Radical Philosophy

An Introduction

Chad Kautzer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317253198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this concise introduction, Chad Kautzer demonstrates the shared emancipatory goals and methods of several radical philosophies, from Marxism and feminism to critical race and queer theory. Radical Philosophy examines the relations of theory and practice, knowledge and power, as well as the function of law in creating extralegal forms of domination. Through a critical engagement with the history of philosophy, Kautzer reconstructs important counter-traditions of historical, dialectical, and reflexive forms of critique relevant to contemporary social struggles. The result is an innovative, systematic guide to radical theory and critical resistance.

Chapter 1 Critical Methodology

DOI: 10.4324/9781315632490-2

Chad Kautzer

Habits have been a target of criticism in the history of philosophy, because they are thought to bypass freedom or prejudice reason. This chapter outlines some reflexive, historical, and dialectical methods employed within radical philosophical projects through a reconstruction of them that is itself historical and dialectical. These include hermeneutical, standpoint, phenomenological, dialectical, and materialist methods. The history of hermeneutics reveals concerns for the ways in which languages and practices are interpreted and for the processes of determining who is authorized to engage in meaning making. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's dialectical method is grasping the moments of nonidentity, mediation, negation, and contradiction that characterize the movement within the circle. His dialectical method is taken up in radical philosophies and it is described in two concerns. The first concerns the social condition of individual freedom, which involves the dialectic of mutual recognition, while the second concerns the relation of theory and praxis, or the dialectic of immanence and transcendence.

Just as theories, epistemologies, and facts produced by any group of individuals represent the standpoints and interests of their creators, the very definition of who is legitimated to do intellectual work is not only politically contested, but is changing.

—Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought¹

Care for human existence and its truth makes philosophy a “practical science” in the deepest sense, and it also leads philosophy—and this is the crucial point—into the concrete distress of human existence.

—Herbert Marcuse, “On Concrete Philosophy”²

We are as much “bundles of habits” (William James) as we are an “ensemble of social relations” (Karl Marx), which is to say that we often unknowingly follow rules and use concepts within the everyday social relations that define us.³ Most of our actions and judgments are neither consciously intended nor accidental but are, rather, entrenched and habitual ways of navigating our social world. Habits have been a target of criticism in the history of philosophy, because they are thought to bypass freedom or prejudice reason. Habit “deprives even good actions of their moral worth because it impairs the freedom of the mind,” asserted Immanuel Kant.⁴

However, there is nothing inherently problematic about habits. Indeed, habit plays an important role in social cooperation, education, ethical behavior, and even the way we perceive and evaluate the world and ourselves.⁵ We inhabit a body, a culture, and a way of life. Yet, as John Dewey reminds us, “habit does not, of itself, know, for it does not of itself stop to think, observe or remember.”⁶ This means that unchecked habits can also, unbeknownst to us, reproduce oppressive behaviors, self-understandings, social structures, as well as various forms of power and privilege. In order to cultivate alternative habits, we need to recognize and scrutinize existing ones, which means making our habitual judgments and behavior explicit. Self-awareness makes self-critique of our problematic habits possible, and self-critique is essential to any radical philosophy.

Consider the “epic theater” of playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), which incorporated a self-reflective distancing or “estrangement effect” (Verfremdungseffekt) into its performance. In Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), for example, performers change their costumes and characters onstage as well as hold up signs describing the scene’s events. The spectator “is prevented from feeling his way into the characters,” Brecht writes. “Acceptance or rejection of the characters’ words is thus placed in the conscious realm, not, as hitherto, in the spectator’s subconscious.”⁷ Brecht referred to this reflexive experience as “dialectical theater,” because it drew traditionally passive spectators into an active, participatory role, making them self-aware and self-critical.⁸ One could not suspend disbelief or lose oneself in spectatorship.⁹ As Theodor Adorno once wrote, the “consequence of the self-critique of logic is the dialectic,” and we can see how the logic of Brecht’s dialectical theater is a consequence of the self-critique of traditional spectatorship—a logic it shares with supposedly disinterested philosophy.¹⁰

