Contemporary Critical Theory and Methodology

Piet Strydom

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781135997861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary critical theory's methodology is currently taking shape under the impact both of transformative internal develops within the discipline, and of external pressures and incentives arising from a series of international debates.

In this book, Piet Strydom presents a groundbreaking treatment of critical theory's methodology, using as a base the reconstruction of the left-Hegelian tradition, the relation between critical theory and pragmatism, and the associated metatheoretical implications. He assesses extant positions, presents a detailed yet comprehensive restatement and development of critical theory's methodology, compares it with a wide range of current concepts of social criticism and critique, and analyzes leading critical theorists' exemplary applications of it. Besides immanent transcendence and the sign-mediated epistemology common to the left-Hegelian tradition, special attention is given to the abductive imagination, reconstruction, normative and causal explanation, explanatory mechanisms and the communicative framework which enables critical theory to link up with its addressees and the public.

Contemporary Critical Theory and Methodology is recommended reading for senior undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as professionals working within disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, political science, critical theory and cultural studies.

Part I

Metatheoretical
foundations

It seems as though reason and history are mutually exclusive, yet they belong together in our identity for we are simultaneously rational and historical beings.

Herbert Schnädelbach

1 Classical foundations

Introduction

Debates in and around Critical Theory during the past three to four decades highlighted the need to take a new look at its classical foundations. Developments in both continental and analytic philosophy, for instance the linguistic and pragmatic turns, which recast the question of knowledge in the mould of language and action in keeping with transformations in social life, made available a new philosophical basis. This prompted a clarification of the subterranean connection between Critical Theory and pragmatism, which in turn led to an elaboration of this relation. Charles S. Peirce emerged here as the central figure, the ‘American Kant’, who kept alive enough potential contact points to allow a fruitful articulation of Critical Theory and pragmatism. From here the attention then shifted towards Critical Theory’s own classical tradition in which questions were raised about the taken-for-granted understanding of these roots. Most immediately, the focus fell on the left-Hegelians, the first generation after Hegel, among whom the towering figure of Marx remained in his dominant position but was now joined by two others from the same generation who had not often been recognized as belonging to this same tradition, namely Peirce and Kierkegaard. By the mid-1980s, this debate about the Hegelian left, the most characteristic heritage of Critical Theory, forced the discussants to take yet a further step back in order to re-investigate the question of the relation between Kant and Hegel as well as the relation of Critical Theory to Kant and Hegel. Like the linguistic and pragmatic turns, like the relation with pragmatism and like the status of the left-Hegelian heritage, the question of the theoretical sense of the relation between and to Kant and Hegel has remained a matter of reflection, debate and elaboration into the twenty-first century.

Considering that contemporary Critical Theory’s methodology cannot be clarified without drawing some lessons from its reflexive self-examinations of the past three to four decades, this chapter is devoted to a re-engagement with its classical foundations with the specific aim of ferreting out anchor points for the concept of immanent transcendence to be discussed later. The chapter opens with a crucial section on Kant in whose philosophy the structure of thinking informing critique is extrapolated and formalized in an unprecedented way. Hegel’s exceptionally important criticism and simultaneous transformation of Kant which prepared the ground for the succeeding generation, particularly the left-Hegelians, is the theme of the next section. The final section is then devoted to a consideration of the three major figures who embody the left-Hegelian heritage of contemporary Critical Theory, namely Marx, Peirce and Kierkegaard.

Kant

Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1803) pre-eminence in the philosophical canon is justified by his creative, judicious and fruitful bringing together of the different concerns and motives of the Enlightenment: from knowledge, science and reason, through freedom, morality and law, to publicity, the improvement of political and social conditions and, of course, critique. Although his peculiar significance derived from the way in which he was able to marshal elements from these various strands to resolve the problem of knowledge in his great epistemological work, Critique of Pure Reason, the compelling power his philosophy exercised subsequently over hearts and minds largely depended on the conviction with which he advanced his moral vision of the world as well as its broad scope. He certainly appreciated the Enlightenment in cultural historical terms as an event that would never be forgotten since it revealed a latent human capacity for civilizational advancement, but he understood it specifically in moral terms as pinpointing ‘the freedom to make public use of one’s reason at every point’ (1957a: 4–5). Rather than focusing his critical vision on the losses accompanying the early modern gains in freedom and the resulting social heteronomy, as did for instance Rousseau, he drew attention to the question of justice. Fittingly for someone who was aware that he lived in ‘the very age of critique’, Kant concentrated at the core of his work on the development of a method of critique that he initially applied in the epistemological field of thinking or knowledge, but then progressively extended to other areas of human activity such as willing or morality, law and politics as well as feeling or aesthetics. It was designed to investigate the form in which the principles of reason emerge with a view to determining their validity, particularly the extent to which they are necessary and universally applicable, and the kind of judgement associated with them. Accordingly, his work was divided into a theoretical, a practical and an aesthetic part to which he devoted his three critiques respectively – Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgement – which were paralleled by a career-long investigation culminating in 1798 in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Although Kant hated all orthodoxy and was convinced that ‘to critique everything … [including] religion … and … law-giving … must submit’ in the sense of a ‘test of free and open examination’ in order to gain ‘the sincere respect which reason accords’ (1968: 9), these works are all cautious formal statements exhibiting his awareness of the threat of the prohibition of his philosophy emanating from the rule of Frederick William II.

