Totalized criticism
Once totalised, criticism merely evacuates itself of content and turns into a series of empty gestures. One cannot gain a truer understanding of the world by criticism alone, any more than one can make a dish of mince with a grinder and nothing to put through it. Totalised criticism is the modern form of intellectual innocence – not a harmless innocence, unhappily, for, by elevating suspicion to the dignity of a philosophical principle, it destroys trust and makes it impossible to learn. (Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology, p. 11)
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