Although this process of self-reflection and critique is never complete—we can never become fully transparent to ourselves for reasons relating to nonidentity and embodiment—it helps us to identify habits of oppression and the possibilities for new practices. It is in this sense that Marx described critical philosophy as the self-clarification of its time, the clarification of “the meaning of its own struggle and its own desires.”¹¹ This holds true for those producing theory and for the content of the theory they produce. As theorists with a particular social location that engenders bias, we can carry out this self-critique of privilege and oppression personally and include it in the theory we develop about social action and social structures. Radical philosophy must, however, still do more. It needs to make explicit the potential for social transformation in existing social relations. This is sometimes called the dialectic of immanence and transcendence, for it is a process of identifying and developing emancipatory possibilities immanent to existing conditions in order to enliven them.

When we move from reflecting on what we think to how we think, we enter the realm of methodology, which is the theoretical account or logos of the methods of an inquiry. Having a methodology means not only pointing out which methods are used in an inquiry, but also having reasons for why they were chosen. Our theorizing always employs methods (i.e., procedures and practices) but often lacks a methodological account explaining their roles, limitations, and application. Because radical philosophical projects move back and forth between theory and practice, their methodology encompasses more than reflections on the methods of theory; it includes reflections on the methods of praxis as well. As with practical experimentation in the sciences, methodology informs and helps explain strategic and tactical choices in social struggles.

While it is important to develop an awareness of methodology, this does not guarantee certainty or precision, particularly when we are engaged in openended projects to understand and transform social conditions and relations. But this is not evidence of failure. As Aristotle remarked in his Nicomachean Ethics, “Our discussion will be adequate if its degree of clarity fits the subject-matter; for we should not seek the same degree of exactness in all sorts of arguments alike, any more than in the products of different crafts.”¹² Efforts to understand and transform social relations and ourselves require practical knowledge, which does not lend itself to mathematical inference or clearly predictable outcomes (i.e., epistēmē). The contexts and projects of understanding and transforming human relations are always indeterminate insofar as they involve ongoing interpretations and unknown outcomes, but this does not render them any less important. These projects are both necessary and necessarily unending, and the unavoidable lack of certainty associated with them only elevates the importance of practical knowledge (phronēsis) for making good judgments. As Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) writes,

The final confusion that dominates methodology of the sciences is the degeneration of the concept of practice. This concept lost its legitimacy in the age of science with its ideal of certainty…. One of the most important lessons the history of philosophy offers for this current problem consists in the role played in Aristotelian ethics and politics by practice and the knowledge that enlightens and leads it, the practical acuteness or wisdom that Aristotle called phronesis.¹³

One aspect of practical knowledge in this context is making judgments about method selection. Although there is no one single method employed in all radical philosophical projects, there is a set of overlapping reflexive, historical, and dialectical methods, which we can subsume under the general heading “critical methodology.” Grouping these practices together in this way is an example of what Ludwig Wittgenstein called “family resemblance,” or the definition of a group by its overlapping affinities or characteristics rather than any single shared characteristic or essence.¹⁴ Together with its emancipatory interest, critical methodology is what generally sets radical philosophical projects apart and allows us to give them a family name. However, not all philosophies, radical or otherwise, make explicit their reasoning for choosing particular methods. It is thus useful to outline some representative examples here, which will allow us to (1) relate subsequent chapters to this historically influential methodological tradition; (2) identify the shared and overlapping methods employed in various projects (i.e., their family resemblance, described in subsequent discussions); and (3) see how these projects differ from other forms of philosophy and social theory, particularly the nomothetic or law-based models of explanation sketched in the Introduction.

