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Categories: 1972 books | Anti-fascism | Anti-psychiatry | Philosophy books | Freudian psychology | Cognitive science literature | Works by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

List of critical theorists

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

See also Critical theory (Frankfurt School)

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

• Theodor Adorno
• Giorgio Agamben
• Karl-Otto Apel
• Louis Althusser
• Michael Apple

B

• Alain Badiou
• Mikhail Bakhtin
• Étienne Balibar
• Roland Barthes
• Gad Barzilai
• Jean Baudrillard
• Walter Benjamin
• Lauren Berlant
• Ernst Bloch
• Homi K. Bhabha
• Susan Bordo
• Pierre Bourdieu
• Stephen Bronner
• Judith Butler

C

• Cornelius Castoriadis
• Hélène Cixous

D

• Angela Davis
• Hamid Dabashi
• Antonia Darder
• Guy Debord
• Michel de Certeau
• Manuel de Landa
• Teresa de Lauretis
• Gilles Deleuze
• Paul De Man
• Jacques Derrida
• Geoffrey Derven
• Enrique Dussel

E

• Terry Eagleton
• Mikhail Epstein

F

• Norman Fairclough
• Frantz Fanon
• Ramon Flecha
• Michel Foucault
• Paulo Freire
• Erich Fromm

G

• Hans-Georg Gadamer
• Henry Giroux
• Antonio Gramsci
• Félix Guattari

H

• Jürgen Habermas
• David Halperin
• Donna Haraway
• Michael Hardt
• David Harvey
• Axel Honneth
• Max Horkheimer

I

• Luce Irigaray

J

• Fredric Jameson
• Henry Jenkins

K

• Joe L. Kincheloe
• Julia Kristeva
• Thomas S. Kuhn

L

• Jacques Lacan
• Emmanuel Lévinas
• Claude Lévi-Strauss
• Ania Loomba
• Alfred Lorenzer
• Leo Löwenthal
• Rosa Luxemburg
• Jean-François Lyotard

M

• Herbert Marcuse
• Karl Marx
• Peter McLaren
• Eduardo Mendieta
• Martin Beck Matustik[1]

N

• Antonio Negri
• Oskar Negt
• Franz L. Neumann

O

• Claus Offe

P

• Friedrich Pollock
• Nicos Poulantzas

R

• Jacques Rancière

S

• Edward Said
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
• Barbara Herrnstein Smith
• Catherine Stupp

V

• Paul Virilio

Z

• Slavoj Žižek

Fredric Jameson (1991)

Postmodernism
or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

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Source: Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Verso, 1991. Just two sections from Chapter 1 reproduced here.

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I

The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the “crisis” of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism. The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s.

As the word itself suggests, this break is most often related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation). Thus abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs, or the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalised and canonised in the works of Wallace Stevens) all are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them. The enumeration of what follows, then, at once becomes empirical, chaotic, and heterogeneous: Andy Warhol and pop art, but also photorealism, and beyond it, the “new expressionism”; the moment, in music, of John Cage, but also the synthesis of classical and “popular” styles found in composers like Phil Glass and Terry Riley, and also punk and new wave rock (the Beatles and the Stones now standing as the high-modernist moment of that more recent and rapidly evolving tradition); in film, Godard, post-Godard, and experimental cinema and video, but also a whole new type of commercial film (about which more below); Burroughs, Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed, on the one hand, and the French nouveau roman and its succession, on the other, along with alarming new kinds of literary criticism based on some new aesthetic of textuality or écriture ... The list might be extended indefinitely; but does it imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style and fashion changes determined by an older high-modernist imperative of stylistic innovation?

It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised and articulated; it was indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism – as it will be outlined in the following pages – initially began to emerge. More decisively than in the other arts or media, postmodernist positions in architecture have been inseparable from an implacable critique of architectural high modernism and of Frank Lloyd Wright or the so-called international style (Le Corbusier, Mies, etc), where formal criticism and analysis (of the high-modernist transformation of the building into a virtual sculpture, or monumental “duck,” as Robert Venturi puts it), are at one with reconsiderations on the level of urbanism and of the aesthetic institution. High modernism is thus credited with the destruction of the fabric of the traditional city and its older neighbourhood culture (by way of the radical disjunction of the new Utopian high-modernist building from its surrounding context), while the prophetic elitism and authoritarianism of the modern movement are remorselessly identified in the imperious gesture of the charismatic Master.

Postmodernism in architecture will then logically enough stage itself as a kind of aesthetic populism, as the very title of Venturi’s influential manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas, suggests. However we may ultimately wish to evaluate this populist rhetoric, it has at least the merit of drawing our attention to one fundamental feature of all the postmodernisms enumerated above: namely, the effacement in them of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories, and contents of that very culture industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern, from Leavis and the American New Criticism all the way to Adorno and the Frankfurt School. The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole “degraded” landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader’s Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply “quote” as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance.

Nor should the break in question be thought of as a purely cultural affair: indeed, theories of the postmodern – whether celebratory or couched in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation – bear a strong family resemblance to all those more ambitious sociological generalisations which, at much the same time bring us the news of the arrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously baptised “Postindustrial society” (Daniel Bell) but often also designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society or high tech, and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely, the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle. The Marxist tradition has therefore resisted them with vehemence, with the signal except on of the economist Ernest Mandel, whose book Late Capitalism sets out not merely to anatomise the historic originality of this new society (which he sees as a third stage or moment in the evolution of capital) but also to demonstrate that it is, if an thing, a purer stage of capitalism than any of the moments that preceded it. I will return to t is argument later; suffice it for the moment to anticipate a point that will be argued in Chapter 2, namely, that every position on postmodernism in culture – whether apologia or stigmatisation – is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today.

A last preliminary word on method: what follows is not to be read as stylistic description, as the account of one cultural style or movement among others. I have rather meant to offer a periodising hypothesis, and that at a moment in which the very conception of historical periodisation has come to seem most problematical indeed. I have argued elsewhere that all isolated or discrete cultural analysis always involves a buried or repressed theory of historical periodisation; in any case, the conception of the “genealogy” largely lays to rest traditional theoretical worries about so-called linear history, theories of “stages,” and teleological historiography. In the present context, however, lengthier theoretical discussion of such (very real) issues can perhaps be replaced by a few substantive remarks.

One of the concerns frequently aroused by periodising hypotheses is that these tend to obliterate difference and to project an idea of the historical period as massive homogeneity (bounded on either side by inexplicable chronological metamorphoses and punctuation marks). This is, however, precisely why it seems to me essential to grasp postmodernism not as a style but rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features.

Consider, for example, the powerful alternative position that postmodernism is itself little more than one more stage of modernism proper (if not, indeed, of the even older romanticism); it may indeed be conceded that all the features of postmodernism I am about to enumerate can be detected, full-blown, in this or that preceding modernism (including such astonishing genealogical precursors as Gertrude Stein, Raymond Roussel, or Marcel Duchamp, who may be considered outright postmodernists, avant la lettre). What has not been taken into account by this view, however, is the social position of the older modernism, or better still, its passionate repudiation by an older Victorian and post-Victorian bourgeoisie for whom its forms and ethos are received as being variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive, and generally “antisocial.” It will be argued here, however, that a mutation in the sphere of culture has rendered such attitudes archaic. Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly, they now strike us, on the whole, as rather “realistic,” and this is the result of a canonisation and academic institutionalisation of the modern movement generally that can be to the late 1950s. This is surety one of the most plausible explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itself, since the younger generation of the 1960s will now confront the formerly oppositional modern movement as a set of dead classics, which “weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” as Marx once said in a different context.

As for the postmodern revolt against all that, however, it must equally be stressed that its own offensive features – from obscurity and sexually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism – no longer scandalise anyone and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become institutionalised and are at one with the official or public culture of Western society.

What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to aeroplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. Such economic necessities then find recognition in the varied kinds of institutional support available for the newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other forms of patronage. Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship. It will therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary flowering of the new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of multinational business, whose expansion and development is strictly contemporaneous with it. Later I will suggest that these two new phenomena have an even deeper dialectical interrelationship than the simple one-to-one financing of this or that individual project. Yet this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror.

The first point to be made about the conception of periodisation in dominance, therefore, is that even if all the constitutive features of postmodernism were identical with and coterminous to those of an older modernism – a position I feel to be demonstrably erroneous but which only an even lengthier analysis of modernism proper could dispel the two phenomena would still remain utterly distinct in their meaning antisocial function, owing to the very different positioning of postmodernism in the economic system of late capital and, beyond that, to the transformation of the very sphere of culture in contemporary society.

This point will be further discussed at the conclusion of this book. I must now briefly address a different kind of objection to periodisation, a concern about its possible obliteration of heterogeneity, one most often expressed by the Left. And it is certain that there is a strange quasi-Sartrean irony – a “winner loses” logic which tends to surround any effort to describe a “system,” a totalising dynamic, as these are detected in the movement of contemporary society. What happens is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic – the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example – the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.

I have felt, however, that it was only in the light of some conception of a dominant cultural logic or hegemonic norm that genuine difference could be measured and assessed. I am very far from feeling that all cultural production today is postmodern in the broad sense I will be conferring on this term. The postmodern is, however, the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses – what Raymond Williams has usefully termed “residual” and “emergent” forms of cultural production – must make their way. If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable. At any rate, this has been the political spirit in which the following analysis was devised: to project some conception of a new systematic cultural norm and its reproduction in order to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of any radical cultural politics today.

The exposition will take up in turn the following constitutive features of the postmodern: a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary “theory” and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose “schizophrenic” structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts; a whole new type of emotional ground tone – what I will call “intensities” – which can best be grasped by a return to older theories of the sublime; the deep constitutive relationships of all this to a whole new technology, which is itself a figure for a whole new economic world system; and, after a brief account of postmodernist mutations in the lived experience of built space itself, some reflections on the mission of political art in the bewildering new world space of late or multinational capital.

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VI

The conception of postmodernism outlined here is a historical rather than a merely stylistic one. I cannot stress too greatly the radical distinction between a view for which the postmodern is one (optional) style among many others available and one which seeks to grasp it as the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism: the two approaches in fact generate two very different ways of conceptualising the phenomenon as a whole: on the one hand, moral judgments (about which it is indifferent whether they are positive or negative), and, on the other, a genuinely dialectical attempt to think our present of time in History.

Of some positive moral evaluation of postmodernism little needs to be said: the complacent (yet delirious) camp-following celebration of this aesthetic new world (including its social and economic dimension, greeted with equal enthusiasm under the slogan of “postindustrial society”) is surely unacceptable, although it may be somewhat less obvious that current fantasies about the salvational nature of high technology, from chips to robots – fantasies entertained not only by both left and right governments in distress but also by many intellectuals – are also essentially of a piece with more vulgar apologies for postmodernism.

But in that case it is only consequent to reject moralising condemnations of the postmodern and of its essential triviality when juxtaposed against the Utopian “high seriousness” of the great modernisms: judgments one finds both on the Left and on the radical Right. And no doubt the logic of the simulacrum, with its transformation of older realities into television images, does more than merely replicate the logic of late capitalism; it reinforces and intensifies it. Meanwhile, for political groups which seek actively to intervene in history and to modify its otherwise passive momentum (whether with a view toward channelling it into a socialist transformation of society or diverting it into the regressive re-establishment of some simpler fantasy past), there cannot but be much that is deplorable and reprehensible in a cultural form of image addiction which, by transforming the past into visual mirages, stereotypes, or texts, effectively abolishes any practical sense of the future and of the collective project, thereby abandoning the thinking of future change to fantasies of sheer catastrophe and inexplicable cataclysm, from visions of “terrorism” on the social level to those of cancer on the personal. Yet if postmodernism is a historical phenomenon, then the attempt to conceptualise it in terms of moral or moralising judgments must finally be identified as a category mistake. All of which becomes more obvious when we interrogate the position of the cultural critic and moralist; the latter, along with all the rest of us, is now so deeply immersed in postmodernist space, so deeply suffused and infected by its new cultural categories, that the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other, becomes unavailable.

The distinction I am proposing here knows one canonical form in Hegel’s differentiation of the thinking of individual morality or moralising from that whole very different realm of collective social values and practices. But it finds its definitive form in Marx’s demonstration of the materialist dialectic, most notably in those classic pages of the Manifesto which teach the hard lesson of some more genuinely dialectical way to think historical development and change. The topic of the lesson is, of course, the historical development of capitalism itself and the deployment of a specific bourgeois culture. In a well-known passage Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible, namely, to think this development positively and negatively all at once; to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought, and without attenuating any of the force of either judgment. We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst.

The lapse from this austere dialectical imperative into the more comfortable stance of the taking of moral positions is inveterate and all too human: still, the urgency of the subject demands that we make at least some effort to think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.

Such an effort suggests two immediate questions, with which we will conclude these reflections. Can we in fact identify some “moment of truth” within the more evident “moments of falsehood” of postmodern culture? And, even if we can do so, is there not something ultimately paralysing in the dialectical view of historical development proposed above; does it not tend to demobilise us and to surrender us to passivity and helplessness by systematically obliterating possibilities of action under the impenetrable fog of historical inevitability? It is appropriate to discuss these two (related) issues in terms of current possibilities for some effective contemporary cultural politics and for the construction of a genuine political culture.

To focus the problem in this way is, of course, immediately to raise the more genuine issue of the fate of culture generally, and of the function of culture specifically, as one social level or instance, in the postmodern era. Everything in the previous discussion suggests that what we have been calling postmodernism is inseparable from, and unthinkable without the hypothesis of, some fundamental mutation of the sphere of culture in the world of late capitalism which includes a momentous modification of its social function. Older discussions of the space, function, or sphere of culture (mostly notably Herbert Marcuse’s classic essay The Affirmative Character of Culture) have insisted on what a different language would call the “semi-autonomy” of the cultural realm: its ghostly, yet Utopian, existence, for good or ill, above the practical world of the existent, whose mirror image it throws back in forms which vary from the legitimations of flattering resemblance to the contestatory indictments of critical satire or Utopian pain.

What we must now ask ourselves is whether it is not precisely this semi-autonomy of the cultural sphere which has been destroyed by the logic of late capitalism. Yet to argue that culture is today no longer endowed with the relative autonomy it once enjoyed as one level among others in earlier moments of capitalism (let alone in pre-capitalist societies) is not necessarily to imply its disappearance or extinction. Quite the contrary; we must go on to affirm that the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imagined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life – from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself – can be said to have become “cultural” in some original and yet untheorised sense. This proposition is, however, substantively quite consistent with the previous diagnosis of a society of the image or the simulacrum and a transformation of the “real” into so many pseudo-events.

It also suggests that some of our most cherished and time-honoured radical conceptions about the nature of cultural politics may thereby find themselves outmoded. However distinct those conceptions – which range from slogans of negativity, opposition, and subversion to critique and reflexivity – may have been, they all shared a single, fundamentally spatial, presupposition, which may be resumed in the equally time-honoured formula of “critical distance.” No theory of cultural politics current on the Left today has been able to do without one notion or another of a certain minimal aesthetic distance, of the possibility of the positioning of the cultural act outside the massive Being of capital, from which to assault this last. What the burden of our preceding demonstration suggests, however, is that distance in general (including “critical distance” in particular) has very precisely been abolished in the new space of postmodernism. We are submerged in its henceforth filled and suffused volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial coordinates and practically (let alone theoretically) incapable of distantiation; meanwhile, it has already been observed how the prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and colonising those very pre-capitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity. The shorthand language of co-optation is for this reason omnipresent on the left, but would now seem to offer a most inadequate theoretical basis for understanding a situation in which we all, in one way or another, dimly feel that not only punctual and local counter-culture forms of cultural resistance and guerrilla warfare but also even overtly political interventions like those of The Clash are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it.

What we must now affirm is that it is precisely this whole extraordinarily demoralising and depressing original new global space which is the “moment of truth” of postmodernism. What has been called the postmodernist “sublime” is only the moment in which this content has become most explicit, has moved the closest to the surface of consciousness as a coherent new type of space in its own right – even though a certain figural concealment or disguise is still at work here, most notably in the high-tech thematics in which the new spatial content is still dramatised and articulated. Yet the earlier features of the postmodern which were enumerated above can all now be seen as themselves partial (yet constitutive) aspects of the same general spatial object.

The argument for a certain authenticity in these otherwise patently ideological productions depends on the prior proposition that what we have been calling postmodern (or multinational) space is not merely a cultural ideology or fantasy but has genuine historical (and socioeconomic) reality as a third great original expansion of capitalism around the globe (after the earlier expansions of the national market and the older imperialist system, which each had their own cultural specificity and generated new types of space appropriate to their dynamics). The distorted and unreflexive attempts of newer cultural production to explore and to express this new space must then also, in their own fashion, be considered as so many approaches to the representation of (a new) reality (to use a more antiquated language). As paradoxical as the terms may seem, they may thus, following a classic interpretive option, be read as peculiar new forms of realism (or at least of the mimesis of reality), while at the same time they can equally well be analysed as so many attempts to distract and divert us from that reality or to disguise its contradictions and resolve them in the guise of various formal mystifications.

As for that reality itself, however – the as yet untheorised original space of some new “world system” of multinational or late capitalism, a space whose negative or baleful aspects are only too obvious – the dialectic requires us to hold equally to a positive or “progressive” evaluation of its emergence, as Marx did for the world market as the horizon of national economies, or as Lenin did for the older imperialist global network. For neither Marx nor Lenin was socialism a matter of returning to smaller (and thereby less repressive and comprehensive) systems of social organisation; rather, the dimensions attained by capital in their own times were grasped as the promise, the framework, and the precondition for the achievement of some new and more comprehensive socialism. Is this not the case with the yet more global and totalising space of the new world system, which demands the intervention and elaboration of an internationalism of a radically new type? The disastrous realignment of socialist revolution with the older nationalisms (not only in Southeast Asia), whose results have necessarily aroused much serious recent left reflection, can be adduced in support of this position.

But if all this is so, then at least one possible form of a new radical cultural politics becomes evident, with a final aesthetic proviso that must quickly be noted. Left cultural producers and theorists – particularly those formed by bourgeois cultural traditions issuing from romanticism and valorising spontaneous, instinctive, or unconscious forms of “genius,” but also for very obvious historical reasons such as Zhdanovism and the sorry consequences of political and party interventions in the arts have often by reaction allowed themselves to be unduly intimidated by the repudiation, in bourgeois aesthetics and most notably in high modernism, of one of the age-old functions of art – the pedagogical and the didactic. The teaching function of art was, however, always stressed in classical times (even though it there mainly took the form of moral lessons), while the prodigious and still imperfectly understood work of Brecht reaffirms, in a new and formally innovative and original way, for the moment of modernism proper, a complex new conception of the relationship between culture and pedagogy.

The cultural model I will propose similarly foregrounds the cognitive and pedagogical dimensions of political art and culture, dimensions stressed in very different ways by both Lukacs and Brecht (for the distinct moments of realism and modernism, respectively).

We cannot, however, return to aesthetic practices elaborated on the basis of historical situations and dilemmas which are no longer ours. Meanwhile, the conception of space that has been developed here suggests that a model of political culture appropriate to our own situation will necessarily have to raise spatial issues as its fundamental organising concern. I will therefore provisionally define the aesthetic of this new (and hypothetical) cultural form as an aesthetic of cognitive mapping.

In a classic work, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch taught us that the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves: grids such as those of Jersey City, in which none of the traditional markers (monuments, nodes, natural boundaries, built perspectives) obtain, are the most obvious examples. Disalienation in the traditional city, then, involves the practical reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory and which the individual subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories. Lynch’s own work is limited by the deliberate restriction of his topic to the problems of city form as such; yet it becomes extraordinarily suggestive when projected outward onto some of the larger national and global spaces we have touched on here. Nor should it be too hastily assumed that his model – while it clearly raises very central issues of representation as such – is in any way easily vitiated by the conventional poststructural critiques of the “ideology of representation” or mimesis. The cognitive map is not exactly mimetic in that older sense; indeed, the theoretical issues it poses allow us to renew the analysis of representation on a higher and much more complex level.

There is, for one thing, a most interesting convergence between the empirical problems studied by Lynch in terms of city space and the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as “the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.” Surely this is exactly what the cognitive map is called upon to do in the narrower framework of daily life in the physical city: to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.