The aim of the Critique of Pure Reason was to determine through mature judgement how knowledge that is able to make an authoritative claim to validity is established and, by the same means, to draw the limits of knowledge by exposing the human propensity toward groundless pretensions, illusions and delusions. Such a critical investigation of knowledge required the bringing together of his own rationalist tradition, with which he had become partially disillusioned, and the psychology-based British empiricist tradition, which he likewise regarded as inadequate if left standing on its own. He found the answer to the problem of the articulation of these two positions in a complex mode of ‘synthesis’ at the centre of which is his unique achievement of having transformed the lingering Greek theory, according to which the object of knowledge is given, by the radically new theory according to which the understanding constitutes the object of possible experience and knowledge. This synthesis involves three different levels of elements and stages in the formation of valid knowledge. First, sensation had to be consolidated into perception, a process of formation that required and was made possible by the forms of space and time which are available in the human mind. Second, perception needed to be shaped into experience that was made possible by concepts or categories which, through schematization, were linked to concrete features of the world and thus made available an object of knowledge. Finally, through judgement experience required to be transformed into knowledge. Over and above the forms and categories, this crucial step depended on general principles or ‘ideas of pure reason’ which were necessarily and unavoidably presupposed in any and every cognitive process. Without the presuppositions that there is a reality (‘world’), that there is a knowing subject (‘soul’) and that validity (‘God’) can be attained, knowledge can achieve no unity and extension – indeed it is simply impossible. In the later Critique of Judgement, however, Kant drastically modified his argumentation by identifying the faculty of judgement as the source of ideas of reason and thus obviating the need for a reference to a sense-transcendent intelligence.

Of particular importance for Kant’s critical method as one designed to discriminate between ‘lawful claims’ to knowledge, on the one hand, and ‘illusory knowledge’, ‘groundless pretensions’ or ‘delusive’ reasoning, on the other, are what he discusses in the ‘Transcendental dialectic’ under the title of ‘ideas of pure reason’ (1968: 318–19). These general ideas have a number of characteristics. They are transcendental in that they are necessary and unavoidable conditions which make knowledge possible; they are formal structures in that they operate in all cognitive processes, which means also that they have universal application; they are regulative in that they are principles which guide and give direction to cognitive processes by providing them with a goal or focus imaginarius; and they are transcendent in that they point beyond all given experience. Kant insists that these ideas of reason have no objective reality. Neither actually existing, nor being concepts of objects, they are at best only capable of lending systematic unity and extension to the conceptual basis of knowledge. For this reason, in the Critique of Judgement he relates ideas of reason to what he calls the ‘reflective judgement’ rather than the ‘determinant judgement’ (1972: 15–6). It is because of this feature that, besides their positive function, ideas of pure reason can also induce illusory, pretentious and delusive usages by misleading reason to claim that they refer to actually existing objects or states of affairs. Ideas of pure reason thus also indicate the necessary limits of knowledge. In fact, he is emphatic about the twofold role of these ideas, which, although not real, nevertheless are by no means merely figments of the imagination. On the one hand, they provide the standards for critique and, on the other, they are fertile soil for the nurturing of misleading transcendental illusions.

