Reason and Critique. Keys to Understanding Modernity

Some 20th-century philosophers emphasized “critique” as a key to understanding the practical and theoretical issues of the modern world. They also tried to establish the conditions for a transformative critique of what exists. In his famous essays of the 1930s, for example, Horkheimer presents critical theory as a multidisciplinary project and analysis that uncovers the internal and external contradictions caused by the market economy on which the modern world is based, with a view to sketching out a new society composed of free individuals. Critical theory thus challenges the established order and aims to fight against it: it pits against the “traditional theory”, which dates back to the origins of modern thought, a new model of scientificity going beyond dualisms and, in particular, the separation between subject and object. While differing from one another, these conceptions and practices of critique, which at times are clearly under the sign of Marx, show, firstly, that from the 15th century onwards, a system of discipline was being prepared with the aim of increasing human production and, secondly, that it is impossible to understand the development of modern thought and culture without analysing its relationship with that of its material basis, namely the mechanisms of power and the relations of production that characterise capitalist societies. How can modern thought, then, be reread on the basis of an analysis of the effects of power in relation to a rationality that has been historically and geographically defined in the West since the 15th century? To what extent can the concept and practice of “critique” be seen as a key to understanding modernity? Can we detect, as André Tosel suggests, in the long discourse of modernity – from Descartes, maybe even Luther –, a persistent self-critique and a self-destructive movement in which each critical gesture replaces previous ones by proposing a reading key that better corresponds to the changing problems of history and society? Should these approaches be carefully distinguished according to the principle on which they are based? Do certain (more or less) radical critical postures of the 20th century unquestionably create a profound break with the guidelines of modern thought (which, in the light of historical reconstructions by authors such as Cousin, Hegel, Feuerbach, go back to Bacon and Descartes) so that a clear boundary can be drawn between one and the other (for example, between traditional theory and critical theory, as Horkheimer argues)? Or are they in continuity with the critical approaches of modern philosophies? How does critical theory fit into the long discourse of modernity? From these problems it is necessary to identify the theoretical nodes of the “critical” interpretation of the modern era, an interpretation that highlights the ambiguity of the notion of progress, the intertwining of reason with power and the progressive decline of theoretical consciousness.