Allowing oneself to be affected

Welte's gesture towards critical theory

Abstract

The analysis of the relationship between Welte and Critical Theory allows us to establish some fundamental traits of what we may call a characteristic “gesture” of his philosophy. He states that after the influence of the great classical philosophers and of his immediate teachers, his thought has become more sober and critical, above all, among other influences, due to the critical theory of Frankfurt`s School. In this paper I will reconstruct, in view of three basic relationships – ideology and religion, negativity and good, meaning and freedom – how this relationship institutes a gesture which begins, in his words, by “allowing oneself to be affected” by the challenges of these philosophies and present events, so to admit the contributions of these critical positions, to review his own thought, and to go back over the critiques precisely from the viewpoint of the irreducible elements of the traditions that formed him, as a corrective and a complement for those aspects that they cannot reach.