What is critique? According to the Kantian tradition, it is an investigation of the transcendental conditions for the possibility of thinking and experience. While later critics shifted the focus to material conditions, core metaphysical commitments and procedures of critique remained unchanged. Critique of Critique (Stanford UP, 2023), the subject of this talk, probes critique as an orientation of thought through its historical manifestations from Plato to the Frankfurt school and present-day critical theory. In the process, it asks us to consider what critical thinking is and whether it can assume orientations other than critique.
Bio: Roy Ben-Shai, a New School graduate, is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College. His recently published book, Critique of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2023), is the first volume in a trilogy on the concept of “orientation” in critical thought. He is currently working on the second volume, Emancipatory Thinking, or the Art of Thinking Otherwise.
In the final part of The Human Condition (1958) Hannah Arendt turns to the danger of ‘world- alienation’. Based on a variety of discoveries and evolutions that are constitutive of modernity (globalization, Protestantism, the invention of the telescope), modern man has adopted an Archimedean, external position vis-à-vis the world. According to Arendt, this ‘view from without’ has gradually jeopardized the experience of a shared world, endangering the foundation of all meaning-giving activities.
My talk can be considered as a reply to Arendt’s pessimistic account of modern ‘world-alienation’. It builds on the idea that some of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century (Ernst Jünger, Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, Sigmund Freud) did not equate the loss of a shared world with the loss of meaning. Rather, the conceptual framework of a substantial part of early twentieth century German philosophy centers on the exploration of a productive opposition, negation or fragmentation of the world. From the perspective of these thinkers, the world’s ‘durability’ (Arendt) is not simply a source of shared meaning since it can be experienced as the mark of its indifference to change and renewal.
Bio:
Stéphane Symons is Full Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Leuven, Belgium. His research is focused on interwar German thought (Frankfurt School) and postwar French philosophy (structuralism and post-structuralism).