Western societies increasingly imagine, plan, and even rehearse their own destruction. This cultural habit reflects a growing contradiction in democracy. On the one hand, liberal societies laud the ideals of participatory democracy, free speech, individual liberty, and governmental transparency. On the other, they grow ever more committed to the biopolitical regulation of life, the mitigation of threats to public health and safety, and the restriction of liberties as a way of securing liberty itself. How do we understand the inexorable growth of a security paradigm in liberal democracies? The answer lies partly in the cultural imaginary that shapes public contemplation of citizenship, liberty, and security. This imaginary reflects both the growing influence of biopolitics and the legacy the Cold War covert action. Paradoxically, the Cold War state’s growing commitment to covert action was itself increasingly public; as a result, public culture has became obsessed with, and enamored of, covert affairs. Despite state secrecy, most citizens believe they know the “kinds of things” their government is doing in secret—yet they cannot know in detail, and they receive most of their knowledge in the form of melodramatic fiction. The result is a growing irrationality in the democratic public sphere.
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Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history chart the development of free, reflective self-conscious selves, but what exactly does that mean? For skeptics, it doesn’t mean much, as Hegel notoriously appears to ground this development in the development of the state. This has inspired Popper’s well-known accusations that Hegel was a puppet of the Prussian monarchy, the “enemy of the open society,” etc., etc., and that the “free” subjects of the state as Hegel describes it are anything but. Further, from Marx to Habermas, Hegel is indicted as one who adopts a quietist attitude of priestly monasticism, so while those imbued with the proper critical, historical consciousness are busy trying to change the world according to the dictates of one or another praxis philosophy, Hegel is content to contemplate it as it goes up in flames. Habermas sees in Hegel’s mature work a “blunting of critique” and a “stoic retreat” from the problems of modernity, the very ones that Habermas believes the younger Hegel so incisively diagnosed. 
Given the rich and diverse history in the discipline of philosophy, many a practicing philosopher might justifiably remark that insightful philosophical inquiry must withstand the test of time. Though “The Collapse of Philosophical Naturalism” was published in Telos in 1969, many of its insights remain highly relevant to conversations that continue in philosophical and sociopolitical circles today. Dale Riepe issues a damning critique, examining four at once distinct and kindred flaws in philosophical naturalism. 
In his Critique of Judgment, Kant explains how “subjective judgments” resemble theoretical claims about truth in that they claim universal assent, even though they do not have an objective basis for doing so. In other words, although they are subjective, they assert a strict sense of objectivity and claim a universal ground for truth. Therefore, the proof of the validity of these judgments cannot be found in a specific “observable feature” of the object, but rather in the “actual intersubjective agreement.” While truth in his third Critique is neither a matter of the intellect nor a thing reducible to conceptual realm, it seems that he offers a different sense of truth that influenced the major trends in continental philosophy. One can trace this sense of truth as it provides a ground not only to “test the limits of our historical era” but also “to go beyond them.” 
