Versions of Critique

Is it possible to criticize others without occupying the higher ground? Should intellectuals strive to be more modest and circumspect, or is any such effort doomed to hypocrisy or bad faith?

by Rita Felski

Is it possible to criticize others without occupying the higher ground? Should intellectuals, especially, strive to be more modest and circumspect, or is any such effort doomed to hypocrisy or bad faith? Can they not think their own views are the right views? (Can anyone, in their heart of hearts, not think their own views are the right views?) “What right do you have to judge?” is a question sometimes asked of those who criticize. If one does have such a right, what is the difference—is there a difference?—between judging and being judgy, patronizing, or self-righteous? And can intellectuals speak for others, or only for themselves? This essay delves into such questions via Robin Celikates’ Critique as Social Practice, a bracing reckoning with the hermeneutics of suspicion that reveals some notable parallels with the turn to postcritique in literary studies and elsewhere. Criticizing, I have argued, “…is an everyday aspect of our being in the world . . . there is no question of giving up disagreement.”¹ What is up for debate is how one disagrees and on what grounds, along with the question of critique’s limits.

Celikates—a key figure in contemporary social philosophy—voices his discontent with a familiar style of intellectual argument: namely “the quasi-Platonic story of the cognitive bondage of everyday understanding and its liberation by theory.”² How might critical theory need to be rethought in the light of its perceived high-handedness and knowing diagnoses of non-intellectual lifeworlds? Is such “enlightenment from above” really a form of emancipation—or closer to domination? And here, Celikates offers a lucid reckoning with the problems of the epistemological break: the carving out of a sharp divide between academic knowing and everyday unknowing. Yet sticking to deferential or anodyne descriptions of what others do or say, he observes, seems like an equally unsatisfying alternative.

Such questions have long roiled person-based fields such as sociology and anthropology. Are the views of participants or observers more trustworthy; is trying to understand the motives of one’s fellow humans preferable to looking behind their backs for causes? They are also the source of a lingering bad conscience among Marxist intellectuals. The working class was destined to bring about the downfall of capitalism; the failure of this prognosis inspired intellectuals to assume the role of political vanguard. Yet there remained the tricky fact of their own class position. The contretemps between historian E. P. Thompson and his Althusserian colleagues, for example, pivoted on the drawbacks of intellectuals diagnosing the worldviews of bus drivers and shop assistants from the perch of their own class position. For Thompson, this was just another form of “bourgeois elitism” that waved away the hard-won wisdom and street smarts of ordinary workers.³

Put differently, is it possible for intellectuals to engage in what Ulf Schulenberg calls “horizontal critique”—to argue and disagree without presuming to know better?⁴ What about the obvious counter-argument that critique cannot afford to be horizontal while society is vertical—when some human beings are elevated and others are persistently disparaged and brought down? Can we ever be truly “on the level?”

The Incorrigible Critic

“Criticize someone and you may well find yourself accused of being a know-it-all,”⁵ writes Celikates on the opening page of Critique as Social Practice. Here, he is referring not just to the give-and-take of everyday conversation—an unkind remark about a friend’s new outfit or their taste in men—but the stance of what he calls the incorrigible critic. For such a critic, who is often though not always an academic, it is axiomatic that most people are unwitting and unknowing, that they do not—and for structural reasons, cannot—see how their words and actions are complicit with systems of inequality. The critic’s task, then, is to pin down causes and effects that others are unable to see. As Celikates puts it, “the reproduction of the social order depends on the fact that individuals do not know what they are doing and that they are not aware of the way in which their thoughts and actions contribute to this order.”⁶ What interests Celikates is this perceived rift between the murkiness of everyday perception and the laser-like gaze of the scholar. Because their fellow human beings do not fully understand what they are up to, intellectuals must shoulder the task of bringing to light what is invisible, transmuting the illusion of immediate knowledge into the cool-headed analysis of social facts. Whatever reasons people give for enjoying a TV show or a type of cuisine, for joining a club or getting married, they are propelled by causes that elude them—such as their position in the social field or their desire for status and distinction.

