§ 01 A bi-pedal philosophy

The concept of critique, like all commonly used terms, is sensitive to the fickle and levelling pressures of usage by our ever-challenged human understanding. Before you know it, the word means both everything and nothing. It makes sense therefore, when intending to use the word thoughtfully, to set out a compass and, taking the magnetic north as your bearing, find the true north to set your own course. That is what I propose to do.

The word critique comes via the Latin from the Greek κριτική (kritikē), denoting our capacity for judgment.¹ It became famous in Immanuel Kant’s three Critiques through which he examined the limitations of human understanding to make assertions and to identify the conditional validity of these assertions. In this way, space and time, rather than being thought of primarily as things ‘out there’ in the ‘real world’ we think about, became concepts of our world of thought, of the human understanding with which human being tries to grasp its relationship to its environment without precisely or fully knowable equivalents in the world it thinks about. With that, our apparent confidence with regard to the external reality of space, time and the rest, had evaporated; there appeared to be no hard facts that weren’t somehow ‘infected’ by the way we thought about them. The deep chasm between reality, the world we think about, and our representations of it in concepts, the world of thought, was for the first time described so thoroughly that it became clear that we would do well to take a closer look at our capacity for representing the world and its workings.

For what it’s worth I shall continue on this path and propose a dual approach to thinking about the world we think about, using two core concepts: analysis and critique. I shall then propose that the concepts of beauty, truth, and goodness (the traditional triad of unum, verum, bonum of scholastic philosophy but then from a strictly pragmaticist, practical and very much non-nostalgic viewpoint, can serve us well to bridge the gap between the two and thus arrive at good (design) decisions. I shall end with a reflection on Architectural Criticism as an important form of criticism that should interest us all.

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This is from the online etymology dictionary: Critique (n.) “critical examination or review of the merits of something,” 1702, restored French spelling of 17c. critick “art of criticism” (see critic), ultimately from Greek kritikē tekhnē “the critical art.” As a verb, “to write or deliver a critique,” 1751.Critic (n.) formerly critick, 1580s, “one who passes judgment, person skilled in judging merit in some particular class of things,” from French critique (14c.), from Latin criticus “a judge, a censor, an estimator,” also “grammarian who detects spurious passages in literary work,” from Greek kritikos “able to make judgments,” from krinein “to separate, decide” (from PIE root *krei- “to sieve,” thus “discriminate, distinguish”). The meaning “one who judges merits of books, plays, etc.” is from c. 1600. The English word always has had overtones of “censurer, faultfinder, one who judges severely.” ↩︎