Travis Grotewold

HUMN 5650 / Final

In what follows I answer the question as to whether the modern project is worth preserving. I

affirm that it is, for critical self-reflection, which is endemic to modernity, is the crucial moment in

which external authority must reckon with its own possible displacement and transformation.

Self-reflection grants the individual the space in which she contests such authority and, more

importantly, comes to understand her place against the backdrop of traditional customs,

governance, and the structure of her own desire – all of these as necessary contextual resistances

to historicized self-reflection. Such resistances are the very matter of critique itself, for in addition

to aiding in the formation of one’s self-reflective content, they also hold the primary position of

issuing from a realm in which another voice can be heard, a discordant tone which contests my

own cadenced worldview. To pursue this ineluctable ground of resistance is not only to take

seriously the site of human agency, wherein self-reflection operates, but also to be mindful of our

effects upon and preconceptions of worldly, lived relations. To preserve this self-reflective

tension, and commensurate critique, is to, ultimately, reaffirm a much needed ethical concern, one

that has been present for centuries.

When Kant wrote What is Enlightenment? he was answering a question posed by a culture

in the throes of its transition to modernity. The public was gradually becoming aware of a new

configuration of freedom, the contours of which were no longer reducible to the dogmatic

proscriptions of religion. According to Kant, each individual has the potential to distance himself

from external authority, this distance arising in the form of reflective questioning, followed by the

inauguration of a new authority: the individual’s own response to this very questioning. This is the

pivotal moment of the modern break with (religious) tradition. It is also an indication of the

destiny of human nature: to become ever more enlightened, or free to both articulate the ends I

desire and the means by which I approach them. 1 Kant, then, in understanding this moment of
1
What is Enlightenment?, p. 57: “One age cannot enter into an alliance on oath to put the next age in a position where
it would be impossible for it to extend and correct its knowledge […] or to make any progress whatsoever in
enlightenment. This would be a crime against human nature, whose original destiny lies precisely in such progress.”

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self-reflection as the instantiation of a gap or distance between the subservient self and the

authoritative dimensions of tradition, must have recognized that the desire to return to such a

tradition was not only wrongheaded but also antithetical to (modern) freedom. In other words,

self-reflection could neither linger in the past nor idle in the present; rather, it ought to guide the

individual toward a more rational or self-determined future.

What German idealism brought to the table was the notion that the existence of freedom is

conditioned by the individual’s dependence on the universal. 2 Speaking generally, the universal is

that system of rationality with which the individual aligns her thoughts and actions, thereby

garnering the sense of her proper place in ethical life (Hegel). Self-reflection is essential to this

process because it grants the individual the space within which she can relate to the given, to her

community and its various authorities. She, in other words, is capable of voicing her own reasons

for the actions she takes within a system that may or may not recognize such actions as valid; she

therefore determines herself in relation to others and to an ‘external’ order. The point here is that

the modern understanding of self-determination entails viewing the individual as necessarily

dependent upon a world which precedes her. Although both Kant and Hegel equate this relational

world with an ultimately demonstrable system (totalized rationality), an equation that many

subsequent modern thinkers take issue with (e.g. Nietzsche, Adorno, Levinas, ad infinitum), we

can nevertheless isolate the modern kernel of self-reflection, which appears logically prior to the

system, without recourse to this hermetic outcome. Doing so not only makes of the individual the

privileged site of critique; it also guarantees the continued existence of critique.3

2
Pippin will continually reiterate this idea in his Modernity as a Philosophical Problem: independence requires
dependence.
3
On the one hand, the first formulation, that of the privileged site, is undoubtedly subject-centered, and there is merit
in the analyses of both Heidegger and Derrida insofar as their incessant bracketing of the subject entails the
suspension of our assumptions concerning what constitutes the subject; this sustained abeyance is fruitful because it
gives us the opportunity to disengage from, and radically reconsider, a perhaps ideological understanding of the
individual, which could be, in the final analysis, not only misguided but also harmful (in terms of the policies we
create according to that understanding). On the other hand, the second formulation, that of the very existence of
critique, implies that, with or without the ‘post’-modern theoretical reduction of the subject, critique still takes place;
and self-reflection, as that (temporary) experience which absents itself from the determining gaze of the outside, is

