Abstract
Despite a rather unattractive cover page, Karin de Boer and Ruth Sonderegger’s Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy provides an insightful illumination of the current debate on critique in philosophy. The edition contains an introduction and 14 chapters written by 14 contributors, an index, but no conclusion. Perhaps the key question why this edition exists is to answer the initial claim raised in the introduction, namely ‘critique has run out of steam’ (Bruno Latour). To a large degree most authors discuss ‘two forms of critique – external and immanent critique’. However, the editors argue that ‘we would suggest that during the 20th century, critique has developed along three different paths’: a ‘radicalisation of 19th century self criticisms of critical philosophy [with] philosophers such as Benjamin, Adorno, Foucault, and Derrida’; ‘Habermas’ critique of society [that] gained force by drawing on criteria that allow the critic to tell right from wrong, true from false or alienation from self-realisation’; and ‘a third path that critique has taken to lead beyond the confines of philosophy…Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Jaques Rancière and Judith Butler’.
Judith Butler distinguishes the ‘domain of the speakable and thinkable’ from what Adorno has called the ‘ineffable’ (see Freyenhagen, ‘Adorno’s Ethics without the Ineffable’, Telos, no. 155), arguing that ‘critique is…protecting the public against harmful doctrines’. To some degree, Butler’s article fights a bygone battle against state intrusion into the domain of academic freedom while the real danger today – inside and outside of universities – is managerialism (see Klikauer, Managerialism, Palgrave, 2013). Nevertheless, she hits the nail on the head when arguing that ‘Kant writes that the philosophy faculty can never lay aside its arms in the face of the danger that threatens the truth entrusted to its protection, because the higher faculties will never give up their desire to rule’. Kantian philosophy occupies a largely unchallenged position when it comes to critical philosophy. This is discussed in the introduction by Butler but perhaps even more so in Tosel’s ‘Spinoza or the Other Critique’. Tosel agrees with Kant’s position inside critical philosophy by arguing that any form of critique – after Kant – has often been seen as ‘the other critique’ and as a reflection of Kant’s seminal trilogy of critiques (1781, 1788, 1790). Tosel maintains that ‘philosophy, as critique, thus potentially subverts the encyclopaedia of knowledge and, without taking recourse to a utopian realm of ends, reforms the idea of the good life governed by reason’.
One of the collection’s most delightful chapters is Quadrio’s ‘Rousseau, Kant and Philosophical Auto-Criticism: The Practical Ends of Critical Thinking’ in which he traces the importance of Rousseau’s critical philosophy by asserting ‘the continental tradition of philosophy is [to be] a civil servant to humanity [with] the task of the philosopher to consist in serving, to the best of their ability, the end of human emancipation’. Quoting Rousseau, Quadrio highlights ‘what are we to think of commerce, in which the interest of every individual dictates to him maxims diametrically opposite to those which the interests of the community recommend to the body of society’. He continues with: ‘we no longer ask if a man has integrity but rather if he has talent; we do not ask if a book is useful but if it is well written. Rewards are showered on clever minds, but virtue receives no honours’. Quadrio concludes with what can be said about many: ‘the thing that thinkers fear most is that they are not the centre of the intellectual world hailed for their theoretical genius’. This is Rousseau’s ‘auto-criticism’ driven to the most exquisite level.
McQuillian’s ‘Beyond the Limits of Reason: Kant, Critique and Enlightenment’ continues this line of argument by focusing on Foucault describing the post-Kantian era as ‘the genuine age of criticism [perhaps partly because] so long as human beings find the courage to sue their own understanding without direction from another, Kant considers them to be enlightened’. Hence, Kant ‘insists that everything must submit to the strict criticism of Enlightenment’. Kant’s immediate German successor – Hegel – continues this as outlined in de Boer’s ‘Hegel’s Conception of Immanent Critique: Its Sources, Extent and Limit’. She emphasizes that ‘Hegel has argued that a genuine philosophical critique must assume the very idea of philosophy as its criterion’. Boer continues by writing: ‘Hegel considers so-called philosophies that merely consist of single, unconnected thoughts to have lost all credit’ (see Klikauer, ‘Hegel’s Philosophy’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 38/6).
But what critique, practical critique, and above all philosophical critique is all about has been outlined to perfection in Robin Celikates’ ‘Karl Marx: Critique as Emancipatory Practice’. Written in the Marcuse tradition of critical theory, Celikates emphasizes that ‘his [Marx’s] version of immanent critique focuses on the internal contradictions of the social order (modern capitalist society) and its social imaginary’. Crucially, ‘based on his critique of idealism, Marx’s materialism claims that the consciousness of individuals is determined, or conditioned, by their social existence and that the superstructure of society (law, politics, religion, morality, etc.) is determined, or conditioned, by its economic structure’. Hence, ‘the critique of ideology is of fundamental importance to Marx’s project: freeing oneself from ideological illusions is a precondition for engaging in emancipatory action’.
