Truth, Values, and the Value of Truth (original) (raw)
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The Role and Function of Critique in the Era of the Truth CRISIS1
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This paper, first published in German in Le Foucaldien 4(1) 2018 and in English in Le Foucaldien 6(1) 2020, explores Bruno Latour’s critique of contemporary critical theory. According to Latour, poststructuralist conceptions of critical inquiry are becoming increasingly outdated. In our “post-factual” era, attempting to expose facts as results of power-laden processes of social construction plays into the hands of anti-scientific obscurantists. This is not to say, however, that one ought to opt for some reductionist notion of objectivity. Instead, Latour proposes a new form of critical realism. While we agree with Latour about the necessity of widening our epistemological paradigm, we deem his critique of poststructuralism unfair and exaggerated. Moreover, we argue that he fails to account for the relationship between epistemology, power, and subjectivity. Since Foucault, on the other hand, succeeds where Latour falls short and probes into this very relationship, his is a form of cr...
REAPING WHAT HAS BEEN SOWN: THE CONCEPT OF TRUTH AND ITS SUFFERINGS
The topic and the concept of 'post-truth' has emerged very evidently in the last year, following several political events in Western countries. The topic has also been made relevant by the uses, or rather the abuses, of the Internet, where uncontrolled, fake news circulate in today's world at top speed. What we are facing now is the result of processes that have developed during the last decades in philosophy, sociology, communication studies, and journalism studies. We can indicate four processes, working at different but intertwined levels, that have contributed to undermining the possibility of any reference to 'truth' or 'reality', or any possible relationship between them. The four processes on which this paper will focus are: 1) the post-modern approach that took hold in many areas of philosophy during the second half of the twentieth century; 2) sociological perspectives that led to constructivist approaches; 3) communication theories that fostered social construction of reality by the media; and 4) the new ways to consider journalists' work as a construction of reality rather than a representation of reality. The emergence of these processes, which tend to weaken any reference to a concept of reality external to the media and its mechanisms in the production and circulation of meaning, has triggered some unexpected backlash such as vague notions of meaning, uncontrolled influencers, communicative bubbles, and a return to a positivist view of social reality.
1999
The cover notes erroneously suggest that this is the first English assessment of Adorno's life and work. Even leaving aside the more specialised works on Adorno, this claim neglects several excellent introductions, most notably those of Rose (1978), Jay (1984) and Jarvis (1998). Since the first two of these are listed in the author's bibliography, I think we can point the finger at overzealous marketing by the publisher. Compared with these authors Brunkhorst is pitched at a level of accessibility between Jay and the more complicated Rose and Jarvis. Brunkhorst focuses on a few selected themes, and his book is perhaps not as well rounded as some of the other introductions. But he makes up for this by providing more than Rose or Jay on Adorno's relation to his philosophical contemporaries (especially Heidegger) and to recent continental critical theory, without becoming as dense as Jarvis's sustained philosophical study. Published as part of a series on Political Philosophy Now, Brunkhorst's book actually places more emphasis on philosophical aesthetics than on politics, perhaps inevitably, given Adorno's scanty contribution to political theory per se. But Brunkhorst cleverly turns this round by emphasising that, for Adorno, in their very alienation from practical politics, experimental forms of art and philosophy make an important political intervention by preserving forms of freedom which have vanished from actual political life. Brunkhorst focuses on Adorno's central dialectic of identity and nonidentity. The closed-in identity of the modern subject is reactively constructed through its fascinated horror at anything non-identical to it, at otherness and difference. So are the totalising systems of thought and closed societies with which that subject is entwined. What is feared and envied is projectively terrorised and forced to conform to the dominant order, by either conceptual or actual violence. Genocide is the ultimate expression of this twisted logic of exclusion: the other is not merely rejected, but exterminated. Brunkhorst examines the connection between Adorno's theory of freedom and his experience of exile from and return to Germany, steering a course between biography and intellectual history. Adorno's privileged upbringing and hothouse education as a musician and philosopher with the Scho¨nberg school in Vienna and the Horkheimer circle in Frankfurt is covered, as are
Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Method, ed. by Giuseppina D'Oro and Søren Overgaard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Ch. 18., 2017
Critical Theory has an uneasy relationship to philosophy, and it is not straightforward at all whether it constitutes a philosophical position: it both aims to transcend philosophy and insists on the need for it. On the one hand, it stands in the tradition of Marx (and Engels), who famously said in The German Ideology that ‘we know only a single science, the science of history’; in the tradition of Kierkegaard and others who are suspicious of the success of and need for certain discursive grounding; and in the tradition of Hegel, who insisted on philosophy as always coming second to practical achievements; as well as in the tradition of Freud, with its calling into question some of the most fundamental notions of traditional philosophy (such as the self and its autonomy). At the very least, this results in a commitment to a truly interdisciplinary approach, and in some authors (such as Adorno) it even leads to a certain anti-philosophical stance, where normative partisanship is not philosophically grounded and the very idea of a philosophical system is seen as an anathema. Traditional metaphysics, Kantian transcendental philosophy, logical positivism and empiricism are just as much rejected as fundamental ontology. On the other hand, the very same authors (including notably Adorno) insist on the continued need for philosophy and require critique of philosophical positions to be, in important senses, internal to philosophy, and, for example, not descend to a crudely Marxist sociology of ideas, whereby theories are reduced to the class position and interests of their authors and supporters. The relentless self-reflexivity mandated by Critical Theory also pushes its proponents in the direction of what has traditionally been described as philosophy. In this Chapter, I investigate this uneasy relationship with philosophy by way of a case study of Adorno’s Critical Theory.
