Critique, criticality and the right to be critical

The ability to thinking critically is often cited as one of the main outcomes of higher education [1] and critical thinking is frequently mentioned as a component of 'information literacy'[2]. Perhaps, then, we should explore this terrain.

Biesta and Stams (2001) bring to attention three traditions of the practice of critique. They are critical dogmatism, transcendental critique and deconstruction. Each approach justifies its right to be critical in different ways. Critical dogmatism bases its right to criticise on the truth of its criterion of judgement. Transcendental critique takes the rationality (reasonableness) of its criterion, i.e. the consensual reason derived from the intersubjectivity of the ideal communication community, as the basis for its right to critique, while deconstruction focuses on a concern for the justness of its critique.

Biesta and Stams trace critical thinking back to the Socratic-Platonic tradition, with Plato formalising the Socratic critique of received opinions into a distinction between knowledge, in the form of episteme, and doxa, in the form of belief. This serves as the basis for distinguishing the elevated position of the philosopher, as having epistemic knowledge, from the common man, who only has doxic belief.

However, Biesta and Stams argue, it is Kant’s three Critiques which remain, for the contemporary 21st century reader, a major attempt to articulate what it could mean for a philosophy to be critical. Kant also provided an explicit argument for linking critique and education. Indeed, Butler (2009: 775) contends, Kant extended the scope of critique yet further:

"Although critique clearly attains its modern formulation with philosophy, it also makes claims that exceed the particular disciplinary domain of the philosophical. In Kant, for instance, the operation of critique operates not only outside of philosophy and in the university more generally but also as a way of calling into question the legitimating grounds of various public and governmental agencies."

Biesta and Stams, as noted above, differentiate the three critical traditions on the basis of how they justify their right to be critical. 

Critical dogmatism is critical in the sense that it provides an evaluation of a specific state of affairs. However, its operation is dogmatic in that the criterion of evaluation itself is left out of the critical operation and is, in that sense, a dogmatic assertion of a particular criterion and therefore particular judgments. Critical dogmatism derives its right to be critical, its justification, from the truth of the criterion. This is a kind of grounding by deduction from what is taken to be a sound foundation, one which is solid and self-evident. While the term dogmatic has a negative connotation, Biesta and Stams point out that there is nothing objectionable about this approach so long as its dogmatic character is explicitly recognised and accepted.

Similarly to critical dogmatism, transcendental critique, deriving from Kant, conceives of critique as the application of a criterion. The main difference between the two approaches lies in the way in which the criterion is justified. Explaining this requires a little background exploration of the transcendental tradition, beginning with Kant. For Kant, once philosophy had lost its role as the foundational discipline due to the emergence of the scientific worldview, the proper task of philosophy became that of articulating the conditions of possibility of true scientific knowledge and of true metaphysical knowledge, i.e. for Kant, knowledge of the synthetic judgments a priori. 

Hegel exposed the problematic character of Kant's approach, in which, in the endeavour to acquire knowledge of something, the existence of the capacity to acquire knowledge has to be presupposed, in order to be able to acquire knowledge at all. Kant was blind to this paradox because he was working within the philosophy of consciousness in which the transcendental apperception, the ‘I think’, was the highest point to which all employment of the understanding can be ascribed. Kant’s idea of critique as a tribunal of reason was challenged by Hegel and, later, by Marx, both of whom brought a more historical orientation to the debate. Both orientations, that of history and that of reason, Biesta and Stams indicate, have continued to play a major role in the two main critical traditions of the 20th century, i.e. Karl Popper’s critical rationalism and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.

Karl-Otto Apel rearticulated Kantian transcendental philosophy by arguing that all knowledge is linguistically mediated. For Apel, argumentation takes place within a language game amongst a particular community of communication, a community which is the condition of possibility of all knowledge. In this view, acquisition of knowledge is no longer an individualistic enterprise, as it is in Kant. 

Apel establishes a strong link between transcendental pragmatics and really existing communities of communication, giving his project a strongly conventionalist basis. To combat this, he introduces a critical element, the ideal community of communication or the transcendental language game by means of which he seeks to go beyond mere convention. He reasons that a participant in a genuine argument is at the same time a member of an actual community of communication and of a counterfactual ideal community of communication which is open in principle to all speakers and excludes all force but that of the better argument. 