Celikates continues by arguing that ‘Marx notes that a focus on redistribution only leads to cosmetic corrections of the status quo as long as the relations of production (and the question of just distribution of the means of production) are not tackled’. Perhaps this is not to be seen totally unconnected from the debate on ‘recognition-vs.-redistribution’ raging inside critical theory (see Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition, Verso, 2003). Conceivably, Fraser’s emphasis on ‘redistribution’ is, at least according to Marx, no more than placing a bit of cosmetics on capitalism’s ugly face, while Honneth’s suggestion that critical theory should focus on ‘recognition’ places even more Botox on capitalism’s repulsive visage. Celikates – an associate member of the Institut für Sozialforschung – does not go into details of this debate but focuses on the subject at hand: critique.
He highlights Marx’s contribution to critical philosophy via the analogy of Marx’s critique of religion, emphasizing that ‘human emancipation…requires a transformation of individuals, their social relations and their self-understanding’. Similar to Seyla Benhabib, Celikates notes that ‘the critique of capitalism as inhumane, unjust and irrational…has to be accompanied by a critique of the bourgeois forms of knowledge which presents a historically specific and politically changeable mode of production as natural and thus as apolitical and unchangeable’. Finally, Celikates continues the aforementioned concept of immanent critique by outlining ‘immanent critique has to be based on an analysis of social reality and finds its criteria in social practice, struggles, experiences and self-understanding’.
A quite different approach to critique is presented in Porter’s contribution of ‘Nietzsche’s Genealogy as Performative Critique’, highlighting key elements of Nietzsche’s thinking such as ‘the slave revolt begins when resentment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values’. Porter concludes that ‘Nietzschean genealogy is a critical practice whose principle object is the human mind and its endless capacities for (self-)delusion’. Drilling even deeper into the human mind is Rottenberg’s part on ‘Psychoanalytic Critique and Beyond’, focusing on Kant and Freud. Rottenberg highlights that ‘psychoanalysis must purify through criticism the mind’s natural but illegitimate demands for consolatory illusion’. She also observes that ‘Freud has, in a sense, returned us to a notion of critique in which destruction takes centre stage…raising the spectre of Freud “the all-destroyer”, of a Freud interested first and foremost in destroying illusions’.
Destroying illusions and myths is also a task set by Walter Benjamin as Lijster’s enjoyable chapter on ‘The Interruption of Myth: Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Critique’ shows. Lijster simply states ‘Benjaminian critique is immanent…it is a critique of myth’. Hence ‘every critical review should be at the same time a philosophy of criticism’. Crucial to understand Benjamin’s take on critique is his ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921). Lijster notes: ‘in Greek mythology, the gods use violence against man not to punish him for breaking the laws, but to manifest their existence [and] for the exercise over life and death, more than in any other legal acts, the law reaffirms itself’ (Benjamin). In other words, hundreds of death row inmates had to die so that American penal law could reaffirm itself. But not only law is mythical, ‘capitalist culture in all its facets contains mythical elements…capitalism reproduces this temporary hell, for instance, in the form of factory labour. The worker on the assembly line, like a modern Sisyphus, has to repeat the same action over and over again’.
In a 1939 essay Benjamin describes the shift from Erfahrung to Erlebnis, whereas the first term denotes meaningful, embedded experiences, the second refers to reified, isolated experiences. Traditionally, the individual’s experience of time went hand in hand with collective experience. His life is embedded within tradition, and is measured by the religious calendar, which lifts certain moments out of the historical continuum. In modernity, tradition is no longer self-evident. Life is measured by the clock, of which its succeeding seconds represent merely the ever-the-same. Within this empty, homogeneous time, experience in its traditional sense is no longer possible.
Yet another highlight of the collection is Freyenhagen’s ‘Adorno’s Critique of Late Capitalism: Negative, Explanatory and Practical’. However, focusing unilaterally on Adorno might cut the highly fruitful and collaborative Adorno-Horkheimer relationship – out of which fundamental aspects of critical theory developed – a bit short. Critical theory not only significantly enhanced Kant’s project of Enlightenment and critique itself (Kant) but also developed critique into a proper theory, namely critical theory. Simultaneously, critical theory remains closely linked to critical philosophy. In his part, Freyenhagen argues that ‘Adorno’s theory is a form of radical social critique in that it aims at changing not merely specific aspects of contemporary society, but its whole social structure’. While not neglecting the Adorno-Horkheimer collaboration, Freyenhagen writes: Adorno wholeheartedly endorsed Horkheimer’s programmatic statement, according to which critical theory’s objective is not simply to eliminate one or other abuses, for it regards such abuses as necessarily connected with the entire setup of the social structure. Although it itself emerges from the social structure, its purpose is not, either in its conscious intention or in its objective significance, the better function of any element in the structure. On the contrary, it is suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable, as these are understood in the present order, and refuses to take them as non-scientific presuppositions about which it can do nothing.
