Abstract
Throughout the twentieth century, many philosophers have implicitly or explicitly assumed that it is possible to criticise a particular philosophical, political or cultural paradigm — be it modernity as such — in the name of a criterion that such a paradigm contains within itself. There is no doubt that this method has been extremely productive. I take it, however, that it also contains an illusory element. In order to shed light on the force and limits of the method that has become known by the name of immanent critique I will, in this chapter, examine Hegel’s conception of philosophical critique. To be sure, Hegel never referred to his method as immanent critique. Yet the self-criticism of reason introduced by Kant and further elaborated by Hegel has originated many modes of philosophy that, implicitly or explicitly, presented their method in these terms. At least in modern philosophy, it was Kant who first conceived of critique as a form of reflection that draws its criterion from reason itself, that is, from the form of thought that faces the task of judging its prevailing mode of appearance — Wolffian metaphysics — as inadequate.
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Notes
Earlier versions of parts of this chapter have been published in ‘Kant, Hegel, en het begrip “immanente kritiek” in de moderne filosofie’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 71/3, 2009, 475–498 (in Dutch) and in ‘Kant and Hegel: Critical Reflections on Reason’, in G. Bertram, D. Lauer, C. Ladou and R. Celikates (eds), Expérience et réflexivité. Perspectives au-delà de l’empirisme et de l’idéalisme (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), 143–155. The argument of the chapter as a whole draws on the theoretical framework presented in my On Hegel: The Sway of the Negative (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
G. W. F. Hegel, ‘On the Essence of Philosophical Criticism Generally, and its Relationship to the Present State of Philosophy in Particular’, translated by H. S. Harris, in G. di Giovanni (ed.), Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism (Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000), 275–291 (hereafter EPC).
‘The Transcendental Analytic accordingly has this important result: That the understanding can never accomplish a priori anything more than to anticipate the form of a possible experience in general, and, since that which is not appearance cannot be an object of experience, it can never overstep the limits of sensibility, within which alone objects are given to us,’ I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by P. Guyer and A. W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A247–248/B303 (hereafter CPR).
I. Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science, translated by G. Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 274.
G. W. F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, translated by W. Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977), 69 (hereafter FK).
In this respect I do not agree with Houlgate’s claim that Hegel’s conception of critique in the Phenomenology differs substantially from the one put forward in his 1802 essay. See S. Houlgate, ‘Glauben und Wissen: Hegels immanente Kritik der Kantischen Philosophie oder die (illegitime) “Ahnung eines Besseren”?’, in A. Arndt, K. Bal and H. Ottmann (eds), Glauben und Wissen, Dritter Teil, [Hegel-Jahrbuch 2005] (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005), 152–158.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 13 (hereafter Phen). In the
Science of Logic, translated by A. V. Miller (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997), Hegel advances the same position. While Spinoza’s philosophy must be considered as true, essential and necessary, Hegel here notes, it unduly regarded itself as the highest possible position (580). A refutation of this latter claim ‘must not proceed from assumptions which lie outside the system in question and do not accord with it. The system itself, however, need not recognise these assumptions. … The genuine refutation must penetrate the power of its opponent and adopt a position within reach of its strength; the matter at hand is not served by attacking him from without and by being proved right where he is not’ (580–581). This does not entail, of course, that Hegel himself has always met his own criteria of philosophical criticism. Even his explicit criticism of Kant is rather less convincing, I hold, than his actual transformation of Kant’s basic insights.
Phen 53. Cf.: ‘The forms of thought are to be considered in and for themselves; … they examine themselves, they are to determine their own limit by themselves and lay bare their own defects’ (G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, translated by W. Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), § 41, add. 1).
G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, translated by H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21 (hereafter PR).
In this regard I disagree with Honneth’s account of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel’s Social Thought, translated by L. Löb (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010). As I see it, Hegel’s analysis of abstract right examines one-sided theories rather than pathological attitudes attributable to individual citizens or groups, as Honneth claims (cf. 49, 59, 67).
Cf. PR, § 189. See on this issue my On Hegel: The Sway of the Negative, Ch. 9. See also S. Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 147–154; and
T. E. Wartenberg, ‘Poverty and Class Structure in Hegel’s Theory of Civil Society’, in Philosophy and Social Criticism, 8, 1981, 169–182. I agree with Wartenberg that Hegel’s philosophy, since it has no answer to the problem of poverty and oppression inherent in the modern state, here begins to reveals its limits (255). In his view, Hegel’s tripartite conception of civil society is at odds with his implicit acknowledgment of the emerging opposition between owners and workers, and that he could not incorporate this latter development into his philosophical account of the modern state.
I consider this insight to be Derrida’s most important contribution to contemporary continental philosophy. See for an account of the relation between Hegel and Derrida that stresses this point my ‘Différance as Negativity: The Hegelian Remains of Derrida’s Philosophy’, in S. Houlgate and M. Baur (eds), Blackwell Companion to Hegel, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 594–610.
See on the history of this concept, for example, A. Buchwalter, ‘Hegel, Marx, and the Concept of Immanent Critique’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 29/2, 1991, 253–279. According to Buchwalter, Marx considered Hegel’s philosophical critique to be ‘infused with transcendent considerations’ (260), because he allegedly drew on the fundamental nature of things rather than on ‘existing principles of evaluation’ (262, cf. 263, 274). Buchwalter argues, however, that any form of immanent critique, including Marx’s, presupposes such a transcendent dimension (261–262, 268). I agree with his view that universalism and contextualism constitute mutually dependent determinations rather than elements of a clear-cut opposition (279).
P. Turetzky, ‘Immanent Critique’, Philosophy Today, 33/2, 1989, 144–158 offers an interesting comparison of what he regards as the formal and material forms of immanent critique elaborated by Habermas and Foucault, respectively. While Turetzky’s defence of Foucault is convincing, I disagree more than he does with Habermas’s view that universal criteria can be derived from the very nature of rational argumentation. As I see it, efforts to dominate at the cost of alternative viewpoints are no less essential to the conditions of actual discourse.
N. Kompridis, ‘Disclosing Possibility: The Past and Future of Critical Theory’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 13/3, 2005, 325–351, similarly endorses a reflective form of critique, a form that no longer takes its bearings from the idea of truth, or universal criteria, or proceduralism (337). Contemporary, pluralist societies, Kompridis argues, call for a form of ‘intimate critique’ that implicates both the critic and its object in an openended process of learning (337). Whereas I agree with the critical element of Kompridis’s account, I do not quite share his apparent optimism as to the capacity of the form of critique that he sketches to facilitate ‘the renewal of utopian energies, the regeneration of confidence and hope’ (348, cf. 340). This optimism itself, I take Derrida to have shown, is too deeply entangled with the Enlightenment conception of critique to go unscathed by a criticism of the latter.
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de Boer, K. (2012). Hegel’s Conception of Immanent Critique: Its Sources, Extent and Limit. In: de Boer, K., Sonderegger, R. (eds) Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230357006_6
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