Yet Lynch’s work also suggests a further line of development insofar as cartography itself constitutes its key mediatory instance. A return to the history of this science (which is also an art) shows us that Lynch’s model does not yet, in fact, really correspond to what will become map-making. Lynch’s subjects are rather clearly involved in pre-cartographic operations whose results traditionally are described as itineraries rather than as maps: diagrams organised around the still subject-centred or existential journey of the traveller, along which various significant key features are marked oases, mountain ranges, rivers, monuments, and the like. The most highly developed form of such diagrams is the nautical itinerary, the sea chart, or portulans, where coastal features are noted for the use of Mediterranean navigators who rarely venture out into the open sea.

Yet the compass at once introduces a new dimension into sea charts, a dimension that will utterly transform the problematic of the itinerary and allow us to pose the problem of a genuine cognitive mapping in a far more complex way. For the new instruments - compass, sextant, and theodolite – correspond not merely to new geographic and navigational problems (the difficult matter of determining longitude, particularly on the curving surface of the planet, as opposed to the simpler matter of latitude, which European navigators can still empirically determine by ocular inspection of the African coast); they also introduce a whole new coordinate: the relationship to the totality, particularly as it is mediated by the stars and by new operations like that of triangulation. At this point, cognitive mapping in the broader sense comes to require the coordination of existential data (the empirical position of the subject) with unlived, abstract conceptions of the geographic totality.

Finally, with the first globe (1490) and the invention of the Mercator projection at about the same time, yet a third dimension of cartography emerges, which at once involves what we would today call the nature of representational codes, the intrinsic structures of the various media, the intervention, into more naive mimetic conceptions of mapping, of the whole new fundamental question of the languages of representation itself, in particular the unresolvable (well-nigh Heisenbergian) dilemma of the transfer of curved space to flat charts. At this point it becomes clear that there can be no true maps (at the same time it also becomes clear that there can be scientific progress, or better still, a dialectical advance, in the various historical moments of map-making).

Transcoding all this now into the very different problematic of the Althusserian definition of ideology, one would want to make two points. The first is that the Althusserian concept now allows us to rethink these specialised geographical and cartographic issues in terms of social space – in terms, for example, of social class and national or international context, in terms of the ways in which we all necessarily also cognitively map our individual social relationship to local, national, and international class realities. Yet to reformulate the problem in this way is also to come starkly up against those very difficulties in mapping which are posed in heightened and original ways by that very global space of the postmodernist or multinational moment which has been under discussion here. These are not merely theoretical issues; they have urgent practical political consequences, as is evident from the conventional feelings of First World subjects that existentially (or “empirically”) they really do inhabit a “postindustrial society” from which traditional production has disappeared and in which social classes of the classical type no longer exist – a conviction which has immediate effects on political praxis.

The second point is that a return to the Lacanian underpinnings of Althusser’s theory can afford some useful and suggestive methodological enrichments. Althusser’s formulation remobilises an older and henceforth classical Marxian distinction between science and ideology that is not without value for us even today. The existential – the positioning of the individual subject, the experience of daily life, the monadic “point of view” on the world to which we are necessarily, as biological subjects, restricted – is in Althusser’s formula implicitly opposed to the realm of abstract knowledge, a realm which, as Lacan reminds us, is never positioned in or actualised by any concrete subject but rather by that structural void called le sujet supposé savoir (the subject supposed to know), a subject-place of knowledge. What is affirmed is not that we cannot know the world and its totality in some abstract or “scientific” way. Marxian “science” provides just such a way of knowing and conceptualising the world abstractly, in the sense in which, for example, Mandel’s great book offers a rich and elaborated knowledge of that global world system, of which it has never been said here that it was unknowable but merely that it was unrepresentable, which is a very different matter. The Althusserian formula, in other words, designates a gap, a rift, between existential experience and scientific knowledge. Ideology has then the function of somehow inventing a way of articulating those two distinct dimensions with each other. What a historicist view of this definition would want to add is that such coordination, the production of functioning and living ideologies, is distinct in different historical situations, and, above all, that there may be historical situations in which it is not possible at all – and this would seem to be our situation in the current crisis.

But the Lacanian system is threefold, and not dualistic. To the Marxian-Althusserian opposition of ideology and science correspond only two of Lacan’s tripartite functions: the Imaginary and the Real, respectively.

Our digression on cartography, however, with its final revelation of a properly representational dialectic of the codes and capacities of individual languages or media, reminds us that what has until now been omitted was the dimension of the Lacanian Symbolic itself.

An aesthetic of cognitive mapping – a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system – will necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex representational dialectic and invent radically new forms in order to do it justice. This is not then, clearly, a call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and more transparent national space, or some more traditional and reassuring perspectival or mimetic enclave: the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object – the world space of multinational capital – at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralised by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.

Truth

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Truth can have a variety of meanings, from the state of being the case, being in accord with a particular fact or reality, being in accord with the body of real things, events, actuality, or fidelity to an original or to a standard. In archaic usage it could be fidelity, constancy or sincerity in action, character, and utterance.^[1] The term has no single definition yet about which over fifty percent of professional philosophers and scholars agree, and various theories and views of truth continue to be debated. There are differing claims on such questions as what constitutes truth; what things are truthbearers capable of being true or false; how to define and identify truth; the roles that revealed and acquired knowledge play; and whether truth is subjective, relative, objective, or absolute. This article introduces the various perspectives and claims, both today and throughout history.

Contents [hide] 1 Nomenclature and etymology 2 The major theories of truth 2.1 Substantive theories 2.1.1 Correspondence theory 2.1.2 Coherence theory 2.1.3 Constructivist theory 2.1.4 Consensus theory 2.1.5 Pragmatic theory 2.2 Minimalist (deflationary) theories 2.2.1 Performative theory of truth 2.2.2 Redundancy and related theories 2.3 Pluralist theories 2.4 Most believed theories 3 Formal theories 3.1 Truth in logic 3.2 Truth in mathematics 3.3 Semantic theory of truth 3.4 Kripke's theory of truth 4 View of truth as somebody 5 Notable views 5.1 Ancient history 5.2 Medieval age 5.2.1 Avicenna 5.2.2 Aquinas 5.3 Modern age 5.3.1 Kant 5.3.2 Hegel 5.3.3 Schopenhauer 5.3.4 Kierkegaard 5.3.5 Nietzsche 5.3.6 Whitehead 5.3.7 Nishida 5.3.8 Fromm 5.3.9 Foucault 5.3.10 Baudrillard 5.3.11 Ratzinger 6 See also 6.1 Truth in logic 6.2 Theories of truth 6.3 Major theorists 7 Notes 8 References 9 External links

Nomenclature and etymology

The English word truth is from Old English tríewþ, tréowþ, trýwþ, Middle English trewþe, cognate to Old High German triuwida, Old Norse tryggð. Like troth, it is a -th nominalisation of the adjective true (Old English tréowe).

The English word true is from Old English (West Saxon) (ge)tríewe, tréowe, cognate to Old Saxon (gi)trûui, Old High German (ga)triuwu (Modern German treu "faithful"), Old Norse tryggr, Gothic triggws,^[2] all from a Proto-Germanic *trewwj- "having good faith". Old Norse trú, "faith, word of honour; religious faith, belief"^[3] (archaic English troth "loyalty, honesty, good faith", compare Ásatrú).

Thus, 'truth' involves both the quality of "faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, sincerity, veracity",^[4] and that of "agreement with fact or reality", in Anglo-Saxon expressed by sōþ.

All Germanic languages besides English have introduced a terminological distinction between truth "fidelity" and truth "factuality". To express "factuality", North Germanic opted for nouns derived from sanna "to assert, affirm", while continental West Germanic (German and Dutch) opted for continuations of wâra "faith, trust, pact" (cognate to Slavic věra "(religious) faith", but influenced by Latin verus). Romance languages use terms following the Latin veritas, while the Greek aletheia and Slavic pravda have separate etymological origins.

The major theories of truth

The question of what is a proper basis for deciding how words, symbols, ideas and beliefs may properly be considered true, whether by a single person or an entire society, is dealt with by the five major substantive theories introduced below. Each theory presents perspectives that are widely shared by published scholars.^[5][6] There also have more recently arisen "deflationary" or "minimalist" theories of truth based on the idea that the application of a term like true to a statement does not assert anything significant about it, for instance, anything about its nature, but that the label truth is a tool of discourse used to express agreement, to emphasize claims, or to form certain types of generalizations.^[5][7][8]

Substantive theories

Correspondence theory

For the truth to correspond it must first be proved by evidence or an individuals valid opinion, which have similar meaning or context.^[9] This type of theory posits a relationship between thoughts or statements on the one hand, and things or objects on the other. It is a traditional model which goes back at least to some of the classical Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.^[10] This class of theories holds that the truth or the falsity of a representation is determined in principle solely by how it relates to "things", by whether it accurately describes those "things". An example of correspondence theory is the statement by the Thirteenth Century philosopher/theologian Thomas Aquinas: Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus ("Truth is the equation [or adequation] of things and intellect"), a statement which Aquinas attributed to the Ninth Century neoplatonist Isaac Israeli.^[11][12] Aquinas also restated the theory as: “A judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality” ^[13]

Correspondence theory practically operates on the assumption that truth is a matter of accurately copying what was much later called "objective reality" and then representing it in thoughts, words and other symbols.^[14] Many modern theorists have stated that this ideal cannot be achieved independently of some analysis of additional factors.^[5][15] For example, language plays a role in that all languages have words that are not easily translatable into another. The German word Zeitgeist is one such example: one who speaks or understands the language may "know" what it means, but any translation of the word fails to accurately capture its full meaning (this is a problem with many abstract words, especially those derived in agglutinative languages). Thus, some words add an additional parameter to the construction of an accurate truth predicate. Among the philosophers who grappled with this problem is Alfred Tarski, whose semantic theory is summarized further below in this article.^[16]

Proponents of several of the theories below have gone further to assert that there are yet other issues necessary to the analysis, such as interpersonal power struggles, community interactions, personal biases and other factors involved in deciding what is seen as truth.

Coherence theory

For coherence theories in general, truth requires a proper fit of elements within a whole system. Very often, though, coherence is taken to imply something more than simple logical consistency; often there is a demand that the propositions in a coherent system lend mutual inferential support to each other. So, for example, the completeness and comprehensiveness of the underlying set of concepts is a critical factor in judging the validity and usefulness of a coherent system.^[17] A pervasive tenet of coherence theories is the idea that truth is primarily a property of whole systems of propositions, and can be ascribed to individual propositions only according to their coherence with the whole. Among the assortment of perspectives commonly regarded as coherence theory, theorists differ on the question of whether coherence entails many possible true systems of thought or only a single absolute system.

Some variants of coherence theory are claimed to characterize the essential and intrinsic properties of formal systems in logic and mathematics.^[18] However, formal reasoners are content to contemplate axiomatically independent and sometimes mutually contradictory systems side by side, for example, the various alternative geometries. On the whole, coherence theories have been criticized as lacking justification in their application to other areas of truth, especially with respect to assertions about the natural world, empirical data in general, assertions about practical matters of psychology and society, especially when used without support from the other major theories of truth.^[19]

Coherence theories distinguish the thought of rationalist philosophers, particularly of Spinoza, Leibniz, and G.W.F. Hegel, along with the British philosopher F.H. Bradley.^[20] They have found a resurgence also among several proponents of logical positivism, notably Otto Neurath and Carl Hempel.

Constructivist theory

Social constructivism holds that truth is constructed by social processes, is historically and culturally specific, and that it is in part shaped through the power struggles within a community. Constructivism views all of our knowledge as "constructed," because it does not reflect any external "transcendent" realities (as a pure correspondence theory might hold). Rather, perceptions of truth are viewed as contingent on convention, human perception, and social experience. It is believed by constructivists that representations of physical and biological reality, including race, sexuality, and gender are socially constructed.

Giambattista Vico was among the first to claim that history and culture were man-made. Vico's epistemological orientation gathers the most diverse rays and unfolds in one axiom – verum ipsum factum – "truth itself is constructed". Hegel and Marx were among the other early proponents of the premise that truth is, or can be, socially constructed. Marx, like many critical theorists who followed, did not reject the existence of objective truth but rather distinguished between true knowledge and knowledge that has been distorted through power or ideology. For Marx scientific and true knowledge is 'in accordance with the dialectical understanding of history' and ideological knowledge 'an epiphenomenal expression of the relation of material forces in a given economic arrangement'.^[21]

Consensus theory

Consensus theory holds that truth is whatever is agreed upon, or in some versions, might come to be agreed upon, by some specified group. Such a group might include all human beings, or a subset thereof consisting of more than one person.

Among the current advocates of consensus theory as a useful accounting of the concept of "truth" is the philosopher Jürgen Habermas.^[22] Habermas maintains that truth is what would be agreed upon in an ideal speech situation.^[23] Among the current strong critics of consensus theory is the philosopher Nicholas Rescher.^[24]

Pragmatic theory

The three most influential forms of the pragmatic theory of truth were introduced around the turn of the 20th century by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Although there are wide differences in viewpoint among these and other proponents of pragmatic theory, they hold in common that truth is verified and confirmed by the results of putting one's concepts into practice.^[25]

Peirce defines truth as follows: "Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth."^[26] This statement emphasizes Peirce's view that ideas of approximation, incompleteness, and partiality, what he describes elsewhere as fallibilism and "reference to the future", are essential to a proper conception of truth. Although Peirce uses words like concordance and correspondence to describe one aspect of the pragmatic sign relation, he is also quite explicit in saying that definitions of truth based on mere correspondence are no more than nominal definitions, which he accords a lower status than real definitions.

William James's version of pragmatic theory, while complex, is often summarized by his statement that "the 'true' is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as the 'right' is only the expedient in our way of behaving."^[27] By this, James meant that truth is a quality the value of which is confirmed by its effectiveness when applying concepts to actual practice (thus, "pragmatic").

John Dewey, less broadly than James but more broadly than Peirce, held that inquiry, whether scientific, technical, sociological, philosophical or cultural, is self-corrective over time if openly submitted for testing by a community of inquirers in order to clarify, justify, refine and/or refute proposed truths.^[28]

Minimalist (deflationary) theories

A number of philosophers reject the thesis that the concept or term truth refers to a real property of sentences or propositions. These philosophers are responding, in part, to the common use of truth predicates (e.g., that some particular thing "...is true") which was particularly prevalent in philosophical discourse on truth in the first half of the 20th century. From this point of view, to assert the proposition “'2 + 2 = 4' is true” is logically equivalent to asserting the proposition “2 + 2 = 4”, and the phrase “is true” is completely dispensable in this and every other context. These positions are broadly described

• as deflationary theories of truth, since they attempt to deflate the presumed importance of the words "true" or truth,
• as disquotational theories, to draw attention to the disappearance of the quotation marks in cases like the above example, or
• as minimalist theories of truth.^[5][29]

Whichever term is used, deflationary theories can be said to hold in common that "[t]he predicate 'true' is an expressive convenience, not the name of a property requiring deep analysis."^[5] Once we have identified the truth predicate's formal features and utility, deflationists argue, we have said all there is to be said about truth. Among the theoretical concerns of these views is to explain away those special cases where it does appear that the concept of truth has peculiar and interesting properties. (See, e.g., Semantic paradoxes, and below.)

In addition to highlighting such formal aspects of the predicate "is true", some deflationists point out that the concept enables us to express things that might otherwise require infinitely long sentences. For example, one cannot express confidence in Michael's accuracy by asserting the endless sentence:

Michael says, 'snow is white' and snow is white, or he says 'roses are red' and roses are red or he says ... etc.

This assertion can also be succinctly expressed by saying: What Michael says is true.^[30]

Performative theory of truth

Attributed to P. F. Strawson is the performative theory of truth which holds that to say "'Snow is white' is true" is to perform the speech act of signaling one's agreement with the claim that snow is white (much like nodding one's head in agreement). The idea that some statements are more actions than communicative statements is not as odd as it may seem. Consider, for example, that when the bride says "I do" at the appropriate time in a wedding, she is performing the act of taking this man to be her lawful wedded husband. She is not describing herself as taking this man, but actually doing so (perhaps the most thorough analysis of such "perlocutionary" statements is J. L. Austin, "How to Do Things With Words"^[31]).

Strawson holds that a similar analysis is applicable to all speech acts, not only to special perlocutionary ones: "To say a statement is true is not to make a statement about a statement, but rather to perform the act of agreeing with, accepting, or endorsing a statement. When one says 'It's true that it's raining,' one asserts no more than 'It's raining.' The function of [the statement] 'It's true that...' is to agree with, accept, or endorse the statement that 'it's raining.'"^[32]

Redundancy and related theories

According to the redundancy theory of truth, asserting that a statement is true is completely equivalent to asserting the statement itself. For example, making the assertion that " 'Snow is white' is true" is equivalent to asserting "Snow is white". Redundancy theorists infer from this premise that truth is a redundant concept; that is, it is merely a word that is traditionally used in conversation or writing, generally for emphasis, but not a word that actually equates to anything in reality. This theory is commonly attributed to Frank P. Ramsey, who held that the use of words like fact and truth was nothing but a roundabout way of asserting a proposition, and that treating these words as separate problems in isolation from judgment was merely a "linguistic muddle".^[5][33][34]

A variant of redundancy theory is the disquotational theory which uses a modified form of Tarski's schema: To say that '"P" is true' is to say that P. Yet another version of deflationism is the prosentential theory of truth, first developed by Dorothy Grover, Joseph Camp, and Nuel Belnap as an elaboration of Ramsey's claims. They argue that sentences like "That's true", when said in response to "It's raining", are prosentences, expressions that merely repeat the content of other expressions. In the same way that it means the same as my dog in the sentence My dog was hungry, so I fed it, That's true is supposed to mean the same as It's raining — if you say the latter and I then say the former. These variations do not necessarily follow Ramsey in asserting that truth is not a property, but rather can be understood to say that, for instance, the assertion "P" may well involve a substantial truth, and the theorists in this case are minimalizing only the redundancy or prosentence involved in the statement such as "that's true."^[5]

Deflationary principles do not apply to representations that are not analogous to sentences, and also do not apply to many other things that are commonly judged to be true or otherwise. Consider the analogy between the sentence "Snow is white" and the character named Snow White, both of which can be true in some sense. To a minimalist, saying "Snow is white is true" is the same as saying "Snow is white," but to say "Snow White is true" is not the same as saying "Snow White."

Pluralist theories

Several of the major theories of truth hold that there is a particular property the having of which makes a belief or proposition true. Pluralist theories of truth assert that there may be more than one property that makes propositions true: ethical propositions might be true by virtue of coherence. Propositions about the physical world might be true by corresponding to the objects and properties they are about.

Some of the pragmatic theories, such as those by Charles Peirce and William James, included aspects of correspondence, coherence and constructivist theories.^[26][27] Crispin Wright argued in his 1992 book Truth and Objectivity that any predicate which satisfied certain platitudes about truth qualified as a truth predicate. In some discourses, Wright argued, the role of the truth predicate might be played by the notion of superassertibility.^[35] Michael Lynch, in a 2009 book Truth as One and Many, argued that we should see truth as a functional property capable of being multiply manifested in distinct properties like correspondence or coherence. ^[36]

Most believed theories

According to a survey of professional philosophers and others on their philosophical views which was carried out in November 2009 (taken by 3226 respondents, including 1803 philosophy faculty members and/or PhDs and 829 philosophy graduate students) 44.9% of respondents accept or lean towards correspondence theories, 20.7% accept or lean towards deflationary theories and 13.8% epistemic theories.^[37]

Formal theories

Truth in logic

Logic is concerned with the patterns in reason that can help tell us if a proposition is true or not. However, logic does not deal with truth in the absolute sense, as for instance a metaphysician does. Logicians use formal languages to express the truths which they are concerned with, and as such there is only truth under some interpretation or truth within some logical system.

A logical truth (also called an analytic truth or a necessary truth) is a statement which is true in all possible worlds^[38] or under all possible interpretations, as contrasted to a fact (also called a synthetic claim or a contingency) which is only true in this world as it has historically unfolded. A proposition such as “If p and q, then p.” is considered to be logical truth because it is true because of the meaning of the symbols and words in it and not because of any facts of any particular world. They are such that they could not be untrue.

Truth in mathematics

There are two main approaches to truth in mathematics. They are the model theory of truth and the proof theory of truth^{[citation needed]}.

Historically, with the nineteenth century development of Boolean algebra mathematical models of logic began to treat "truth", also represented as "T" or "1", as an arbitrary constant. "Falsity" is also an arbitrary constant, which can be represented as "F" or "0". In propositional logic, these symbols can be manipulated according to a set of axioms and rules of inference, often given in the form of truth tables.

