Meta-Critiquing: Critique, Hermeneutics, Theory

Abstract

This chapter clarifies the notion of critique by triangulating the relations between critique, hermeneutics, and theory. The aim is not to define critique; but rather to indicate the issues at stake in grasping how it has been understood in the work of Immanuel Kant and in post-Kantian thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and Gianni Vattimo. The chapter argues for the necessary reciprocity of critique and hermeneutics, especially through engaging with the work of Ricoeur, and, by way of the work of Vattimo, for a global intercultural way of thinking that is at once hermeneutic and critical. Cultures are not immutable substances; rather, Xie claims, they are necessary but fallible frameworks of epistemology and interpretation that are responsive to change and transformable. Xie concludes that the intercultural is already figured in the intracultural dynamics of critique and self-critique, and that this is by no means a Western prerogative or advantage. For any culture to become self-conscious and thus “autonomous,” it would have already encountered some (forms of) alternative thinking both within itself and in relation to other cultures.