If social structures shape the possibilities available to individuals, then they also shape the possibilities available to thought.
This creates a problem for criticism.
A philosopher may criticise an institution, a political order or a social system. But the concepts used in that criticism have themselves been formed within a particular society. The critic is not standing outside the world being criticised.
The question therefore becomes:
How can thought criticise the conditions that make that thought possible?
This problem had already appeared in Kant's critical philosophy, where reason examined the conditions of its own knowledge. But historical and social thinking gave the problem a new dimension.
Marx made the challenge especially sharp. If people's ideas are shaped by their social conditions, then philosophical criticism cannot simply assume that its own categories are socially neutral. Concepts such as freedom, property, equality and individuality may acquire different meanings within different forms of social organisation.
Criticism therefore has to ask where its own concepts come from.
This does not mean that every idea is merely an expression of social interest.
If that were so, criticism would undermine itself. The claim that all thought is socially conditioned would itself be a socially conditioned claim, with no special reason to accept it.
The deeper possibility is more interesting.
Social conditions can shape what becomes thinkable without determining what must be thought.
A society can make some distinctions obvious, others difficult to see, and still leave room for criticism, reinterpretation and invention.
This gives critique a peculiar position.
It is neither outside society nor completely trapped within it.
It works from within the very conditions it attempts to understand.
Nietzsche takes this reflexivity in another direction. His genealogical method asks where values came from, what kinds of struggles produced them, and what forms of life they sustain. The apparently universal can acquire a history.
But genealogy also turns upon the genealogist.
The critic's own values and perspectives require examination.
The result is a new conception of philosophical activity.
Criticism is no longer simply the comparison of reality with an external standard.
It can become an investigation of the conditions under which standards themselves arise.
This makes philosophy more difficult, but potentially more powerful.
A concept can be criticised for contradiction.
It can be criticised for failing to describe experience.
It can also be criticised for concealing relations that it takes for granted.
And finally, it can be criticised for the possibilities it opens or closes.
The philosophical question therefore becomes increasingly relational.
Not simply:
Is this idea true?
But also:
What does this idea make visible?
What does it make difficult to see?
What relations does it presuppose?
What forms of life does it make possible?
These questions do not replace the older philosophical questions. They add another dimension to them.
The history we have been following has therefore produced an unusual situation.
Philosophy began by questioning the world.
It learned to question knowledge.
It learned to question the knower.
It learned to question history, society and the concepts through which society understood itself.
Now it must question the position from which questioning occurs.
Critique has become reflexive.
And once it does, philosophy can no longer regard itself as merely describing a world that exists independently of its activity.
Its own concepts participate in the world they describe.
The philosopher is not simply an observer of the possibility-space.
The philosopher is inside it.
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