In addition, from at least the time of Hilbert's program at the turn of the twentieth century to the proof of Gödel's theorem and the development of the Church-Turing thesis in the early part of that century, true statements in mathematics were generally assumed to be those statements which are provable in a formal axiomatic system.

The works of Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and others shook this assumption, with the development of statements that are true but cannot be proven within the system.^[39] Two examples of the latter can be found in Hilbert's problems. Work on Hilbert's 10th problem led in the late twentieth century to the construction of specific Diophantine equations for which it is undecidable whether they have a solution,^[40] or even if they do, whether they have a finite or infinite number of solutions. More fundamentally, Hilbert's first problem was on the continuum hypothesis.^[41] Gödel and Paul Cohen showed that this hypothesis cannot be proved or disproved using the standard axioms of set theory and a finite number of proof steps.^[42] In the view of some, then, it is equally reasonable to take either the continuum hypothesis or its negation as a new axiom.

Semantic theory of truth

The semantic theory of truth has as its general case for a given language:

'P' is true if and only if P

where 'P' is a reference to the sentence (the sentence's name), and P is just the sentence itself.

Logician and philosopher Alfred Tarski developed the theory for formal languages (such as formal logic). Here he restricted it in this way: no language could contain its own truth predicate, that is, the expression is true could only apply to sentences in some other language. The latter he called an object language, the language being talked about. (It may, in turn, have a truth predicate that can be applied to sentences in still another language.) The reason for his restriction was that languages that contain their own truth predicate will contain paradoxical sentences like the Liar: This sentence is not true. See The Liar paradox. As a result Tarski held that the semantic theory could not be applied to any natural language, such as English, because they contain their own truth predicates. Donald Davidson used it as the foundation of his truth-conditional semantics and linked it to radical interpretation in a form of coherentism.

Bertrand Russell is credited with noticing the existence of such paradoxes even in the best symbolic formalizations of mathematics in his day, in particular the paradox that came to be named after him, Russell's paradox. Russell and Whitehead attempted to solve these problems in Principia Mathematica by putting statements into a hierarchy of types, wherein a statement cannot refer to itself, but only to statements lower in the hierarchy. This in turn led to new orders of difficulty regarding the precise natures of types and the structures of conceptually possible type systems that have yet to be resolved to this day.

Kripke's theory of truth

Saul Kripke contends that a natural language can in fact contain its own truth predicate without giving rise to contradiction. He showed how to construct one as follows:

• Begin with a subset of sentences of a natural language that contains no occurrences of the expression "is true" (or "is false"). So The barn is big is included in the subset, but not " The barn is big is true", nor problematic sentences such as "This sentence is false".
• Define truth just for the sentences in that subset.
• Then extend the definition of truth to include sentences that predicate truth or falsity of one of the original subset of sentences. So "The barn is big is true" is now included, but not either "This sentence is false" nor "'The barn is big is true' is true".
• Next, define truth for all sentences that predicate truth or falsity of a member of the second set. Imagine this process repeated infinitely, so that truth is defined for The barn is big; then for "The barn is big is true"; then for "'The barn is big is true' is true", and so on.

Notice that truth never gets defined for sentences like This sentence is false, since it was not in the original subset and does not predicate truth of any sentence in the original or any subsequent set. In Kripke's terms, these are "ungrounded." Since these sentences are never assigned either truth or falsehood even if the process is carried out infinitely, Kripke's theory implies that some sentences are neither true nor false. This contradicts the Principle of bivalence: every sentence must be either true or false. Since this principle is a key premise in deriving the Liar paradox, the paradox is dissolved.^[43]

View of truth as somebody

Expressing the serious view of Christians, especially the Catholic Church, not limited to truth in matters of religion, Father John Corapi repeatedly states and is frequently quoted as stating (with minor variations in wording) that "The Truth is not a something. It is a Somebody. And His Name is Jesus Christ.”^[44] Christians cite the Gospel of John, in which Jesus Christ is quoted as telling Thomas the Apostle that "I am the way, the truth, and the life."^[45] The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that "God ... is the truth"^[46] and that "the whole of God's truth" is manifest in His son, Jesus Christ.^[47] "He is the Truth." [emphasis in original]^[48] Ancient Egyptians held "In a hymn to Amon-Re, the creator and sustainer of the world, Ma’at equates with truth: Thy Mother is Truth, O Amon!" In Zoroastrian theology, the angel Rashnu, who presides at the "ordeal court", is truth personified. ^[49] Islamic prophecy projects: "All glory will come after his advent. He will be the personification of Truth and Uprightness, as if Allah had descended from the Heaven." (Tazkira, Page 691)

Notable views

Ancient history

The ancient Greek origins of the words "true" and "truth" have some consistent definitions throughout great spans of history that were often associated with topics of logic, geometry, mathematics, deduction, induction, and natural philosophy.

Socrates', Plato's and Aristotle's ideas about truth are commonly seen as consistent with correspondence theory. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle stated: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true”.^[50] The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy proceeds to say of Aristotle:

Aristotle sounds much more like a genuine correspondence theorist in the Categories (12b11, 14b14), where he talks of “underlying things” that make statements true and implies that these “things” (pragmata) are logically structured situations or facts (viz., his sitting, his not sitting). Most influential is his claim in De Interpretatione (16a3) that thoughts are “likenessess” (homoiosis) of things. Although he nowhere defines truth in terms of a thought's likeness to a thing or fact, it is clear that such a definition would fit well into his overall philosophy of mind.^[50]

Very similar statements can also be found in Plato (Cratylus 385b2, Sophist 263b).^[50]

Medieval age

Avicenna

In early Islamic philosophy, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) defined truth in his Metaphysics of Healing, Book I, Chapter 8, as:

What corresponds in the mind to what is outside it.^[51]

Avicenna elaborated on his definition of truth in his Metaphysics Book Eight, Chapter 6:

The truth of a thing is the property of the being of each thing which has been established in it.^[52]

However, this definition is merely a translation of the Latin translation from the Middle Ages.^[53] A modern translation of the original Arabic text states:

Truth is also said of the veridical belief in the existence [of something].^[54]

Aquinas

Following Avicenna, and also Augustine and Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas stated in his Disputed Questions on Truth:

A natural thing, being placed between two intellects, is called true insofar as it conforms to either. It is said to be true with respect to its conformity with the divine intellect insofar as it fulfills the end to which it was ordained by the divine intellect... With respect to its conformity with a human intellect, a thing is said to be true insofar as it is such as to cause a true estimate about itself.^[55]

Thus, for Aquinas, the truth of the human intellect (logical truth) is based on the truth in things (ontological truth).^[56] Following this, he wrote an elegant re-statement of Aristotle's view in his Summa I.16.1:

Veritas est adæquatio intellectus et rei.
(Truth is the conformity of the intellect to the things.)

Aquinas also said that real things participate in the act of being of the Creator God who is Subsistent Being, Intelligence, and Truth. Thus, these beings possess the light of intelligibility and are knowable. These things (beings; reality) are the foundation of the truth that is found in the human mind, when it acquires knowledge of things, first through the senses, then through the understanding and the judgement done by reason. For Aquinas, human intelligence ("intus", within and "legere", to read) has the capability to reach the essence and existence of things because it has a non-material, spiritual element, although some moral, educational, and other elements might interfere with its capability.

Modern age

Kant

Immanuel Kant discussed the correspondence theory of truth^[50] in the following manner, criticizing correspondence theory as circular reasoning.

Truth is said to consist in the agreement of knowledge with the object. According to this mere verbal definition, then, my knowledge, in order to be true, must agree with the object. Now, I can only compare the object with my knowledge by this means, namely, by taking knowledge of it. My knowledge, then, is to be verified by itself, which is far from being sufficient for truth. For as the object is external to me, and the knowledge is in me, I can only judge whether my knowledge of the object agrees with my knowledge of the object. Such a circle in explanation was called by the ancients Diallelos. And the logicians were accused of this fallacy by the sceptics, who remarked that this account of truth was as if a man before a judicial tribunal should make a statement, and appeal in support of it to a witness whom no one knows, but who defends his own credibility by saying that the man who had called him as a witness is an honourable man.^[57]

According to Kant, the definition of truth as correspondence is a "mere verbal definition", here making use of Aristotle's distinction between a nominal definition: a definition in name only, and a real definition: a definition that shows the true cause or essence of the term that is being defined. From Kant's account of the history, the definition of truth as correspondence was already in dispute from classical times, the "skeptics" criticizing the "logicians" for a form of circular reasoning, though the extent to which the "logicians" actually held such a theory is not evaluated.^[57]

Hegel

Hegel tried to distance his philosophy from psychology by presenting truth as being an external self–moving object instead of being related to inner, subjective thoughts. Hegel's truth is analogous to the mechanics of a material body in motion under the influence of its own inner force. "Truth is its own self–movement within itself."^[58] Teleological truth moves itself in the three–step form of dialectical triplicity toward the final goal of perfect, final, absolute truth. For Hegel, the progression of philosophical truth is a resolution of past oppositions into increasingly more accurate approximations to absolute truth. Chalybäus used the terms "thesis," "antithesis," and "synthesis" to describe Hegel's dialectical triplicity. The "thesis" consists of an incomplete historical movement. To resolve the incompletion, an "antithesis" occurs which opposes the "thesis." In turn, the "synthesis" appears when the "thesis" and "antithesis" become reconciled and a higher level of truth is obtained. This "synthesis" thereby becomes a "thesis," which will again necessitate an "antithesis," requiring a new "synthesis" until a final state is reached as the result of reason's historical movement. History is the Absolute Spirit moving toward a goal. This historical progression will finally conclude itself when the Absolute Spirit understands its own infinite self at the very end of history. Absolute Spirit will then be the complete expression of an infinite God.

Schopenhauer

For Schopenhauer,^[59] a judgment is a combination or separation of two or more concepts. If a judgment is to be an expression of knowledge, it must have a sufficient reason or ground by which the judgment could be called true. Truth is the reference of a judgment to something different from itself which is its sufficient reason (ground). Judgments can have material, formal, transcendental, or metalogical truth. A judgment has material truth if its concepts are based on intuitive perceptions that are generated from sensations. If a judgment has its reason (ground) in another judgment, its truth is called logical or formal. If a judgment, of, for example, pure mathematics or pure science, is based on the forms (space, time, causality) of intuitive, empirical knowledge, then the judgment has transcendental truth.

Kierkegaard

When Søren Kierkegaard, as his character Johannes Climacus, wrote that "Truth is Subjectivity", he does not advocate for subjectivism in its extreme form (the theory that something is true simply because one believes it to be so), but rather that the objective approach to matters of personal truth cannot shed any light upon that which is most essential to a person's life. Objective truths are concerned with the facts of a person's being, while subjective truths are concerned with a person's way of being. Kierkegaard agrees that objective truths for the study of subjects like mathematics, science, and history are relevant and necessary, but argues that objective truths do not shed any light on a person's inner relationship to existence. At best, these truths can only provide a severely narrowed perspective that has little to do with one's actual experience of life.^[60]

While objective truths are final and static, subjective truths are continuing and dynamic. The truth of one's existence is a living, inward, and subjective experience that is always in the process of becoming. The values, morals, and spiritual approaches a person adopts, while not denying the existence of objective truths of those beliefs, can only become truly known when they have been inwardly appropriated through subjective experience. Thus, Kierkegaard criticizes all systematic philosophies which attempt to know life or the truth of existence via theories and objective knowledge about reality. As Kierkegaard claims, human truth is something that is continually occurring, and a human being cannot find truth separate from the subjective experience of one's own existing, defined by the values and fundamental essence that consist of one's way of life.^[61]

Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche believed the search for truth or 'the will to truth' was a consequence of the will to power of philosophers. He thought that truth should be used as long as it promoted life and the will to power, and he thought untruth was better than truth if it had this life enhancement as a consequence. As he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, "The falseness of a judgment is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgment... The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding..." (aphorism 4). He proposed the will to power as a truth only because according to him it was the most life affirming and sincere perspective one could have.

Robert Wicks discusses Nietzsche's basic view of truth as follows:

Some scholars regard Nietzsche's 1873 unpublished essay, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" ("Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn") as a keystone in his thought. In this essay, Nietzsche rejects the idea of universal constants, and claims that what we call "truth" is only "a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms." His view at this time is that arbitrariness completely prevails within human experience: concepts originate via the very artistic transference of nerve stimuli into images; "truth" is nothing more than the invention of fixed conventions for merely practical purposes, especially those of repose, security and consistence.^[62]

Whitehead

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead a British mathematician who became an American philosopher, said: "There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that play the devil".

The logical progression or connection of this line of thought is to conclude that truth can lie, since half-truths are deceptive and may lead to a false conclusion.

Nishida

According to Kitaro Nishida, "knowledge of things in the world begins with the differentiation of unitary consciousness into knower and known and ends with self and things becoming one again. Such unification takes form not only in knowing but in the valuing (of truth) that directs knowing, the willing that directs action, and the feeling or emotive reach that directs sensing."^[63]

Fromm

Erich Fromm finds that trying to discuss truth as "absolute truth" is sterile and that emphasis ought to be placed on "optimal truth". He considers truth as stemming from the survival imperative of grasping one's environment physically and intellectually, whereby young children instinctively seek truth so as to orient themselves in "a strange and powerful world". The accuracy of their perceived approximation of the truth will therefore have direct consequences on their ability to deal with their environment. Fromm can be understood to define truth as a functional approximation of reality. His vision of optimal truth is described partly in "Man from Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics" (1947), from which excerpts are included below.

the dichotomy between 'absolute = perfect' and 'relative = imperfect' has been superseded in all fields of scientific thought, where "it is generally recognized that there is no absolute truth but nevertheless that there are objectively valid laws and principles".

In that respect, "a scientifically or rationally valid statement means that the power of reason is applied to all the available data of observation without any of them being suppressed or falsified for the sake of a desired result". The history of science is "a history of inadequate and incomplete statements, and every new insight makes possible the recognition of the inadequacies of previous propositions and offers a springboard for creating a more adequate formulation."

As a result "the history of thought is the history of an ever-increasing approximation to the truth. Scientific knowledge is not absolute but optimal; it contains the optimum of truth attainable in a given historical period." Fromm furthermore notes that "different cultures have emphasized various aspects of the truth" and that increasing interaction between cultures allows for these aspects to reconcile and integrate, increasing further the approximation to the truth.

Foucault

Truth, for Michel Foucault, is problematic when any attempt is made to see truth as an "objective" quality. He prefers not to use the term truth itself but "Regimes of Truth". In his historical investigations he found truth to be something that was itself a part of, or embedded within, a given power structure. Thus Foucault's view shares much in common with the concepts of Nietzsche. Truth for Foucault is also something that shifts through various episteme throughout history.^[64]

Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard considered truth to be largely simulated, that is pretending to have something, as opposed to dissimulation, pretending to not have something. He took his cue from iconoclasts who he claims knew that images of God demonstrated the fact that God did not exist.^[65] Baudrillard wrote in "Precession of the Simulacra":

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

—Ecclesiastes^[66][67]

Some examples of simulacra that Baudrillard cited were: that prisons simulate the "truth" that society is free; scandals (eg, Watergate) simulate that corruption is corrected; Disney simulates that the U.S. itself is an adult place. One must remember that though such examples seem extreme, such extremity is an important part of Baudrillard's theory. For a less extreme example, consider how movies usually end with the bad being punished, humiliated, or otherwise failing, thus affirming for viewers the concept that the good end happily and the bad unhappily, a narrative which implies that the status quo and institutionalised power structures are largely legitimate.^[65]

Ratzinger

Philosopher and theologian Joseph Ratzinger, before his election as Benedict XVI, commented upon the relationship of truth with tolerance,^[68] conscience,^[69] freedom,^[70] and religion.^[68] For him, "beyond all particular questions, the real problem lies in the question of truth."^[68]

Ratzinger refers to achievements of the natural sciences as evidence that human reason has the power to know reality and arrive at truth. He also argues that "the modern self-limitation of reason" rooted in Immanuel Kant's philosophy, which views itself incapable of knowing religion and the human sciences such as ethics, leads to dangerous pathologies of religion and pathologies of science.^[68][71] He thinks that this self-limitation, which "amputates" the mind's capacity to answer fundamental questions such as man's origin and purpose, dishonors reason and is contradictory to the modern acclamation of science, whose basis is the power of reason.^[68][71]

In his book Truth and Tolerance, Ratzinger argued that truth and love are identical. And if well understood, according to him, this is "the surest guarantee of tolerance."^[68]

See also

	Book:Epistemology
Books are collections of articles which can be downloaded or ordered in print.

Aletheia Asha Belief Confirmation holism            contextualism Degrees of truth Disposition Eclecticism Imagination Independence Inquiry Interpretation Invariance

Knowledge Lie Lie-to-children List of fallacies Normative science Objectivity Paradox Perspectivism Philalethia Physical symbol system            Public opinion Reality Relativism

Religion Religious truth Slingshot argument Statistical independence Tautology (logic) Tautology (rhetoric) Truthiness Truthlikeness Two truths doctrine Unity of the proposition Verisimilitude Veritas

Truth in logic

Fuzzy logic Logic Logical value

Modal logic Multi-valued logic Principle of bivalence

Truth conditions Truth function Truth table

Criteria of truth

Theories of truth

Anekantavada Coherence theory of truth Coherentism Consensus theory of truth Correspondence theory of truth            Deflationary theory of truth

Epistemic theories of truth Indefinability theory of truth Pragmatic theory of truth Redundancy theory of truth Semantic theory of truth

Major theorists

Thomas Aquinas Aristotle J.L. Austin Brand Blanshard John Dewey Hartry Field Gottlob Frege Jürgen Habermas            G. W. F. Hegel

Martin Heidegger Augustine of Hippo Paul Horwich William James Harold Joachim Saul Kripke Friedrich Nietzsche Charles Sanders Peirce            Plato

Karl Popper W.V. Quine Frank P. Ramsey Bertrand Russell Arthur Schopenhauer Socrates P.F. Strawson Alfred Tarski Ludwig Wittgenstein