A methodology encompasses several methods, chosen because they support the epistemological and metaphysical assumptions of the methodology and reflect the values and interests of the practitioners. As Georg Lukács writes, “Facts can only become facts within the framework of a system—which will vary with the knowledge desired.”¹⁵ Epistemology is the study of knowledge and so by epistemological assumptions I mean assumptions about belief, certainty, truth, and justification that follow from the method used to acquire knowledge. For example, a common definition in epistemology, going back to Plato, is that descriptive (or propositional) knowledge is a true belief that is justified by empirical observation and testing.¹⁶ Metaphysics is the study of causes and concepts that are not empirically observable.¹⁷ Thus, by metaphysical assumptions, I refer to assumptions about how to distinguish and relate concepts such as subject and object or universal and particular. Although these distinctions might at first appear inconsequential for radical social theory and practice, they make themselves felt in both mundane and revolutionary contexts. Finally, by interests I am referring to the motivating factor of the inquiry or investigation (i.e., practical, technical, material, or emancipatory interests), and by values I mean the commitments that shape those interests, such as various forms of equality, mutual aid, or social justice.

In the following sections, I outline some reflexive, historical, and dialectical methods employed within radical philosophical projects through a reconstruction of them that is itself historical and dialectical. These include hermeneutical, standpoint, phenomenological, dialectical, and materialist methods. Although not exhaustive of the possible constituent parts of a critical methodology, they do provide us with an important and influential set of approaches that can serve as touchstones for subsequent discussions.

Hermeneutics and Standpoint

The term hermeneutics comes from the Greek word hermeneuō, which means to translate or interpret and was associated with the Greek messenger-god Hermes. Each of us learns through a process of interpretation, which derives or constitutes meaning, and it is thus through a process of interpretation that we make sense of our world and our selves. All social and political struggles are engaged in creating new meanings, in developing new self-understandings, in critiquing oppression, and in articulating alternative forms of life from within a world (and a language) already marked and structured by oppression.¹⁸ Hermeneutics helps us to identify the conditions that enable or foreclose the possibility for different kinds of interpretation and knowledge production in light of those struggles, while acknowledging that the language we use is never entirely our own.¹⁹ No one can exit language, escape power, or bring an end, in one fell swoop, to the dominant interpretations circulating within the systems in which we find ourselves. Yet radical philosophies cannot fail to reveal the interests, structures, and relations of power reflected in these ways of understanding the world, or fail to engage in interpretive resistance and the process of creating alternatives. Hermeneutics is thus an essential part of a critical methodology, for interpretation is an important site of struggle.

The history of hermeneutics reveals concerns for the ways in which languages and practices are interpreted and for the processes of determining who is authorized to engage in meaning making. The Protestant Reformation, for example, represented a struggle to wrest the authority to interpret religious texts away from the leadership of the Catholic Church and redistribute it downward.²⁰ Around the time of the Reformation, we also witness the development of interpretive methods in philology (the historical study of language) and jurisprudence (the study of law) with the retrieval, interpretation, and incorporation of Roman law and classical texts into Renaissance culture and legal thought.²¹ These interpretative methods arose in response to the problems with translating texts from another language, another time, or both—often the result of war and colonialism. Over time there was an expansion of the objects of interpretation—from texts to experiences, traditions, and even the self—which led to an expansion of hermeneutics from a particular method to a general characteristic of all understanding. This shift from limited methods for interpreting texts to philosophical methods for understanding subjects and social relations more generally did not leave the struggles and conflicts over authority and exclusion behind.

The philosophical practice of hermeneutics emerged in opposition to the scientific model of the Enlightenment and its epistemological assumption of a rational, self-aware, and transcendental subject.²² By uprooting the subject from what was thought to be the irrationalism of subjective and historical traditions as well as the corrupting influence of emotional life and the body, this independent subject could produce universal knowledge. These are two sides of the same coin: a universal rational subject abstracted from particular conditions, which makes possible universal knowledge unscathed by historical contingency. This tendency culminated in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), in which experience is said to be possible only when mediated through certain universal properties of the transcendental subject’s cognitive faculty (i.e., the categories of the understanding). These categories, together with the institutions of time and space, acti...