ³⁴ A version of internal purposiveness, as part of a valid form of teleological judgement, grounds Hegel’s following section on ‘the Idea’, the first chapter of which is dubbed ‘Life’.

In Hegel’s introduction to the ‘Idea’ section, he begins to clarify the concept in a way that echoes the latter discussion quoted by Jaeggi: ‘The idea is the adequate concept, the objectively true, or the true as such. If anything has truth, it has it by virtue of its idea, or something has truth only in so far as it is idea’. ³⁵ The idea is the concept made actual, or where the internal purpose of a thing is actualized by the subsistence of that thing – ‘the idea is the unity of the concept and objectivity, the true, we must not regard it as just a goal which is to be approximated but itself remains always a kind of beyond; we must rather regard everything as being actual only to the extent that it has the idea in it and expresses it’. ³⁶ The Hegelian notion of truth, and thus the criterion for a critique, is the union of concept and reality, ‘of soul and body’, where a thing properly accords with the purposiveness that it expresses in its structure, and the absence of which is like the parting of the soul from the human body, that is, a dead thing. Already jumping to the level of social objects, Hegel notes that ‘wholes like the state and the church cease to exist in concreto when the unity of their concept and their reality is dissolved’ and equates the inorganic world with ‘the dead’ like these. ³⁷ Nonetheless, for something like a despotic state, which can be regarded as being close to death, the concept of the state is ‘essential’ to even bad states; it remains ‘present in them as so mighty an impulse that they are driven to translate it into reality, be it only in the form of external purposiveness, or to put up with it as it is, or else they must needs perish…the individuals still obey the power of a concept [emphasis added]’. ³⁸ Hegel’s concept of the concept is the Kantian internal purposiveness that, like Schelling’s, is shorn of the artisan–artefact conception of purpose and conceives a causal relationship between a thing and its concept. Even the despotic state corresponds to the state-ness that it self-posits as an instance of its kind, and its struggle to survive is properly regarded as something that actualizes to lesser or greater degrees its own ideal.

Hegel continues from this introductory sketch to the first chapter of this section dissecting the ‘idea of life’. ³⁹ The sketch of the dialectic of this chapter proceeds as such: life as the living individual that is indifferent to objectivity, then the life process that posits the externality of the objective, and lastly the genus-process that sublates the living singular individual into the objectivity, returning the individual back to its concept. Albeit posed in different language, Hegel’s life chapter is actually quite similar in content to Schelling’s theory. The idea of the living individual begins as a self-restricted process, but in that process of positing its externality and reproducing itself, what the concrete idea of life in fact engages in is the moments of ‘sensibility and irritability’ and undergoing the ‘feeling and power of resistance’. ⁴⁰ This reference to the outward-facing nature of the living individual is what gets encapsulate by Hegel’s term ‘the life-process’. The mechanical causality that for Kant threatened our capacity for knowing the organic is again recognized as that which ‘excites’ the living being to enact its purpose. And like Schelling, there is the recognition of the dynamic interaction of a living purposiveness within an indeterminate, objective world, that is, of the organism interacting with its mechanistic environment, adapting to, rather than collapsing under, the external influences. ⁴¹ This is not the interaction of a closed, static structure with an environment, but of the objectification of life as a process of appropriating and assimilating its environment to itself. ⁴² In its identifying of the singular individual with the negative objectivity of its surrounding, the idea of life is raised from its particularity into its universality as the genus-process. Stated otherwise, the reproduction of the organism posits the individual as individual, as a member of a species which is the actual subject of continued identity through this process. The individual impulse to self-preserve, in a contradictory sense, annuls such preservation, instead reproducing the universal: the tree does not, in fact, reproduce itself, but another instance of its species. The actuality of the species, of the concept of life, is reflected in the ‘propagation of the living species’, while the generation of the singular individual operates on the presupposition of the species. ⁴³ There is a ‘holistic relationship of living beings to their kinds’ in this genus process, where the individual is made possible by the concept and the continued instantiation of the individual in reproduction asserts the actuality of the species. ⁴⁴ As Lindquist excellently sums up Hegel’s definition of life, ‘a living being is a functionally organized totality of members that maintains itself against and through its environment in the manner of some particular species’, that is, the autopoietic organism. ⁴⁵

