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Chapter 8. The Achievement of Self-Criticism
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CHAPTER EIGHT The Achievement of Self-Criticism The Critical Moment The final end of all rational discourse is the transformative moment of successful self-criticism, which reaches its high point, we would like to think, when self-applied to one’s very standards of thought and action . Normative self-criticism is also the ultimate form of criticism from within, the should-be culmination point of Walzer’s project (and for that matter, also of Brandom’s) that interpretivists have yet to take beyond the social (and Brandom and Taylor,1 beyond the interpersonal). In selfcriticizing too, a certain balance between closeness and remoteness must be struck, but it is the reverse, mirror image of the sort of such balance characteristic of prudently criticizing others. Here too a measure of selfdistancing and self-detachment is centrally involved but to a profoundly different end from when criticizing someone else. When criticizing another person, the critic creates distance from herself in an attempt to emulate the other person’s perspective and way of thinking. Second-guessing others is not always easy, but it is something we do habitually, and not only to criticize.“Deontic scorekeeping,”Brandom’s term for the check we regularly keep on our fellow discussants’ commitments and entitlements, forms the cornerstone practice that grounds his entire picture of “mind, meaning and rationality.”One does not have to be a Brandomian inferentialist to acknowledge this, or a Walzerian interpretivist to realize that the 229 230 Normative Self-Criticism better informed people are of their addressees’ culture and scheme of values, the easier such feats of self-distancing as required in criticizing others are. The self-distancing required in self-criticism, however, is a different matter entirely. Here one aims not at second-guessing and emulating someone else’s way of thinking but at gaining a detached perspective on one’s own. This cannot be achieved, as in ordinary criticism, by purporting to adopt someone else’s perspective. All that would entail is the realization that that other person sees things differently. Self-criticizing requires being of two minds, literally—both of which are one’s own! We can now begin to better appreciate how important trustworthy critics can be. If we deem our critics sincere, even if we do not accept their criticism, we will be deeming their account of how we think an honest portrayal. We may judge them to be wrong perhaps, to have mistaken us for someone we are not, but, if we deem them sincere, we shall have to admit that others see us differently than we see ourselves. And the better acquainted those others are perceived by us to be, the more disturbing and humbling the discrepancy. Criticism becomes effective when a person ’s critics’portrayal of him is at least partly endorsed to the at least partial rejection of his own self-portrayal. That is the transformative critical moment, we shall be arguing in detail in what follows, the moment in which a person’s mind is changed about itself by internalizing someone else’s picture of it. But first to self-reflection. We self-reflect constantly, acquainting ourselves with what we deem true and right by making explicit and then applying the norms and standards that underlie and underwrite our selfassessment . Many stress the inherently self-critical dimension of selfre flection, but most limit it, as does Brandom in his recent work, to troubleshooting the unity of one’s commitments for clarity, coherence, consistency, and priority.2 But, as Harry Frankfurt argues, normative selfcriticism can extend much further, in ways that involve unsettling levels of self-detachment, self-estrangement, and even self-alienation. Frankfurt ’s much-discussed“mesh”account of free will, especially his grounding of personal identity, rationality, and normativity on a firm distinction between first- and higher-order desires, sets forth from an insightful account of both the threatening and prized features of self-reflection. [54.166.200.255] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:23 GMT) Normative self-criticism, if not in the full sense sought for in the present study, is central to Frankfurt’s picture of agency and rationality, although he leaves it a largely unanalyzed phenomenon of self-management. In what follows we take Frankfurt’s influential picture as our point of departure , not only because of the major role it plays in so much recent discussion of questions of agency and normativity,3 but, as will become apparent, because of the way it...