Notes

References

• Aristotle, "The Categories", Harold P. Cooke (trans.), pp. 1–109 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.
• Aristotle, "On Interpretation", Harold P. Cooke (trans.), pp. 111–179 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.
• Aristotle, "Prior Analytics", Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.
• Aristotle, "On the Soul" (De Anima), W. S. Hett (trans.), pp. 1–203 in Aristotle, Volume 8, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1936.
• Audi, Robert (ed., 1999), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1995. 2nd edition, 1999. Cited as CDP.
• Baldwin, James Mark (ed., 1901–1905), Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, 3 volumes in 4, Macmillan, New York, NY.
• Baylis, Charles A. (1962), "Truth", pp. 321–322 in Dagobert D. Runes (ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy, Littlefield, Adams, and Company, Totowa, NJ.
• Benjamin, A. Cornelius (1962), "Coherence Theory of Truth", p. 58 in Dagobert D. Runes (ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy, Littlefield, Adams, and Company, Totowa, NJ.
• Blackburn, Simon, and Simmons, Keith (eds., 1999), Truth, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. Includes papers by James, Ramsey, Russell, Tarski, and more recent work.
• Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan (1987), Truth and Beauty. Aesthetics and Motivations in Science, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
• Chang, C.C., and Keisler, H.J., Model Theory, North-Holland, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1973.
• Chomsky, Noam (1995), The Minimalist Program, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
• Church, Alonzo (1962a), "Name Relation, or Meaning Relation", p. 204 in Dagobert D. Runes (ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy, Littlefield, Adams, and Company, Totowa, NJ.
• Church, Alonzo (1962b), "Truth, Semantical", p. 322 in Dagobert D. Runes (ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy, Littlefield, Adams, and Company, Totowa, NJ.
• Clifford, W.K. (1877), "The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays". (Prometheus Books, 1999) [2]
• Dewey, John (1900–1901), Lectures on Ethics 1900–1901, Donald F. Koch (ed.), Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL.
• Dewey, John (1932), Theory of the Moral Life, Part 2 of John Dewey and James H. Tufts, Ethics, Henry Holt and Company, New York, NY, 1908. 2nd edition, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1932. Reprinted, Arnold Isenberg (ed.), Victor Kestenbaum (pref.), Irvingtion Publishers, New York, NY, 1980.
• Dewey, John (1938), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938),Holt and Company, New York, NY. Reprinted, John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–1953, Volume 12: 1938, Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL, 1986.
• Field, Hartry (2001), Truth and the Absence of Fact, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
• Foucault, Michel (1997), Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Paul Rabinow (ed.), Robert Hurley et al. (trans.), The New Press, New York, NY.
• Garfield, Jay L., and Kiteley, Murray (1991), Meaning and Truth: The Essential Readings in Modern Semantics, Paragon House, New York, NY.
• Gupta, Anil (2001), "Truth", in Lou Goble (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Philosophical Logic, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK.
• Haack, Susan (1993), Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK.
• Habermas, Jürgen (1976), "What Is Universal Pragmatics?", 1st published, "Was heißt Universalpragmatik?", Sprachpragmatik und Philosophie, Karl-Otto Apel (ed.), Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. Reprinted, pp. 1–68 in Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, Thomas McCarthy (trans.), Beacon Press, Boston, MA, 1979.
• Habermas, Jürgen (1990), Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (trans.), Thomas McCarthy (intro.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
• Habermas, Jürgen (2003), Truth and Justification, Barbara Fultner (trans.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
• Hegel, Georg, (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, ISBN 0-19-824597-1.
• Horwich, Paul, (1988), Truth, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
• James, William (1904), A World of Pure Experience.
• James, William (1907), Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Popular Lectures on Philosophy, Longmans, Green, and Company, New York, NY.
• James, William (1909), The Meaning of Truth, A Sequel to 'Pragmatism', Longmans, Green, and Company, New York, NY.
• James, William (1912), Essays in Radical Empiricism. Cf. Chapt. 3, "The Thing and its Relations", pp. 92–122.
• Kant, Immanuel (1800), Introduction to Logic. Reprinted, Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (trans.), Dennis Sweet (intro.), Barnes and Noble, New York, NY, 2005.
• Kirkham, Richard L. (1992), Theories of Truth, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
• Kneale, W., and Kneale, M. (1962), The Development of Logic, Oxford University Press, London, UK, 1962. Reprinted with corrections, 1975.
• Kreitler, Hans, and Kreitler, Shulamith (1972), Psychology of the Arts, Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
• Le Morvan, Pierre (2004), "Ramsey on Truth and Truth on Ramsey", British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 12 (4) 2004, 705–718, PDF.
• Peirce, C.S., Bibliography.
• Peirce, C.S., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 1–6, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (eds.), vols. 7–8, Arthur W. Burks (ed.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1931–1935, 1958. Cited as CP vol.para.
• Peirce, C.S. (1877), "The Fixation of Belief", Popular Science Monthly 12 (1877), 1–15. Reprinted (CP 5.358–387), (CE 3, 242–257), (EP 1, 109–123). Eprint.
• Peirce, C.S. (1901), "Truth and Falsity and Error" (in part), pp. 718–720 in J.M. Baldwin (ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, vol. 2. Reprinted, CP 5.565–573.
• Polanyi, Michael (1966), The Tacit Dimension, Doubleday and Company, Garden City, NY.
• Quine, W.V. (1956), "Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes", Journal of Philosophy 53 (1956). Reprinted, pp. 185–196 in Quine (1976), Ways of Paradox.
• Quine, W.V. (1976), The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays, 1st edition, 1966. Revised and enlarged edition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1976.
• Quine, W.V. (1980 a), From a Logical Point of View, Logico-Philosophical Essays, 2nd edition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
• Quine, W.V. (1980 b), "Reference and Modality", pp. 139–159 in Quine (1980 a), From a Logical Point of View.
• Rajchman, John, and West, Cornel (ed., 1985), Post-Analytic Philosophy, Columbia University Press, New York, NY.
• Ramsey, F.P. (1927), "Facts and Propositions", Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 7, 153–170. Reprinted, pp. 34–51 in F.P. Ramsey, Philosophical Papers, David Hugh Mellor (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1990.
• Ramsey, F.P. (1990), Philosophical Papers, David Hugh Mellor (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
• Rawls, John (2000), Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, Barbara Herman (ed.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
• Rorty, R. (1979), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
• Russell, Bertrand (1912), The Problems of Philosophy, 1st published 1912. Reprinted, Galaxy Book, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 1959. Reprinted, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY, 1988.
• Russell, Bertrand (1918), "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism", The Monist, 1918. Reprinted, pp. 177–281 in Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950, Robert Charles Marsh (ed.), Unwin Hyman, London, UK, 1956. Reprinted, pp. 35–155 in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, David Pears (ed.), Open Court, La Salle, IL, 1985.
• Russell, Bertrand (1956), Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950, Robert Charles Marsh (ed.), Unwin Hyman, London, UK, 1956. Reprinted, Routledge, London, UK, 1992.
• Russell, Bertrand (1985), The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, David Pears (ed.), Open Court, La Salle, IL.
• Schopenhauer, Arthur, (1974), On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Open Court, La Salle, IL, ISBN 0-87548-187-6.
• Smart, Ninian (1969), The Religious Experience of Mankind, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, NY.
• Tarski, A., Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers from 1923 to 1938, J.H. Woodger (trans.), Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1956. 2nd edition, John Corcoran (ed.), Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis, IN, 1983.
• Wallace, Anthony F.C. (1966), Religion: An Anthropological View, Random House, New York, NY.

Reference works

• Audi, Robert (ed., 1999), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1995. 2nd edition, 1999. Cited as CDP.
• Blackburn, Simon (1996), The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1994. Paperback edition with new Chronology, 1996. Cited as ODP.
• Runes, Dagobert D. (ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy, Littlefield, Adams, and Company, Totowa, NJ, 1962.
• Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, Unabridged (1950), W.A. Neilson, T.A. Knott, P.W. Carhart (eds.), G. & C. Merriam Company, Springfield, MA. Cited as MWU.
• Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1983), Frederick C. Mish (ed.), Merriam–Webster Inc., Springfield, MA. Cited as MWC.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Truth

Look up truth in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• An Introduction to Truth by Paul Newall, aimed at beginners.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
  • Truth
  • Coherence theory of truth
  • Correspondence theory of truth
  • Deflationary theory of truth
  • Identity theory of truth
  • Revision theory of truth
  • Tarski's definition of truth
  • Axiomatic theories of truth
• Heidegger on Truth (Aletheia) as Unconcealment
• History of Truth: The Greek "Aletheia"
• History of Truth: The Latin "Veritas"

Social theory

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Social theories are theoretical frameworks which are used to study and interpret social phenomena within a particular school of thought. An essential tool used by social scientists, theories relate to historical debates over the most valid and reliable methodologies (e.g. positivism and antipositivism), as well as the primacy of either structure or agency. Certain social theories attempt to remain strictly scientific, descriptive, and objective. Conflict theories, by contrast, present ostensibly normative positions, and often critique the ideological aspects inherent in conventional, traditional thought.

Тhe origins of social theory are difficult to pinpoint, but debates frequently return to Ancient Greece (Berberoglu 2005, p. xi). From these foundations in Western philosophy arose Enlightenment social contract theory, sociological positivism, and modern social science. Today, 'social science' is used as an umbrella term to refer, not just to sociology, but also to economics, political science, jurisprudence, and other disciplines. Social theory is accordingly interdisciplinary; drawing upon ideas from fields as diverse as anthropology and media studies. Social theory of an informal nature, or authorship based outside of academic social and political science, may be referred to instead as "social criticism" or "social commentary". Similarly, "cultural criticism" may be associated both with formal cultural and literary scholarship, as well as other non-academic or journalistic forms of writing.

Contents [hide] 1 Social theory as a discipline 1.1 Social theory in relation to the natural sciences 2 History 2.1 Pre-enlightenment social theory 2.2 Sociology in medieval Islam 2.3 Political philosophy and social contract theory 2.4 Classical social theory 2.5 Modern social theory 2.6 Post-modern social theory 3 Theory construction 4 See also 5 External links 6 References

Social theory as a discipline

Harrington discusses the etymology of social theory, stating that while the term did not exist in any language before the twentieth century, its origins are ancient and lie in two words; ‘social’ from the Latin socius and ‘theory’ from the Greek theoria (Harrington 2005). Social theorising aided the Greeks in making sense of their lives, and in questioning the value and meaning of things around them.

Social theory as a distinct discipline emerged in the 20th century and was largely equated with an attitude of critical thinking, based on rationality, logic and objectivity, and the desire for knowledge through aposteriori methods of discovery, rather than apriori methods of tradition. With this in mind it is easy to link social theory to deeper seated philosophical discussions.

Social theory in relation to the natural sciences

Compared to disciplines within the objective natural sciences -- such as physics or chemistry -- social theorists may make less use of the scientific method, and their conclusions and data can be interpreted more subjectively. While standards of rigor do exist within quantitative social science methodologies, their precision is bounded by a degree of uncertainty inherent in human behavior. However, because experiments in the natural sciences are necessarily social artifacts, and social theory treats social artifacts as being constructed, social theorists posit that even experiments in the natural sciences and their concomitant results are social constructions. Social theories can complement research in the natural sciences and vice-versa.

The concept that social theory may supersede certain aspects of the natural sciences is called the social construction of reality. Social theory takes knowledge, the manner in which we acquire knowledge, and the institutions by which knowledge is reified and disseminated among a human collectivity to be socially constructed. In effect, the laws of nature can only be derived using social tools within a social context. According to social theory, the understanding of natural phenomena is predicated on the understanding of social phenomena, as the interpretation of natural phenomena is a social activity.

This interpretation of the natural sciences leads to some deeper epistemological questions. By questioning the methods by which we deem knowledge to be "objective," we necessarily put into question any scientific knowledge whatsoever. Social theory does not exist in mutual exclusion to the natural sciences; one is often complementary to the other. Rather, social theory calls for natural scientists to examine their methodologies with a critical eye by situating said methodologies within a social context.

History

Pre-enlightenment social theory

The earliest proto-social scientific observations are to be found in the founding texts of Western philosophy (Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Polybius and so on), as well as in the non-European thought of figures such as Confucius.^[1] Prior to the enlightenment, social theory took largely narrative and normative form. Expressed as stories and fables, it may be assumed the pre-socratic philosophers and religious teachers were the precursors to social theory proper.

Saint Augustine (354 - 430) and St. Thomas Aquinas (circa 1225 - 1274) concerned themselves exclusively with the idea of the just society. St. Augustine describes late Ancient Roman society but through a lens of hatred and contempt for what he saw as false Gods, and in reaction theorized The City of God. Similarly, in China, Master Kong (otherwise known as Confucius) (551 - 479 BCE) envisaged a just society that went beyond his contemporary society of the Warring States. Later on, also in China, Mozi (circa 470 - circa 390 BCE) recommended a more pragmatic sociology, but ethical at base.

Sociology in medieval Islam

There is evidence of early Muslim sociology from the 14th century: Ibn Khaldun, in his Muqaddimah (later translated as Prolegomena in Latin), the introduction to a seven volume analysis of universal history, was the first to advance social philosophy and social science in formulating theories of social cohesion and social conflict. He is thus considered by many to be the forerunner of sociology.^[2][3]

Political philosophy and social contract theory

During the Age of Enlightenment, political entities expanded from basic systems of self-governance and monarchy to the complex democratic and communist systems that exist in the Industrialized and the Modern Eras. In the 18th century, after Montesquieu's The Spirit of Law established that social elements influence human nature, the pre-classical period of social theories developed a new form that provides the basic ideas for social theory, such as: evolution, philosophy of history, social life and social contract, public and general will, competition in social space, organistic pattern for social description and so forth. Jean-Jacques Rousseau in this time played a significant role in social theory. He revealed the origin of inequality, analyzed the social contract(and social compact) that forms social integration and defined the social sphere or civil society. He also emphasized that man has the liberty to change his world, a revolutionary assertion that made it possible to program and change society.

Classical social theory

The first “modern” social theories (known as classical theories) that begin to resemble the analytic social theory of today developed almost simultaneously with the birth of the science of sociology. Auguste Comte (1798 - 1857), known as the "father of sociology" and regarded by some as the first philosopher of science,^[4] laid the groundwork for positivism - as well as structural functionalism and social evolutionism. In the 19th century three great classical theories of social and historical change emerged: the social evolutionism theory (of which Social Darwinism forms a part), the social cycle theory and the Marxist historical materialism theory.

Another early modern theorist, Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903), coined the term "survival of the fittest". Some Post-Modern social theorists like Shepard Humphries, draw heavily upon Spencer's work and argue that many of his observations are timeless (just as relevant in 2008 as 1898). Vilfredo Pareto (1848 - 1923) and Pitirim A. Sorokin argued that 'history goes in cycles', and presented the social cycle theory to illustrate their point. Ferdinand Tönnies (1855 - 1936) made community and society (Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, 1887) the special topics of the new science of "sociology", both of them based on different modes of will of social actors.

Most of the 19th century pioneers of social theory and sociology, like Saint-Simon, Comte, Marx, John Stuart Mill or Spencer, never held university posts. In this sense they were broadly regarded as philosophers. Emile Durkheim, however, endeavoured to formally established academic sociology, and did so at the University of Bordeaux in 1895, publishing his Rules of the Sociological Method. In 1896, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a case study of suicide rates amongst Catholic and Protestant populations, distinguished sociological analysis from psychology or philosophy.

Many of the classical theories had one common factor: they all agreed that the history of humanity is pursuing a certain fixed path. They differed on where that path would lead: social progress, technological progress, decline or even fall, etc. Social cycle theorists were much more skeptical of the Western achievements and technological progress, however, arguing that progress is but an illusion of the ups and downs of the historical cycles. The classical approach has been criticized by many modern sociologists and theorists, among them Karl Popper, Robert Nisbet, Charles Tilly and Immanuel Wallerstein.

Karl Marx rejected Comtean positivism but nevertheless aimed to establish a science of society based on historical materialism, becoming recognised as a founding figure of sociology posthumously. At the turn of the 20th century, the first wave of German sociologists, including Max Weber and Georg Simmel, developed sociological antipositivism. The field may be broadly recognised as an amalgam of three modes of social scientific thought in particular; Durkheimian sociological positivism and structural functionalism, Marxist historical materialism and conflict theory, and Weberian antipositivism and verstehen critique.

Modern social theory

Much of 19th-century classical social theory has been expanded upon to create newer, more contemporary social theories such as Multilineal theories of evolution (neoevolutionism, sociobiology, theory of modernization, theory of post-industrial society) and various strains of Neo-Marxism.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, social theory became most closely related to academic sociology while other related studies such as anthropology, philosophy, and social work branched out into their own disciplines. Such subjects as "philosophy of history" and other such multi-disciplinary subject matter became part of social theory as taught under sociology.

Attempts to recapture a space for discussion free of disciplines began in earnest in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research provides the most successful historical example. The Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago followed in the 1940s. In the 1970s, programs in Social and Political Thought were established at Sussex and York. Others followed, with various different emphases and structures, such as Social Theory and History (University of California, Davis). Cultural Studies programs, notably that of Birmingham University, extended the concerns of social theory into the domain of culture and thus anthropology. A chair and undergraduate program in social theory was established at the University of Melbourne and a number of universities now specialize in social theory (UC-Santa Cruz is one example). Social theory at present seems to be gaining more acceptance as a classical academic discipline.

In modern times, generally speaking, social theory began to stress free will, individual choice, subjective reasoning, and the importance of unpredictable events in place of the classic determinism – thus social theory become much more complex. Rational Choice Theory and Symbolic Interactionism furnish two examples. Most modern sociologists deem there are no great unifying 'laws of history', but rather smaller, more specific, and more complex laws that govern society.

Post-modern social theory

Scholars and historians most commonly hold postmodernism to be a movement of ideas arising from, but also critical of elements of modernism^{[citation needed]}. Because of the wide range of uses of the term, different elements of modernity are chosen as being continuous, and different elements of modernity are held to be critiqued. Each of the different uses also is rooted in some argument about the nature of knowledge, known in philosophy as epistemology. Individuals who use the term are arguing that either there is something fundamentally different about the transmission of meaning, or that modernism has fundamental flaws in its system of knowledge^{[citation needed]}.

The argument for the necessity of the term states that economic and technological conditions of our age have given rise to a decentralized, media-dominated society in which ideas are simulacra and only inter-referential representations and copies of each other, with no real original, stable or objective source for communication and meaning. Globalization, brought on by innovations in communication, manufacturing and transportation, is often^{[citation needed]} cited as one force which has driven the decentralized modern life, creating a culturally pluralistic and interconnected global society lacking any single dominant center of political power, communication, or intellectual production. The postmodern view is that inter-subjective knowledge, and not objective knowledge is the dominant form of discourse under such conditions, and the ubiquity of copies and dissemination fundamentally alters the relationship between reader and what is read, between observer and the observed, between those who consume and those who produce. Not all people who use the term postmodern or postmodernism see these developments as positive.^{[citation needed]} Users of the term often argue^{[citation needed]} that their ideals have arisen as the result of particular economic and social conditions, including what is described as "late capitalism" and the growth of broadcast media, and that such conditions have pushed society into a new historical period.

The term "postmodernism" was brought into social theory in 1971 by the Arab American Theorist Ihab Hassan in his book: The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature. In 1979 Jean-François Lyotard wrote a short but influential work The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge. Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes were influential in 1970s in developing postmodern theory.

See post-modern feminism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism.

Theory construction

Almost all good research is guided by theory. Selecting or creating appropriate theory for use in examining an issue is thus an important skill for any researcher. Important distinctions: a theoretical orientation (or paradigm) is a worldview, the lens through which one organizes experience (i.e. thinking of human interaction in terms of power or exchange); a theory is an attempt to explain and predict behavior in particular contexts. A theoretical orientation cannot be proven or disproven; a theory can. Having a theoretical orientation that sees the world in terms of power and control, I could create a theory about violent human behavior which includes specific causal statements (e.g. being the victim of physical abuse leads to psychological problems). This could lead to an hypothesis (prediction) about what I expect to see in a particular sample, e.g. “a battered child will grow up to be shy or violent.” I can then test my hypothesis by looking to see if it is consistent with data in the real world. I might, for instance, review hospital records to find children who were abused, then track them down and administer a personality test to see if they show signs of being violent or shy. The selection of an appropriate (i.e. useful) theoretical orientation within which to develop a potentially helpful theory is the bedrock of social science.

See also

• Critical Theory
• Culture theory
• Feminist theory
• Functionalism (sociology)
• Interactionism
• Literary Theory
• Methodological individualism
• Political theory
• Postmodernism
• Post-colonial theory
• Post-structuralism
• Queer Theory

External links

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Introduction to Sociology

• The International Social Theory Consortium
• Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory
• Sociological Theorists
• Social Theory Research Network of the European Sociological Association

Posthegemony

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Posthegemony is the theory that the concept of hegemony can no longer properly describe social order.

Contents [hide] 1 Theory 2 Criticism 3 Notes 4 Bibliography 5 See also 6 External links

Theory

Posthegemony finds that ideology is no longer a political driving force and that the theory of hegemony therefore no longer accurately reflects the social order: "ideology critique--the analysis of discourse in search of distortions produced by ideological operations--is now superfluous."^[1] Posthegemony also finds that history is not, as Karl Marx described it, a class struggle, but rather a "struggle to produce class."^[2]

The theory of posthegemony is influenced by the work of theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Bourdieu, and Antonio Negri. It is also in synch with post-Foucauldian theorists such as Giorgio Agamben. Nicholas Thoburn, drawing on Agamben's discussion on the "state of exception," writes that "it is, perhaps, with the recasting of the relationship between law and politico-military and economic crises and interventions that is instituted in the state of exception that the time of hegemony is most revealed to have passed."^[3]

Criticism

Among the criticisms of the theory of posthegemony is Richard Johnson's, that it involves "a marked reduction of social complexity."^[4] Johnson concedes that "one considerable achievement of ‘the post-hegemony project’ is to draw many observable post-9/11 features into a single imaginative picture, while also synthesizing different currents in contemporary social theory." But he argues that "it is strange, however, that the result is viewed as the end of hegemony rather than as a new hegemonic moment."^[5] He therefore calls for a rejuvenation of the concept of hegemony, rather than its abandonment.

