Critical Theory As Disclosing Critique: A Response to Kompridis

Abstract

Critical Theory seems to have fallen on hard times of late. In a recent essay, for example, Axel Honneth remarks that anyone who attempts to locate critical theory today is "easily exposed to suspicions of nostalgically misjudging the current situation in philosophical thought." 1 Indeed, the Frankfurt School idea of critical theory as an interdisciplinary endeavor attempting to "critically diagnose social reality" is a tradition that "ceased to exist some time ago." 2 Nonetheless, there is still more to critical theory than "any arbitrary theory of society" that critically analyzes various social phenomena. 3 Honneth's doubts about the status of critical theory today might sound surprising given his own philosophical project, which is nothing if not an attempt to renew critical theory via a dialogue with social theory and contemporary moral-political philosophy. Nonetheless, we might, given Honneth's doubts concerning the viability of the tradition, still ask: What is the situation of critical theory today? Does it have a future?Such questions have prompted a number of philosophers to re-examine the very idea of critical theory. Nikolas Kompridis, for example, has recently argued that the future of critical theory depends upon a more pluralistic appropriation of its past, above all a critical appropriation of Heidegger's concept of "world-disclosure." 4 Such a move, Kompridis maintains, would overcome what he argues is Habermas' overly reductive proceduralist conception of reason and thereby transform critical theory into a more pluralistic form of "disclosing critique" -a project concerned with disclosing novel forms of thought and action that might make possible a more productive, practical orientation towards the future. In what follows, I engage in a critical dialogue with Kompridis' bold challenge to critical theory and his argument for a novel form of Heideggerian "world-disclosing critique." Though I agree with Kompridis that critical theory should retrieve the romantic strain within its own heritage and that it should therefore integrate forms of world-disclosing critique, I shall argue that Kompridis' Heideggerian revision of critical theory requires supplementation by Axel Honneth's theory of recognition. The central question with which I shall be concerned is that of the relationship between disclosure and recognition and its significance for the renewal of critical theory. Although Kompridis' expansive definition of disclosing critique expands the meaning of critical theory to the point where it risks losing coherence as a critical analysis of modernity, it nonetheless raises important questions concerning the ways in which the idea of disclosing critique might be brought together with the theory of recognition. This attempt at integration, in turn, raises further questions: What is "critical" about the world-disclosing model of critique? What provides its normative orientation? I suggest in conclusion that one way of developing the concept of critical theory that integrates world-disclosing critiqu...

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