User:Walkinxyz/Reflective disclosure

In his book Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future, Nikolas Kompridis describes a heterogeneous set of social practices that he believes are a significant source of ethical, political and cultural renewal. He collectively calls these practices "reflective disclosure", after Martin Heidegger's insights into the phenomenon of world disclosure, and he argues that social criticism, or critique, and "critical theory" in particular, ought to incorporate Heidegger's insights about this phenomenon if it is to have, as he puts it, "a future worthy of its past".

According to Kompridis, "reflective disclosure" refers to a diverse set of practices through which we can imagine and articulate alternatives to present conditions – alternatives, for example, that were previously untried or suppressed – in order to regenerate hope and confidence in the future and offer new ways of "going on" with our traditions and institutions. These practices, according to Kompridis, constitute what Charles Taylor calls a "new department" of reason, which is distinct from reason understood as the "slave of the passions" (Hume) or as a faculty of public justification (Rawls).

In contrast to theories of social change that emphasize socio-historical "contradictions" (Marxist and neo-Marxist), and to those which explain change in terms of processes outside of human agency (much of contemporary globalization discourse) – and in opposition to theories about the procedures by which moral and political questions are settled (Rawls/Habermas) – the purpose of reflective disclosure is to reopen the future cooperatively through "intimate critique", by disclosing practical alternatives and expanding what Kompridis calls the "logical space of possibility" for speech and action.