Having developed this idea of the organism or life, Hegel makes the prima facie confusing move to say that the idea of life is the idea of cognition. In so far as it is the idea who’s actualization relates itself to itself as an idea, where universality itself is the ‘determinateness and existence’ of the idea (in reproduction, the idea of the species as a kind of universality is made actual; a simple universality is made real), the idea of life is another way of referring to the ‘idea of cognition’. ⁴⁶ The concept of the organic grounds the capacity of the Hegelian to criticize things as failed instances of their kind because it is life as universal, achieved in the reproduction of the species, that concretizes the concept which can be cited for a judgement, to determine whether there is unity between the concept and reality. ⁴⁷ As Hegel says in a moment of clarity: ‘it is from the idea of life that the idea of spirit has emerged, or what is the same thing, that has demonstrated itself to be the truth of the idea of life. As this result, the idea possesses its truth in and for itself, with which one may then compare the empirical reality or the appearance of spirit to see how far it accords with it [emphasis added]’. ⁴⁸ In Hegel’s estimation, it is only on the basis of the organicism of the object that something like immanent critique becomes possible – the reality of the universal in the organism enables judgement of that thing as good/bad.

We may now diverge from the overall trajectory of Hegel’s text to trace this idea of comparing things with their concepts, as it gets elaborated in the ‘idea of cognition’ chapter. Honing in on the section of the Logic that Jaeggi cites to explain cases of things not matching their concepts, we find Hegel in the middle of a discussion of analytic and synthetic cognitions, considering definitions as a moment of synthetic cognition. ⁴⁹ A definition for Hegel reduces a subject matter into its abstract concept. As opposed to artefacts and geometric objects, he notes the difficulty of this abstracting for ‘concrete objects, of nature as well as of spirit’. ⁵⁰ In these cases, one has to discover what is the genus/species/essential properties of the object. Here, Hegel presents the case of there being a difference between concepts and their realization as a problem for definition-based forms of judgement, but concludes that recognition of such implies that one determines the concepts by reference to something other than what is immediately apparent in the object. ⁵¹ As Jaeggi puts it, such an articulation of ‘the possibility of a divergence between actuality and concept and the normative definitional power of the concept with respect to actuality…now opens up the possibility of a particular variety of normative criticism of social phenomena – namely, criticism of incomplete or deficient instantiations of concepts’. ⁵² Two points ought to be highlighted about this selection from Hegel. Firstly, in Hegel’s examples, he explicates this difference-noticing with four kinds of objects: bad plants, bad animal types, contemptible human individuals and bad states, the last of which recalls the example given in the section introduction. These are all objects of nature and spirit (i.e. universalized nature) which is a fact Jaeggi leaves unremarked upon. Secondly, the concept by which one would criticize the first three kinds of objects would be its species, and recalling the above-described intrinsic relationship between an individual and its species that Hegel’s conception of life entails, the determination of any instances as ‘bad’ would have to be in reference to this relationship. In the case of the state, while a digression on Hegel’s theory of state is beyond the scope of this article, insofar as the state can be considered akin to an organic arrangement of a human population through organs like laws, associations, and classes that relate to, presuppose, and produce each other, to consider the state an organism is quite amenable to the concept developed heretofore.

