Analysis and Critique, Why separate if you can distinguish?

With the concepts of analysis and critique, we have grasped two easily distinguishable as well as fundamental philosophical activities that every discipline needs in order to arrive at itself: things need to be understood, in order to be made useful.¹

Things need to be understood well in order to be made properly and sustainably useful.

Analysis and critique are necessary activities for the preparation and evaluation of any intentional action, including that of design and the making of properly grounded design decisions.

Everything is shaped in our thinking through analysis and placed in relation to us by critique.

Whenever anyone practicing any discipline, performs these activities—and we all do—we can say that they are doing the philosophy bit of their discipline.

I argue that analysis, rigorously applied, leads to considered judgments of truth and beauty, and that thorough critique held against the light of various ethical criteria of judgment leads to wanting good things and good use of them.

I further argue that it is useful to properly distinguish analysis and critique in this way, but also to suggest that the one cannot exist without the other. They cannot be separated in any way.

Theirs is a purely conceptual or virtual separation, opportunistic if you like, whilst in our actual doings, the activities work in tandem and must always be related, much like the way that human beings can be distinguished from their environment but not separated from it.

The distinction between human being and its environment may well be objectifiable, useful, and good with regard to certain uses, but their separation would be fatal to the one, and probably a bit of a relief to the other.

Having distinguished them, we might be tempted to say that analysis precedes critique, or that the one is more valuable than the other in some way, but that is neither accurate, desirable, or even practicably possible.

Analysis and critique form an insistent yin and yang, the one needing the activities of the other to correct itself. Only in the proper pursuit of both do we find what freedom we have to learn and so act in harmony with well-considered wishes.

The reason for this is that the world presents itself to human being as it is busy accommodating itself in it.

The world is full of information, but our understanding of that information is at best incomplete, partial, biassed, faulty, and never fully coherent or fully consistent.

Moreover, we have to situate ourselves as we are busy building an understanding of our situation. The value of their proper distinction is that their working together can be better organized, leading to clearer thinking.

Depending on which leg we put forward first, the other will have to make the next move, or we lose balance. We have to go to considerable lengths and effort to carefully conceptualise the world in such a way that we can speak of a properly conducted objectification of the world, an analysis in which even human being is itself neatly—without pain, discrimination, violation, or humiliation—objectified with regard to its role in the dynamic constellation of wholes and their working parts with which we interfere by living our everyday lives.

In the same way critique is dependent upon good, reliable analysis in order to accommodate ourselves intelligently, intelligibly, comfortably, securely, and enjoyably.

Both activities come loaded with ready assumptions, prejudices as well as the complications of fossilised understanding, firmly embedded in the acculturated constructions of the habits and traditions in thought with which we are brought up.

Part of the efforts of both analysis and critique is to undo ourselves of unfortunate and unhelpful descriptions and prescriptions and so learn to exercise whatever autonomy we have.

1. This essay was first published in Jacob Voorthuis, Theoria, use, intention & design, a philosophical reckoning; Analysis & Critique: Gardening in the metaphysics of the beautiful, the true, and the good, AHT, Tu/e (2024) ↩︎

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