Notes

Bibliography

• Jon Beasley-Murray, "On Posthegemony." Bulletin of Latin American Research 22.1 (January 2003): 117-125. [1]
• Scott Lash. 2007. "Power after Hegemony: Cultural Studies in Mutation?" Theory, Culture, and Society. 24(3):55-78.
• Nicholas Thoburn, "Patterns of Production: Cultural Studies after Hegemony." Theory, Culture, and Society 24.3 (2007): 79-94. [2]
• Richard Johnson, "Post-hegemony? I Don't Think So." Theory, Culture, and Society 24.3 (2007): 95-110. [3]

See also

• Hegemony
• Toni Negri
• Michael Hardt
• Pierre Bourdieu
• James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990)

External links

• Posthegemony, a blog on "Hegemony, Posthegemony, and Related Matters"

Jean-François Lyotard

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-Francois Lyotard, photo by Bracha L. Ettinger, 1995
Full name	Jean-François Lyotard
Born	10 August 1924(1924-08-10) Versailles, France
Died	21 April 1998 Paris, France
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Postmodernism
Main interests	Metanarrative
Notable ideas	The "postmodern condition" Collapse of the "grand narrative"
Influenced by[show] Montaigne · Kant · Marx · Freud Wittgenstein · Parsons · Durkheim J.L. Austin
Influenced[show] Rorty · Barthes ·

Jean-François Lyotard (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ fʀɑ̃swa ljɔˈtaʀ]; 10 August 1924– 21 April 1998) was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well-known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition.

Contents [hide] 1 Biography 1.1 Political life 1.2 Academic career 1.3 Later life and death 2 Thought 2.1 The collapse of the "Grand Narrative" 2.2 The sublime 3 Criticism 4 Legacy 5 Selected Publications 6 See also 7 References 8 External links

Biography

He was born in 1924 in Versailles, France to Jean-Pierre Lyotard, a sales representative, and Madeleine Cavalli. He went to primary school at the Paris Lycées Buffon and Louis-le-Grand and later began studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. After graduation, in 1950, he took up a position teaching philosophy in Constantine in French East Algeria. Lyotard earned a Ph.D in literature. He married twice: in 1948 to Andrée May, with whom he had two daughters, and for a second time in 1993 to the mother of his son, who was born in 1986.

Political life

In 1954 Lyotard became a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, a French political organisation formed in 1948 around the inadequacy of the Trotskyist analysis to explain the new forms of domination in the Soviet Union. His writings in this period are mostly concerned with ultra-left politics, with focus on the Algerian situation which he witnessed first hand while teaching philosophy in Constantine. ^[1] Socialisme ou Barbarie became increasingly anti-Marxist and Lyotard was prominent in the Pouvoir Ouvrier, a group that rejected the position and split in 1963. ^[2]

Academic career

In the early 1970s Lyotard began teaching at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes until 1987 when he became Professor Emeritus. During the next two decades he lectured outside of France, notably as a Professor of Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine and as visiting professor at universities around the world including Johns Hopkins, Berkeley, Yale and the University of California, San Diego in the U.S., the Université de Montréal in Québec (Canada), and the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He was also a founding director and council member of the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris. Before his death, he split his time between Paris and Atlanta, where he taught at Emory University as the Woodruff Professor of Philosophy and French.

Later life and death

Lyotard repeatedly returned to the notion of the Postmodern in essays gathered in English as The Postmodern Explained to Children, Toward the Postmodern, and Postmodern Fables. In 1998, while preparing for a conference on Postmodernism and Media Theory, he died unexpectedly from a case of leukemia that had advanced rapidly. He is buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Thought

Lyotard's work is characterised by a persistent opposition to universals, meta-narratives, and generality. He is fiercely critical of many of the 'universalist' claims of the Enlightenment, and several of his works serve to undermine the fundamental principles that generate these broad claims.

In his writings of the early 1970s, he rejects what he regards as theological underpinnings of both Marx and Freud: "In Freud, it is judaical, critical sombre (forgetful of the political); in Marx it is catholic. Hegelian, reconciliatory (...) in the one and in the other the relationship of the economic with meaning is blocked in the category of representation (...) Here a politics, there a therapeutics, in both cases a laical theology, on top of the arbitrariness and the roaming of forces".^[3] Consequently he rejected Adorno's negative dialectics which he regarded as seeking a "therapeutic resolution in the framework of a religion, here the religion of history".^[4] In Lyotard's "libidinal economics" (the title of one of his books of that time), he aimed at "discovering and describing different social modes of investment of libidinal intensities".^[5]

The collapse of the "Grand Narrative"

Most famously, in La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge) (1979), he proposes what he calls an extreme simplification of the "postmodern" as an 'incredulity towards meta-narratives'.^[6] These meta-narratives - sometimes 'grand narratives' - are grand, large-scale theories and philosophies of the world, such as the progress of history, the knowability of everything by science, and the possibility of absolute freedom. Lyotard argues that we^[who?] have ceased to believe that narratives of this kind are adequate to represent and contain us all. We have become alert to difference, diversity, the incompatibility of our aspirations, beliefs and desires, and for that reason postmodernity is characterised by an abundance of micronarratives. For this concept Lyotard draws from the notion of 'language-games' found in the work of Wittgenstein.

In Lyotard's works, the term 'language games', sometimes also called 'phrase regimens', denotes the multiplicity of communities of meaning, the innumerable and incommensurable separate systems in which meanings are produced and rules for their circulation are created.

This becomes more crucial in Au juste: Conversations (Just Gaming) (1979) and Le Différend (The Differend) (1983), which develop a postmodern theory of justice. It might appear that the atomisation of human beings implied by the notion of the micronarrative and the language game suggests a collapse of ethics. It has often been thought that universality is a condition for something to be a properly ethical statement: 'thou shalt not steal' is an ethical statement in a way that 'thou shalt not steal from Margaret' is not. The latter is too particular to be an ethical statement (what's so special about Margaret?); it is only ethical if it rests on a universal statement ('thou shalt not steal from anyone'). But universals are impermissible in a world that has lost faith in metanarratives, and so it would seem that ethics is impossible. Justice and injustice can only be terms within language games, and the universality of ethics is out of the window. Lyotard argues that notions of justice and injustice do in fact remain in postmodernism. The new definition of injustice is indeed to use the language rules from one 'phrase regimen' and apply them to another. Ethical behaviour is about remaining alert precisely to the threat of this injustice, about paying attention to things in their particularity and not enclosing them within abstract conceptuality. One must bear witness to the 'differend.'

"I would like to call a differend the case where the plantiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim. If the addressor, the addressee, and the sense of the testimony are neutralized, everything takes place as if there were no damages. A case of differend between two parties takes place when the regulation of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom." ^[7]

The sublime

Lyotard was a frequent writer on aesthetic matters. He was, despite his reputation as a postmodernist, a great promoter of modernist art. Lyotard saw 'postmodernism' as a latent tendency within thought throughout time and not a narrowly-limited historical period. He favoured the startling and perplexing works of the high modernist avant-garde. In them he found a demonstration of the limits of our conceptuality, a valuable lesson for anyone too imbued with Enlightenment confidence. Lyotard has written extensively also on few contemporary artists of his choice: Valerio Adami, Daniel Buren, Marcel Duchamp, Bracha Ettinger and Barnett Newman, as well as on Paul Cézanne and Wassily Kandinsky.

He developed these themes in particular by discussing the sublime. The "sublime" is a term in aesthetics whose fortunes revived under postmodernism after a century or more of neglect. It refers to the experience of pleasurable anxiety that we experience when confronting wild and threatening sights like, for example, a massive craggy mountain, black against the sky, looming terrifyingly in our vision.

Lyotard found particularly interesting the explanation of the sublime offered by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (sometimes Critique of the Power of Judgment). In this book Kant explains this mixture of anxiety and pleasure in the following terms: there are two kinds of 'sublime' experience. In the 'mathematically' sublime, an object strikes the mind in such a way that we find ourselves unable to take it in as a whole. More precisely, we experience a clash between our reason (which tells us that all objects are finite) and the imagination (the aspect of the mind that organises what we see, and which sees an object incalculably larger than ourselves, and feels infinite). In the 'dynamically' sublime, the mind recoils at an object so immeasurably more powerful than we, whose weight, force, scale could crush us without the remotest hope of our being able to resist it. (Kant stresses that if we are in actual danger, our feeling of anxiety is very different from that of a sublime feeling. The sublime is an aesthetic experience, not a practical feeling of personal danger.) This explains the feeling of anxiety.

The feeling of pleasure comes when human reason asserts itself^{[citation needed]}. What is deeply unsettling about the mathematically sublime is that the mental faculties that present visual perceptions to the mind are inadequate to the concept corresponding to it; in other words, what we are able to make ourselves see cannot fully match up to what we know is there. We know it's a mountain but we cannot take the whole thing into our perception. What this does, ironically, is to compel our awareness of the supremacy of the human reason^{[citation needed]}. Our sensibility is incapable of coping with such sights, but our reason can assert the finitude of the presentation. With the dynamically sublime, our sense of physical danger should prompt an awareness that we are not just physical material beings, but moral and (in Kant's terms) noumenal beings as well. The body may be dwarfed by its power but our reason need not be. This explains, in both cases, why the sublime is an experience of pleasure as well as pain.

Lyotard is fascinated by this admission, from one of the philosophical architects of the Enlightenment, that the mind cannot always organise the world rationally. Some objects are simply incapable of being brought neatly under concepts. For Lyotard, in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, but drawing on his argument in The Differend, this is a good thing. Such generalities as 'concepts' fail to pay proper attention to the particularity of things. What happens in the sublime is a crisis where we realise the inadequacy of the imagination and reason to each other. What we are witnessing, says Lyotard, is actually the differend; the straining of the mind at the edges of itself and at the edges of its conceptuality.

Criticism

Some argue that Lyotard's theories may seem self-contradictory because The Postmodern Condition seems to offer its own grand narrative in the story of the decline of the metanarrative. Against this it can be argued that Lyotard's narrative in The Postmodern Condition declares the decline of only a few defunct "narratives of legitimation" and not of narrative knowledge itself. It is not logically contradictory to say that a statement about narratives is itself a narrative, just as when Lyotard states that "every utterance [in a language game] should be thought of as a 'move' in a game"^[8] his statement is itself a 'move' in a language game.

See also the critical analysis of David Harvey in his book 'The Condition of Postmodernity' (Blackwell, 1989). Harvey's materialistic perspective finds traits of postmodernity to be rooted in the large-scale shifts from Fordist to flexible accumulation through a period of pronounced 'time-space compression' taking place in conjunction with the technological advances happening roughly around the 1970s. Far from being liberating, postmodernity draws us into ever more chaotic and disruptive spirals of accumulation that are ultimately as damaging as the Enlightenment project.

Legacy

This section requires expansion.

An international symposium about Jean-François Lyotard organized by the Collège International de Philosophie was held in Paris on January, 25-27th 2007.

Selected Publications

• “Adorno as the Devil”. Telos 19 (Spring 1974). New York: Telos Press.

See also

• Continental philosophy
• Postmodernism

References

Lewis, Jeff Cultural Studies, (London: Sage, 2008).

Lyotard, J-F, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

External links

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Jean-François Lyotard
• Jean-Francois Lyotard European Graduate School
• The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (The first 5 chapters)
• Post-modern Philosophical Martyrdom
• International symposium : January 2007, 25-27th

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Paul de Man

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Paul de Man (December 6, 1919 – December 21, 1983) was a Belgian-born deconstructionist literary critic and theorist.

He began teaching at Bard College. Later, he completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in the late 1950s. He then taught at Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Zurich, before ending up on the faculty in French and Comparative Literature at Yale University, where he was considered part of the Yale School of deconstruction. At the time of his death from cancer, he was Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale. After his death, the discovery of some two hundred articles he wrote during World War II for collaborationist newspapers, including one explicitly anti-Semitic, caused a scandal and provoked a reconsideration of his life and work. De Man oversaw the dissertations of both Gayatri Spivak and Barbara Johnson.

Contents [hide] 1 Academic work 2 Influence and legacy 3 Wartime journalism and anti-Semitic writing 4 Posthumous controversy 5 Works 6 Selected secondary works 7 See also 8 Notes 9 External links

Academic work

In 1966, de Man met Jacques Derrida at a conference at Johns Hopkins University on structuralism during which Derrida first delivered his essay "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences". The two became close friends and colleagues. De Man elaborated a distinct deconstruction in his philosophically-oriented literary criticism of Romanticism, both English Romanticism and German Romanticism, with particular attention to William Wordsworth, John Keats, Maurice Blanchot, Marcel Proust, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Walter Benjamin, William Butler Yeats, Friedrich Hoelderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke.

While de Man's work in the 1960s is normally distinguished from his deconstructive work in the 1970s, there is considerable continuity. His 1967 essay "Criticism and Crisis" argues that because literary works are understood to be fictions rather than factual accounts, they exemplify the break between a sign and its meaning: literature "means" nothing, but critics resist this insight because it lays bare "the nothingness of human matters" (de Man quoting Rousseau, one of his favorite authors). De Man would later observe that, due to this resistance to acknowledging that literature does not "mean", English departments had become "large organizations in the service of everything except their own subject matter" ("The Return to Philology"), as the study of literature became the art of applying psychology, politics, history, or other disciplines to the literary text, in an effort to make the text "mean" something.

Among the central threads running through de Man's work is his attempt to tease out the tension between rhetoric (which in de Man's usage tends to mean figural language and trope) and meaning, seeking out moments in the text where linguistic forces "tie themselves into a knot which arrests the process of understanding."^[1] De Man's earlier essays from the 1960s, collected in Blindness and Insight,^[2] represent an attempt to seek out these paradoxes in the texts of New Criticism and move beyond formalism. One of De Man's central topoi is of the blindness on which these critical readings are predicated, that the "insight seems instead to have been gained from a negative movement that animates the critic's thought, an unstated principle that leads his language away from its asserted stand...as if the very possibility of assertion had been put into question."^[3] Here de Man attempts to undercut the notion of the poetic work as a unified, atemporal icon, a self-possessed repository of meaning freed from the intentionalist and affective fallacies. In de Man's argument, formalist and New Critical valorization of the "organic" nature of poetry is ultimately self-defeating: the notion of the verbal icon is undermined by the irony and ambiguity inherit within it. Form ultimately acts as "both a creator and undoer of organic totalities," and "the final insight...annihilated the premises which led up to it."^[4]

In Allegories of Reading^[5], de Man further explores the tensions arising in figural language in Nietzsche, Rousseau, Rilke, and Proust. In these essays, he concentrates on crucial passages which have a metalinguistic function or metacritical implications, particularly those where figural language has a dependency on classical philosophical oppositions (essence/accident, synchronic/diachronic, appearance/reality) which are so central to Western discourse. Many of the essays in this volume attempt to undercut figural totalization, the notion that one can control or dominate a discourse or phenomenon through metaphor. In de Man's discussion of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, for instance, he claims that genetic conceptions of history appearing in the text are undercut by the rhetorical strategies Nietzsche employs: "the deconstruction does not occur between statements, as in a logical refutation or a dialectic, but happens instead between, on the one hand, metalinguistic statements about the rhetorical nature of language and, on the other hand, a rhetorical praxis that puts these statements into question."^[6] For de Man, an "Allegory of Reading" emerges when texts are subjected to such scrutiny and reveal this tension; a reading wherein the text reveals its own assumptions about language, and in so doing dictates a statement about undecidability, the difficulties inherent in totalization, their own readability, or the "limitations of textual authority."^[7]

De Man is also known for subtle readings of English and German romantic and post-romantic poetry and philosophy (The Rhetoric of Romanticism) and concise and deeply ironic essays of a quasi-programmatic theoretical orientation. Specifically noteworthy is his critical dismantling of the Romantic ideology and the linguistic assumptions which underlie it. His arguments follow roughly as follows. First, de Man seeks to deconstruct the privileged claims in Romanticism of symbol over allegory, and metaphor over metonymy. In his reading, because of the implication of self-identity and wholeness which is inherent in the Romantics' conception of metaphor, when this self-identity decomposes, so also does the means of overcoming the dualism between subject and object, which Romantic metaphor sought to transcend. In de Man's reading, to compensate for this inability, Romanticism constantly relies on allegory to attain the wholeness established by the totality of the symbol.^[8]

In addition, in his essay "The Resistance to Theory", which explores the task and philosophical bases of literary theory, de Man uses the example of the classical trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic to argue that the use of linguistic sciences in literary theory and criticism (i.e. a structuralist approach) was able to harmonize the logical and grammatical dimension of literature, but only at the expense of effacing the rhetorical elements of texts which presented the greatest interpretive demands. He posits that the resistance to theory is the resistance to reading, thus the resistance to theory is theory itself. Or the resistance to theory is what constitutes the possibility and existence of theory. Taking up the example of the title of Keats' poem The Fall of Hyperion, de Man draws out an irreducible interpretive undecidability which bears strong affinities to the same term in Derrida's work and some similarity to the notion of incommensurability as developed by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition and The Differend. De Man argues forcefully that the recurring motive of theoretical readings is to subsume these decisions under theoretical, futile generalizations, which are displaced in turn into harsh polemics about theory.

Influence and legacy

De Man followed developments in contemporary French literature, criticism, and theory. De Man's influence on literary criticism was considerable for many years, in no small part through his many influential students. He was a very charismatic teacher and influenced both students and fellow faculty members profoundly.

Much of de Man's work was collected or published posthumously. The Resistance to Theory was virtually complete at the time of his death. Andrzej Warminski, previously a colleague at Yale, edited the works already published which were to appear in a planned volume with the tentative title Aesthetic Ideology.

Wartime journalism and anti-Semitic writing

After de Man's death, some two hundred articles he wrote during World War II for a collaborationist Belgian newspaper Le Soir were discovered by Ortwin de Graef, a Belgian student researching de Man's early life and work.^[9] de Graef contacted Samuel Weber who, in turn, consulted Derrida. Derrida would later arrange for the collection and publication of de Man's war time journalism.^[10] In one piece, titled “Jews in Contemporary Literature,” de Man examined the way "[v]ulgar anti-semitism willingly takes pleasure in considering post-war cultural phenomenon (after the war of 14-18) as degenerate and decadent because they are [enjewished]."^[11] He notes that "Literature does not escape this lapidary judgement: it is sufficient to discover a few Jewish writers under Latinized pseudonyms for all contemporary production to be considered polluted and evil. This conception entails rather dangerous consequences... it would be a rather unflattering appreciation of western writers to reduce them to being mere imitators of a Jewish culture which is foreign to them."^[11] The article continued to claim that contemporary literature had not broken from tradition as a result of the First World War and that "the Jews cannot claim to have been its creators, nor even to have exercised a preponderant influence over its development. On any closer examination, this influence appears to have extraordinarily little importance since one might have expected that, given the specific characteristics of the Jewish Spirit, the later would have played a more brilliant role in this artistic production."^[11] The article concluded that “our civilization... [b]y keeping, in spite of semitic interference in all aspects of European life, an intact originality and character... has shown that its basic character is healthy." It concluded that "the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe" as “a solution to the Jewish problem” (probably referring to a suggested Jewish colony in Madagascar, but not to Hitler's Final Solution, which was not widely known at this early period) would lack any "deplorable consequences" for "the literary life of the west."^[12]

This is the only known article in which de Man pronounced such views. At the time de Man published the article, March 1941, Belgium had passed anti-Jewish legislation that expelled Jews from the professions of law, teaching, government service, and journalism. On August 4, 1942, the first trainload of Belgian Jews left Brussels for Auschwitz. De Man continued to write for the (during the war) Nazi-controlled newspaper Le Soir until November 1942, although it is unlikely he was aware of what was happening to the Jews in Auschwitz.^[13] Subsequently, several facts that have come to light rendered any sweeping Anti-semitic allegations questionable: "...in 1942 or 1943, about a year after the journalistic publication of his compromising statement, he and his wife sheltered for several days in their apartment the Jewish pianist Esther Sluszny and her husband, who were then illegal citizens in hiding from the Nazis. During this same period, de Man was meeting regularly with Georges Goriely, a member of the Belgian Resistance. According to Goriely's own testimony, he never for one minute feared denunciation of his underground activities by Paul de Man."^[14] It is intriguing as well that De Man's example in "Jews and Contemporary Literature" of a solidly "European" contemporary author is Franz Kafka, though there is no way to determine whether he was privately aware of Kafka's Jewish ancestry.

Posthumous controversy

The discovery of de Man's wartime writing made the front page of the New York Times,^[15] and angry debate followed. Jeffrey Mehlman, a professor of French at Boston University, declared there were “grounds for viewing the whole of deconstruction as a vast amnesty project for the politics of collaboration during World War II”,^[16] while Derrida published a long piece responding to critics, declaring that “To judge, to condemn the work or the man on the basis of what was a brief episode, to call for closing, that is to say, at least figuratively, for censuring or burning his books is to reproduce the exterminating gesture which one accuses de Man of not having armed himself against sooner with the necessary vigilance. It is not even to draw a lesson that he, de Man, learned to draw from the war.”^[17] That seemed to some readers to draw an objectionable connection between criticism of de Man and extermination of the Jews.^[18] Derrida, a Jew himself, however, does not refrain from condemning de Man's wartime writings.

