Critical Habits: Ideology, Immanent Critique and Second Nature

Abstract

In this thesis, I define a conception of anthropology based on habits that proves suitable to figure in a theory of ideology critique. In the first part, I reconstruct neo-Hegelian theories of ideology and immanent critique to articulate a challenge for Karen Ng’s dialectical theory of ideology critique. To answer this challenge in the second part of this thesis, I adapt Ng’s theory by supplementing it with Hegelian anthropology and contemporary work on self-consciousness. Drawing on a conception of habits provided by Sebastian Rödl, I define a threefold structure that provides us with the positive side of habits in their constitutive role in self-consciousness. Given the negative role of habits in the Hegelian conception of historical change, I am able to explain how habits exist on a societal level and how habits may become stagnant and oppose change. This leads to the contradictory character of habits that illustrates how habits could form both an oppressive and a liberating force. As such, I arrive at a theory of ideology critique with habits as its object and its ground.