For Apel, then, any claim to intersubjectively valid knowledge implicitly acknowledges this ideal community of communication to be its ultimate source of justification, in its form as a meta-institution of rational argumentation. In this way, the ideal community of communication provides a criterion which makes critique possible. 

This approach differs from critical dogmatism because, Apel argues, this criterion is not installed dogmatically but, instead, by means of a process of reflexive grounding. Apel’s starting point is the recognition that the conditions of possibility of argumentation have to be presupposed by all argumentation. One cannot argue against these conditions without falling into a performative contradiction, wherein the performative dimension of the argument, the act of arguing, contradicts the propositional content, what is argued. All contentions that cannot be disclaimed without falling into the performative contradiction are taken by Apel to express a condition of the possibility of the argumentative use of language. 

Apel thereby installs a principle of performative consistency as the criterion that can reveal the ultimate foundations of the argumentative use of language. These foundations constitute a set of propositions that do not need further grounding because they cannot be understood without knowing that they are true. Application of the principle of performative consistency can bring into view the meta-rules of all argumentative use of language, such as that all communication rests upon the validity of claims to truth, rightness and truthfulness, and that these claims can in principle be redeemed. These meta-rules outline the ideal community of communication.

The importance of Apel’s position lies in his going beyond the individualism of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, to bring the transcendental approach into the realm of argumentation, communication, and intersubjectivity. The strength of transcendental critique rests upon the validity of the transcendental style of argumentation. 

Both transcendental criticism and deconstruction reject the possibility of grounding by deduction, as employed by critical dogmatism. Similarly to Apel, Derridean deconstruction follows the option of a reflexive paradox. However, unlike Apel, deconstruction does not try to escape the paradox by means of a transcendental movement to an ideal community of communication. Deconstruction remains within the paradoxical terrain and explores its critical potential, in the process questioning the very possibility of articulating conditions of possibility in an unambiguous way.

Biesta and Stams argue that Derrida construes the history of Western philosophy as a repeated attempt to find a fundamental ground to serve as an absolute beginning and as a centre from which all that emanates from it can be mastered and controlled. Since Plato, this origin and centre has been understood in terms of presence. Fully present to itself and wholly self-sufficient, in this tradition Being is determined as presence. This decision defines the domain in which Western metaphysics is elaborated by means of a hierarchical axiology in which the origin/centre is designated as pure, simple, normal, standard, self-sufficient and self-identical, a position from which then to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident and difference. 

It is this hierarchical schema that Derrida puts into question, as did Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger before him. However, rather than adopt a ‘destructive' position, seemingly stepping outside of that Platonic tradition in order to surpass or destroy it, Derrida argues that a total break with that tradition is not possible. This tradition cannot be shaken from a neutral and innocent place outside of metaphysics. Rather, Derrida seeks to show that this tradition is already shaking from within. He does so by demonstrating the impossibility of its attempt to fix or immobilise Being through the presentation of a self-sufficient presence. Deconstruction, as Derrida names his approach, differentiating it therefore from ‘destruction', is not applied from without to the texts of the metaphysical tradition, but takes its lead and orientation from within those texts, shaking the foundations they seek to establish by exploiting their tensions and torsions.

One of the notions Derrida uses to characterise his approach is ‘differance’, a notion he develops in the context of a discussion of Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics. Through an emphasis on structural relation, as difference without a positive term, combined with an emphasis on non-identity, or non-presence-to-itself, Derrida arrives at an awareness of the other-than-itself implied by non-presence-to-itself. What is called the present is constituted by means of this relation to what it is not, a contamination that is a necessary contamination. For the present to be itself, it already has to be other than itself. The non-presence of the present to itself makes the presence of the present possible, but this non-presence can only make presence possible by means of its own exclusion.

By bringing this necessary process of exclusion into view, deconstruction generates a concern for the constitutive outside of that which presents itself as self-sufficient. Thereby, deconstruction affirms what is excluded and obscured, i.e. an affirmation of what is other. However, this raises the problematic question of how can deconstruction bring that which is excluded into view, given that it cannot be brought into presence, pure and simple.