I now depart from this explication of the Logic to clearly state what the foregoing hopes to have demonstrated. In the logical progression from Kant’s antinomy and the distinction of internal and external purposiveness, up through the idea of life into the elaboration of the concept of the concept which Jaeggi finds fecund for normative-critique purposes, one can clearly see the uninterrupted dependence of the latter ideas upon the prior, as per Hegel’s method. The concepts and arguments he was dealing with were all centred on the problem of life and the concept of the organic. It is the idea of life that is constituted by the movement between individual and species in self-maintenance and reproduction that establishes the basis on which Hegel can recognize something like the difference between an instance and its concept – it is the failure of an organism to sustain itself, to reproduce, to be properly autopoietic that concept and reality become incongruent. Inorganic things do not have that property of actuality which creates an essential connection between the subject and its universal, a connection that derives from the organization of the thing. The method of immanent criticism that employs such incongruency to mount a criticism of social phenomena is ultimately reliant on this intellectual heritage of German Idealist theorizing of the organic, insofar as it is only the internally purposive, that which contains its concept in itself, which can be the subject of immanent critique. Through this intellectual history, a single powerful point can be made: immanent criticism is an intrinsically organic concept in that it is only organisms which are susceptible to it. In the next section, I will elaborate this point in a manner that, shorn of the complexity of Hegel’s more systematic ambitions, shows the organicism of immanent critique remains a reasonable proposition.

Bureaucracy

My first illustration of how the ideal of stability can fail us as a criterion is the cyberneticist Stafford Beer’s discussion of self-reproducing bureaucracy. Cybernetics, being the study of self-regulating systems, draws heavily off of natural systems to conceptualize what a viable, environmentally interactive and self-reproducing system looks like at the purely abstract level. In the course of his Designing Freedom lecture series, Beer presents the basics of cybernetics as it can relate to the problems of social organization. Systems, for Beer, can ultimately be reduced to a single principle/purpose/output state by which their organization can be understood and by which its interaction with the environment accords. ⁷⁰ A firm is a system where the chief principle is the profit motive, which governs its structure and the manner in which it reacts to stimuli. Profitability is the output that the organization of the firm seeks to maximize or stabilize; to criticize it on any other basis would, in our terms, be external criticism. A room heated and cooled by an AC unit linked to a thermostat is a similar system, defined by a single output state – keep the room at a cool 65 degrees Fahrenheit. A system that maintains the expected output against the perturbations of its environment successfully can be called a homeostatic system. Such thinking can be applied to the technologies, organisms, and institutions making up our world, with systems within systems and systems overlapping the apparent barriers between ‘things’; systems-thinking, not entity-thinking. ⁷¹ The only difference between the thermostat and an animal is that an organic body’s purpose or output state is its own preservation/unity/stability/preservation.

In Beer’s estimation, the growing bureaucratic components of the late-Fordist welfare state was precisely a failed system because while they were constructed to serve some functional purpose (the output of the state health department is supposed to be the health of the community), in the transformation of its organization over time, the output state or purpose shifted into being its own preservation as a bureaucracy. The bureaucracy effectively became an organism like the human body: a homeostatic system whose output state is its own preservation. ⁷² But a self-sustaining bureaucracy is not what we intended when we built such institutions like universities or health departments. The bureaucracy was intended to be like a functional organ that serves a wider institution and its chief output. The transformation of an organ of some functional system into a self-concerned unity is destructive of the overall system: the humanities are defunded, shallow building projects are prioritized, or the health of the community is ignored. Long term, we can say that the ‘nucleus growing within the institution’ might, by its self-interested preservation ultimately destroy its institutional environment and thereby the original reason for its being – a bureaucratically bloated department is either defunded and ultimately eliminated itself (destroying the possibility of even the original functionalist bureaucracy), or more disturbingly, the bureaucracy persists and continues to defraud and undermine all other organizations so as to feeds its budget. To recall Kant, there seem to be genuine problems when something that was only supposed to be externally purposive like dead matter manages to, in its own right, become internally purposive; this is a serious danger for social institutions, because we really do want these to be merely functional. An internally purposive hammer will obstruct the construction project. Bureaucracies are dangerous for their dynamism, threatening the conditions for organization in their immediate environment, as well as negatively affecting other forms of life in their failure to just be externally purposive functions. ⁷³ We do not want bureaucracies to be internally purposive in the first place, but when they are, what makes them being such so undesirable is not that they are unsuccessful in reproducing themselves (failure to do so would annul the problem), but that they are.

