Our cognitive power as a whole has two domains, that of the concepts of nature and that of the concept of freedom, because it legislates a priori by means of both kinds of concept. Now philosophy too divides, according to these legislations, into theoretical and practical. And yet the territory on which its domain is set up and on which it exercises its legislation is still always confined to the sum total of the objects of all possible experience, insofar as they are considered nothing more than mere phenomena, since otherwise it would be inconceivable that the understanding could legislate with regard to them. (emphasis in original)
This scheme is vulnerable to materialist refutation because the ineffability of the thing-in-itself ultimately resolves thought into mere contemplation, despite the shaping dialectical vigor that interpretation exercises on the phenomenal plane. The classic analysis here remains that of Lukács, for whom the problem of the thing-in-itself is actually the problem of capitalist reification and the consequent opaqueness of the commodity to bourgeois consciousness; and Lukács’s critique of Kant has been interestingly reworked by many more recent commentators4 Nonetheless, with Kant the notion of critique and critical thought breaks from the problematic of knowing as a merely extractive process (the necessary illusion of all philosophical realism and, indeed, precisely the “careful observation” suggested by the OED) and is resituated as the project of making visible the absolute presuppositions of any knowledge whatever. With the advent of critique and the critical in the Kantian and post-Kantian sense, theory decisively loses its innocence; henceforth any mode of thought that declines to interrogate its own presuppositions and to engage its own role in the construction of the objects of its own knowledge may appropriately be stigmatized with the adjective precritical. Precritical theory has certainly continued to exist to this day, but there is a real sense in which it represents a regression to an intellectual prehistory that ought to have been permanently transcended.
And yet to speak of an intellectual prehistory that “ought” to have been transcended is, in itself, inadequate; just as it is inadequate to describe the moment of critical theory as Kantian and post-Kantian, if such a description is taken to imply that what is solely or mainly at stake are the abstract narratives of intellectual history. A fully concrete historicization of the critical would in the end probably involve nothing less than the reconstruction of modernity itself (using that term both in the conventional sense of the decisively postmedieval and imperialist phase of Western civilization but also in Habermas’s sense of a project that remains “incomplete” even in our own “postmodern” era).5 Among the extremely various historical determinants of the critical moment, however, there are at least two that have special relevance to the particular interests of this essay.
One is the triumph of the natural sciences. It is well known that science was an explicitly pressing issue for Kant himself, who in many ways counts as the last major speculative philosopher for whom the ancient link between philosophy and science remains fully vital: the entire edifice of Kant’s critical philosophy rests on the presupposition that the results obtained by natural science are valid, though in ways that pre-Kantian philosophy had not succeeded in formulating with precision. But the relevance of science to the advent of critique has a significance far wider than that particular bit of intellectual “influence.” For science—even though many of its practitioners have historically thought their way forward in empiricist and, later, specifically positivist terms—possesses a fundamentally critical, nonempiricist charge in its ceaseless questioning of the given, in its refusal to repose in any material or intellectual status quo. By the late eighteenth century the practical transformations wrought by the scientific project, which had been blessed by official sanction a century earlier in England through the formation of the Royal Society, had become sufficiently urgent to help stimulate and in turn be stimulated by critical theory in the modern sense—theory, that is, engaged in fundamental interrogation and self-interrogation, theory decisively free of conservative epistemological canons of tradition, appearance, or logic in the merely formal sense.
Nor is textual evidence of the link between the natural sciences and critical thought to be located only in academic philosophy such as Kant’s. In the current context it is especially pertinent to recall that hardly more than a generation after the appearance of Critique of Judgement came Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which has not only been listed in many genealogies of the genre as the first science-fiction novel (a context in which we shall later return to it) but which also probably counts as the first important work of fiction to engage modern science seriously and to feature a scientist as its protagonist.6 Indeed, the intellectual significance of Frankenstein is actually underscored by consideration of an obvious but superficial objection to its status as science fiction, in the sense of fiction in some way allied to science: namely, that its ethical stance is ultimately conservative and hostile to science. So it is: but such hostility by no means cancels the epistemological radicalism of the novel, its sense that the most fundamental of material and intellectual categories—condensed into the problem of life itself—can no longer be taken for granted but are now somehow up for grabs and can be challenged and rethought. Victor Frankenstein’s experiment is monstrous, to be sure, but its viability amounts to intellectual revolution, to an awareness that what the text itself might designate a moment of “Promethean” critical thought is at hand.
A convenient literary index of the hegemony that science attained sometime between the turn of the eighteenth century and that of the nineteenth is the contrast of Mary Shelley’s hostility to science with that of Swift in book 3 of Gulliver’s Travels, published ninety-two years before Frankenstein. In 1726, it was still possible for a serious mind (though, admittedly, Swift’s mind was intellectually reactionary even by the standards of the time) to refuse to take science seriously, to lampoon it as a series of frivolous, self-referential games in which no authentic intellectual activity was taking place and no practical consequences were at issue.7 This attitude is inconceivable in the mental universe of Frankenstein. From Mary Shelley—perhaps from Goethe—onward, serious objections to science must be based on the assumption that the latter is not trivial but dangerous; and such a sense of danger is inseparable from the awareness that fundamental questions are at stake, questions that demand the dialectical reflexivity of critical theory in the strongest sense. Indeed, although, as we shall see, many later versions of critical theory have remained as friendly to natural science as Kant’s, it is striking that a rather post-Mary-Shelleyan unease with science is central to the most prominent instance of critical theory as a named movement: the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School (another matter to which we shall return).
In the emergence of critical thought, however, probably even more important than the rise of the physical sciences was the invention of political modernity in the French Revolution and its aftermath. Here, of course, there is little question of direct influence on Kantian critical philosophy; the third of the great critiques was published only one year after the fall of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. It is nonetheless appropriate to consider critique as representing, on the philosophical plane, what T. S. Eliot might have called an “objective correlative” to the almost contemporary innovations of sociopolitical revolution. Revolution might be understood as enacting a reduction of inherited sociopolitical categories from the noumenal to the phenomenal level, as inaugurating a transformative (as contradistinguished from contemplative) stance toward social reality as irrevocably as science was performing much the same operation with regard to natural reality. The great events effected or announced in 1789—not only the Declaration itself but also the Tennis Court Oath, the repeal of social class as a legal category, the demotion of the king from sovereign to first magistrate, and the expropriation of the church—effectively destroyed the status quo as a self-legitimating mechanism and made it necessary to retheorize the most fundamental categories of social and political life. As in the sphere of nature, what had been settled was now capable of being put in question and practically altered: so that 1789 (building