It is interesting that Kant, rather than waiting for the opportunity created later by his moral philosophy presented in the Critique of Practical Reason (1956), claims already in the Critique of Pure Reason, particularly the ‘Transcendental dialectic’, that the ideas of pure reason are not just ideas, but at the same time also ideals. Whereas ideas lay down rules, ideals serve as archetypes or examples which can be followed. Ideas of reason are indeed not constitutive like Platonic ideas, yet they do possess ‘practical power (as regulative ideas)’ and ‘have their own good, proper and therefore immanent use’ in that they ‘form the basis of the possible perfection of certain actions’ by providing a ‘standard for our actions … with which we compare and judge ourselves, and so reform ourselves, although we can never attain to the perfection thereby prescribed’ (1968: 486, 532). In fact, despite the fact that they are ‘not completely pure concepts’, he nevertheless regards ‘moral concepts’ as good examples of ideas of reason. The shift from epistemology or theoretical philosophy to morality or practical philosophy entails, of course, that it is no longer objects of knowledge that are at the centre of attention, but rather objects of the will. That this shift is an important one for Kant is borne out by his reversal in the Critique of Practical Reason (1956: 124) of the primacy accorded to theoretical reason over practical reason in all previous philosophy. In so far as theoretical reason points beyond itself by way of ideas of pure reason, it is determined by the needs of practical reason. This step beyond the theoretical is finally consolidated in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1996) where the question of the human being is posed.

The same critical method he applied to theoretical reason Kant also brought to bear on practical reason. His so-called ‘Copernican revolution’ in epistemology involving a shift from an emphasis on things to a manner of acting is thus also carried out in morality. Inspired by Rousseau’s pregnant statement regarding ‘obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves in liberty’ (1966: 16), he therefore avoided the traditional approach of starting from a definition of some material good and instead took the experience of obligation as his point of departure from which to derive the moral law. The basic moral principle in the Critique of Practical Reason, accordingly, is the ‘categorical imperative’, which theoretically formulates the formal conditions of obligation as being the freedom of the will and at the same time the necessary relation of the good to it: ‘So to act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle establishing universal law’ (1956: 30). Autonomy or freedom of the will is morally paramount, yet it requires an object to guide moral action to which it stands in a necessary relation that, nevertheless, does not destroy the moral agent’s freedom. It must be an unconditioned object that it gives itself, and this object can only be autonomous or free willing itself, which by implication is thus universalized.

By contrast with its pure version, Kant also speaks of finite practical reason, in which case autonomous or free willing becomes manifest as a practical ideal in the form of the good will. It is ‘a model … [which all] … finite rational beings … [can be expected] … to strive towards even though they cannot reach it … The utmost that finite practical reason can accomplish is to make sure of the unending progress of its maxims towards this model and of the constancy of the finite rational being in making continuous progress’ (1956: 33). Although generally Kant extended his practical philosophy, of which morality is the centre piece, to the philosophy of the state, law, international politics and history, this very insight is also employed in these writings – for instance, where he deals with possible human progress through such topics as cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace. As regards the apparent contradiction in these writings, one has to disregard his older dogmatic-metaphysical view that nature has an intention which guarantees progress in human history (1957b: 24) in favour of his critical position on the role of ideas of reason or regulative ideas and, further, on practical reason’s priority over theoretical reason. It is on this basis that the regulative idea and moral postulate or practical ideal of good will can be regarded as morally and politically ‘making it our duty to work toward this end, which is not just a chimerical one’ but a task (1957b: 32), namely a just cosmopolitan order characterized by perpetual peace.

The absolutely crucial point that Kant thus established is that reason, through ideas of pure reason and moral postulates, has a world-creating or world-forming force.

Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) philosophy consummated the idealistic movement to which Kant’s thought gave rise and which Johann Gottlieb Fichte (Schulz 1962) fundamentally and systematically shaped by emphatically making self-consciousness – subjectively reflection and objectively the world as a system of reason – the principle of idealism. On the one hand, Fichte jettisoned Kant’s highly problematic conception of the unknowable reality behind every object of knowledge and, on the other, he focused exclusively on elaborating his conception of reason’s spontaneous and creative production of its objects of experience and thought. This latter transcendental-logical dimension provided the starting point for Fichte’s development in fine detail of the dialectical method which Hegel so profusely applied in all spheres and at all levels. If, for Fichte, the essential nature of the mind was to divide itself and then from that state of internal division to recreate its original unity under new conditions, Hegel turned to the historical process as the medium of ‘mind’, ‘spirit’ or the ‘idea’, whether the history of consciousness or universal history, including the history of society or ‘objective spirit’. It is a process driven by mind, spirit or the idea as the self-determining and self-reflective subject representing the whole, which unfolds itself in such a way that its particular forms at each of its different stages of thesis, antithesis and synthesis possess significance as links in this self-creative process. In its objective development, which is relevant here, spirit shapes for itself successively the rational, reason-filled or mindful forms of family life, civil society and finally the state as the realization of consciousness in general or the ethical idea. Traditional ethical life centred on family and political life had to make room at the beginning of modern times for civil society centred on civil and economic interests whose dialectic generated competition, class formation, conflict and internal division, which could be overcome and reconciled only by the state as the realization of an ethical totality. This conception of society or objective spirit as an essentially normative reality was determined by the impact of Kant’s towering moral vision of the world and Fichte’s endorsement of it by making moral science his principal concern.

