Critical Consciousness

If you have made it to this point, the odds are low that you require any statement on, or formation in, critical consciousness. Despite this, a brief rehearsal is worth reviewing so that your subsequent conceptions may be distinguished from the voluminous literature on “critical theory.”

Beginning with etymology, we note that “criticism” follows from the Greek “kritik” meaning to judge. Critical theories, then, are theories of judgment.

What then, is judgment?

If Plato is right, it is roughly equivalent to careful deliberation, having an inner discourse to oneself as to what is and is not appropriate. Like Aristotle, it ultimately concludes in a statement of definition (or essence) which is either affirmed or denied. For Plato, as written in media consciousness, critique is thereby ultimately a transcendental judgment against any media as mimetic, simulacral imitations of the Forms. One could thereby be critical of tyranny so far as it was led by a simulacral, shambolic leader fallen into his passions, a tyrant.

If Aristotle is right, judgment is instead an act of “putting together” of the “objects of thought.” The result hereof is a premise, either an affirmation or denial, from which conclusions may be inferred through syllogistic reasoning. Ever the materialist, Aristotle denies (pace Peirce) that syllogisms have an infinite regress. There must, for any subject (or hypokeimenon) be a first premise from which subsequent premises are deduced and a series of attributes about subject which may be joined to the terms in the first premises. Scientific knowledge thus begins from the statements of such first premises which, lacking priors, must be definitions of the terms in use. The definition (a first premise) is, likewise, the formulable essence of the thing, the statement of “what it is to be” that thing. Essence, incidentally, is equivalent to the form of a living thing, its soul. For poetry, about which we may practice literary criticism and literary judgment, we begin from the plot, which is “first premise, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy.” The critique of constitutions likewise begins with their own souls, constitutions. The critique of a given situation by the wise man practicing “the activity of the soul in conformity with virtue” is thereby the appropriate assortment of particulars under universal essences for choice. Critique and judgment in general, therefore, are the discovery of essences and their appropriate combination. All critique of dogma and inappropriate regimes follows from this work.

Contemporary schools of “critical thinking” roughly follow the path set out by Plato and Aristotle, largely aiming to bring students into rote familiarity with the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) so that they may better understand their faculties. The hope, so such reasoning goes, is that by having such a conceptual repertoire, these students may grow up to be better, more civically engaged thinkers.

Through the Middle Ages, these accounts roughly fall into obscurity. Indeed, with the Romans, critique largely becomes a series of practical maxims for organizing the (typically literary) subject-matter (or hypokeimenon) under discussion: Horace’s Ars Poetica, Ovid’s Ars Amortoria, Cicero’s works on rhetoric, Pseudo-Longinus On the Sublime, etc. Of course, New Comedy in Ancient Greece as well as the satires of Juvenal and Lucian maintained aspects of what we would today call “social criticism,” albeit in a largely bawdy and humorous form—ironic derision of authority, statements of collective hypocrisy, and some fart joked sprinkled in to take the mighty down a notch. To be sure, advances in aesthetics were made by Plotinus and in semiotics were made by St. Augustine. Allegorical thinking was already practiced by Philo of Alexandra and Gregory of Nyssa. For an account of what made criticism, or judgment, possible, however, we would have to wait for the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.

In Aquinas we receive the first major work of hermeneutic (albeit Biblical) criticism since Aristotle’s De Interpretatione. For Aquinas, there are four senses of scripture: the literal meaning and three spiritual senses: the allegorical sense of prototypes in the Old Testament and antetypes in the New Testment, the moral sense in which such types are “tropes” or characters for how we ought to live our lives, and in the anagogical sense in which scripture speaks of the Kingdom of God to come. Such senses were critically founded upon the God’s writing of the Book of Nature (reason) and the Book of Revelation (faith). As such, since Aristotle had already founded the means to interpret the book of nature, criticism was essentially founded on Aristotle himself having been a creature of God.

By the 1600s, as Hans Georg Gadamer has argued, this reasoning had developed into three “subtleties” or “talents” of the mind to judge of texts: subtilitas intelligendi (understanding) and subtilitas explicandi (interpretation); and third element, subtilitas applicandi (applicandi). These largely borrowed from developments in historical and source criticism from Lorenzo Valla and were, more or less, to become associated with the science of philology.

For “critical” theory in its contemporary sense, as well as the critical consciousness associated with it, we would have to wait another 200 years for Immanuel Kant. As he explains in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, his essential task was to sail between the Scylla and Charybdis of dogmatic rationalism and skeptical empiricism—Hume having, as Kant famously writes, interrupted his “dogmatic slumber.” In doing so, he set upon the doctrine that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (Critique of Pure Reason, A51/B76). Or, more plainly, human reason possesses a priori concepts, but their legitimate theoretical use is limited to objects of possible empirical experience. The favorite debates of the Scholastics, ranging from questions about angels to questions about the eternality of the world, could thus issue in opposed deductions whenever reason attempted to treat objects beyond possible experience as objects of knowledge. Kant’s Antinomies famously show reason generating opposed conclusions concerning the world as a whole—for example, that the world has a beginning in time and that it has no beginning. Kant accordingly subjected the traditional “special metaphysics” of God, the soul, and the world to critique: speculative reason could not establish knowledge of such supersensible objects. God and immortality would later reappear, together with freedom, as postulates of practical reason, rather than objects of speculative knowledge. Hereby Kant declared that he had set up Reason’s own “tribunal” for itself: the Critique of Pure Reason is at once a critique of reason and one conducted by reason, determining the legitimacy and limits of its own claims. He thereby initiated what he called a “Copernican revolution” away from taking the structures of things as simply given to cognition and instead toward the conditions supplied by the knowing subject under which objects can appear to us at all. Critique, in this sense of reason judging its own capacities and limits, would remain influential well after Kant and among his post-Kantian followers.

