In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • From the “Gotcha!” to Immanent Critique
  • Holly Moore

Students often enter a philosophy class believing that philosophy is the practice of logical one-upmanship. Defusing the in-class strategies that endorse this view is pedagogically challenging, but the theoretical tradition of immanent critique offers an opportunity to mobilize students’ thirst for honest philosophical debate in order to achieve a deeper understanding of the role of critique in philosophical discourse. In these reflections, I argue that what I will call the “gotcha” critique, often employed by students to fend off a more serious encounter with ideas, in fact provides an opening for the insights of immanent critique to convert the glib aims of the “gotcha” toward a more critical approach to philosophical reflection.

The Insights of Immanent Critique

When Kant subjected reason to its own “Copernican revolution,” philosophy resolved anew to account for the conditions that make it possible; at that same moment, philosophy became typified by the critical perspective. Notable inheritors of this legacy—thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, and many others, all pursuing diverse philosophical questions—have similarly committed their thought to the goal of accounting for itself and its own conditions. The contemporary tradition of critical theory pays homage to this history of critique, agreeing that philosophical thought must be subject to its own logic. Pursuing this aim, critical theory has established that insofar as philosophy aims to comprehend the world, it necessarily reduces all things to itself, subjecting what is other than thought to its own criteria, resulting in a fundamental incapacity to account for the grounds of its own activity. [End Page 87] Consequently, the work of critique resides most properly in analyzing these inherent inconsistencies within ideology. According to critical theory, philosophical critique is most properly immanent critique.

A central proponent of critical theory, Theodor Adorno argues that rather than defeating the aims of philosophy, a practice of self-effacement is in fact central to it. Furthermore, insofar as it aims to comprehend all, including itself, philosophy is able to figure in its own redemption. As he states in “Why Still Philosophy?”:

[E]ver since the celebrated pre-Socratics, traditional philosophers have practiced critique. . . . If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought’s powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence on the other of untruth.

(Adorno 1998, 7, 10; my emphasis)

In the legacy of critique, we see that, although the urge to make sense of everything subjects all to the will of thought, this very urge necessarily also wills that thought make sense of itself. Adorno maintains that the critical stance native to philosophy ensures the possibility that it might acknowledge what lies outside of thought. The lesson of immanent critique—namely, that philosophy’s impulse to comprehend all beholds it to knowing itself—not only applies to the history of philosophy, but can also fruitfully inform philosophical pedagogy. Most importantly, I aim to show here that a pedagogy guided by immanent critique has the capacity to mobilize the very impulses that students use to turn away from critical thought, in order to enliven their engagement with it.

The “Gotcha!” Agenda

We have all seen it: a calm half-smile begins to form beneath a slightly lowered head as a confident hand rises into the air: “He just contradicted himself!” Students who are brave enough to address a class often arm themselves with their skill in identifying authors’ mistakes. This is understandable; when we ask students to participate in “critique” they often hear us asking them to criticize an author or text. Here are some typical “gotcha” critiques: “Anaximenes thought that the earth was shaped like a drum, but we all know that the earth is spherical”; “Aristotle thought that some people are slaves by nature, but everybody knows that we’re all born equal”; “Descartes says he has to doubt everything, but then he doesn’t doubt that he can doubt.” Each of these critiques is aimed at...

pdf

Share