Derrida argues as follows. The play of difference which is the condition for the possibility and functioning of each and every (relational) sign is itself a silent play (or in-visible or in-sensible play). If we want to articulate that which does not let itself be articulated, while being the condition of possibility for all articulation, as is the case in order to prevent a metaphysics of Being as presence from re-entering the fray, it must be acknowledged that there can never be a word or a concept to represent this silent play. This play cannot simply be exposed (presented), because one can expose only that which can, at a certain moment, become present. Furthermore, it must be acknowledged that there is nowhere to begin this exposure/exposition for the reason that the quest for a rightful beginning, an absolute point of departure, has itself been put in question. To express this conditionality/conditioning, Derrida uses the neographism ‘differance’. 

Derrida’s caveat is that while the play of difference is identified as the condition for the possibility of all conceptuality, it should not be concluded that the real origin of conceptuality has been discovered. The condition of possibility of conceptuality cannot belong to what makes it possible, i.e. the (‘higher’, logical) order of (pre-)conceptuality. Yet, the only way in which this (‘higher’, logical) order of (pre-)conceptuality can be articulated is from within conceptuality.

Derrida further argues that because conditions of possibility are contaminated by the system that is made possible by them, this system is never wholly delimited by these conditions. Thus, deconstruction tries to open up the system in the name of that which cannot be thought in terms of the system yet makes the system possible. In this way, deconstruction is an affirmation not simply of what is known to be excluded by the system (the non-present) but also of what is wholly other, of that which is unforeseeable from the ‘present’, however constituted and acknowledged. 

Deconstruction is an acknowledgement of an otherness that is to come, as an event which exceeds calculation, rules, programmes and anticipations. Deconstruction is thus an openness toward the unforeseeable incoming, emergent, invention of the other.

It is from this concern for the wholly other, a concern that Derrida refers to as a concern for justice, that deconstruction derives its right to be critical and its right to permit recognition of (ongoing, inherent) deconstruction. Applebaum articulates the importance of this openness to the other in the following terms:

"Derrida connects deconstruction with "justice," understood as a relation to the other's otherness that is "an experience of the impossible." The impossibility of knowing the other implies that we must always be open to the surprise of the invention of the other. Ethics begins when this radical undecidability is embraced as something that continues to inhabit our decisions." (Applebaum, 2011: 56)

The other is not contained by a transcendental ideal communication ('speech') community nor controlled by systemic conditions of possibility. The other is, or, more properly, the others are, to that extent, 'free' to fail to conform, to engage in 'failed' communication, along the lines of Sedgwick's (2003: 154 and 168) “near-miss pedagogy” or “failed pedagogy”.They fail to conform and they fail to 'learn' because acting otherwise, but not on wholly other grounds. This opens up the possibility for uncharted mutual engagement, the possibility of developing an agonistic relation from what might otherwise be antagonistic (Mouffe, 2013: 1-18).

Deconstruction, critical dogmatism and transcendental critique

The moment of krinein or of krisis, in the senses of decision, choice, judgement and discernment, is a key concern for deconstruction. Derrida demonstrates in many different ways that there is no ultimate safe ground on which to base decisions and that there are no pure, uncontaminated, original criteria on which judgements can be simply and straightforwardly based. At the basis of decision-making is a radical undecidability which cannot be closed off by the decisions that are made and which continue to inhabit the decision. [It is here, with the notion of undecidability, that Laclau and Mouffe insert the concept of hegemony as that which permits a decision to be made in particular directions in particular circumstance of power].

While in some sense staying remarkably close to the intuitions of transcendental pragmatics, deconstruction nevertheless provides a serious challenge to this line of thought. Both Apel and Derrida concur that people are always on the inside of language and history. The language games that make people who they are, which give people the possibility of speaking in the first place, are ‘unsurpassable’, in Apel’s terms, an insight that leads Derrida to acknowledge that a total rupture from the language game of metaphysics is not possible. 

The crucial difference between transcendental critique and deconstruction, according to Biesta and Stams, lies in the following. Apel has to assume that the conditions of possibility control the system that is made possible by them. All possible performances in the system are, thus, controlled by these conditions. It is this total control which makes the criterion of performative contradiction valid. Derrida, on the contrary, highlights that conditions of possibility can never be articulated independently of the system. They can never be articulated from some safe metaphysical position outside the system. For this reason, the conditions of possibility cannot have total control of the system. What is possible is always more than what any conditions of possibility allow for. Deconstruction wants to do justice to this unforeseeable excess (the wholly other), as well as that which the system constitutionally excludes (the non-presence of presence, the other of itself). Criticism, in this sense, is a just action.