For Kant’s follower Hegel, critique was something immanent to the unfolding of concepts. Through his ouevre, Hegel develops a general conception of what his student Adorno calls, perhaps following Diotima in Plato’s Symposium, a “labor of the concept.” Hereby, Hegel develops a distinction between what he calls phenomena in themselves (and for us) and phenomena for themselves, roughly equivalent to Aristotle’s conception of essences. Beyond these phenomena lie beings in-and-for themselves, or concepts whose contents (like Aristotelian definitions) are immanent and at work in reality. Hegelian “immanent critique” could thereby stage any mode of historical consciousness or any social phenomenon and array its phenomenal characteristics against those which were phenomenally necessary for the functioning of the mode/phenomenon. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, a bildungsroman of consciousness itself, such phenomenal contradictions between presented characteristics and necessary criteria lead ultimately to Absolute Spirit, in which all contingent and free characteristics and necessary criteria are unified. This Hegel calls the “speculative identity” of thought and being, within which contingent being and necessary thought are unified in Absolute Science.

For Hegel’s student Marx, immanent critique is a linguistic instrument. Studying the works of contemporary liberal economists, and bracketing Hegel’s claims to Absolute Science, Marx suggests that the phenomena of capitalist exchange are inadequately captured by the necessities of those theorists he studies. He thus performs an immanent critique of their terms, since the very terms they use are insufficient to save the appearances of the phenomena they attempt to economize. To this extent, Marx was a critical scientist like any other. Marx’s immanent critique differs from that of, say, Copernicus of Ptolemy insofar as he retained the Hegelian doctrine that historical data instantiate modes of historical consciousness. Following his gloss on base and superstructure, these modes were but projections of the mode of production reflected into thought. As such, by articulating an economic scheme, a “proletarian science,” describing capitalist development in its apogee, Marx believed he could demonstrate capital’s self-overcoming, immanent to the categories of early liberal political economy.

Frankfurt school “critical theory,” following Marx, thereby roughly implied the generalized application of Hegelian-Marxist immanently critical methods to any social phenomenon. With Foucault, “critique” instead came to mean a Nietzschean-Kantian synthesis that both rejected the unmasking/projective project of Marx and his followers and embraced the genealogical methods of Nietzsche. As he put it in his work What is Critique? critique is a negative governmentality, an art of discovering “how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them.” Likewise, in Jürgen Habermas, critique instead a reconstruction of the norms immanent to communicative action. For Judith Butler, it is a constitution of the performative force with which those norms come to adjudicate truth-claims.

In a much broader sense, “critical theory” instead aims at the rules for the adjudication of any kind of criticism. Thus, one may speak of a critical theory about texts—literary criticism—critical theory about human associations—social criticism—and critical theory about cultural implicature—cultural criticism. (This last is a fan favorite of most “critics” online, since almost anyone who lives in and among others is exposed to, compelled to practice, and distraught by the incoherence of their own culture.)

Critical consciousness, with the immanent critic Paolo Friere, is a mode of Durkheimian common consciousness—a sense shared experience of wrongdoing, a sense for the origins thereof, and a sense for its rectification. In this sense, with John Dewey, critical consciousness is the understanding obtained from an education that does not aim to deposit facts but, instead, aims at the development of democratic habits of collaboration, experimentation, and social justice.

The essential characteristics of critical consciousness, then, are roughly:

1. Relationality — social reality consists not primarily of isolated persons or facts, but of relations among persons, institutions, practices, concepts, and material conditions.
   • From this follow systemic understanding, social determination, standpoint, mediation, interested knowledge, domination, solidarity, and collective consciousness.
2. Contradiction — social forms can fail to coincide with their own principles, conditions of possibility, functions, or professed identities. What something is may conflict with what it claims, requires, or tends to become.
   • From this follow immanent critique, awareness of hypocrisy, recognition of suffering as socially significant, conceptual discrimination, sensitivity to presuppositions, and the capacity for negation.
3. Historicity — social relations and forms of consciousness are produced, reproduced, and transformed through time rather than simply given by nature.
   • From this follow denaturalization, contingency, genealogy, awareness of reproduction, ideology critique, defamiliarization, and the recognition that existing arrangements could be otherwise.
4. Reflexivity — consciousness itself belongs to the reality it judges and must therefore become an object of its own criticism. The critic is socially situated, conceptually mediated, and fallible.
   • From this follow self-critique, judgment of limits, resistance to dogmatism, recognition of standpoint, dialogical consciousness, and self-correction.
5. Praxis — because social reality is relational, contradictory, and historical, it is susceptible to purposive transformation by agents who are themselves situated within it. Knowledge of social conditions therefore contains a practical dimension.
   • From this follow agency, emancipation, experimentalism, democratic participation, solidarity, practical judgment, and the search for realizable alternatives

For us, critical consciousness is the desire for systematically induced “free and open encounters” of persons with each other. We say with all iterations of critical theory that there are “mystical forms of consciousness obscure to themselves,” and that literary, social, and cultural criticism are tools—following from time and historical consciousness—with which we may open up social contradictions and learn how to not be governed by them. Life itself is sufficient school in critical consciousness. Indeed, as “Big Bill” Haywood has said, “I’ve never read Marx’s Capital, but I have the marks of capital all over me.”