Hegel’s acute sensibility for focusing in on the historically specific – for ‘philosophy to apprehend its own time in thoughts’ (1967: 11) – while never losing sight of the larger context, not only distinguished him rather sharply from Kant, but at the same time also allowed him to develop a penetrating and multifaceted yet by no means unproblematic criticism of his predecessor. Although he accepted with Kant that the ‘principle of the modern world is freedom of subjectivity’ (1967: addition 165), which had to be protected at all costs, he nevertheless directed his scalpel especially at Kant’s partial account of morality, particularly the categorical imperative, but this criticism had implications also for the latter’s views of the subject, society and history as well as knowledge.

In his famous criticism of Kant’s practical philosophy in his Philosophy of Right (1967), Hegel made essentially four points (Kuhlmann 1986). Kant’s moral doctrine is formalistic and thus devoid of any content; second, its universalistic reach is abstract and thus unhistorical; third, the individualistic moral demand it articulates is nothing but a mere ought and therefore without any consequence whatsoever; and, finally, its emphasis on pure conviction of the need to fulfil one’s duty harbours the danger of repression. The source of these formalistic, abstract universalistic, subjectivistic and terroristic weaknesses Hegel traced back to the fact that Kant fundamentally misconceived not only the individual, but also the world to which the individual belongs as well as the relation between the two. On the one hand, the individual is indeed seen as a free subject capable of rationally giving itself and maintaining the moral point of view, yet only at the cost of being reduced to the pure internality of a rational subject cut off from its world and thus unable to give any effect to moral claims and demands. On the other hand, the individual’s world, embracing the natural and social environment including the individual, its actions and their consequences, is an unhistorical and unchanging reality, devoid of any rationality and closed to any demands of reason. From this gulf between a morally impotent subject and an indifferent world Hegel drew the influential conclusion that Kant’s position allowed no possibility for the realization of reason in reality.

Hegel’s answer to these deficiencies was encapsulated by his concept of Sittlichkeit or ‘concrete ethical life’ which was strongly influenced by Aristotle and his criticism of Plato. From this standpoint, by contrast with Kant, moral autonomy or freedom cannot simply be something subjective, confined to the individual mind, a practically inconsequential demand and opposed to an indifferent world. Rather, ethical life manifests the fact that reason has already been incorporated in the real world and continues to be effective there. Social reality is shot through with concretized moral rules or rational reasons so that it becomes ‘immanently rational’ (1967: paragraph 29). They have entered habits, mores, institutions and forms of life and have become effective in structuring social life by regulating orientations, actions and relations. Having taken concrete and objective form, moral considerations have been generalized and obtained universal validity. This objective ethical reality not only makes possible and throughout supports individual self-consciousness, but provides the individual with identity and a feeling of self-worth and confidence. Indeed, Hegel argues that ethical life is emancipatory. It makes possible ‘liberation’ from the demands of ‘natural impulse’ and ‘indeterminate subjectivity’, thus allowing the individual to obtain ‘substantive freedom’ (1967: paragraph 149).

The reference to substantive freedom gained in a real ethical community is a reminder that Hegel is not just criticizing Kant’s narrow focus on ‘the standpoint of morality’, but is actually engaged in a critical diagnosis of his own time (Honneth 2001). As made clear in the introduction to the Philosophy of Right, he is concerned about two closely related matters. On the one hand, he views critically the widely acc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Metatheoretical foundations
• 1 Classical foundations
• 2 Appropriation of the classical foundations
• 3 Contemporary Critical Theory and pragmatism
• 4 Immanent transcendence as key concept
• Part II Methodology
• 5 Contemporary critical theorists on methodology
• 6 The methodological framework of critical theory
• 7 Varieties of critique
• 8 Methodology in action
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index