What does it mean to be critical?
What does it mean to be critical? Today the common understanding is that it means to be against something, to criticize it because it is wrong. Whether to be critical or not has become a moral proposition: everyone must decide to have an opinion, even when the stakes are low and the gains remain symbolic. The critique of society — of economics, politics, and art — has become a shadow of that damning, religious fervor from the distant past which could only ever see the devil in the heroic deeds of mankind. But our present-day understanding has disfigured the original, revolutionary sense of critique.
This original sense comes to us from the philosopher Immanuel Kant who famously wrote his three critiques — of Pure Reason (the True), Practical Reason (the Good), and Judgment (the Beautiful) — to recast the ancient ideals in light of the freedom and boundless potential exhibited by modern social life. Whereas the ancients had conceived the True, the Good, and the Beautiful as an indissoluble unity — where what is True is Good because it is True and Beautiful because it is Good — Kant recognized that the revolution in theory and practice brought about by the simultaneous growth of cooperative commercial society and the spread of Enlightenment thinking had irreversibly divided the categories of old: for Kant what was True could be True independently of being Good or Beautiful and what was Beautiful could be so without needing to be Good or even True. The critique elaborated by Kant was not a simple criticism of the ancient ideals of traditional philosophy but an immanent critique that showed how a consciousness of a new kind of modern freedom could be possible through a transformation of the old concepts that had become petrified.
David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Face in Dirt), 1992-93. New Yorker
For Kant, to be critical meant to grasp reality as a process of change in which the limits and potentials of our own understanding and ability are reflected. To be critical means to see beyond what currently exists to perceive what could be possible given the available means. Critique therefore is not the same as mere criticism which is a childish expression of ‘no’ that only bites at the ankles. Critique can't afford to be opposed to everything even though it recognizes precisely that everything has gone bad and nothing can be recommended wholeheartedly. The ruthless criticism of everything existing was envisioned by Marx as a confession that collective mankind would make to itself:
It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work.
… In order to secure remission of its sins, mankind has only to declare them for what they actually are. [1]
When people today criticize the leaders of the American Revolution as self-serving opportunists they only project their own narrowness and narcissism onto the conditions of the past. They forget that slave revolts are as old as slavery, which is to say as old as civilization itself, and that never had a revolution been successful until the American one of 1776, an act which soon inspired the French and the Haitians, as well as many others that saw that for the first time freedom had been the made the object of politics and that for the first time it seemed possible that the whole oppressive rule of the entire history of civilization up to then might finally — and miraculously — be overturned and overcome, redeemed and transformed. It was only on the basis of the Declaration of Independence — its declaration of the inalienable freedom of all and of each — that the Civil War could have ever been waged. Without the groundwork of Washington and Jefferson, no Lincoln or Ulysses S. Grant. And without Lincoln or Grant, no reason to ever hope for the eventual salvation of our wretched of the earth. To the victor go the spoils: I, for one, am grateful that this Union still stands, for had the American Revolution been defeated, in 1776 or in 1865, there would be no critique of present freedom that would be possible today and no hope for any greater freedom in the future; the great historical experiment in democracy and independence, the self-direction of mankind, would have proved to be a failure and the ancient laws of slavery and servitude, heavenly ordained, might have reasserted themselves across the globe. If a revolution is still possible today, then it is only because the American Revolution has never been defeated. The French Revolution succumbed first to the Empire and then to the resurrected crown; the Haitian Revolution had only local significance; and the Russian Revolution that came a century and a half later devolved and degenerated with growing confusion; only the American Revolution created a freedom still living — the only hope for all the freedom unrealized.
Harold Cruse once noted, with regard to the Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, that many of the theaters that had staged the Harlem Renaissance had been converted to churches by 1967; all the talk of cultural revolution that filled the air in the 60s was blinding to the actual conditions that would have allowed for its success. The New Left indeed mounted an oppositional critique against the petrified institutions of declining post-war capitalism, but that critique has failed to do anything more than condemn what already exists — which simply because it exists will not be erased so easily. The truth is that our freedom has yet to be proved; only when it makes its own reality out of the reality it wishes to deny will the struggle for freedom have found its true beginning. If culture today is clearly aimless, this is because it suffers from a lack of critique. Contemporary art has lost its footing because when it looks back into the history of art, it can no longer see from whence it came; instead everything has been unthinkingly flattened, rendered in black and white. Let us be faithful to Kant:
Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction from another. This minority is self-incurred when its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! [dare to be wise] Have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment. [2] //
Alfred Steiglitz, Spiritual America, 1923. Wikimedia
[1] Karl Marx in a letter to Arnold Ruge. marxists.org
[2] Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 1784. Columbia University.