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The merit of modern self-reflection is that it has very little to do with passivity. Although

the system of Hegel (the quintessential modern philosopher) may give one the impression that

self-reflection is no more than a god’s-eye-view of the totality of being, or the relic of the ancient

sage who, secure in the ethical life of his people, contemplated the heavens and found fulfillment

there, the tensions endemic to this system are nevertheless moments in which the self-reflective

individual must actively engage the other or the outside, and this as the way of despair. 4 If

passivity were the nature of self-reflection, that (Kantian) moment in which authority is contested,

a moment that problematizes the individual’s relationship to society, would never have arisen. Yet

this is precisely the problem which we have inherited, and it is reiterated each time the individual

senses an encroaching, external influence, shrouded in darkness but only at first. The stygian veil

is lifted when the self-reflective or critical individual articulates, by dismantling then

reconstructing, this external influence. Following this, the knowing which transpires here is

neither an inert content or medium nor a passive state of receptivity; rather, it is an active

engagement with the outside. This forces the outside or external authority into the inside of

knowledge, resulting in the individual’s control over that which had previously confined her.

Simply put, if external processes are clearly understood by the individual experiencing them, and

if she senses that these are detrimental to her, then she will be able to articulate ways of

circumventing, reorganizing, or destroying such processes; i.e. they will lose their (malevolent) air

of foreignness. This, at least, is the resolution which modern thought hopes for, yet more

precisely what motivates critique (that of Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, and innumerable others).
4
According to Hegel, consciousness has developed over the centuries. Such development is a result of contradictions
arising within experience itself. The overcoming of such contradictions entails the loss of a prior state of self-
consciousness, thereby resulting in a necessary experience of despair, of being unable to return to a (once essential)
part of oneself. The self-reflective individual doubts aspects of himself (whether personal or cultural, i.e. universal)
because they are no longer lived, immediate relations; i.e. certainty vanishes. Consequently, he must forge other
relations anew (hence passivity is out of the question), thus resulting in a tense, sometimes despairing though
sustained, experience of critique, of project: “[The preceding moment upon the developmental path of natural
consciousness] counts for [the individual] as the loss of its own self; for it does lose its truth on this path. The road can
therefore be regarded as the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair.” (Hegel, Phenomenology of
Spirit, A.V. Miller translation, §78, p. 49)

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importantly (and more practically): The concept of agency, which both self-reflection and the

contesting of authority require, and which is also primarily modern in form and function, is not

easily dismissed. On the contrary, it is a concept that helps to explain the motivation behind

revolutionary events and socio-political change.5

Human agency, however, does not occur in a vacuum; rather, its basis of self-reflection

implies that the individual acts in such a way that she ‘reads’ the dynamics of public space or the

processes by which authorities make themselves known. In fact, in order for there to be an action

that either directly addresses a socio-historical issue or at least evinces a common theme, there

must exist a universal (though not perfect) ‘readability’ between the ‘isolated’ individual and her

others, her public. Kant believed that this ‘readability’ is constituted by the categories, by those

immanent features of thought which are universally shared. Hegel, however, posited the dialectic

as the common feature of both thought and being. According to him, the latter two regions are of

the same rational structure or system, and the dialectic is the ever operative term between them,

unifying them as the active, immanent plane of self-consciousness. Following this, dialectical

thought produces a kind of knowledge that mirrors the (dialectical) processes of nature and

society. This mirroring takes place in the self-reflective subject, and it is an advance over other

forms of thought (e.g. the understanding) insofar as it presents the subject with the latter’s image

in the world, thereby endowing the individual with a sense(s) that she has effected this, that she

5
Although Kant did not advocate revolutionary thought or action, opting rather for a public forum of discussion
wherein issues concerning the limitations of (private) vocations could be addressed and gradually resolved, he did
isolate the moment of self-reflection essential to human agency, which he hoped would clear up the blindness of the
faithful (from both the metaphysical and religious traditions). The public forum, however, could only be understood as
a free realm of contestation if the monarchical state, which delineated this realm, were likewise of a free or rational
constitution, without any sleight of hand, double dealing, or deception. The fact that Kant was not skeptical
concerning the rational potential of public discourse underscores the optimism of early modernity. Given Habermas’s
much later theory of communicative rationality (or Kantian public discourse revamped through the lens of
phenomenology), we see a return to Kantian optimism, yet not without numerous caveats. The important point here is
that the desire for (free) public discourse, hence for universal understanding, is still in effect; just as it was in Kant’s
time, so it is in our own. This desire, at its core, is supported by the universal existence of self-reflection, of that
rational apprehension of one’s place in the whole, one’s experience of ‘hearing’ an external order within whilst
‘voicing’ a change without.

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owns this, and that history or tradition (with its sometimes presupposed malevolence and its

“slaughter bench” covered in human offal) is not something to be either discarded or repelled by,

but rather something to be consciously, rationally inherited.6 Self-reflection, then, is that essential

space in which the individual sees herself both as having a determinate effect on the world and the

world, in turn, as having a determinate effect on her.