Celikates takes issue with the belief that ordinary persons are “cultural dopes,” in Harold Garfinkel’s well-known phrase. Dazzled by the seductive force of their own theories or led astray by their class biases, scholars miss much of what is going on around them: the dodges and deflections, sighs and eye rolls, postures of perfunctory acquiescence or sheer indifference, discreet acts of sabotage or open expressions of resentment or ridicule. Critical awareness, in short, does not require a break with the supposed naïveté of the everyday world; it already forms part of this world. To zoom in more closely on the practices of social life is to become conscious of what the anthropologist James C. Scott calls “a diverse repertoire of forms of critique and resistance, of counter-hegemonic practices and forms of self-understanding.”⁷

Many others have queried the picture of their fellow human beings as hapless and hopeless pawns of social forces. In literary studies, the language of “structure” is often held to be the only alternative to thinking in terms of individuals, yet sociologists and anthropologists have wrestled with the problems of the structure concept for decades.⁸ A telegrammatic summary of these problems might include: its radical diminishing of the agency and perspicuity of ordinary persons; its inability, as a synchronic concept, to account for movement and change; and its underplaying of conflict and unpredictability in social life. Structure, in short, is prone to being reified and deified, taking on a life of its own, as if it were a metaphysical entity directing and determining human actions rather than something that only comes into being via such actions. The result is what is often dubbed functionalism: a ruthless paring down of the many meanings of human behavior to the sole purpose of propping up a system. It would seem essential, rather, to reckon with stability and unpredictability, larger patterns and surprising variations, the thing called “society” and the very different and sometimes warring phenomena—bureaucracies, social movements, families, the workplace, religion, art, the law—out of which the social world is made. It is questionable whether the language of “structure” or even the ubiquitous dyad of “structure and agency” can do this work.⁹

Arguments grounded in the epistemological break are thus prone to paint a misleading picture. Denying or downplaying the ability of ordinary persons to reflect on their circumstances, Celikates remarks, “obscures the complexity of social reality in general and of everyday practice in particular.”¹⁰ The intellectual’s claims to superior knowledge, moreover, can all too easily veer in an anti-democratic direction. Opinions that clash with their own can be disqualified via an assortment of ready-to-hand adjectives (complicit, neoliberal, naive) or explained away (“how predictable that you make such an argument, given the privileges of your race/gender/ sexuality!”) rather than engaged in their own terms as normative arguments or value claims.

The incorrigible critic will claim that they are not targeting individuals but exposing the logic of systems. In response, Celikates quotes Joseph Heath’s remark about an unwritten rule of twentieth-century social criticism: “that it is okay to call people stupid as long as you make it clear that their stupidity is someone else’s fault.”¹¹ This style of criticism, Heath points out, runs the risk of rebounding on its maker. If I am always claiming that others are in error, the suspicion will arise that it is I who am at fault—that I do not understand what they are doing. To explain the beliefs, intentions, and motives of others as nothing more than effects of structures is to objectify one’s fellow humans—to engage, per Celikates, in forms of symbolic violence.¹² The asymmetry is hard to overlook. The critic, after all, expects her own arguments to be taken seriously as arguments (rather than diagnosed as symptoms), and does not see her social position as predetermining every aspect of her being in the world. It is hard to see on what grounds this same respect can be withheld from others.

Critique as Ordinary

What of the more egalitarian approaches to the social world? Celikates looks first to ethnomethodology, an approach pioneered by Harold Garfinkel and Ervin Goffman in the 1950s that was devoted to the painstaking recording of everyday life. The precipitous leap to structure, they contend, prevents sociologists from noticing what is going on in front of their own

eyes; the rules of conduct that affect how people queue for movie tickets or surgeons carry out operations; how children behave while riding on carousels or waiters comport themselves in the “backstage” of restaurant kitchens. Viewed through a magnifying glass, the familiar turns out to be remarkable; everyday life is revealed as an elaborate performance that hums with meaning. “Being ordinary” is something we must learn to do.¹³ Meanwhile, the pragmatic sociology of Luc Boltanski and his colleagues focuses on forms of ordinary critique—how people argue and disagree, criticize and justify in the office or the kitchen, at a soccer game or in a bar. Not only will this close-up view generate richer accounts of the social world, but it also serves as a much-needed brake on the hubris of intellectuals, who need to learn from those they study—and not conclude that their motives and reasons can be translated into already known causes. “This change in attitude,” remarks Celikates, “leads to a ‘flat’ image of social practice.”¹⁴

But what if someone’s beliefs have been forged under conditions of deprivation or limitation? If a young woman arrives at university after having been home-schooled by evangelical Christians, are her teachers not obliged to point out the limits of her education? To suggest that some of her assumptions are, in fact, mistaken? Social media, moreover, are awash with an endless supply of misinformation, manipulation, and outright lies. Wringing one’s hands over the elitism of correcting others looks, from this angle, like an overly scrupulous or fastidious response. One problem with the “ordinary critique” thesis, Celikates argues, is that it presumes the same conditions for thought apply universally. Even if everyone has the potential to be critical, some people have far greater access to information and ideas than others.