The Social Critic as Liar: Wilde, Adorno, and the Crisis of Post-truth Politics
Theory & Event, 2023
How does one speak the truth in a "post-truth" polity? This article turns to Oscar Wilde and Theodor Adorno to develop an account of critique as mendacious truth-telling that mobilizes the aesthetically pleasing, world-reconstructing power of lying embraced by contemporary neofascists on behalf of democratic social transformation. Rejecting demystification and empirical truth-telling as incapable of responding to the post-truth predicament, the critic as liar combats the "false lies" of neofascism by devising "fine lies" that imagine new, more egalitarian modes of social organization.
The Relevance of Critical Theory in the Post-Truth Era
“An incurable allergy towards non-sense and dogmatism is the soul of any critical philosophy whatsoever”. This would be my foolproof and naïve definition of critical philosophy, if I am asked to define it! The perennial resistance to dogmatism and non-sense arises out of the very structure of human reason. Immanuel Kant is, perhaps, the best known philosopher ever engaged in a systematic survey of the very structural capacity of human reason. Accordingly, Human reason, at the behest of its own constitution, would ascend to an infinite horizon of inquiry where it is intercepted by questions that are either legitimate or illegitimate, but warranted by the common sense. The ceiling drawn by Kant reminds us always of the very limitations of reason. Thus, any serious philosophizing must avoid megalomaniac claims by allowing enough space for doubt. The productivity of doubt is the very starting point of philosophy. This is what we see in Descartes’ methodic doubt as well. Inflated certainties of the arrogantly cocky ones would end up in nothing but extremism and terrorism of dogma. The freedom to disagree and to critically evaluate one’s own surroundings is guaranteed by the human incapacity to know everything. This might have made Bertrand Russell say that ‘the idiots are cocksure while the intelligent ones are full of doubt’. Now, this critical attitude must be made a universal method to interpret the reality! This is the herculean task that critical philosophy has shouldered up.
Since the initial work began on this paper a substantial shift has taken place in its theoretical focus. This shift, which can be considered a furthering of the initial critique offered in the abstract, came about because of continued research, writing, and reflection. There are good reasons for rethinking the meaning of subjectivity. Stemming largely from German Idealism, the philosophy of consciousness or subjectivism, to which Adorno's theoretical work has been consistently and unfairly categorized as, has been replaced by the paradigm of intersubjectivity which is based on communicative rationality. The rational and subsequent completeness of this shift has often been characterized as a theoretical necessity, with the hoped for consequence of ensuring that theories of the social are able to proceed beyond the confines of idealism, structuralism, poststructuralism, positivism and even early critical theory, particularly Adorno's brand of critical theory. Despite the question of whether or not such a complete paradigm shift was necessary, the fact remains that it has occurred. One consequence of this shift has been the reception and treatment of Adorno's work, which seems to sway between either the outright dismissal of his theoretical legacy, or its division and separation with the aim of adapting it to current contexts. This has resulted in a popular and persistent interpretation of Adorno's work that centers on the notion that, in its original form, it can offer no further contribution to political practice or to the project of emancipation. This shift can be summarized by what we call here "primitive terms," specifically: subjectivity, aesthetics, mimesis, self-reflection, the social, truth and freedom.