Restoring the Effectiveness of Critique
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Highlights
- Latour argues that if we were more consistent in adopting another posture, fair-mindedness — extending greater charity and curiosity towards things we find distasteful or repugnant while demonstrating more humility, introspectiveness and flexibility with respect to the things we support – academics could work ourselves out of this intellectual ditch, and perhaps help the societies and cultures we are embedded in do the same.
- “Resistance is a reactive state of mind. While it can be necessary for survival and to prevent catastrophic harm, it can also tempt us to set our sights too low and to restrict our field of vision… leading us to forget our ultimate purpose and place in history… Another world is possible, but we can’t achieve it through resistance alone.”
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It is not enough to understand what is wrong with the prevailing order and criticize those shortcomings. It is also necessary to explore what works and is worth preserving or even enhancing about the current state of affairs. It means not only bashing the establishment for its shortcomings, but also thinking through – in a serious way – how these flaws could be plausibly rectified or what could actually be erected in its place, and how.
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What one does find is genuine curiosity about why others hold the views they do, an insistence on engaging the strongest or most reasonable version of that view he can muster, willingness to learn from whomever has insight, a commitment to identify and incorporate valuable contributions – even from views the author thinks are importantly wrong in many respects.
- Central to Scott’s approach is his insistence that one should evaluate propositions relative to the question or problem they were formulated in response to. If you don’t understand this context, he argues, then you don’t understand the proposition itself – and attempts to rely on or debunk said proposition will be ill-conceived.
- “[According to R.G. Collingwood] To understand any proposition it is first necessary to identify the question to which the proposition may be regarded as an answer… this is an important principle for any practice of historical or philosophical (and I might add, anthropological) understanding. Contrary to the rationalist view (as prevalent among contemporary anti-essentialist postmodernists as among the essentialists they attack), you cannot simply read off the error of a proposition without the prior labor of reconstructing the question to which it aims to respond… you cannot assume in advance that you know the question in relation to which the text constitutes itself as an answer.
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Up to now, critique has often served to reinforce these trends – but it could be used to mitigate them instead. It could serve to open up horizons, to restore a sense of possibility and agency, to help sort out what is valuable from what is not, in order to understand and respond to the challenges and opportunities with which we are currently faced.