{"id":5643,"date":"2009-03-06T13:16:50","date_gmt":"2009-03-06T13:16:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5643"},"modified":"2009-03-06T13:16:50","modified_gmt":"2009-03-06T13:16:50","slug":"critical-thinking-about-critical-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5643","title":{"rendered":"critical thinking about &#8220;critical thinking&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here are three interestingly complementary comments. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/01\/27\/opinion\/27brooks.html?_r=1&#038;sq=david%20brooks%20harvard%20&#038;st=cse&#038;%2334;What%20Life%20Asks%20of%20Us=&#038;%2334;=&#038;scp=1&#038;pagewanted=print\">first <\/a>is from the moderate-conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p>A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. &#8220;The aim of a liberal education&#8221; the report declared, &#8220;is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The report implied an entire way of living. Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<p>This approach is deeply consistent with the individualism of modern culture, with its emphasis on personal inquiry, personal self-discovery and personal happiness. But there is another, older way of living, and it was discussed in a neglected book that came out last summer called &#8220;On Thinking Institutionally&#8221; by the political scientist Hugh Heclo.<\/p>\n<p>In this way of living, to borrow an old phrase, we are not defined by what we ask of life. We are defined by what life asks of us. As we go through life, we travel through institutions \u2014 first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft. &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>New generations don\u2019t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve. So the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarily taken delivery of. &#8220;In taking delivery,&#8221; Heclo writes, &#8220;institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed.&#8221;<\/ul>\n<p>The second comment is from the influential Yale literary and queer theorist Michael Warner (hardly a moderate conservative, nor a pundit&#8211;although he might be a pandit). In a chapter entitled &#8220;Uncritical Reading,&#8221; Warner writes that the standard justification of college-level English is to teach students to be critical readers, ones who aren&#8217;t fooled by various forms of ideology, emotion, bias or writerly tradecraft.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p>Critical reading is the folk ideology of a learned profession, so close to us that we seldom feel the need to explain it. &#8230; Since literary critics tend to think of critical reading as a necessary form of any self-conscious reading, they seldom think of it as the kind of practice that might have&#8211;as I think it does have&#8211;a history, an intergenetic mix of forms, a discipline. &#8230; The very specific culture of critical reading is not the only normatively or reflexively organized method of reading, to which all others should be assimilated.<\/ul>\n<p>Warner ends with a quote from the philosopher Bernard Williams (who, considering his politics as a British social democrat, makes a nice third leg of this stool):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p>This ideal [of critical reason] involves an idea of ultimate freedom, according to which I am not entirely free as long as there is any ethically significant aspect of myself that belongs to me simply as a result of the process by which I was contingently formed. If my values are mine simply in virtue of social and psychological processes to which I have been exposed, then (the argument goes) it is as though I had been brainwashed: I cannot be a fully free, rational, and responsible agent.<\/ul>\n<p>Williams is skeptical about this ideal of separating the &#8220;criticizing self&#8221; from &#8220;everything that a person contingently is.&#8221; To put the point in my terms (not his): We can criticize any value. We can always ask, Why? Why should people have freedom of speech? Because they have equal dignity. But why should they have equal dignity? When moral words and phrases have emotional appeal, we can learn to disassociate ourselves from the positive emotions by asking critical questions. That process, carried to its relentless conclusion, leaves nothing.<\/p>\n<p>Thus a good life is not simply a critical one; it also requires appreciation of contingency and solidarity for others. In my opinion, it is right to appreciate the <em>diverse <\/em>values that people have inherited (for contingent reasons) and to feel solidarity with them despite these differences. In that case, critical thinking and critical reading are not satisfactory goals of education, at any level. Some critical independence is valuable, but there must also be a positive affective dimension.<\/p>\n<p>A separate question is to what extent critical thinking really dominates at institutions like Harvard. My sense is that the faculty report that Brooks quotes is only part of the picture. Universities also powerfully teach respect or even reverence for various institutions and traditions. Indeed, they try to teach students to revere academia itself&#8211;not mainly as a venue for critical debate but as a social gatekeeper and arbiter of norms. The fact that &#8220;critical reading&#8221; takes place in the seminar room helps to justify the institution&#8217;s major function, which is to bestow membership and recognition on some and not on others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here are three interestingly complementary comments. The first is from the moderate-conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks: A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. &#8220;The aim of a liberal education&#8221; the report declared, &#8220;is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-philosophy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5643\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}