In addition to the debate over the significance of de Man’s wartime writings, there was also a debate over the fact that he had not publicly declared his wartime writings throughout the thirty-five years of his life in America. However, it has since come to light that in 1955, while de Man was at Harvard, there was an anonymous denunciation concerning his activity in Belgium during the war. de Man explained himself in a letter to the Head of the Society of Fellows: "In 1940 and 1941 I wrote some literary articles in the newspaper "Le Soir" and I, like most of the other contributors, stopped doing so when Nazi thought-control did no longer allow freedom of statement. During the rest of the occupation I did what was the duty of any decent person. After the war, everyone was subjected to a very severe examination of his political behaviour, and my name was not a favourable recommendation. In order to obtain a passport one had not merely to produce a certificate of good conduct but also a so-called "certificat de civisime" which stated one was cleared of any collaboration. I could not possibly have come to this country two times, with proper passport and visa, if there had been the slightest reproach against me. To accuse me now, behind my back... is a slanderous attack which leaves me helpless."^[19]

de Man's colleagues, students and contemporaries attempted to come to grips with both his early writings and his subsequent silence about them in the volume Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism (edited by Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan; Nebraska, 1989).

After the war de Man's career took him to the United States. His wife, Anaïde Baraghian, was denied a visa because she had no work waiting for her in America. Instead she and the children sailed to Argentina where her parents had recently emigrated. de Man would remarry in America.^[20]

A 1992 newspaper article reports, on the basis of interviews with people who knew de Man and documents which are not publicly available, that de Man married his second wife prior to obtaining a divorce from his first, that this second wife was a student at Bard College (where de Man worked from 1949-1951) and that he was fired from that institution upon accusations of petty thievery and chicanery.^[21]

Works

• Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, (ISBN 0-300-02845-8) 1979
• Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (2nd ed.), (ISBN 0-8166-1135-1) 1983
• The Rhetoric of Romanticism, (ISBN 0-231-05527-7) 1984
• The Resistance to Theory, (ISBN 0-8166-1294-3) 1986
• Wartime Journalism, 1934-1943, (ISBN 0-8032-1684-X) eds. Werner Hamacher, Neil Heertz, Thomas Keenan, 1988
• Critical Writings: 1953-1978, (ISBN 0-8166-1695-7) Lindsay Waters (ed.), 1989
• Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, (ISBN 0-8166-1695-7) eds. E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and Andrzej Warminski, 1993
• Aesthetic Ideology, (ISBN 0-8166-2204-3) ed. Andrzej Warminski, 1996

Selected secondary works

• Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch (eds.), Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing
• Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, Andrzej Warminski (eds.), Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory (essays pertaining to de Man's posthumously published work in Aesthetic Ideology)
• Ortwin De Graef. Serenity in Crisis: A Preface to Paul de Man, 1939-1960. University of Nebraska Press, 1993.
• Ortwin De Graef. Titanic Light: Paul de Man's Post-Romanticism. University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
• Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man
• Rodolphe Gasché, The Wild Card of Reading
• Neil Hertz, Werner Hamacher, and Thomas Keenan (eds.), Responses to Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism
• Jon Wiener, "The Responsibilities of Friendship: Jacques Derrida on Paul de Man's Collaboration." Critical Inquiry 14 (1989), 797-803.
• Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology
• David Lehman, Signs of the times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man.
• Lindsay Waters & Wlad Godzich, Reading de Man. University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

See also

• List of deconstructionists

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Full name	Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Born	1942 Calcutta, British India
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Post-colonial theory
School	Post-colonial theory Post-structuralism
Main interests	History of ideas · Literature · Deconstruction · Feminism · Marxism
Notable ideas	"subaltern", "strategic essentialism"
Influenced by[show] Immanuel Kant, Jacques Derrida, Karl Marx, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (born February 24, 1942) is an Indian literary critic and theorist. She is best known for the article "Can the Subaltern Speak?", considered a founding text of postcolonialism, and for her translation of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. Spivak teaches at Columbia University, where she was tenured as University Professor in March 2007. A prolific scholar, she travels widely and gives lectures around the world. She is also a visiting faculty member at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.

Contents [hide] 1 Life and Work 2 Philanthropy 3 Books 3.1 Academic 3.2 Literary 4 See also 5 External links 6 References

Life and Work

Spivak was born Gayatri Chakravorty, in Calcutta, India, 24 February 1942. After completing her school education from the St. John's Diocesan Girls' Higher Secondary School, she received an undergraduate degree in English at the University of Calcutta (1959), graduating with first class honours. After this, she completed her Master's in English from Cornell University, and then pursued her Ph.D. while teaching at the University of Iowa. Her dissertation was on W.B. Yeats, directed by Paul de Man, titled Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats. At Cornell, she was the second woman elected to membership in the Telluride Association. She was briefly married to Talbot Spivak in the 1960s. The Bride Wore the Traditional Gold by Talbot Spivak is an autobiographical novel that deals with the early years of this marriage.

It was her subsequent translation of Derrida's Of Grammatology that brought her to prominence. She included a translator's introduction which has since been described as "setting a new standard for self-reflexivity in prefaces." After this, she carried out a series of historical studies (as a member of the "Subaltern Studies Collective") and literary critiques of imperialism and international feminism. She has often referred to herself as a "Practical Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist,". Her overriding ethico-political concern has been the tendency of institutional and cultural discourses/practices to exclude and marginalize the subaltern, especially subaltern women. Edward Said has noted that "She pioneered the study in literary theory of non-Western women and produced one of the earliest and most coherent accounts of that role available to us."^[1]

Her recent work, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, published in 1999, explores how major works of European metaphysics (e.g., Kant, Hegel) not only tend to exclude the subaltern from their discussions, but actively prevent non-Europeans from occupying positions as fully human subjects.

Spivak coined the term "strategic essentialism," which refers to a sort of temporary solidarity for the purpose of social action. For example, the attitude that women's groups have many different agendas makes it difficult for feminists to work for common causes. "Strategic essentialism" is about the need to accept temporarily an "essentialist" position in order to be able to act.

Spivak had taught at several universities before arriving at Columbia in 1991. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, received numerous academic honors including an honorary doctorate from Oberlin College^[2], and has been on the editorial board of academic journals such as boundary 2. On March 9, 2007, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger appointed Spivak University Professor, the institution's highest faculty rank. In a letter to the faculty, he wrote,

“

Not only does her world-renowned scholarship--grounded in deconstructivist [sic] literary theory--range widely from critiques of post-colonial discourse to feminism, Marxism, and globalization; her lifelong search for fresh insights and understanding has transcended the traditional boundaries of discipline while retaining the fire for new knowledge that is the hallmark of a great intellect.

”

Spivak's writing has been described by some as opaque.^[3] It has also been suggested that her work puts style ahead of substance.^[4]

In her defense, it has been argued that this sort of criticism reveals an unwillingness to substantively engage with her texts.^[5] Judith Butler has noted that Spivak's supposedly inaccessible language has, in fact, resonated with, and profoundly changed the thinking of, "tens of thousands of activists and scholars." ,^[6] And Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, who has called her writing "inaccessible," noted nevertheless that "there can thus be few more important critics of our age than the likes of Spivak.... She has probably done more long-term political good, in pioneering feminist and post-colonial studies within global academia than almost any of her theoretical colleagues."^[7]

In speeches given and published since 2002, Spivak has addressed the issue of terrorism. Clearly stating that her intention is to bring an end to suicide bombing, she has explored and, "tried to imagine what message [such acts] might contain." ^[8]. These ruminations have included descriptions such as: "suicide bombing is an act inscribed on the body when no other means will get through."

One critic has suggested that this sort of stylized language may serve to blur important moral issues relating to terrorism. ^[9] However, she stated in the text of the speech that "Single coerced yet willed suicidal 'terror' is in excess of the destruction of dynastic temples and the violation of women, tenacious and powerfully residual. It has not the banality of evil. It is informed by the stupidity of belief taken to extreme."^[10]

Philanthropy

Spivak founded The Pares Chandra and Sivani Chakravorty Memorial Education Project, a not-for-profit 501(c)3 organization, in 1997, to provide a primary education of quality for children in some of the poorest regions of the globe, continuing work that Spivak had started doing in 1986. The Project currently operates schools in rural areas of West Bengal, India. By setting up schools and giving sustained training to local teachers who operate them with the help of local supervisors, the Project seeks to offer children in these areas the resources to enter the mainstream education system for high school and beyond. The Project is committed to using the existing state curriculum and textbooks to train teachers, in the belief that by using these materials they can better enable their students to enter the national education system on equal terms with others. "Since India constantly brags about being the world's largest democracy, and this is a large sector of the electorate, what I'm trying to do is develop rituals of democratic habits," she said of the Project.^[11]

Books

Academic

• Myself, I Must Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1974).
• Of Grammatology (translation, with critical introduction, of Derrida's text) (1976)
• In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987).
• Selected Subaltern Studies (edited with Ranajit Guha) (1988)
• The Post-Colonial Critic (1990)
• Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993).
• The Spivak Reader (1995).
• A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999).
• Death of a Discipline (2003).
• Other Asias (2005).

Literary

• Imaginary Maps (translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi) (1994)
• Breast Stories (translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi) (1997)
• Old Women (translation with critical introduction of two stories by Mahasweta Devi) (1999)
• Song for Kali: A Cycle (translation with introduction of story by Ramproshad Sen) (2000)
• Chotti Munda and His Arrow (translation with critical introduction of the novel by Mahasweta Devi) (2002)
• Red Thread (forthcoming)

See also

• List of deconstructionists
• Postcolonialism
• Postcolonial feminism

External links

• 'Righting Wrongs' (Read full article)
• 'Woman' as Theatre in Radical Philosophy
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak - An Overview
• Full article "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
• "In the Gaudy Supermarket" - A critical review of A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books, May 1999
• "Exacting Solidarities" - Letters responding to Eagleton's review of Spivak by Judith Butler and others
• Glossary of Key Terms in the Work of Spivak

References

1. ^ Dinitia Smith, "Creating a Stir Wherever She Goes," New York Times (9 February 2002) B7.
2. ^ [1] Commencement Address
3. ^ [2]
4. ^ [3] New Statesman
5. ^ [4] London Review of Books
6. ^ [5]
7. ^ Terry Eagleton, "In the Gaudy Supermarket," London Review of Books (13 May 1999).
8. ^ [6] See p. 93
9. ^ [7]
10. ^ Gayatri Spivak, "Terror: A Speech After 9-11," boundary 2 31.2 (2004).
11. ^ Quoted in Liz McMillen, "The Education of Gayatri Spivak," Chronicle of Higher Education (14 September 2007) B16.

Barbara Johnson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Barbara Johnson (1947-2009) was an American literary critic and translator. She was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University. Her scholarship incorporated a variety of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives—including deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and feminist theory—into a critical, interdisciplinary study of literature. As a scholar, teacher, and translator, Johnson helped make the theories of French philosopher Jacques Derrida accessible to English-speaking audiences in the United States at a time when they had just begun to gain recognition in France. Accordingly, she is often associated with the "Yale School" of academic literary criticism.

Contents [hide] 1 Education 2 Overview of major works 2.1 The Critical Difference 2.2 A World of Difference and The Feminist Difference 2.3 The Wake of Deconstruction 3 The Problematics of Language 3.1 The Question of Translation 3.2 Deconstruction, Indeterminacy, and Politics 4 Selected works and suggestions for further reading 5 Edited volumes and projects 6 Translations 7 See also

Education

Barbara Johnson attended Oberlin College from 1965 to 1969, and completed a Ph.D. in French at Yale University in 1977. Her graduate studies occurred during the emergence of the "Yale School," a group of literary critics that included Johnson's thesis director, Paul de Man. The Yale School's characteristic integration of structuralist and poststructuralist theory into the study of literature became an essential feature of Johnson's approach to criticism.

Overview of major works

In her 1990 essay, "Writing" (in Critical Terms for Literary Study), Johnson outlines the importance of theory to analyses of literature. She argues that the history of writing (l'écriture) is an important philosophical, political, and psychoanalytical concept in twentieth-century French thought. She posits French theorist Roland Barthes’ appropriation of Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of the sign—encompassing both a "signifier" and a "signified"—as the foundation of his theory that language is a “structure,” a system of relations governed by a set of rules. Johnson then goes on to describe the central roles played by Derrida and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in destabilizing Barthes' account of the relation between signifier and signified and the “structure” of language. Following Derrida, Johnson argues that reading is not the task of grasping the true single meaning of a text, but of grasping its multiple meanings, which are often unstable and contradictory. This polysemy has allowed feminist and marginalized readers to enter texts at the locations where the author tries to "dominate, erase, or distort" the various "other" claims that are made through language and reassert their identities.

The Critical Difference

In The Critical Difference (1980), Johnson argues that any model of difference as a polarized difference “between entities (prose and poetry, man and woman, literature and theory, guilt and innocence)” is necessarily founded upon “a repression of differences within entities” (pp. x-xi). In this book, Johnson explores how the unknown and the unknowable function in a text. The “unknown” to which she refers is not something concealed or distant, but a fundamental unknowability that constitutes and underlies our linguistic cognition.

In one of the articles in The Critical Difference, “Melville’s Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd,” Johnson reads Herman Melville’s novel as a performance of the irreconcilability between the “signifier” and the “signified.” She argues that if a description could perfectly describe its referent and actually “hit” its intended object (just as Billy Budd hits and kills John Claggart), the result would be the annihilation of that object. Language, thus, can only function upon imperfection, instability, and unknowability.

A World of Difference and The Feminist Difference

Johnson’s next book, A World of Difference (1987), reflects a move away from the strictly canonical context of her analyses in The Critical Difference. Johnson wants to take her investigation beyond “the white male Euro-American literary, philosophical, psychoanalytical, and critical canon” that dominates the academy as a whole and her work in particular (p. 2). But she also calls the “sameness” of that white Euro-American literary and critical tradition into question, undertaking a thorough interrogation of its boundaries. In addition, Johnson expands the scope of her literary subjects to include black and/or women writers, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Dinnerstein, James Weldon Johnson, and Adrienne Rich. Her subsequent collection, The Feminist Difference (1998), offers a continued critique of the terms in play throughout feminism’s history and an examination of the differences within and between feminisms.

The Wake of Deconstruction

The Wake of Deconstruction (1994) approaches the general state of deconstruction in light of the backlash it faced over the course of the 1980s and early '90s. Through the double lenses of Paul de Man’s posthumous Nazi collaboration scandal and the academic community’s reaction to the murder of feminist legal theorist Mary Joe Frug, Johnson discusses allegory, feminism, and the misinterpretation of deconstruction.

The Problematics of Language

The Question of Translation

In "Taking Fidelity Philosophically" (in Difference in Translation), Johnson describes translation as an ultimately impossible endeavor because the "mother" or original language is already, intrinsically untranslatable from signifier to signified. The more one attempts to translate a work into comprehensibility, the more likely one is to stray from its original ambiguity. Jacques Derrida, with his thoughts on différance, elucidates the complicating but necessary fact of language: that it is foreign to itself. Every attempt to translate sets the language against itself, creating new tensions as it progresses. Translation, though impossible, is also necessary, as it is precisely these tensions that constitute language.

Deconstruction, Indeterminacy, and Politics

Throughout her work, Johnson emphasizes both the difficulty of applying deconstruction to political action and of separating linguistic contradictions, complexities, and polysemy from political questions. In A World of Difference, she makes a turn to a “real world,” but one which is always left in quotation marks—"real," but nonetheless inseparable from its textual, written aspect. In a chapter of the book entitled, “Is Writerliness Conservative?” Johnson examines the political implications of undecidablility in writing, as well as the consequences of labeling the poetic and the undecidable as politically inert. She writes that, if “poetry makes nothing happen,” poetry also “makes nothing happen”—the limits of the political are themselves fraught with political implications (p. 30). Harold Schweizer writes in his introduction to The Wake of Deconstruction that “[i]f interpretive closure always violates textual indeterminacy, if authority is perhaps fundamentally non-textual, reducing to identity what should remain different, Johnson’s work could best be summarized as an attempt to delay the inevitable reductionist desire for meaning” (p. 8).

Selected works and suggestions for further reading

• Moses and Multiculturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010)
• Persons and Things (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008)
• Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003)
• "Using People: Kant with Winnicott," in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 2000)
• "Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law," in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 10 Yale J.L. & Human. 549 (Summer 1998)
• "Moses and Intertextuality: Sigmund Freud, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Bible," in Poetics of the Americas, ed. Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997)
• The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race and Gender (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)
• The Wake of Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)
• "Writing," in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)
• A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)
• "Taking Fidelity Philosophically," in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985)
• The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)
• Défigurations du langage poétique: La seconde révolution baudelairienne (Paris: Flammarion, 1979)

Edited volumes and projects

• The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Principal ed., Vincent B. Leitch, with William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, John McGowan, and Jeffery J. Williams (New York: Norton, 2001)
• Freedom and Interpretation: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, 1992 (New York: Basic Books, 1993)
• Consequences of Theory: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987-1988, ed. with Jonathan Arac (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)
• A New History of French Literature, Principal ed., Dennis Hollier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)
• Yale French Studies, No. 63, "The Pedalogical Imperative: Teaching as a Literary Genre" (1982)

Translations

• Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007)
• Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)
• Philippe Sollers, "Freud's Hand," in Yale French Studies, No. 55-56 (1979)
• Jacques Derrida, "Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok," in the Georgia Review, No. 31 (1977)

See also

• List of deconstructionists

Ecosophy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ecosophy, and ecophilosophy, are neologisms formed by contracting the phrase ecological philosophy.

Confusion as to the meaning (suggesting that such a meaning should be singular and exact) of ecosophy is primarily the consequence of it being used to designate different and often contradictory (though conceptually related) concepts by the Norwegian father of Deep Ecology, Arne Næss, and French post-Marxist philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari.

Contents [hide] 1 Naess's definition of ecosophy 2 Félix Guattari 3 References 4 See also 5 External links

Naess's definition of ecosophy

While a professor at University of Oslo in 1972, Arne Naess, introduced the terms "deep ecology movement" and "ecosophy" into environmental literature. Naess based his article on a talk he gave in Bucharest in 1972 at the Third World Future Research Conference. As Drengson notes in Ecophilosophy, Ecosophy and the Deep Ecology Movement: An Overview, "In his talk Naess discussed the longer-range background of the ecology movement and its connection with respect for Nature and the inherent worth of other beings." Naess's construction of a Nature which sits outside the human sphere of culture, and furthermore his preference for 'natural' values over cultural (particularly Western) values demarcates him as a dualist - which sharply contrasts with the alternative construction of ecosophy outlined by Guattari.

Naess defined ecosophy in the following way:

By an ecosophy I mean a philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium. A philosophy as a kind of sofia (or) wisdom, is openly normative, it contains both norms, rules, postulates, value priority announcements and hypotheses concerning the state of affairs in our universe. Wisdom is policy wisdom, prescription, not only scientific description and prediction. The details of an ecosophy will show many variations due to significant differences concerning not only the ‘facts’ of pollution, resources, population, etc. but also value priorities.

—A. Drengson and Y. Inoue, 1995, page 8

Félix Guattari

Ecosophy also refers to a field of practice introduced by psychoanalyst, poststructuralist philosopher and political activist Félix Guattari. In part Guattari's use of the term demarcates what he observes as the necessity for the proponents of social liberation whose struggles in the 20th century were dominated by the paradigm of social revolution and Marxism to embed their arguments within an ecological framework which understands the interconnections of social and environmental spheres.

Guattari holds that traditional environmentalist perspectives obscure the complexity of the relationship between humans and their natural environment through its maintenance of the dualistic separation of human (cultural) and nonhuman (natural) systems; he envisions ecosophy as a new field with a monistic and pluralistic approach to such study. Ecology in the Guattarian sense then, is a study of complex phenomena, including human subjectivity, the environment, and social relations, all of which are intimately interconnected. Despite this emphasis on interconnection, throughout his individual writings and more famous collaborations with Gilles Deleuze Guattari has resisted calls for holism, preferring to emphasise heterogeneity and difference, synthesising assemblages and multiplicities in order to trace rhizomatic structures rather than creating unified and, holisitic structures.

