Abstract

This study clarifies the role reflection should play in ethical and political life. Today individuals are increasingly called on to utilize their reflective capacities, but without the Socratic assurance that the examined life will be more fit for living than the unexamined life. ;Chapter One introduces the concept of reflexivity in theorizing reflection under current philosophical assumptions. Internalist conceptions of reflexivity focus on the skill of agents to adopt a reflective stance through mutual dialogue. Externalist conceptions of reflexivity take a distanciating stance toward dialogue and communication. ;Chapters Two and Three examine Habermas's synthesis of internalism and externalism. The reflexive use of communication provides his starting point, whereas externalism enables him to explain how existing social conditions prevent reflexivity's normative-rational potential from being realized. I criticize his assumption that externalism need only explain what prevents reason from being realized, since the realization of reason may itself sustain conflict and inequality. Contestation is endemic to reflexive practice, it is not incidental to, nor is it the "other" of, reflexivity. My critique yields the thesis that reflexive reason is a highly structured, socially contested product. This thesis bears on today's conflicts over reflexive participation, including social movements and initiatives for holding economic institutions publicly accountable. Pace Habermas, these conflicts are not only about social systems that block agents' reflexive participation; instead, they are also about which forms reflexive participation should assume. ;Chapters Four and Five present Foucault's genealogies as an externalist critique of reflexive agency. Contrary to the interpretation that genealogy dispenses with agency and precludes critique, I argue that our constitution as reflexive agents, and our capacity for taking normative stances and critical action, concern Foucault profoundly. His goal is to reveal how we ourselves sustain power in multiple, if not always apparent ways. By making our responsibility for current conditions more apparent, genealogy also calls on us to take cognizance of and active responsibility for the power relations we uphold. Through an analysis of "the care of the self," genealogy's critical and normative stance is elaborated as an art of living, as a self-distanciating practice of the examined life