Beer’s example of the bureaucracy illustrates how, within an ontological picture where there are systems within systems, just as Jaeggi recognized nested Lebensformen, an issue that has to be considered is the way that the stability of an organism may, in some cases, be in a zero-sum game with other such organisms. The ideal of experimental pluralism becomes social Darwinism in a situation of nested and interrelated forms of life, where parasitic Lebensformen may emerge and actively destroy all else around it before it would ever be demonstrably self-contradictory. In the case of an organic bureaucracy developing within the health system, the material conditions for certain kinds of ethical relations are undermined by the stability of the bureaucratic form of life. At the level of politics this implies having to go beyond a merely immanent critique of a Lebensform via experimental principles, towards a willingness to choose between exclusive options that are not obviously so, like between a generically Northern and Southern Lebensform (during the American Civil War) or between a bureaucratically organized health department and its corresponding community. In Beer’s systems-theoretic analysis, by definition, something like a self-interested stable institution will adapt to and reroute internal reforms aimed at re-functionalizing it; such things, like cancer, have to be killed. ⁷⁴ Or in Jaeggi’s terms, there is no guarantee the blocked learning process of a Lebensform will collapse all by itself on the equal plane of experimentalism, nor that experimentalism even makes sense within the picture of ‘nested’ subordinate/dominant relationships between forms of life (i.e. between the rural American form of life and the overall American form of life). At the level of theory, this means supplementing the Hegelian account of internal contradiction with something like Althusser’s notion of external contradiction to describe the analysis of a (contradictory) unity interacting with another (contradictory) unity which may result in either homeostatic maintenance in spite of their internal contradictions, or lead to the destruction of either or both, as well as these interactions being constitutive of some larger unity’s own internal contradiction. ⁷⁵ The organism/Lebensform, precisely not as a closed whole, but as an open, dynamic, systematic thing, can have ‘contradictions’ with things beyond their ostensive unities that nonetheless relate to, impinge on, and result from their own unitary nature and the preservation thereof. The example of internally purposive bureaucracies indicate a case where forms of life need to be, at the very least on practical grounds, criticized as forms of life that ought not be, and without the post hoc criterion of its own survivability. The criterion of immanent critique is simply too narrow to understand or evaluate these ways in which forms of life, as forms of life, are deceptive and destructive of others through their organic stability.

Capitalism and the ecological environment

Another illustrative example of the limits of the immanent critique of Lebensformen is the case of capitalism’s relation to the ecological environment and global warming. Capitalism, considered as a Lebensform, is perhaps the most complex and largest-scale social unity that may be referred to as a form of life. The capitalist system, as an ensemble of interlocking relationships or capital circuits that bind all into relationships like the world market, can be said to have a self-regulative and self-preserving tendency (adjustments to scarcity, aggregative growth through time and space, mediation of anticapitalistic militancy via social bodies like police and symbolic recuperation). Capital is an incredibly successful autopoietic system. The old Marxist wager of ever-increasing contradictions producing the explosive force to destroy capital has yet to pay off, but it operated on this conception of capital as a short-term organic unity. The failure of the orthodox Marxist philosophy of history should be proof enough that the survivability criterion is not sufficient for a convincing immanent critique of capitalism; capital-as-Lebensform has confronted countless droughts, like Jaeggi’s example rural society, but it has succeeded in reproducing itself for many centuries now. To claim that this or that was a ‘false solution’, with reference to some theoretical ‘long term’, appears weakly justified. Marx’s critique of capital was limited so long as his immanent critique of capital was never alloyed with some moral or ethical component like alienation theory.