What is gained, under such conditions, by vowing to abstain from criticism? Don’t intellectuals need to acknowledge that we sometimes do know more than others and have access to what is, in fact, not common wisdom? Many teachers have the experience of shaking up their students’ lives by challenging beliefs that had gone unquestioned, introducing them to ways of thinking they could never have imagined. A stance of deference looks from another angle like an abrogation of responsibility, a hoarding of insights that deserve to be shared with others, or a failure to stand up against wrong-headed ideas and pernicious arguments.

Reconstructive Critique

How, then, do we disagree without looking down? Is it possible to steer clear of the pitfalls of both aristocratic pessimism and deferential populism? In the latter half of his book, Celikates lays out his own vision of reconstructive critique. This way of thinking, he declares, spurns the “dogma of asymmetry and the break;”¹⁵ intellectuals are now expected to refrain from ill-tempered grumbling about the stupefied or reactionary masses. Yet there is a crucial difference, Celikates points out, between critical capacities and the actualizing of such capacities. Reconstructive critique wants to keep squarely in view the conditions that allow individuals to think independently or fail to do so. “Second-order pathologies” is the phrase Celikates uses to denote such failure: how someone’s milieu—from family and friends to news channels and Facebook feeds—can block their access to knowledge.

It is here that the critical theorist steps in, via a role that Celikates likens to that of the therapist. Analyst and patient are engaged in a dialogue; the input of the patient is vital, yet it is the task of the therapist to bring the patient to a clearer view of their own situation. Note that Celikates is highlighting the structure of the psychoanalytical encounter, not its content. There is a formal parallel between psychoanalysis and critical theory insofar as both seek to trigger critical reflection in others. Why, Celikates asks, do members of disadvantaged groups often endorse the status quo or accept pseudo-explanations for their own lack of power? And here it is crucial that analyst and analysand, theorist and layperson, form an alliance in which they are “both equal partners and play an active role.”¹⁶

Celikates builds his case with commendable care, raising various objections to his own analogy between therapist and critical theorist before showing why they are not justified. Nevertheless, it is hard to see how reconstructive critique does not ultimately reinstate the hierarchy of expert and layperson he had previously condemned. The therapist, after all, holds most of the cards; it is their concepts, idioms, and frameworks that set the terms for a dialog that is very likely to hew to unspoken norms and established scripts. One does not have to be a die-hard Foucauldian to point out the power-laden dynamic of the therapeutic session.

To put it another way, Celikates often refers to ordinary people closing their eyes to real problems, but what might critical theorists be missing? Why do we hear so little about Habermasians—or Foucauldians—being challenged to rethink some of their core beliefs? Can’t intellectuals be brought to see things differently by talking to people from very different circumstances? And are academic lifeworlds entirely bereft of flaws and foibles, prejudices and “pathologies”? This is not to ricochet toward the opposite stance of craven acquiescence to the popular will, but to point out that being fallible is an equal opportunity condition. It is surprising, in this context, that Celikates makes no mention of the well-known debate between Gadamer and Habermas, or of Gadamer’s insistence on a shared condition of human finitude. As Lorenzo Simpson writes in a book that argues for the relevance of hermeneutics to race, “any fully adequate understanding of another will place the informing assumptions of both self and other at risk.”¹⁷

The Hermeneutics of Gender and Race

Among feminist philosophers, Linda Alcoff and Georgia Warnke have made the strongest pitch for a hermeneutic politics. They concur with Gadamer that there is no view from nowhere—that, as he says, “the standpoint that is beyond any standpoint. . . is a pure illusion.”¹⁸ But what exactly counts as a standpoint? Is it a matter of being rooted in one spot? Are walking or running allowed? Feminist standpoint theory sought solid ground in the reality of women’s lives, as a basis for more authoritative knowledge. Here we see another version of the epistemological break—grounded not in cool objectivity but in intimate knowledge of, and protest against oppression. Yet this line of thought would soon trigger countless objections, counterexamples, and accusations of essentialism. As it fell under the influence of French thought, feminist theory veered in a different direction; rather than appealing to female identity, the aim was now to defamiliarize and destabilize, to subvert gender norms.