This rather lengthy quote reminds us once again what the task of critical theory is. Crucially, Freyenhagen emphasizes that ‘Adorno, in fact, doubts that the strict division between immanent and external critique can be maintained’. Not least because ‘late capitalism has become so delusional and has affected our faculties so much that we cannot even imagine what a really different society would be like’ (e.g. Brink’s ‘Damaged Life’ in Brink and Owen, Recognition and Power, Cambridge University Press, 2010). Feyenhagen closes with Lukács’ famous objection that often theory ‘amounts to the lament of a few intellectuals lodging in the “Grand Hotel Abyss” and contemplating the end of civilisation’.
Perhaps more than contemplating civilization is shown in ‘Habermas’ Social Theory: The Critical Power of Communicative Rationality’, as Cooke explains by arguing ‘the linguistically focused critical approach on society [has been exposed to] the accusation that this critical perspective is insufficiently robust – too thin and too weak – to do justice to the forms of suffering and subordination characteristic of contemporary modern societies. Axel Honneth is representative of this line of criticism’. Having outlined several major critiques of Habermas’ version of critical theory, Cooke concludes that these ‘objections to the concept of communicative rationality offer no compelling reason to Habermas to abandon his critical project’. Habermas’ critical project is somewhat different from Foucault’s project but it also contains a few meeting points (see Habermas, ‘Foucault’s Lecture on Kant’, Thesis Eleven, 1986).
A Foucauldian version of critique is presented in Hendricks’ ‘Prophecy and Parrēsia: Foucauldian Critique and the Political Role of Intellectuals’. To some degree it represents a continuation of Lukács’ ‘intellectuals lodging in the Grand Hotel Abyss’. Hendricks argues that ‘according to Foucault, intellectuals can contribute to political change by employing critique to undermine what appears in the present to be stable, certain or necessary’. Important is Foucault’s concept of genealogical critique on which Hendricks writes: ‘according to Foucault, genealogical critique is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them’. It also involves Parrēsia. In contrast to Kant, Hegel, Marx and critical theory, ‘Parrēsia does not involve demonstrating the truth but is instead a form of critics, including those who are more powerful that the speaker. Hendricks’ Parrēsia therefore involves risks and requires courage’. Her conclusion – Parrēsia is ‘courageous truth-telling as critique in the face of risk’ – is somewhat contradictory to her ‘Parrēsia which does not involve demonstrating the truth’.
Foucault has often been associated with what has been called post-modernism and so has Derrida, who is the subject of Custer’s ‘Derrida: Echoes of the Forthcoming’ in which Custer quotes Derrida when writing ‘he [Derrida] insists that deconstruction is not a critique in a general sense or in a Kantian sense’. Nevertheless, ‘Derrida gives us all the goals to see in these foundations of critique also the foundations of imperialism and colonialism – the dark side of Enlightenment, that which we must not settle for’. Custer concludes by re-emphasizing that ‘deconstruction is not critique. That is, deconstruction is all about not being critique’.
Sonderegger’s ‘Negative versus Affirmative Critique: On Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Rancière’ argues that ‘according to Bourdieu, structures of domination remain in place, and oftentimes even go unrecognised by those who suffer from them’. Key to Bourdieu’s idea is, however, that ‘people living in poor conditions…are prepared to accept much more than we would have believed…They put up with a great deal, and this is what I mean by doxa – that there are many things people accept without knowing’.
Sonderegger highlights that Rancière saw Bourdieu’s ideas as ‘anti-emancipatory sociology’, arguing that ‘Bourdieu’s theory of practice is yet another variant of authoritarian ideology critique’. ‘Rancière later on developed a theory of emancipatory disagreement (mésentente)’. Sonderegger notes: ‘Rancière holds that the critical theorist should almost disappear so as to give voice to actual practitioners of critical disagreement’ as outlined in his ‘The Ignorant Schoolmaster’ (e.g. wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx_Reloaded). The Boer/Sonderegger collection ends without a conclusion on ‘the conceptions of critique in modern and contemporary philosophy’. Despite this, their seminal edition is one of the most meaningful contributions to the discussion of critical philosophy.