§ 03 Critique, the activity of subjectification
The activity of critique will be reserved for subjectifying moves in thought, placing ourselves emphatically among the things described analytically and evaluating our relationship with them in terms of use and virtue.
The activity of critique will look at the validity and limitations of judgments made in placing human being in its environment with reference to use in its widest sense and values as expressed or labelled by ‘the good’. We will know that we are doing this activity well, whenever our judgments regarding these relationships help us formulate sensible aims and furnish theoretical means to achieve them well. If we are successful, our statements will have the value of goodness and lead us to the good.
Placing human being in the world with reference to use changes that world from an objectified space in which wholes and their parts behave in ways as a result of the properties they exhibit regardless of our interest in them, to a highly charged, almost magical subjective space organized conically around the perspective of human beings scouring the world for qualities that can be used to their benefit and advantage. In this kind of space, objects are placed and sequenced relative to an observing eye, a listening ear, a smelling nose and a sensitive skin, all looking for use value.
These two ways of organizing space allow us to distinguish two activities, one looking at the world and its workings dispassionately (that is objectively) and the other looking at our own (very passionate) use-informed relationship with the world. Using the words analysis and critique for these two activities makes sense as the meaning and etymology of both do not contradict such a use. In fact, they seem to lead to exactly this distinction. Analysis asks what there is and how it works, it is fundamentally ontological and has discovered its most promising methods in science, and critique asks how that matters to us in whatever way it might.
With critique we are expressly not concerned with making analytical descriptions of existential or ontological values such as expressed in the sentence ‘there is a stone’ or with qualifications of that existence in the form of ‘the stone is red’. Instead, we are interested in using such values. The values we are concerned with in critique are values expressing our relationship to things in use, as exemplified in sentences such as ‘the stone is good to build a wall with’. Here the stone accords or harmonizes in its shape, size, material properties (such as strength) as well as its visual and haptic qualities, with a sense of purpose; one moreover that we can fulfil because of our knowledge, skills, and attitude regarding the making of walls and the selection or dressing of stones. Critique concerns itself with the description of use values and thus allows the formulation of prescriptive statements as in ‘you ought to build a wall with that kind of stone’. It concerns itself with judgment in terms of use and in terms of virtue, thereby placing human being in its environment as a way of being that matters to itself, to others and to the environment at large.
The concept of harmony plays an important role in this essay and so I will also quickly tell its story. The word harmony comes from the Greek Ἁρμονία (harmonía), which means ‘fitting’ as well as ‘agreement’ and is derived from the verb ἁρμόζω (harmozo) ‘to fit’, ‘to connect’, a word from the construction industry with which one can express satisfaction regarding a well-made joint or solid truss. As Viollet le Duc wrote in his Entretiens sur l’architecture:
“A beautiful construction does not lie in the perfections acquired by a highly advanced civilization or industry but in the judicious use of materials and resources available to the builder.”1
My favourite examples of two expert ‘fitters’, already mentioned in the introductory story, are the Λιθοδόμος (lithodomos) and the Λιθολόγος (lithologos), the two kinds of mason, one that dresses stones to make them fit together, as in walls made of ashlar masonry, and one that seeks stones of the right shape so as to puzzle them together to form dry-stone walls. Both the procrustean method of ashlar masonry and the heuristic method of puzzling stones together to make dry-stone Cyclopean walls have something rather satisfying about them but lead to very different kinds of wall, each with their own kind of beauty when made well, but both relying on the notion of ‘fitting’.
Sentences such as ‘the stone is beautiful’, where an aspect of our experience of the stone accords with a conceptually held position with which it is deemed in harmony, are special cases. In such sentences analysis and critique meet and form a relationship whereby the analytical description and the critical evaluation become engaged. With the judgments of truth and beauty things begin to fit in terms of coherence and consistency, with the judgment of virtue they begin to do so for a purpose.
In this essay, I will attempt to argue that the judgment ‘the stone is beautiful’ is both an analytical judgment because it is objectifiable: it is descriptive of what something is and how its parts harmonize and fit together in a working relationship, and it is also a critical judgment, that is, it sets the thing so judged up for admiration and thereby for the making of prescriptive statements in the attempt to achieve some good. Beauty is where analysis and critique meet; beauty is how truth and goodness communicate with each other through the notions of coherence, fittingness, and consistency.
We shall see how the analytical judgment of beauty, together with alethic judgment regarding the truth of whatever is said, together form a tipping point whereby a thing or relation is judged true and beautiful and in this way made available by our descriptive understanding to our prescriptive or practical desire. The conceptual constructs of analysis ‘offer themselves’ to human use as an affordance and make it possible to arrive at a sound judgment regarding use and virtue. In this way we are able to say that alethic judgments and aesthetic judgments when deployed, become the pre-condition for what we deem to be good use on the basis of judgments of virtue.
I let the above account stand as the foundation for this essay and the project I am concerned with in general. Practicing critique is the activity of legitimately assigning and, if necessary, reforming certain values and norms by which human being places itself in its environment emphatically as a using subject.
Where ‘critique’ will stand for the subjectifying moves in the language game, the word ‘analysis’ will stand for the objectifying moves in that same game
- Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Entretiens sur l’architecture, vol. 1 (Bruxelles, P. Mardaga 1863) ↩︎