How does our thinking change if we see gender not as a social construction in need of deconstruction but as an interpretation? Baked into the latter word is the idea that there are many ways of making sense of a biblical passage, a lyric poem, or a legal opinion. We no longer fixate on nailing down a once-and-for-all meaning; what Bleak House or Beloved say to us will be affected—to lean on Gadamer’s term—by our prejudgments. Much the same holds true for words such as woman, slut, or tomboy, which can be uttered with feminist or anti-feminist intent and will carry wildly different meanings. A hermeneutic perspective on gender does not see the need to ground feminism in an uncontestable identity (“all women”). Yet this does not mean that anything goes; some accounts of gender, like some readings of Bleak House. will prove more plausible or illuminating than others.

As Warnke points out, different aspects of identity will press to the fore in different times and places. At certain moments—during a feminist rally, perhaps, or at a doctor’s office—matters of sex and gender are likely to be at the forefront of one’s mind; at other times—praying in a place of worship, working in a lab—they may well be overshadowed by more pressing identifications, to be forced into awareness of them at such moments will feel like an unwanted intrusion. “When are sex and gender interpretations compelling and important ways to conceive of individuals,” asks Warnke, “and for what social, medical, or cultural purposes? Are these purposes legitimate, and for whom?”¹⁹ These are, precisely, questions that have no fixed answers and that must be argued and debated anew. “The historical movement of human life consists in the fact that it is never absolutely bound to any one standpoint,” writes Gadamer, “. . . horizons change for a person who is moving.”²⁰ Similarly, Alcoff draws out the affinities between hermeneutics and feminist theories of knowledge, including a shared stress on receptivity and intersubjective understanding. Gadamer invites us to “let down our epistemic guard, to hold our own views in abeyance in order to be open to other possible truths.”²¹

Lorenzo Simpson, moreover, draws on Gadamer to dispute the assumption that cultures are incommensurable and that any attempt at understanding ethnic or racial difference will inevitably spiral into misrecognition and the tyranny of sameness. How could the world ever change if the words of others were intrinsically unintelligible—if we could not work toward a rough sense of the demands being made upon us? Hermeneutics insists that what seems alien, enigmatic, or off-putting must be connected to what we already know if the nature of that knowing is to be challenged. Understanding does not have to mean a unilateral imposition of dominant racial ideologies onto passive others; thanks to the hermeneutic circle, we may end up in a very different place than where we started. Like Warnke, Simpson points out that appealing to a notion of pure alterity makes no more sense than insisting that human beings are essentially the same. It is trivially true that every phenomenon can be described as similar or different to every other; which distinctions matter at a given moment is not a matter of truth but of interpretation.

Taking as his main example the (sadly overused) idea of female genital mutilation, Simpson asks: why do people accept—and sometimes energetically defend—customs that appear to work against their own interests? Like Celikates, he weighs up the presumption of “us” claiming to know more than “them” versus the reality that individuals do not have equal access to alternative perspectives and counter-arguments. Alongside the need for criticism, however, Simpson’s hermeneutic orientation inspires a stress on humility and a willingness to change one’s mind. “To understand what sort of valuing is going on, one must gain access to the view of the social world held by the agents in question. In other words, one must seek an answer to the question, “What do they take themselves to be doing?”²² Hermeneutics demands that we listen to reasons rather than just ascribing causes; in doing so, we may find our own assumptions thrown into crisis, our worldview placed at risk.

Elevator Shoes

Ulf Schulenberg’s phrase “horizontal critique” captures, in pungently condensed form, the issues we have been considering. To what extent does critique imply an elevated vantage point—either because of years spent poring over the words of Marx or Foucault, or thanks to first-hand experience of being disregarded or trodden upon? If I do not insist on being right—or at least less wrong than others—why should anyone pay attention? What could it conceivably mean to argue “horizontally”? Does such a phrase open the floodgates to relativism?