If we elide the human agency which is essential to this modern relation, opting rather to

take the postmodern turn away from this subjective site, we will misrepresent the individual’s

actual lived conditions and misdiagnose the framework within which she contests this or that

authority.7 This is precisely what Walter Benjamin articulates in The Author as Producer, where

he describes the intimate relation between reason and practice, and how these can be utilized to

alter the habitual sequence of events, a sequence that determines, seemingly from without, the

ways in which we approach the world and others.8 For Benjamin, the dialectical (or concretely

modern) understanding of experience is key here, for it bridges the divide between abstract

thought (of the thinker, the writer) and the material world, placing both in close proximity to one

another. In other words, there is a “functional connection” 9 between the external world of

production (with its specific products, including works of art) and the lived experience of

6
Note the (in)famous line from Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History: “But even regarding history as the
slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been
victimized — the question involuntarily arises — to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have
been offered.” (§24) That final aim is precisely freedom, according to Hegel, and developed self-reflection – a type of
development requiring formative, rational (to see reason in tradition and in one’s own constitution) education – is the
sustained, lived experience of critique in which the atrocities of history are not so much justified as affirmed; and yet,
this is speculative education indeed, for it underscores Hegel’s justificatory logic, a logic that both distances him from
voicing an ethical condemnation on an unethical past and brings him near to a more self-critical, reasonable
community, where true ethics commences. I think it would be a stretch to call Hegel’s judgment on history
misanthropy. For my present purposes, I will simply call it (modern) optimism.
7
I would argue that the individual’s (self-reflective) framework of counter-resistance is always context-specific. The
context, then, limits the scope of self-reflection, thereby endowing it with a contingent coloring or style. A given
moment of self-reflection cannot transpire without some form of resistance, and this, in turn, always in a particular
time and place. Self-reflection is therefore an artifact of historical conditions. This idea will become increasingly more
visceral, more representative of the human condition, and more amenable to philosophical discourse with Marx. His
work re-conceptualizes resistance as production, thereby forcing self-reflection into a new skin, a new set of relations
in which the individual understands her place in, and effects upon, the world. Benjamin and Arendt follow suit.
8
W. Benjamin, The Author as Producer, P. 267.
9
Ibid, p. 266.

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individuals or the audience, in this case that of the theater. Following this, the artist or producer

can either present us with something we are already familiar with, hence habituated to, or he can

interrupt our habits of receptivity by arranging the presentation in such a way that we are forced to

fall back on our self-reflective potential. In Benjamin’s example of Brechtian theater, the non-

traditional practice of this art form results in a visceral interruption of given, habitual experience

by opening up a space in which the audience no longer simply receives a message or theme, which

is a feature of passivity; rather, the individual in attendance has the very medium of the message,

the very form of the production, for his content. This is the introduction of a critical distance, i.e.

reason and its commensurate activity of self-reflection, within the often merely receptive stream

of life.

When Hegel posited dialectical activity as constitutive of both everyday experience and the

seemingly exterior forms of governance and civil society, he was indeed affirming the necessity of

contradictions; the primary contradiction being the difference or tension between the individual’s

sense of self-certainty and the resultant truth, through communal activity, of putting this certain

knowledge into practice, of testing it in the world. Specifically, this primary contradiction is the

very form of phenomenological or developmental experience, that is, of (human) time itself, which

engenders self-consciousness as a locus of motivation. In the same optimistic spirit as Kant,

however, who held that the gradual contesting of one’s vocation (and all this entails, including the

authorities which supervise it) was granted free reign (within reason) in public space, Hegel

envisioned the modern nation-state as the instantiation of shared, universal freedom. Within this

state, each citizen, from out of his singular life and vocation, contributes to the greater good of the

shared experience of freedom. Such experience justifies the idiosyncratic life of the individual by

providing him with the space of reasons (tested in self-consciousness no doubt) within which he

rationalizes his proper place in the system, and in so doing affirms the truth of his existence as a

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dependent being. Following this, the individual, at this historical endpoint, sees nothing within his

act of self-reflection that is not shared by others. And it is precisely these others, every other,

including those in the upper echelons of government, that Hegel has (modern) faith in.

