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Abstract:
Since the Enlightenment, critique has played an overarching role in how Western society understands itself and its basic institutions. However, opinions differ widely concerning the understanding and evaluation of critique. To understand such differences and clarify a viable understanding of critique, the article turns to Kant's critical philosophy, inaugurating the "age of criticism". While generalizing and making critique unavoidable, Kant coins an unambiguously positive understanding of critique as an affirmative, immanent activity. Not only does this positive conception prevail in the critique of pure and practical reason and the critique of judgment; these modalities of critique set the agenda for three major strands of critique in contemporary thought, culminating in among others Husserl, Popper, Habermas, Honneth, and Foucault. Critique affirms and challenges cognition and its rationality, formulates ethical ideals that regulate social interaction, and further articulates normative guidelines underway in the ongoing experimentations of a post-natural history of human nature.
In contradistinction to esoteric Platonic theory, philosophy at the threshold of modernity becomes closely linked to an outward-looking critique that examines and pictures what human forms of life are in the process of making of themselves and challenges them, by reflecting upon what they can and what they should make of themselves. As a very widely diffused practice, however, critique may also become a self-affirming overarching end in itself.
Key words: Affirmative critique, judgment, distinction, practice, philosophy, reason, Enlightenment, Man, anthropology, Kant, Heidegger, Habermas, Foucault, Schlegel, Plato
Critique in the Age of Criticism
In the foreword to the 1781 version of Critique of Pure Reason, the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant characterizes his own time as the 'age of criticism'. Indeed, critique is characterised as that, "to which everything must be subjected" (Kant, 1781/1976, p. 13). While religion may often call upon its sanctity, just as governmental legislation upon authority, to avoid the challenges that arise in critique, phenomena that seek to elude criticism must, according to Kant, awaken legitimate misgivings of not being able to resist critique. For this reason, "they become the subjects of just suspicion, and cannot lay claim to high esteem, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination (Kant, 1781/1976, p. 13).
Just as Kant thought of his time,...