Without modifications to the social and material environment, there can be no change in mentalities. Here, we are in the presence of a circle that leads me to postulate the necessity of founding an "ecosophy" that would link environmental ecology to social ecology and to mental ecology.

—Guattari 2000:27

Guattari's concept of the three interacting and interdependent ecologies of mind, society, and environment stems from the outline of the three ecologies presented in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, a collection of writings by cyberneticist Gregory Bateson.

References

• Drengson, A. and Y. Inoue, eds. 1995. The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology. Berkeley: North Atlantic Publishers.
• Guattari, F. 2000. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar & Paul Sutton, London & New Brunwick, NJ: The Athlone Press.
• Maybury-Lewis, David. 1992. "On the Importance of Being Tribal: Tribal Wisdom." Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World. Binimun Productions Ltd.

See also

• Deep ecology

External links

• Ecophilosophy, Ecosophy and the Deep Ecology Movement: An Overview by Alan Drengson Ecospherics.net. Accessed 2005-08-14.

 

Ecophilosophy, Ecosophy and the Deep Ecology Movement: An Overview 

By Alan Drengson ©1999 

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An earlier version of this article appeared in The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, Vol 14, No. 3, Summer 1997, pages 110-111, entitled “An Ecophilosophy Approach, the Deep Ecology Movement, and Diverse Ecosophies” Thanks to Arne Naess and Ted Mosquin for their suggestions.

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During the last thirty years philosophers in the West have critiqued the underlying assumptions of Modern philosophy in relation to the natural world. This development has been part of an ongoing expansion of philosophical work involving cross cultural studies of world views or ultimate philosophies. Since philosophical studies in the West have often ignored the natural world, and since most studies in ethics have focused on human values, those approaches which emphasize ecocentric values have been referred to as ecophilosophy. Just as the aim of traditional philosophy is sophia or wisdom, so the aim of ecophilosophy is ecosophy or ecological wisdom. The Practice of ecophilosophy is an ongoing, comprehensive, deep inquiry into values, the nature of the world and the self.

The mission of ecophilosophy is to explore a diversity of perspectives on human-Nature contexts and interrelationships. It fosters deeper and more harmonious relationships between place, self, community and the natural world. This aim is furthered by comparing the diversity of ecosophies from which people support the platform principles of the global, long range, deep ecology movement.

Here is Arne Naess’s original definition of ecosophy:  “By an ecosophy I mean a philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium. A philosophy as a kind of sofia (or) wisdom, is openly normative, it contains both norms, rules, postulates, value priority announcements and hypotheses concerning the state of affairs in our universe. Wisdom is policy wisdom, prescription, not only scientific description and prediction. The details of an ecosophy will show many variations due to significant differences concerning not only the ‘facts’ of pollution, resources, population, etc. but also value priorities.” (See A. Drengson and Y. Inoue, 1995, page 8.)

In 1973 (Inquiry 16, pp. 95-100) the name "deep ecology movement" was introduced into environmental literature by Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Professor Arne Naess. (For a reprint of the article see Drengson and Inoue 1995.) Environmentalism emerged as a popular grass roots political movement in the 1960's with the publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. Those already involved in conservation/preservation efforts were joined by many others concerned about the detrimental environmental impacts of modern industrial technology. The longer range, older elements of the movement included writers and activists like Thoreau and Muir, whereas the newer mainstream awareness was closer to the wise conservation philosophy of people like Gifford Pinchot. 

Naess's article was based on a talk he gave in Bucharest in 1972 at the Third World Future Research Conference. In his talk Naess discussed the longer-range background of the ecology movement and its connection with respect for Nature and the inherent worth of other beings. As a mountaineer who had climbed all over the world, Naess enjoyed the opportunity to observe political and social action in diverse cultures. Both historically and in the contemporary movement Naess saw two different forms of environmentalism, not necessarily incompatible with one another. One he called the "long-range deep ecology movement" and the other, the "shallow ecology movement." The word "deep" in part referred to the level of questioning of our purposes and values, when arguing in environmental conflicts. The "deep" movement involves deep questioning, right down to fundamentals. The shallow stops before the ultimate level. 

In his ecophilosophy framework for cross cultural analysis of grass roots social-political movements, Naess distinguishes between four levels of discourse (see the chart below). In forming cross cultural global movements some general consensus develops that focuses the movement through platform principles (as is the case for many movements--literary, philosophical, social, political, etc.), such as the principles of social justice, or the principles of peace and nonviolence, or the principles for the deep ecology movement (DEM). Movements so described have their principles emerge from the bottom up and are thus called grass roots movements (as in the Gandhian tradition), not top down power over hierarchies . 

The aim of ecophilosophy is a total or comprehensive view of our human and individual situation. Comprehensive includes the whole global context with us in it, sharing a world with diverse cultures and beings. We move toward a total view via deep questioning--always asking why--to ultimate norms and premises, and via articulation  (or application) to policies and practices. Much cross cultural work is done at the level of platform principles, and we can have a high level of agreement at this level that Naess calls Level II. From Level II we can engage in deep questioning and pursue articulating our own ecosophy, which might be grounded in some major worldview or religion, such as Pantheism or Christianity. This level of ultimate philosophies is called Level I. There is considerable diversity at this level. From Level II principles we can develop specific policy recommendations and formulations, or Level III. From Level III application leads us to practical actions, Level IV. There is considerable diversity at the level of policies, but even more at the level of practical actions. 

Table Showing Levels of Questioning and Articulation

Level  I	Ultimate Premises	Taoism, Christianity, Ecosophy T, etc.
Level  II	Platform Principles Movement	Peace Movement, Deep Ecology Movement, Social Justice Movement, etc.
Level  III	Policies	A, B, C, etc.
Level  IV	Practical Actions	W, X, Y, etc.

 [The above chart is a simplification of Naess's Apron Diagram. See Drengson and Inoue, 1995, pp. 10-12.]

In deep questioning we move toward ultimate premises and norms. In the process of derivation and application we move toward platform support and developing policies and practical actions. This is a continuous back and forth process which keeps our understanding and practices in harmony with a changing world. The deep approach, then, becomes evolutionary, changing with natural conditions. (For example, the “new corporation” [or community] has to engage in this back and forth movement and so requires full employee participation, diverse leaders and initiative takers.) In the three grassroots movements mentioned above the principles are individual and international.  It is important to note that there is great diversity at the level of ultimate philosophies. We do not all have to subscribe to the same ultimate ecological philosophy in order to work cooperatively for the benefit of the planet and its communities of beings. The front is very long and we each have values to contribute to realizing higher qualities in life as a whole. We must work on many different levels.

Naess has much first-hand experience in the world peace and social justice movements, and he is a committed practitioner of the way of nonviolence taught by Gandhi (Naess 1974). He also is a philosopher of science and logic who has done innovative work on language and communication.  His studies and travels have given him deep cross-cultural knowledge and perspectives. (For more details on his philosophy of communication see Naess (1953). This work will be reissued in the Selected Works of Arne Naess to be published in English by Klewer in 2000.) Naess is well placed to identify the main features of the emerging grass-roots environmental movement, which is supported by social activists from all parts of the political spectrum. The shallow-deep spectrum he describes is not the same as the old right-left split. It cuts across many conventional distinctions.

In his talk and paper Naess explained the difference between the short-term, shallow and the long-range deep ecology movements in broad terms. He explained that the distinctive aspects of the deep ecology movement is its recognition of the inherent value of all other living beings, and of the inherent worth of diversity of all kinds. This awareness is used to shape environmental policies and actions. Those who work for social changes based on this recognition are motivated by love of Nature as well as for humans. They try to be caring in all their dealings. They recognize that we cannot go on with industrial culture’s business as usual. We must make fundamental changes in basic values and practices or we will destroy the diversity and beauty of the world, and its ability to support diverse human cultures. 

In 1972, not many people appreciated that Naess was characterizing a grass-roots social movement, not stating his personal ultimate philosophy. Since then, he has articulated a set of platform principles to clarify matters. Grass-roots political movements often join people with diverse ultimate beliefs and backgrounds. In order to state the shared objectives of the movement a platform is usually put forth. The platform presents the more general principles that unite the group in terms of shared projects, aims and values. 

Naess and others have proposed a set of eight principles to characterize the deep ecology movement as part of the general ecology movement. These principles are endorsed by people from a diversity of backgrounds who share common concerns for the planet, its many beings and ecological communities. In many Western nations supporters of the platform principles stated below come from different religious and philosophical backgrounds. Their political affiliations differ considerably. What unites them is a long-range vision of what is necessary to protect the integrity of the Earth's ecological communities and values. Supporters of the principles have a diversity of ultimate beliefs. "Ultimate beliefs" here refers to their own basic metaphysical, personal and religious grounds for their values, actions and support for the deep ecology movement. Different people and cultures have different mythologies and stories. Nonetheless, they can support the platform and work for solutions to our shared environmental crisis. A diversity of practices is emerging, but there is considerable overlap, as can be seen in hundreds of environmental conflicts all over the world. 

Supporters of the platform principles stated below come from all walks of life, and a wide variety of cultures and places. Because they live in different places, the courses of practical action that follow from commitment to the platform are also diverse. Each person has something unique to contribute by living their own ecosophies. Here are the proposed platform principles of the deep ecology movement as originally formulated by Arne Naess and George Sessions in 1984 while on a hiking trip in Death Valley California: 

The Platform Principles of the Deep Ecology Movement 

1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes. 
2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realizations of these values and are also values in themselves. 
3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital human needs. 
4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease. 
5. Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening. 
6. Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present. 
7. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great. 
8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation to directly or indirectly try to implement the necessary changes. 

(Bill Devall and George Sessions, 1985, p. 70. Note that this platform is discussed in an exchange of papers between Stan Rowe and Arne Naess, published originally in The Trumpeter 1996,13, 1, and now online at <http://www.ecospherics.net>.)

Anyone who endorses these eight principles, is called by Naess and others a supporter of the deep
ecology movement, not a deep ecologist. Naess feels that “deep ecologist” is too immodest, and “shallow ecologist” is unkind language. The word “supporter” is more Ghandian and rich for interpretation. As mentioned, Naess stresses that those who support these principles can do so from a wide range of different ultimate views. Just as birds build different kinds of nests in different habitats, so human cultures which grow out of ecological places with respect for their inherent values develop diverse forms of practice, technology and social order. 

Naess calls his own ultimate philosophy Ecosophy T. It is deeply influenced by Norwegian friluftsliv (a movement to experience living in the outdoors, see Henderson, 1997), Gandhian nonviolence, Mahayana Buddhism and Spinozan pantheism. T refers to Tvergastein, Naess's mountain hut in Norway, where much of Ecosophy T was worked out. The T also refers to the Norwegian word for interpretation (tolkning) which is central to his philosophy of language and communication. A basic norm in Naess's Ecosophy T is Self realization!--for all beings. The Self to be realized for humans is not the ego self (small s), but the larger ecological Self (cap S). This self/Self distinction has affinities with Mahayana Buddhism. Naess says we can realize our ecological Selves in a number of ways. The way he talks most about is extension of identification. He prefaces this by saying that he assumes one is well integrated and has a healthy ego so as to avoid projection of the small self and its shadow.

Sometimes people confuse the "deep ecology movement" as described above, with Naess' own ultimate ecocentric philosophy, Ecosophy T. Naess calls his own ultimate philosophy Ecosophy T, not deep ecology. It is on the basis of Ecosophy T that he personally supports the platform principles of the deep ecology movement. 

Naess tries to make his whole view surveyable by starting with only the one norm, Self-Realization! Self-realization! is taken to imply: "Self-realization for all beings!" The exclamation point is used to mark that this is not a mere description, but that it says something that ought to be. Naess feels the norm as a basis of his own lived ecosophy. He urges others to develop their own ecosophies based on their ultimate views. Self-realization for humans he says, can be achieved in a variety of ways. His own approach is to extend his sense of identification to a larger sense of Self. Humans naturally have this capacity as Naess and others have observed cross-culturally. We have the capacity to connect with a much larger sense of self, transcending ego, by extending our sense of identification beyond the usual narrow focus on ego to a wider sphere of relationships. It is not difficult for us to identify with other living beings. We can actually practice or cultivate this capacity. One way is to practice extending our care and affection. We can also explore this larger Self in a variety of other ways. 

Many other authors have developed ecosophies very similar to Naess's based on the idea of extending awareness and care to a larger ecological Self. However, other supporters of the deep
ecology movement have ecosophies which do not start with the Self-realization! norm. Warwick Fox (1990) and I have both observed that the extension of self and the idea of the ecological Self overlaps in many ways with work in transpersonal psychology. Fox calls these Self-realization types of ecosophies transpersonal ecologies. (Today we call them transpersonal ecosophies and their psychological study is transpersonal ecology.) Matthew Fox's (1988) Creation Theology (which has a long history as a minority tradition in Christianity) is a transpersonal ecology in the form of a Christian philosophy and practice that finds the Christ principle and power of love revealed in the ongoing creation of the world. It is this that we should reverence. This opens us to the expansive sense of Self. A Mahyana Buddhist, concerned for the deliverance of all sentient beings, can easily support the deep ecology movement principles.

Other writers who support the platform principles of the deep ecology movement have criticized the extension of self identification. Some prefer to find their ultimate premises and ecosophies grounded in a different conception of self, emphasizing the social self--in some cases, or stressing the difference between the way self identity develops for women in contrast to men in our traditions. In this way, some supporters of the deep ecology movement are ecofeminists, some are social ecologists, some Christians. 

No supporters of the deep ecology movement as characterized above could be anti-human, as is sometimes alleged. Some vociferous environmentalists who claim to be supporters of the movement have said and written things that are misanthropic in tone. They have not explained how such statements are consistent with commitment to platform principle number one, which recognizes the inherent worth of all beings, including humans. Supporters of the deep ecology movement deplore antihuman statements and actions. They support Gandhian nonviolence in word and deed. Arne Naess says that he is a supporter of the ecofeminist, social ecology, social justice, bioregional, and peace movements. He believes that the platform principles of the deep ecology movement are broad enough to be this inclusive. 

Another dispute has centered on the critique of anthropocentrism offered by some supporters of the deep ecology movement. "Anthropocentrism" has a number of different meanings. We must not let verbal misunderstandings be divisive. When we defend our loved ones or are moved more by human suffering than the suffering of other beings, we are acting as descendants, parents, friends, lovers, etc. One can support the deep ecology movement consistent with such feelings. What is inconsistent is refusing to recognize the inherent worth of other beings to the extent that one is willing to allow unmerciful exploitation and destruction of life forms purely for human convenience and profit. Anthropocentrism as a bias against other life forms fails to recognize that we are part of these lives and they are part of ours. Our human self in the deepest sense cannot be separated from the earth from which we have grown. Anthropocentrism is objectionable when it emphasizes "humans first!" regardless of the consequences to other beings.

When we explore our own embodied, in place, ecological Self we discover our affinities with other beings as part of our humanity. This once more emphasizes that the platform principles refer to the intrinsic worth of all beings, including humans. Supporters of the deep ecology movement platform are committed to recognizing and respecting in word and deed the inherent worth of humans and other beings. This leads to actions that try to minimize our own impacts on ecological communities and other human cultures. In order to start the process of lessening our impacts diverse transition strategies are vital. In the area of business, for example, The Natural Step (Nattrass and Altomore 1999) is a process of lessening negative impacts and encouraging positive ones. It uses bottom up initiatives, diverse leaders, and back and forth play between workers and leaders. For more on industrial ecology and new values and directions in work and business see Hawken (1993 & 1999) and on higher value leadership see Secretan (1996.)

If one accepts the platform principles of the deep ecology movement, this involves commitment to respect the intrinsic values of richness and diversity. This in turn leads to a critique of industrial society. This critique cuts across cultural boundaries. It is presented from both within and outside of industrial societies. It is partly from such a critique that support for indigenous cultures arises within Modern societies. The gist of the critique goes like this: 

Industrial culture represents itself as the only acceptable model for progress and development. However, application of this model and its financial and technological systems to all areas of the planet results in destruction of habitat, extinction of species, and destruction of indigenous cultures. The biodiversity crisis is about loss of critical species, populations and processes that perform necessary biological functions, and it is also about loss of multitudes of other values which are good in themselves and depend on preservation of natural diversity and wild evolutionary processes. Industrial society is a monoculture in agriculture and forestry, and in every other way. Its development models construe the Earth as only raw material to be used to satisfy consumption and production to meet not only vital needs, but inflated desires whose satisfaction requires more and more consumption. Its monocultures destroy cultural and biological diversity, both of which are good in themselves and critical to our survival and flourishing. The older industrial development models are now superseded by the ecological approaches referred to in this paper. (See websites listed below.)

If we do not accept the Industrial development model, what then? Endorsing the deep ecology platform principles might lead us to study the ecosophies of aboriginal and indigenous people so as to learn from them values and practices that can help us to dwell wisely in neighboring places. We also can learn from the wisdom of our places and the many beings who inhabit them. At the same time, the ecocentric values implied by the platform lead us to recognize that all human cultures have a mutual interest in seeing Earth and its diversity continue for our sake, for its own sake and because we love it. Most want to flourish and realize themselves in harmony with other beings and cultures. How can we better develop common understandings that enable us to work with civility toward harmony with other cultures, creatures and beings? The deep ecology movement platform principles are guides in this direction. Respect for diversity leads us to recognize the forms of ecological wisdom that grow out of specific places and contexts. Supporters of the deep ecology movement embrace place-specific, ecological wisdom, and vernacular technology practices. No one philosophy and technology is applicable to the whole planet.  Diversity on every level is good!

In the West there is a renewal of Christian practices that support ecotheology based on a reverential spirit for Creation. The ferment of this with the new ecocentric paradigms--influenced by field ecology and leading edge science--has led writers like Thomas Berry (1988) to begin fashioning a "new story" as a basis for Western initiatives in creating an ecologically wise and harmonious society. All of these efforts can be seen as compatible with support for the platform principles of the deep ecology movement, with perhaps some slight modifications. 

Bioregionalism (see The Planet Drum, and also Sale 1985) is an activist form of support for the deep ecology movement. The Wildlands Project, The Arne Naess Selected Works Project, the Ecoagriculture Movement, the Ecoforestry Institute and Institute for Deep Ecology education programs, and the Ecostery Foundation are a few examples of applications of deep ecology movement principles to work in support of biodiversity, preservation of wildness and ecological restoration. Other deep efforts include Ecopsychology (Roszak, et al 1995), The Natural Step, the Turning Point Project, the project to measure our ecological footprint (Rees and Wackernagel 1996), and Redefining Progress and its measures by means of a General Progress Index or GPI.

For specific applications to Forestry see Drengson and Taylor (1997). For examples of how Buddhist thought and practice have influenced some Western ecosophies see the works of Joanna Macy (1991) and Gary Snyder (1990). For applications and critiques from Third World perspectives see the writings of Vandana Shiva (1993) and Helena Norberg-Hodge (1991). On trade, the global economy and relocalization see Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith (1996). For more on natural capitalism and industrial ecology see Paul Hawken, Amory and Hunter Lovins (1999). To learn more about ecophilosophy and the movement to deep and diverse values check out the illustrative (not exhaustive) sample of references and websites listed below.

References

Abrams, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Language and Perception in a More-than-Human World. New York, Pantheon Books.

Berry, Thomas. 1988. Dream of the Earth. San Francisco, Sierra Books.

Bowers, C.A. 1993. Education, Cultural Myths and the Ecological Crisis: Toward Deep Changes. Albany, SUNY Press.

Devall, Bill. Editor. 1994. Clearcut: The Tragedy of Industrial Forestry. San Francisco, Earth Island Press.

Devall, Bill. 1988. Simple in Means, Rich in Ends: Practicing Deep Ecology. Salt Lake City,
Gibb Smith.

Devall, Bill & George Sessions. 1985. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered. Salt Lake City, Peregrine Smith.

Drengson, Alan and Yuichi Inoue, Editors. 1995. The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology. Berkeley, North Atlantic Publishers. (This book has been revised and translated for
publication in Japanese.)

Drengson, Alan. 1995. The Practice of Technology: Exploring Technology, Ecophilosophy, and Spiritual Disciplines for Vital Links. Albany, SUNY Press.

Drengson, Alan & Duncan Taylor, Editors. 1997. Ecoforestry: The Art and Science of Sustainable Forest Use. Gabriola Island, New Society Publishers.

Fox, Matthew. 1988. The Coming of the Cosmic Christ. San Francisco, Harper and Row.

