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Granted that one is misleading as well as misled to allow for precritical ways of doing philosophy and theology (cf. Notebooks, 21 September 2005), there may nevertheless be good reasons to allow that there are more or less critical ways of doing them. In other words, even if one assumes, as I have, that "a secondary activity" in Whitehead's sense "is eo ipso 'critical,'" one need not, and I now believe, should not, assume that there is only one way of being, properly, "critical." Consider the following reasoning. 

'''Theology' may be defined very generally as a way of appropriating more or less critically the faith and witness explicitly mediated by religion. The qualification 'more or less critically' is necessary because, in the theological context, as in others, appropriation, or reflection (the terms are here used synonymously), can occur on different levels. To appropriate, or reflect, critically on either level is to make judgments using certain criteria. But whereas, on the first, less critical level, the criteria used are simply the consuetudinary criteria established in the particular context of reflection, on the second, more critical level, they are the ultimate criteria of experience and reason as these require to be used in that particular context. Simply to say, then, that theology is a way of performing the 'second act' of critically appropriating the 'first act' of faith and witness is to pass over the possibility that there can be less, as well as more, critical ways of doing this" ("Existentialist Theology": 1), 

It will be noted that this reasoning follows closely that of Habermas and Apel in allowing that the claims to validity necessarily implied by our various speech acts can be redeemed "immediately," on the primary level of "interaction," as well as "mediately," or "discursively," on the secondary level of "discourse." But "more or less critical appropriation" is an apt way to distinguish the two levels of redemption, as they understand them, because the difference between the levels is the difference between criticizing everything, including all consuetudinary criteria, by the relevant ultimate criteria of experience and reason, and not criticizing everything, but only everything other than the consuetudinary criteria that are employed in the criticism.

Of course, there may be reason enough, from the standpoint of a more critical appropriation, to think and speak of any less critical one such as is alone possible on the primary level of self-understanding and life-praxis as "precritical." . But thinking and speaking in this way is apt to mislead and is probably best avoided, especially since the only important and, so far as I can see, entirely justified distinction is that between "more and less critical." 

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