Nikolas Kompridis
Encyclopedia
Nikolas Kompridis is a professor at the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney
. His scholarly work addresses a wide range of subjects in contemporary social
and political philosophy
, as well as in aesthetics
and philosophy of culture
. Kompridis' published works cover topics that include: critical theory
; democratic theory; theories of agency and action; theories of rationality
; theories of identity
, recognition
, and culture; the role of social criticism in social change
; the renewal of romanticism
; and issues in philosophy of art, literature, music and film.
standard-bearer Jürgen Habermas
. However, he was eventually troubled by what he saw as serious shortcomings in the German philosopher's work. The result was the publication of Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future, a book that, while drawing on many of his insights, is intensely critical of Habermas. In addition to presenting a "meta-critique" of his thought, it offers an alternative interpretation of Frankfurt School critical theory, based on alternative conceptions of agency, reason, and argument, and alternative sources of normativity
.
Critique and Disclosure advances a vision of critical theory as a "possibility-disclosing" practice of social criticism. Engaging with Habermas' work in considerable depth, Kompridis argues that it has in large part severed critical theory's connection to German idealism
, modernity
's particular relationship to time, and the utopian aspirations of critique. In the book, Kompridis offers an alternative vision of what critical theory should be "if it is to have a future worthy of its past," arguing strongly against Habermas' procedural conception of reason
and in favour of a reorientation of critical theory around transformative practices of reflective disclosure
– an idea based on Martin Heidegger
's idea of world disclosure
. This idea gives animus to a new interpretation of the role of philosophy in social change.
In a review of the book, Fred R. Dallmayr writes:
Along these same lines, Kompridis has published essays arguing for his own conceptions of cultural change, critique, recognition and reason
, and has engaged in written debates about these and other issues with Axel Honneth
, Nancy Fraser
and Seyla Benhabib
(see "Exchange with Seyla Benhabib", below).
, Stanley Cavell
, Hubert Dreyfus
, Richard Eldridge, Robert Pippin and others, as well as his own contributions. The topics addressed in the volume include: "Beginning anew"; "Self-determination and expression"; "Art and irony"; "The living force of things"; and "Returning the everyday".
In 2009, Kompridis published a chapter on Romanticism in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, articulating his view of the relationship between romanticism and social change, and particularly the work of the social critic. There, he connects the work of a number of poets, artists and philosophers – including Rainer Maria Rilke
, Walter Benjamin
, Jean-Luc Godard
, William Wordsworth
and Ralph Waldo Emerson
– whom Kompridis sees sharing a deep concern with the possibility of individual and cooperative transformation. He writes that:
at a conference on "The Post/Human Condition", held in Auckland by the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy. His talk was entitled "Technology's Challenge to Democracy", and a related essay was subsequently published in the online journal Parrhesia. In the talk, as in the paper, Kompridis outlined the dangers posed by new technologies such as genetic engineering
, synthetic biology
, robotics
and nanotechnology
, and exposed what he considered to be the transhumanist aspirations of many contemporary scientific research programs. According to Kompridis, these technologies and research programs – including several at MIT, Stanford and Oxford University – are making the post-human "a real, not a notional… possibility."
In sympathy with other philosophers, scientists and intellectuals, including Jacques Derrida
, Francis Fukuyama
, Bill Joy
, Jürgen Habermas, and Michael Sandel
, Kompridis warns about the power of the new technologies… "to radically and permanently alter what it is to be a human being, and to make what it was to be human potentially unrecognizable as human." He says that as a result of this power, "the question [of what it means to be human] is all of a sudden a pressing question, a question absolutely pressed for time—since, evidently, the space in which it can still be meaningfully posed, and thus the space in which a meaningful response could be fashioned, is shrinking at an alarming rate."
In response to this urgent situation, Kompridis has called for a renewed debate about the question of what it means to be human
, in order to "thematise the normative significance of the question, and to sustain our engagement with it, reflecting on the answer our technological civilization is already giving to it." The "answer that our technological civilization is already giving to it" is a naturalist
picture of what it means to be human, expressed in the contemporary scientific view of living things as "machines whose components are biochemicals."
Arguing that "we have an obligation to deepen our understanding of what it is that is actually threatened" by the new technologies, Kompridis has proposed an inter-disciplinary "counter science of the human" to provide alternatives to naturalistic assumptions about identity. This counter science would take as its two main starting points:
This approach is intended to complement and build upon the work of others who have similar philosophical concerns, including Harry Frankfurt
, Charles Taylor
and Maurice Merlau-Ponty.
. In his view, this commits her to applying a double-standard for endangered or marginal cultural traditions in larger (liberal, capitalist) societies, leaving minority cultures at a disadvantage. Benhabib denied this, writing that "[c]ultures which are subject to decentering, reflexivity, and pluralization can regenerate from within themselves novel semantic resources of resistance" to cultural assimilation.