At the core of this early modern optimism is the belief in self-reflection as a frequently

occurring phenomenon sanctified by the presence of universal good will. According to Hegel, 10 if

the individual is initially hindered from clearly perceiving her milieu and her relations to others,

she must still be undergoing her formative education, not yet able to understand the rational

necessity of the whole; i.e. she is (temporarily) excluded from universal engagement with others,

the developmental endpoint. When Benjamin, however, describes that same moment of critical

distance or self-reflection, he makes of material production the dialectical ground upon which self-

reflection arises, the latter as the very interruption of that ground. In other words, the individual is

determined by external forces to such an extent that the pivotal moment of self-reflection arises

much more infrequently than earlier modernist thought had imagined. 11 Yet this is of course not to

10
And not according to Hegel: he never would have condoned my use of the feminine pronoun in the remainder of
this sentence. For him, woman is a plant that develops, unfolds, blossoms, yet only within the confines of the family.
Her roots are those of love, and the terrifying power of negativity (Phenomenology, §32), which is essential to self-
reflection, uproots ‘us’ from the (familial) given, disrupts ‘our’ homeostasis, and reduces love and other natural
feelings to sublated moments of rationality and, further, recollection. The modern interpretation of a plant? That which
remains stuck in the ground, immobile yet endowing perambulatory creatures with their bearings, their unconscious
placeholders of certainty within a very uncertain future.
11
This early modern belief in the frequently occurring phenomenon of self-reflection is also tied to a particular
conception of freedom. This conception is at the center of Hegel’s system, the logic of which we glimpse here: “While
matter has its “substance” [i.e. its source of support] outside itself, Spirit is autonomous and self-sufficient, a Being-
by-itself (Bei-sich-selbst-sein). But this, precisely, is freedom […] I am free when I exist independently, all by myself.
This self-sufficient being is self-consciousness, the consciousness of self.” (G.W.F. Hegel, Freedom, Individual &
State, p. 20) Hegel presents us with the universal potential, in each and every individual (leaving aside the question of
gender), of enacting freedom according to a content derived from the dialectical processes of self-consciousness, the
logical or rational structure of which is self-reflection. What Hegel calls here “self-sufficient being” (i.e. freedom in its
bare, naked state) is actually an assumed logical starting point, for as his system unfolds we see that the endpoint or
goal is a thorough representation of ethical life, with its necessary structure of inter-subjectivity solidified by
mutual/reciprocal recognition. Freedom, then, exists in the ‘beginning’ as (logical) motivation and in the ‘end’ as
(actual) community. What occurs in-between is a long history of self-reflective development. The results of this
development are of course disputed by many modern thinkers, not to mention postmodern thinkers envisioning a
radical break. Yet it is precisely the concept of development which is in most need of preservation, for it signifies the
necessary mental and physical labor required not only for self-reflective distance, but also for communal, ethical
change. The modern project teaches us that resistance to freedom is an a priori condition of being human; it is the
matter with which we cannot fail to contend. Following this, the rationality which transpires as self-reflection is
precisely what motivates us to demarcate, form a dialogue with, and envision ways of overcoming resistance. Preserve
modernity? How could we do otherwise?

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say that self-reflection is precluded outright; on the contrary, Benjamin and many other modern

thinkers hold that our approach to self-reflection, to its theoretical significance and practical

power, must be reformulated if we are not to misdiagnose the human condition. 12 We must, in

other words, alter our conception of the modern individual. Doing so, following Benjamin who

follows Marx, entails understanding the individual as both a producer and an effect of production.

Following this, the most fruitful way to contest authority or to overcome passivity is to manipulate

the means of production, a sustained act of manipulation that, in Benjamin’s essay, is most

effective on an aesthetic register; there, the staging of a play. That critical self-reflection is

possible there, within this scene of self-alienating given-ness and passive ‘self’-determination –

this possibility is distinctly modern, for it raises the problematic issue of freedom within a

determinate context, within a world of competing institutions and ideals. We are obliged, as it

were, to contend with a history we did not ask for, a history we cannot transcend.

In this essay thus far I have presented self-reflection as the essential feature of the modern

project. It soon became evident that self-reflection possesses no meaning in itself, but is rather

always context-specific, always bound to a particular place and time. This context takes many

forms in the history of modern thought: the dogmatic authorities of metaphysics and religion

(Kant), the (universal) community against which the individual must test her idiosyncratic beliefs

(Hegel), the (unconscious) effects of production on an audience of consumers (Benjamin), and so

on. Regardless of the specific contextual form, the recurrent theme is that there exists an external

order which we must work either for or against, and self-reflection is precisely the ‘lens’ through

which we do so. Such (critical) labor requires that we comprehend this order and, furthermore,

that we, in turn, have just as much of an effect on it as it has on us.