Fox, Warwick. 1990. Toward a Transpersonal Ecology. Boston, Shambhala.

Hawken, Paul. 1993. The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability. New York, Haper Collins.

Hawken, Paul, and Amory and L. Hunter Lovins. 1999. Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. Boston, Little, Brown.

Henderson, Bob. 1997. “Friluftsliv”. The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, Vol 14, No. 2, Spring 97, p. 93-94.

Jackson, Wes. 1994. Becoming Native to this Place. Lexington, University of Kentucky.

Lauck, Joanne Elizabeth. 1998. The Voice of the Infinite in the Small: Revisioning the Insect-Human Connection. Mill Spring, NC, Swan and Raven Press.

LaChapell, Dolores. 1988. Sacred Sex, Sacred Land: Concerning Deep Ecology and Celebrating Life. Silverton, CO. Finn Hill Arts. 

Macy, Joanna. 1991. World as Lover, World as Self. Berkeley, Parallax Press.

Mander, Jerry & E. Goldsmith. 1996. The Case Against the Global Economy: And a Turn Toward the Local. San Francisco, Sierra Books.

McLaughlin, Andrew. 1993. Regarding Nature: Industrialism and Deep Ecology. Albany, SUNY Press.

Naess, Arne. 1953. Interpretation and Preciseness. Oslo, Dybwad.

Naess, Arne. 1974. Gandhi and Group Conflict. Oslo, Universitets-Forlaget.

Naess, Arne. 1991. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle. London, Cambridge.

Naess, Arne. 2000. Selected Works of Arne Naess. In English, edited by Harold Glasser. Amsterdam, Klewer. Forthcoming in approximately 10 volumes.

Nattrass, B. & M. Altomare. 1999. The Natural Step for Business and the Evolutionary Corporation. Gabriola Island, New Society Publishers.

Norberg-Hodge, Helena. 1991. Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh. San Francisco, Sierra Books.

Orr, David. 1992. Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Post Modern World. Albany, SUNY Press.

Rees, Bill & Mathis Wackernagel. 1996. Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth. Gabriola Island, New Society Publishers.

Roszak, T., Gomes, M.E. & Kanner, A.D. 1995. Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. San Francisco, Sierra Books.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. 1985. Dwellers on the Land: The Bioregional Vision. San Francisco, Sierra Club Books.

Secretan, Lance. 1996. Reclaiming Higher Ground: Creating Organizations that Inspire the Soul. Toronto, Macmillan.

Sessions, George, Editor. 1995. Deep Ecology for the 21st Century. Boston, Shambhala.

Shiva, Vandana. 1993. Monocultures of the Mind: Biodiversity, Biotechnology and the Third World. Penong, Third World Publishing.

Snyder, Gary. 1990. The Practice of the Wild. Berkeley, North Point Press. 

Spretnak, Charlene. 1997. The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World. Reading MA, Addison-Wesley.
 

Some Websites relevant to the deep ecology movement
From cross-cultural, ultimate philosophies to specific practical actions

1. The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy is at: http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca

2. Ecoforestry information is at: http://ecoforestry.ca

3. For The Turning Point Project see: http://www.Turningpoint.org Note: Their ad campaign on changing to ecologically responsible practices is at: http://www.turnpoint.org

4. For more on international trade and globalization see the International Forum on Globalization at: http://www.ifg.org

5. The Natural Step approach to changing business practices started in Sweden. Read more at: http://www.naturalstep.org

6. For more on redefining and measuring progress, see: http://www.rprogress.org

7. In Atlantic Canada local redefining of progress is described at: http://www.gpiatlantic.org

8. Bill Devall’s website of deep ecology movement material is at: http://www.deep-ecology.net

9. Ted Mosquin’s ecocentrically oriented website is at: http://www.ecospherics.net

10. For the Wildlands Project see: http://www.twp.org

11. The Institute for Deep Ecology is at: http://www.deep-ecology.org

12. The Earth Institute is at: http://www.nwei.org

13. The Land Institute is at: http://www.landinst_development.midkan.net

14. Ecopsychology is located at: http://www.isis.csuhayward.edu

15. For more on natural capitalism see: http://www.naturalcapitalism.org
 
 

Critical theory

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Critical theory is the examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism. This has led to the very literal use of 'critical theory' as an umbrella term to describe theoretical critique.

Critical theory, in the sociological context, refers to a style of Marxist theory with a tendency to engage with non-Marxist influences (for instance the work of Nietzsche and Freud).^[1] This tendency has been referred to pejoratively by stricter Marxists as 'revisionism'. Modern critical theory arose from a trajectory extending from the nonpositivist sociology of Weber and Simmel, the neo-Marxist theory of Lukács and Gramsci, toward the milieu associated with Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. It is with the so-called 'Frankfurt School' of theorists that the term is most commonly associated: Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Jürgen Habermas. With the latter, critical theory shed further its roots in German Idealism and moved closer to American Pragmatism. The theoretical concern for a cultural 'superstructure' derived from a material 'base' often remains as the only central Marxist tenet in contemporary critical theory.^[2]

Contents [hide] 1 Two primary definitions 2 In social theory 2.1 Postmodern critical theory 2.2 Critical ethnography 3 In literary criticism 4 Language and construction 4.1 Language and communication 4.2 Construction 5 See also 5.1 Lists 5.2 Related subjects 5.3 Journals related and/or dedicated to Critical Theory 6 Footnotes 7 References 8 External links

Two primary definitions

The two meanings of critical theory—from different intellectual traditions associated with the meaning of criticism and critique—derive ultimately from the Greek word kritikos meaning judgment or discernment, and in their present forms go back to the 18th century. While they can be considered completely independent intellectual pursuits, increasingly scholars are interested in the areas of critique where the two overlap.

To use an epistemological distinction introduced by Jürgen Habermas in Erkenntnis und Interesse [1968] (Knowledge and Human Interests), critical theory in literary studies is ultimately a form of hermeneutics, i.e. knowledge via interpretation to understand the meaning of human texts and symbolic expressions -- including the interpretation of texts which are themselves implicitly or explicitly the interpretation of other texts. Critical social theory is, in contrast, a form of self-reflective knowledge involving both understanding and theoretical explanation to reduce entrapment in systems of domination or dependence, obeying the emancipatory interest in expanding the scope of autonomy and reducing the scope of domination.

From this perspective, much literary critical theory, since it is focused on interpretation and explanation rather than on social transformation, would be regarded as positivistic or traditional rather than critical theory in the Kantian or Marxian sense. Critical theory in literature and the humanities in general does not necessarily involve a normative dimension, whereas critical social theory does, either through criticizing society from some general theory of values, norms, or "oughts," or through criticizing it in terms of its own espoused values.

In social theory

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Critical theory was first defined by Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School of sociology in his 1937 essay Traditional and Critical Theory: Critical theory is a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it. Horkheimer wanted to distinguish critical theory as a radical, emancipatory form of Marxian theory, critiquing both the model of science put forward by logical positivism and what he and his colleagues saw as the covert positivism and authoritarianism of orthodox Marxism and Communism. Core concepts are: (1) That critical social theory should be directed at the totality of society in its historical specificity (i.e. how it came to be configured at a specific point in time), and (2) That critical theory should improve understanding of society by integrating all the major social sciences, including geography, economics, sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology.

This version of "critical" theory derives from Kant's (18th-century) and Marx's (19th Century) use of the term "critique", as in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Marx's concept that his work Das Kapital (Capital) forms a "critique of political economy". For Kant's transcendental idealism, "critique" means examining and establishing the limits of the validity of a faculty, type, or body of knowledge, especially through accounting for the limitations imposed by the fundamental, irreducible concepts in use in that knowledge system. Early on, Kant's notion associated critique with the disestablishment of false, unprovable, or dogmatic philosophical, social, and political beliefs, because Kant's critique of reason involved the critique of dogmatic theological and metaphysical ideas and was intertwined with the enhancement of ethical autonomy and the Enlightenment critique of superstition and irrational authority. Marx explicitly developed this notion into the critique of ideology and linked it with the practice of social revolution, as in the famous 11th of his "Theses on Feuerbach," "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in certain ways; the point is to change it".^[3]

One of the distinguishing characteristics of critical theory, as Adorno and Horkheimer elaborated in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), is a certain ambivalence concerning the ultimate source or foundation of social domination, an ambivalence which gave rise to the “pessimism” of the new critical theory over the possibility of human emancipation and freedom.^[4] This ambivalence was rooted, of course, in the historical circumstances in which the work was originally produced, in particular, the rise of National Socialism, state capitalism, and mass culture as entirely new forms of social domination that could not be adequately explained within the terms of traditional Marxist sociology.^[5] For Adorno and Horkheimer state intervention in the economy had effectively abolished the tension in capitalism between the "relations of production" and "material productive forces of society," a tension which, according to traditional critical theory, constituted the primary contradiction within capitalism. The market (as an "unconscious" mechanism for the distribution of goods) and private property had been replaced by centralized planning and socialized ownership of the means of production.^[6] Yet, contrary to Marx’s famous prediction in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, this shift did not lead to "an era of social revolution," but rather to fascism and totalitarianism. As such, critical theory was left, in Jürgen Habermas’ words, without "anything in reserve to which it might appeal; and when the forces of production enter into a baneful symbiosis with the relations of production that they were supposed to blow wide open, there is no longer any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope."^[7] For Adorno and Horkheimer, this posed the problem of how to account for the apparent persistence of domination in the absence of the very contradiction that, according to traditional critical theory, was the source of domination itself.

In the 1960s, Jürgen Habermas raised the epistemological discussion to a new level in his Knowledge and Human Interests, by identifying critical knowledge as based on principles that differentiated it either from the natural sciences or the humanities, through its orientation to self-reflection and emancipation. Though unsatisfied with Adorno and Horkeimer's thought presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Habermas shares the view that, in the form of instrumental rationality, the era of modernity marks a move away from the liberation of enlightenment and toward a new form of enslavement.^[8] His ideas regarding the relationship between modernity and rationalization are in this sense strongly influenced by Max Weber. Habermas dissolved further the elements of critical theory derived from Hegelian German Idealism, though his thought remains broadly Marxist in its epistemological approach. Perhaps his two most influential ideas are the concepts of the public sphere and communicative action; the latter arriving partly as a reaction to new post-structural or so-called 'post-modern' challenges to the discourse of modernity. Habermas engaged in regular correspondence with Richard Rorty and a strong sense of philosophical pragmatism may be felt in his theory; thought which frequently traverses the boundaries between sociology and philosophy.

Postmodern critical theory

While modernist critical theory (as described above) concerns itself with “forms of authority and injustice that accompanied the evolution of industrial and corporate capitalism as a political-economic system,” postmodern critical theory politicizes social problems “by situating them in historical and cultural contexts, to implicate themselves in the process of collecting and analyzing data, and to relativize their findings” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 52). Meaning itself is seen as unstable due to the rapid transformation in social structures and as a result the focus of research is centered on local manifestations rather than broad generalizations.

Postmodern critical research is also characterized by what is called, the crisis of representation, which rejects the idea that a researcher’s work is considered an “objective depiction of a stable other” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 53). Instead, in their research and writing, many postmodern scholars have adopted “alternatives that encourage reflection about the ‘politics and poetics’ of their work. In these accounts, the embodied, collaborative, dialogic, and improvisational aspects of qualitative research are clarified” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 53). For an example of postmodern critical work, see Rolling’s piece, entitled Secular Blasphemy: Utter(ed) Transgressions Against Names and Fathers in the Postmodern Era (2008).

Often, the term 'critical theory' is appropriated when an author (perhaps most notably Michel Foucault) works within sociological terms yet attacks the social or human sciences (thus attempting to remain 'outside' those frames of enquiry). Jean Baudrillard has also been described as a critical theorist to the extent that he was an unconventional and critical sociologist; this appropriation is similarly casual, holding little or no relation to the Frankfurt School.

Critical ethnography

Critical ethnography is "a type of reflection that examines culture, knowledge, and action...Critical ethnographers describe, analyze, and open to scrutiny otherwise hidden agendas, power centers, and assumptions that inhibit, repress, and constrain" (Thomas, 1993, pp. 2–3). While "conventional ethnography" "describes what is", critical ethnography "asks what could be"….Conventional ethnographers study culture for the purposes of describing it; critical ethnographers do so to change it" (Thomas, 1993, p. 4).

In literary criticism

The second meaning of critical theory is that of theory used in literary criticism ("critical theory") and in the analysis and understanding of literature. This is discussed in greater detail under literary theory. This form of critical theory is not necessarily oriented toward radical social change or even toward the analysis of society, but instead specializes on the analysis of texts. It originated among literary scholars and in the discipline of literature in the 1960s and 1970s, and has really only come into broad use since the 1980s, especially as theory used in literary studies has increasingly been influenced by European philosophy and social theory.

This version of "critical" theory derives from the notion of literary criticism as establishing and enhancing the understanding and evaluation of literature in the search for truth. Some consider literary theory merely an aesthetic concern, as articulated, for example, in Joseph Addison's notion of a critic as one who helps understand and interpret literary works: "A true critic ought to dwell rather upon excellencies than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation."^[9] This notion of criticism ultimately goes back to Aristotle's Poetics as a theory of literature.

From the literary side, starting in the 1960s literary scholars, reacting especially against the New Criticism of the previous decades, which tried to analyze literary texts purely internally, began to incorporate into their analyses and interpretations of literary works initially semiotic, linguistic, and interpretive theory, then structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and deconstruction as well as Continental philosophy, especially phenomenology and hermeneutics, and critical social theory and various other forms of neo-Marxian theory.

Thus literary criticism became highly theoretical and some of those practicing it began referring to the theoretical dimension of their work as "critical theory", i.e. philosophically inspired theory of literary criticism. And thus incidentally critical theory in the sociological sense also became, especially among literary scholars of left-wing sympathies, one of a number of influences upon and streams within critical theory in the literary sense.

Furthermore, along with the expansion of the mass media and mass/popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s and the blending of social and cultural criticism and literary criticism, the methods of both kinds of critical theory sometimes intertwined in the analysis of phenomena of popular culture, as in the emerging field of cultural studies, in which concepts deriving from Marxian theory, post-structuralism, semiology, psychoanalysis and feminist theory would be found in the same interpretive work. Both strands were often present in the various modalities of postmodern theory.

Language and construction

The two points at which there is the greatest overlap or mutual impingement of the two versions of critical theory are in their interrelated foci on language, symbolism, and communication and in their focus on construction.

Language and communication

From the 1960s and 1970s onward, language, symbolism, text, and meaning became foundational to theory in the humanities and social sciences, through the short-term and long-term influences of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ferdinand de Saussure, George Herbert Mead, Noam Chomsky, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and other thinkers in the traditions of linguistic and analytic philosophy, structural linguistics, symbolic interactionism, hermeneutics, semiology, linguistically oriented psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan, Alfred Lorenzer), and deconstruction. When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Jürgen Habermas also redefined critical social theory as a theory of communication, i.e. communicative competence and communicative rationality on the one hand, distorted communication on the other, the two versions of critical theory began to overlap or intertwine to a much greater degree than before.

Construction

Both versions of critical theory have focused on the processes of synthesis, production, or construction by which the phenomena and objects of human communication, culture, and political consciousness come about. Whether it is through the universal pragmatic principles through which mutual understanding is generated (Habermas), the semiotic rules by which objects of daily usage or of fashion obtain their meanings (Barthes), the psychological processes by which the phenomena of everyday consciousness are generated (psychoanalytic thinkers), the episteme that underlies our cognitive formations (Foucault), and so on, there is a common interest in the processes (often of a linguistic or symbolic kind) that give rise to observable phenomena. Here there is significant mutual influence among aspects of the different versions of critical theory. Ultimately this emphasis on production and construction goes back to the revolution wrought by Kant in philosophy, namely his focus in the Critique of Pure Reason on synthesis according to rules as the fundamental activity of the mind that creates the order of our experience.

See also

	Book:Critical theory
Books are collections of articles which can be downloaded or ordered in print.

Lists

• Information criticism
• List of major critical theorists
• List of works in critical theory

Related subjects

• American Studies in Britain
• Comparative Literature
• Continental philosophy
• Critique of technology
• Cultural studies
• Culture theory
• Critical management studies
• Literary theory
• Perestroika Movement (political science)
• Political philosophy
• Social criticism
• Cultural Marxism
• Hermeneutics
• Critical ethnography
• Critical pedagogy
• Critical philosophy
• Critical legal studies

Journals related and/or dedicated to Critical Theory

• Constellations
• Representations
• Critical Inquiry
• Telos
• Theory and Society
• Law & Critique

Footnotes

1. ^ Outhwaite, William. 1988. Habermas: Key Contemporary Thinkers 2nd Edition (2009). p5. ISBN: 9780745643281
2. ^ Outhwaite, William. 1988. Habermas: Key Contemporary Thinkers 2nd Edition (2009), p.5-8 (ISBN: 9780745643281)
3. ^ "Theses on Feuerbach". Marxists Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm. Retrieved 2008-08-22. 
4. ^ Adorno, T. W., with Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. 242.
5. ^ "Critical Theory was initially developed in Horkheimer’s circle to think through political disappointments at the absence of revolution in the West, the development of Stalinism in Soviet Russia, and the victory of fascism in Germany. It was supposed to explain mistaken Marxist prognoses, but without breaking Marxist intentions." "The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Horkheimer and Adorno." in Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. 116. Also, see Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory, trans. Benjamin Gregg (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1985).
6. ^ "[G]one are the objective laws of the market which ruled in the actions of the entrepreneurs and tended toward catastrophe. Instead the conscious decision of the managing directors executes as results (which are more obligatory than the blindest price-mechanisms) the old law of value and hence the destiny of capitalism." Dialectic of Enlightenment. p. 38.
7. ^ "The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment," p. 118.
8. ^ Outhwaite, William. 1988. Habermas: Key Contemporary Thinkers 2nd Edition (2009). p6. ISBN: 9780745643281
9. ^ Addison, Joseph (1712-02-02). "Literary Criticism". Spectator 291. http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/fowlerjh/chap20.htm. Retrieved 2008-08-22. 

References

• An accessible primer for the literary aspect of critical theory is Jonathan Culler's Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction ISBN 0-19-285383-X
• Another short introductory volume with illustrations: "Introducing Critical Theory" Stuart Sim & Borin Van Loon, 2001. ISBN 1-84046-264-7
• A survey of and introduction to the current state of critical social theory is Craig Calhoun's Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference (Blackwell, 1995) ISBN 1-55786-288-5
• Problematizing Global Knowledge. Theory, Culture & Society. Vol. 23 (2–3). (Sage, 2006) ISSN 0263-2764
• Raymond GeussThe Idea of a Critical Theory. Habermas and the Frankfurt School. (Cambridge University Press,1981) ISBN 0-521-28422-8
• Charles Arthur Willard Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy. University of Chicago Press. 1996.
• Charles Arthur Willard, A Theory of Argumentation. University of Alabama Press. 1989.
• Charles Arthur Willard, Argumentation and the Social Grounds of Knowledge. University of Alabama Press. 1982.
• Harry Dahms (ed.) No Social Science Without Critical Theory. Volume 25 of Current Perspectives in Social Theory (Emerald/JAI, 2008).
• Charmaz, K. (1995). Between positivism and postmodernism: Implications for methods. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 17, 43–72.
• Conquergood, D. (1991). Rethinking ethnography: Towards a critical cultural politics. Communication Monographs, 58, 179–194.
• Lindlof, T. R., & Taylor, B. C. (2002). Qualitative Communication Research Methods, 2nd Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• An example of critical postmodern work is Rolling, Jr., J. H. (2008). Secular blasphemy: Utter(ed) transgressions against names and fathers in the postmodern era. Qualitative Inquiry, 14, 926–948.
• Thomas, Jim (1993). Doing Critical Ethnography. London, New York (NY): Sage 1993, pp. 1–5 & 17–25
• An example of critical qualitative research is Tracy, S. J. (2000). Becoming a character for commerce: Emotion labor, self subordination and discursive construction of identity in a total institution. Management Communication Quarterly, 14, 90–128.
• Luca Corchia, La logica dei processi culturali. Jürgen Habermas tra filosofia e sociologia, Genova, Edizioni ECIG, 2010, ISBN 978-88-7544-195-1.

External links

• Critical Theory, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• "Death is Not the End" N+1 magazine's short history of academic critical theory.
• Critical Legal Thinking A Critical Legal Studies website which uses critical theory in an analysis of law and politics.

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