In a response published in the same issue of Political Theory, Kompridis writes that this demands too little of modern democracies, and puts too great a burden on minority cultures:
In place of the "essentialist anti-essentialist" perspective that he finds in Benhabib's work, Kompridis suggests starting from the view that cultures are both "identical and non-identical" with themselves. Had Benhabib started from this position, he suggests, she "could have approached questions of cultural preservation very differently, and more open-mindedly." The problem of cultural preservation "doesn’t have to be presented (and easily rejected) as demanding the right to 'freeze' existing cultural differences… it can be presented instead as a matter of fairly and sensitively enabling the free interplay between what is identical and non-identical in a culture with itself."
University of Western Sydney
The University of Western Sydney, also known as UWS, is a multi-campus university in the Greater Western region of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia...
. His scholarly work addresses a wide range of subjects in contemporary social
Social philosophy
Social philosophy is the philosophical study of questions about social behavior . Social philosophy addresses a wide range of subjects, from individual meanings to legitimacy of laws, from the social contract to criteria for revolution, from the functions of everyday actions to the effects of...
and political philosophy
Political philosophy
Political philosophy is the study of such topics as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it...
, as well as in aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
and philosophy of culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
. Kompridis' published works cover topics that include: critical theory
Critical theory
Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...
; democratic theory; theories of agency and action; theories of rationality
Rationality
In philosophy, rationality is the exercise of reason. It is the manner in which people derive conclusions when considering things deliberately. It also refers to the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons for belief, or with one's actions with one's reasons for action...
; theories of identity
Identity (social science)
Identity is a term used to describe a person's conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations . The term is used more specifically in psychology and sociology, and is given a great deal of attention in social psychology...
, recognition
Recognition (sociology)
Recognition in sociology is public acknowledgement of person's status or merits .When some person is recognized, he or she is accorded some special status, such as a name, title, or classification...
, and culture; the role of social criticism in social change
Social change
Social change refers to an alteration in the social order of a society. It may refer to the notion of social progress or sociocultural evolution, the philosophical idea that society moves forward by dialectical or evolutionary means. It may refer to a paradigmatic change in the socio-economic...
; the renewal of romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
; and issues in philosophy of art, literature, music and film.
Reorienting Critical Theory
After gaining his Ph.D at Toronto's York University, Kompridis was invited to work with the renowned philosopher and Frankfurt SchoolFrankfurt School
The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
standard-bearer Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'...
. However, he was eventually troubled by what he saw as serious shortcomings in the German philosopher's work. The result was the publication of Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future, a book that, while drawing on many of his insights, is intensely critical of Habermas. In addition to presenting a "meta-critique" of his thought, it offers an alternative interpretation of Frankfurt School critical theory, based on alternative conceptions of agency, reason, and argument, and alternative sources of normativity
Norm (philosophy)
Norms are concepts of practical import, oriented to effecting an action, rather than conceptual abstractions that describe, explain, and express. Normative sentences imply “ought-to” types of statements and assertions, in distinction to sentences that provide “is” types of statements and assertions...
.
Critique and Disclosure advances a vision of critical theory as a "possibility-disclosing" practice of social criticism. Engaging with Habermas' work in considerable depth, Kompridis argues that it has in large part severed critical theory's connection to German idealism
German idealism
German idealism was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment...
, modernity
Modernity
Modernity typically refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period, one marked by the move from feudalism toward capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, the nation-state and its constituent institutions and forms of surveillance...
's particular relationship to time, and the utopian aspirations of critique. In the book, Kompridis offers an alternative vision of what critical theory should be "if it is to have a future worthy of its past," arguing strongly against Habermas' procedural conception of reason
Communicative rationality
Communicative rationality, or communicative reason, is a theory or set of theories which describes human rationality as a necessary outcome of successful communication. In particular, it is tied to the philosophy of Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas, and their program of universal pragmatics, along...
and in favour of a reorientation of critical theory around transformative practices of reflective disclosure
Reflective disclosure
Reflective disclosure is a term coined by philosopher Nikolas Kompridis. In his book Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future, Kompridis describes a set of heterogeneous social practices he believes can be a source of significant ethical, political, and cultural transformation...
– an idea based on Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
's idea of world disclosure
World disclosure
World disclosure is a phenomenon described by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his landmark book Being and Time. It has also been discussed by philosophers such as John Dewey, Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor...
. This idea gives animus to a new interpretation of the role of philosophy in social change.