12
I will discuss shortly an important aspect of Hannah Arendt’s thought.

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Hannah Arendt’s insight is apt here: What modernity brought to bear on consciousness and

social life was a ‘new’ conception of the individual: homo faber: ‘he’ whose essence is to make, to

fabricate (rather than contemplate) the means by which ‘he’ approaches truth and garners a sense

of certainty. Such fabrication entails producing an effect in the world, or what Arendt calls an

“event” as opposed to a mere idea.13 Following this, when the individual realizes that her primary

function is to effect change within the world, only subsequently to fall back on abstract thought,

she will have also realized that her actions affect other individuals. 14 This pivotal modern

realization or self-reflection is the necessary moment in which the individual senses her proper

place, her context-bound life.

I have sought to present the modern project as an attempt to grasp the context of or

resistance to self-reflection, as well as it being the theorization of the moments in which freedom

is enacted or expressed. The transition from Kant and Hegel to Benjamin and Arendt evinces the

development of a gradual, productive understanding of the context of freedom. The pivotal,

modern moment of freedom is that of self-reflection, a moment that none of these thinkers lose

sight of.15 Insofar as freedom is communal or inter-subjective in modern discourse, a more layered

13
“It was not reason but a manmade instrument, the telescope, which actually changed the physical world view; it was
not contemplation, observation, and speculation which led to the new knowledge, but the active stepping in of homo
faber, of making and fabricating.” (H. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 274) and, “[The most general and most
generally accepted attitude of the modern age]: though one cannot know truth as something given and disclosed, man
can at least know what he makes himself.” (Ibid, p. 282)
14
Especially when one considers the large scale effects of inter-continental commerce, technological transfers between
cultures and, more generally, globalization in all its forms.
15
As Habermas says of Adorno, we could say of a thinker such as Derrida (Though only the popular, ill-formed
understanding of Derrida as a ‘philosopher’ who absents himself from engaging the world and its social contexts; the
fact of the matter, on the contrary, is that Derrida attempts to reassess our assumptions concerning resistances to self-
reflection, and he does so in order to criticize traditional critique even further, thereby engaging the world to a greater
degree while practicing caution around and respect toward the ever-close yet ever-receding other.): A performative
contraction arises when the one who critiques argues that critique is impossible (or that it, here, has no referent in the
actual, lived world), but I would add: in such a way that contexts and resistances to self-reflection are left out of
account; such leaving out of account obfuscates a critique’s relation to the external world, a relation that should be of
primary importance. Following this, to preserve the modern project would be to return to critique, and to not lose sight
of critique as a powerful lens through which resistances to self-reflection appear as so many relations to other cultures
and systems of thought. Coming to terms with such resistance is to enact an ethical concern. (Foucault also does not
lose sight of critique, as he reassesses the importance of Kant in the former’s (now French, now inherited) What is
Enlightenment?)

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or embodied (following Merleau-Ponty) understanding of it entails a critical approach to lived,

relational contexts. This does not imply that we have mastered or adequately foreseen such

contexts, which in fact would be anathema to non-insular freedom, but simply that the future is

still open, still a work in progress.16 This, precisely, is what motivates the modern project in its

ongoing critique of resistances to self-reflection. The ethical concern is, perhaps, secondary yet

nevertheless an important counter-measure to hermetic systems of knowledge and ossified theories

of social interaction. In the history of modern thought, the primary question has been whether

one’s freedom (as ambiguous a term as this is) is being constricted or granted the space in which to

flourish; a difficult question to both formulate and answer, no doubt, yet one always worth asking.

16
There is of course a tradition of the work insofar as it is given to us partially formed by the hands of our precursors.
Following this, we can’t fully determine the consequences of continuing to pencil in this or that line, or to gradate the
shading of an incomplete hue, yet we can ask others, in the present we all share, for their help in forming the work.
We, then, begin to hear a voice which is not our own, a voice which precedes the scene, the form, and the threat of
(modern) completion. Our response to this voice transpires within self-reflection, that moment in which we sense
resistance to our freedom and make the choice either to preconceive and mute such resistance or to let it appear in its
own fashion, to allow it, in effect, to intone and unsettle our preconceptions. (Yet what is freedom here, let alone our
freedom? Perhaps ‘simply’ the tension between working with an historical given while simultaneously keeping open
the possibility that this too shall pass, that another ‘we’ will replace us – An historicized freedom; always informed;
never unformed; neither absolute nor groundless.) I believe this is what Levinas means when he writes of our
responsibility for the Other, of our openness to the other before action or conception supervene. Besides this
phenomenological question of how the other enters from the outside, a fascinating question no doubt, there is still the
more general modern question of how ethical responsibility is to be put into practice; that is, how does such
responsibility contribute to the fashioning of a work we all share?

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