Reality, Schulenberg argues, is not something we find but something we make; abstaining from metaphors of verticality weans us away from an appearance/reality distinction and the claim that intellectuals are able to see how things really are. The philosopher Richard Rorty, Schulenberg points out, makes a similar argument, urging us to replace metaphors of depth with those of width as part of his call for a post-metaphysical culture. Writing at the height of the linguistic turn, Rorty insists that nothing grounds our practices, raising a quizzical eyebrow at philosophy’s self-image as a cultural overseer who “knows what everyone else is really doing whether they know it or not.”²³

So far so good. And yet, we might ask: is making opposed to finding? Doesn’t the former depend on the latter? To make a cake, after all, I walk over to the refrigerator and look for butter and eggs; if I want to paint a picture, I must first lay my hands on canvas, brushes, and pigments. Human creativity depends on stuff that is not just a product of discourse, even if it can only be described in words. The world pushes back, reminding us of its presence: missing the final step on the subway stairs, I end up with an ugly bruise on my knee. Looking skeptically at philosophy’s claim to be the final arbiter of truth does not absolve us of the need to reckon with material realities. In a post-metaphysical culture, writes Schulenberg, “the world would no longer be a conversation partner, and the subject, by creatively and imaginatively acting to solve problems and achieve purposes, would appear as a maker.”²⁴ Such a prospect is surely to be dreaded rather than desired; rejecting the world as a conversation partner has already wreaked catastrophic consequences (see climate change). Such issues are ethical and political, but questions of knowledge can hardly be pushed aside. How, after all, can we learn to treat the world well if we have no interest in understanding it?

Understanding, however, is not just a matter of fine-tuning our theories of epistemology, but of our ongoing involvement in the world, of know-how and practice. In daily life, we routinely check our assumptions against what turns out to be the case. The picture we thought we had hung correctly turns out to be lopsided; the umbrella we brought to the park in anticipation of bad weather is never unfurled. We are not going about things the right way, the philosopher Charles Taylor suggests, if we view such behaviors as a matter of belief, or ideology, or metaphysical worldview; they are pre-conceptual and pre-reflective, a matter of doing rather than interpreting. “Our grasp of things is not something that is in us, over against the world; it lies in the way we are in contact with the world, in our being-in-the-world (Heidegger) or being-to-the-world (Merleau-Ponty).”²⁵ We cannot walk away from the problem of knowledge—shrugging it off in Rortyan fashion as a wrong turn in the history of philosophy—because it remains intimately tied up with our everyday actions and commitments.

How do these philosophical debates link up to the politics of the break? To question the view that any social group has automatic access to truth is not to call for an embargo on discriminating and judging—to ban the language of true and false or right and wrong. There is no necessary link between the use of such words and the claim to a higher epistemological ground—just a history of past associations. Proponents of postcritique want to expand and develop affirmative vocabularies that have shriveled from neglect; they are not calling for an (obviously self-refuting!) ban on all forms of nay-saying. What might it mean to argue and disagree without presuming the break? We need only turn to everyday practice. If I offer some criticisms of your cooking or your political views, you may be appreciative or deeply offended—depending on how gracefully they are worded—but they imply no philosophical claim to a higher standpoint. We can criticize without donning the elevator shoes of critique, without the heel lift of the epistemological break. This does not mean that I do not believe what I say is true, or that criticism cannot itself be criticized. As Rorty used to say when accused of relativism: no one really behaves as if they think all options are equally valid. But we no longer assume access to a hidden reality that is inaccessible to our fellow human beings (ideology critique) or cast a knowing glance from above at their naïvely held beliefs (poststructuralist critique).

And here the social theorist Simon Susen pitches the helpful idea of an epistemic continuum: gradations of similarity and difference between various knowledge forms. He mulls over the unsatisfying alternatives we have been looking at: vaunting the superiority of intellectual thought versus automatic deference to the truth claims of the lowly or excluded. While forms of knowledge differ, they do not fall neatly into such pre-ordained hierarchies. As Susen writes, “the seemingly distortive aspects of knowledge production—such as bias, doxa, ideology, prejudice, background, milieu, etc.—permeate both “ordinary” and “scientific” modes of epistemic engagement.”²⁶ It is often claimed that intellectual life differs from everyday life insofar as any idea can be interrogated and nothing is taken for granted. Yet scholars also rely heavily on “results obtained by others, problems stated by others, solutions suggested by others, methods worked out by others,” to quote Alfred Schutz.²⁷ All disciplines rely on shared norms, frameworks, and habits of thought, and their practitioners will soon close ranks when these are too vigorously questioned (see the pariah status of Rorty in many philosophy departments).