In a review of the book, Fred R. Dallmayr writes:
This is an important and timely (or time-sensitive) book, both in philosophical and in practical-political terms. Today its plea for a recovery of trust in the future has gained unexpectedly broad resonance… the book in a way signals the end of a period marked by divergent, even opposite tendencies: on the one hand, the "postmodern" fascination with "extraordinary" rupture (or rapture), and on the other, the streamlining of critical theory in the mold of a rule-governed, rationalist normalcy.
Along these same lines, Kompridis has published essays arguing for his own conceptions of cultural change, critique, recognition and reason
Reason
Reason is a term that refers to the capacity human beings have to make sense of things, to establish and verify facts, and to change or justify practices, institutions, and beliefs. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, language, ...
, and has engaged in written debates about these and other issues with Axel Honneth
Axel Honneth
Axel Honneth is a professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, Germany and director of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.-Biography:...
, Nancy Fraser
Nancy Fraser
Nancy Fraser is an American critical theorist, currently the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science and professor of philosophy at The New School in New York City...
and Seyla Benhabib
Seyla Benhabib
Seyla Benhabib is Eugene Mayer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University, and director of the program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics, and a well-known contemporary philosopher. She is the author of several books, most notably about the philosophers Hannah Arendt and...
(see "Exchange with Seyla Benhabib", below).
Romanticism
Kompridis has written that he sees critical theory, and critique in general, as implicitly romantic in its self-understanding, and much of his other scholarly work reflects this concern. His edited collection, Philosophical Romanticism, includes essays on diverse themes in romanticism from philosophers such as Albert BorgmannAlbert Borgmann
Albert Borgmann is an American philosopher, specializing in the philosophy of technology. He was born in Freiburg, Germany, and is a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana.-Philosophy:...
, Stanley Cavell
Stanley Cavell
Stanley Louis Cavell is an American philosopher. He is the Walter M. Cabot Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University.-Life:...
, Hubert Dreyfus
Hubert Dreyfus
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley....
, Richard Eldridge, Robert Pippin and others, as well as his own contributions. The topics addressed in the volume include: "Beginning anew"; "Self-determination and expression"; "Art and irony"; "The living force of things"; and "Returning the everyday".
In 2009, Kompridis published a chapter on Romanticism in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, articulating his view of the relationship between romanticism and social change, and particularly the work of the social critic. There, he connects the work of a number of poets, artists and philosophers – including Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke , better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language...
, Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist...
, Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
, William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
and Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...
– whom Kompridis sees sharing a deep concern with the possibility of individual and cooperative transformation. He writes that:
"What is demanded of [the romantic critic], in spite of all the obstacles and constraints, in spite of the improbability and possible futility of it all, is to find and found new ways of looking at things, new ways of speaking and acting, new kinds of practices, and new kinds of institutions. Anyone who thinks such change is not only necessary but also (improbably) possible, whatever their view of 'romanticism,' is a hopeless romantic."
Technology and Human Being
In 2008, Kompridis was invited to give the keynoteKeynote
A keynote in literature, music, or public speaking establishes the principal underlying theme. In corporate or commercial settings, greater importance is attached to the delivery of a keynote speech or keynote address...
at a conference on "The Post/Human Condition", held in Auckland by the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy. His talk was entitled "Technology's Challenge to Democracy", and a related essay was subsequently published in the online journal Parrhesia. In the talk, as in the paper, Kompridis outlined the dangers posed by new technologies such as genetic engineering
Genetic engineering
Genetic engineering, also called genetic modification, is the direct human manipulation of an organism's genome using modern DNA technology. It involves the introduction of foreign DNA or synthetic genes into the organism of interest...
, synthetic biology
Synthetic biology
Synthetic biology is a new area of biological research that combines science and engineering. It encompasses a variety of different approaches, methodologies, and disciplines with a variety of definitions...
, robotics
Robotics
Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...
and nanotechnology
Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology is the study of manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Generally, nanotechnology deals with developing materials, devices, or other structures possessing at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100 nanometres...
, and exposed what he considered to be the transhumanist aspirations of many contemporary scientific research programs. According to Kompridis, these technologies and research programs – including several at MIT, Stanford and Oxford University – are making the post-human "a real, not a notional… possibility."
In sympathy with other philosophers, scientists and intellectuals, including Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
, Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama is an American political scientist, political economist, and author. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. Before that he served as a professor and director of the International Development program at the School of...
, Bill Joy
Bill Joy
William Nelson Joy , commonly known as Bill Joy, is an American computer scientist. Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003...
, Jürgen Habermas, and Michael Sandel
Michael Sandel
Michael J. Sandel is an American political philosopher and a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for the Harvard course 'Justice' which is available to , and for his critique of Rawls' A Theory of Justice in his Liberalism and the Limits of Justice...