A kind of Eco-Marxist critique of capitalism can be introduced here, or at least consideration of capital’s complicated relationship to natural processes. ⁷⁶ It seems as if capital is not just ethically destructive, alienating and exploiting workers, but in the pursuit of exchange value, it also systematically undermines the conditions of its own wealth generation by immiserating its human components and destroying the soil. ⁷⁷ With global warming in mind, we might specifically target the necessity of cheap carbon fuels for profitability and the capitalism-destroying prospects of ecological collapse. But like with the case of bureaucracy, this is only a long-term stability problem – the contradiction is still preserved in an interminable state, the organic unity of global human civilization has not yet removed every wooden board from the cabin to heat the stove. The crisis-potential is diagnosable, but in terms of the organism itself, in its correspondence with its concept, non-identity remains only implicit; our temporalized epistemic position never definitively recognizes false solutions until after the fact, producing an implicit sceptical conundrum, a problem elided by the presumption of access to the long term. Jaeggi’s model of criticizing a Lebensform as a successful or failed learning process is thus only a purely reactive kind of critique. Most damningly, this mode of critique seems totally ill-equipped to do the normative evaluation of the single most important target for Critical Theory as a tradition – capitalism. Capital is nothing if not dynamic, transformative, and adaptive to the various conditions of human culture and practice around the world. Its not even clear that Jaeggi has the resources to claim that capitalism is a ‘bad’ Lebensform, except in reference to its undermining of other, smaller scale forms of life; and again, she maintains a version of the ethical abstinence of the liberals that precludes taking a side as a theorist, deferring instead to the vague notion of experimentalism. Echoing Marx in his occasional celebratory or awe-filled moments in Capital and elsewhere, it is hard to say, after a couple centuries, that capitalism is not a surprisingly successful Lebensform. ⁷⁸

Even further, the immanent critique of the capitalist Lebensform on Jaeggi’s model does not capture the dynamic of capitalist processes undermining the potential for any future forms of life to be able to persist after its diagnosed eventual failure. Just like the bureaucracy which destroys the public trust in any future community health programs, capital’s destruction of the environment portends the inability of any future form of life to exist after it. Separate from the questionable appeal to the ‘long-term’ and capital’s apparent stability, this is the concept of the organic showing us the lasting environmental (in the abstract sense) damage of an organism going through a cycle of development, expansions, truncated learning, and catastrophic collapse. Jaeggi elides this issue by assuming crisis and collapse open up the space for new forms and a greater sublimation in the wider experiment, but the downstream effects of organic collapse, in the case of the capitalist Lebensform, are not ignorable in an analysis hoping to say ‘what, if anything, is wrong with capitalism’. ⁷⁹

The limitations I see here in immanent critique, as explicated by Jaeggi and recognized as organic, can be neatly summed up. Immanent critique of Lebensformen-as-Lebensformen is too narrow to recognize the complicated, contradictory relationships between the socio-organic unities that make up our life; dependence on the notion of the ‘long term’ is symptomatic of a practically useless reactivity of the survivalist-normativity of such critique, exemplified in the case of capital’s production of ‘false solutions’ in ecological degradation, which for the ecologist, portends the destruction of ethical life in general; and we simply do not want certain things, like bureaucracies, to achieve the spiritual unity of an organism. These are explicable as limits of immanent critique, as opposed to simply being evaluations it is not designed to perform, because these problems are precisely only explicable with reference to the organic constitution of these objects. We require the concept of the organic to explicate these problematic forms of life, but ‘non-correspondence of object and concept’ is definitely not the sufficient criterion justifying a criticism of these forms of life. The destructiveness of the bureaucracy is here understood to be the result of an autopoietic structure interfering with its original, functionalist institution within its ‘host’. Capital’s eventual failure to sustain its engagement with the physical makeup of the planet as a whole is its failure as an organism, and its deferring of that outcome in the meantime via stopgap measures, making the final collapse ever more catastrophic for the possibility of any future form of ethical life (i.e. post-capitalist climate apocalypse), is only explicable as species-reproduction with/against an environment. I am willing to admit that the issue of immanent criticism’s dependence on the problematic ‘final instance’ may be theoretically addressed in a way I have not anticipated. But the critical issues of wanting bureaucracy to remain only externally purposive and for capital to not destroy the potential of post-capitalist forms of life in its collapse push us beyond the scope of mere supplementation of the original notion of immanent criticism, into the realm of needing some kind of external commitment to organize inter-Lebensformen comparison and critique. The immanent standpoint can register these issues, but the way immanent critique appears to cash out the instance-species relationship to normative effect is not applicable within temporality, without immediate access to the ‘in the last instance’ of the pluralist experiment.