To argue for such an epistemic continuum is not to minimize the value of specific forms of expertise, which deserves their full measure of recognition. An English professor’s knowledge of modernist poetry and a sociologist’s familiarity with Weber both outstrip—by far—that of the person on the street. Here any claim for a radical symmetry or equality does not hold up; by any measure, the professor has a more thorough grasp, based on many years of intensive study, of the topic at hand. Yet this domain-specific knowledge does not make them the final arbiter of the real interests or hidden motives of the person who packs their groceries. A climatologist may be exceptionally well informed about the scientific consensus on global heating, while being clueless about how to use this information to energize or mobilize others. The lives of these others are largely opaque and will remain so without a major effort at hermeneutic, as distinct from diagnostic, understanding. “Values,” as Lorenzo Simpson points out, “cannot be inferred from behavior in any straightforward sense. Values are thus not observables; to gain access to an agent’s values, one must enter the hermeneutic circle.”²⁸

In this sense, the questions raised by Celikates about the status of the break remain very much in play. For example, scholars who are women and/or people of color and who bear the brunt of micro—or macro—aggressions in the academy may not think of themselves as part of an elite group. Yet such experiences do not magically dissolve divisions of class and education: there is no necessary commonality of interests between intellectuals and those of the same race or gender who inhabit very different lifeworlds. Styles of argument that are hailed as daringly transgressive in a graduate seminar (so many hierarchies undermined!) may come across as obscurantist or elitist in other contexts. Prejudice is not just the other person’s problem but also one’s own; intellectual lifeworlds have their full share of misrecognitions and failures of understanding. Rather than engaging in endless critiques of critique, however, we might strike out on another path. As philosophical hermeneutics has long argued, we can experiment with other orientations, dispositions, and styles of thought—a task that is now being taken up, albeit in rather different form, by proponents of postcritique.

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Notes

1. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 187.

2. Robin Celikates, Critique as Social Practice: Critical Theory and Social Self-Understanding. trans. Naomi van Steenbergen (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), 10.

3. E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Monthly Review Press, 1978).

4. Ulf Schulenberg, Marxism, Pragmatism, and Postmetaphysics: From Finding to Making (New York: Palgrave, 2019), 4.

5. Robin Celikates, Critique as Social Practice, 1.

6. Ibid., 3.

7. Ibid., 58.

8. The wording of this paragraph, as well as several other sentences in this section, is taken directly from my essay “Postcritique: Past Influences and Present Conjunctures,” Media Theory, 7, 1 (2023), 329-342.

9. Anthony King, for example, argues for jettisoning this vocabulary in The Structure of Social Theory (London: Routledge, 2012).

10. Robin Celikates, Critique as Social Practice, 68.

11. Ibid., 46.

12. Ibid., 46.

13. Harvey Sacks, “On Doing Being Ordinary,” in Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed. J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

14. Celikates, Critique as Social Practice, 93.

15. Ibid., 117.

16. Ibid., 153.

17. Lorenzo Simpson, Hermeneutics as Critique: Science, Politics, Race, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 56 (my italics).

18. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York, Continuum, 2003), 376.

19. Georgia Warnke, “Hermeneutics and Constructed Identities,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lorraine Code (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003), 78.

20. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 304.

21. Linda Alcoff, “Gadamer’s Feminist Epistemology,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lorraine Code (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003, 239.

22. Simpson, Hermeneutics as Critique, 86.

23. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 317.

24. Ulf Schulenberg, Marxism, Pragmatism, and Postmetaphysics.

25. Charles Taylor, “Rorty and Philosophy,” in Richard Rorty, ed. Charles B. Guignon and David R. Hiley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 167.

26. Simon Susen, “The Case for a Critical Hermeneutics: From the Understanding of Power to the Power of Understanding,” in Hans-Herbert Kögler’s Critical Hermeneutics, ed. K. C. M. Mertel and L. Dunaj (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

27. Alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities,” in Collected Papers 1: The Problem of Social Reality (Springer, 1972), 250.

28. Simpson, Hermeneutics as Critique, 18.