, Kompridis warns about the power of the new technologies… "to radically and permanently alter what it is to be a human being, and to make what it was to be human potentially unrecognizable as human." He says that as a result of this power, "the question [of what it means to be human] is all of a sudden a pressing question, a question absolutely pressed for time—since, evidently, the space in which it can still be meaningfully posed, and thus the space in which a meaningful response could be fashioned, is shrinking at an alarming rate."
In response to this urgent situation, Kompridis has called for a renewed debate about the question of what it means to be human
Human
Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...
, in order to "thematise the normative significance of the question, and to sustain our engagement with it, reflecting on the answer our technological civilization is already giving to it." The "answer that our technological civilization is already giving to it" is a naturalist
Naturalism (philosophy)
Naturalism commonly refers to the philosophical viewpoint that the natural universe and its natural laws and forces operate in the universe, and that nothing exists beyond the natural universe or, if it does, it does not affect the natural universe that we know...
picture of what it means to be human, expressed in the contemporary scientific view of living things as "machines whose components are biochemicals."
Arguing that "we have an obligation to deepen our understanding of what it is that is actually threatened" by the new technologies, Kompridis has proposed an inter-disciplinary "counter science of the human" to provide alternatives to naturalistic assumptions about identity. This counter science would take as its two main starting points:
- The concept of the personPersonA person is a human being, or an entity that has certain capacities or attributes strongly associated with being human , for example in a particular moral or legal context...
, underpinned not by consciousnessConsciousnessConsciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
, but by a definition based on the things that human beings care about in peculiarly human ways; and - The phenomenon of intercorporeality, a term coined originally by Husserl ("Zwischenleiblickeit") and Merleau-Ponty and then used by Hubert Dreyfus in order to capture the way human beings develop the ability to learn and to make sense of things under conditions of embodiment in a social context.
This approach is intended to complement and build upon the work of others who have similar philosophical concerns, including Harry Frankfurt
Harry Frankfurt
Harry Gordon Frankfurt is an American philosopher. He is professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University and has previously taught at Yale University and Rockefeller University. He obtained his B.A. in 1949 and Ph.D. in 1954 from...
, Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor (philosopher)
Charles Margrave Taylor, is a Canadian philosopher from Montreal, Quebec best known for his contributions in political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, and in the history of philosophy. His contributions to these fields have earned him both the prestigious Kyoto Prize and the...
and Maurice Merlau-Ponty.
Exchange with Seyla Benhabib
In 2006, Kompridis participated in an exchange with critical theorist Seyla Benhabib, when she responded to an essay of his published in the journal Political Theory. Kompridis had criticized Benhabib's book The Claims of Culture, arguing that she promotes a prematurely normativized and politically neutralized concept of hybridityHybridity
Hybridity refers in its most basic sense to mixture. The term originates from biology and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in racial theory in the nineteenth century. Its contemporary uses are scattered across numerous academic disciplines and is salient in popular culture...
. In his view, this commits her to applying a double-standard for endangered or marginal cultural traditions in larger (liberal, capitalist) societies, leaving minority cultures at a disadvantage. Benhabib denied this, writing that "[c]ultures which are subject to decentering, reflexivity, and pluralization can regenerate from within themselves novel semantic resources of resistance" to cultural assimilation.
In a response published in the same issue of Political Theory, Kompridis writes that this demands too little of modern democracies, and puts too great a burden on minority cultures:
"How curious that Benhabib can be firmly opposed to freezing cultural differences, yet firmly in favour of freezing constitutional principles. It seems that hybridity is very much welcome if it is confined to the domain of culture… [but] complex cultural dialogue should not be so defensive; it should not asymmetrically distribute the risk of decentering, reflexivity, and openness to change, either between minorities and majorities or between democratic politics and constitutional principles."
In place of the "essentialist anti-essentialist" perspective that he finds in Benhabib's work, Kompridis suggests starting from the view that cultures are both "identical and non-identical" with themselves. Had Benhabib started from this position, he suggests, she "could have approached questions of cultural preservation very differently, and more open-mindedly." The problem of cultural preservation "doesn’t have to be presented (and easily rejected) as demanding the right to 'freeze' existing cultural differences… it can be presented instead as a matter of fairly and sensitively enabling the free interplay between what is identical and non-identical in a culture with itself."
Works
- Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future. 2006. Cambridge: MIT Press, 337 pp. (ISBN 026211299X, ISBN 9780262112994)
- Philosophical Romanticism (ed.) 2006. London: Routledge, 304 pp. (ISBN 0415256445, ISBN 9780415256445)
External links
- Nikolas Kompridis on Biodiversity and the Arts: "The memory of loss" (video-recorded lecture)
- Biography on University of Western Sydney website
- "An Innovative Approach to Critical Theory," York University Y-File article.
- "Technology's Challenge to Democracy: What of the human?", (PDF) by Nikolas Kompridis.