Thinking Critically About ‘Critical Thinking’

“We must never,” Bismarck is said to have warned, “look into the origins of laws or sausages.” Sage advice, I’ve always thought (and no pun intended with that “sage”)—but how much at odds it is with the dominant current of modern thought, which is to say Enlightenment thought. 

Immanuel Kant, a great hero of the Enlightenment, summed up the alternative to Bismarck’s counsel when, in an essay called “What is Enlightenment?,” he offered Sapere Aude, Dare to know!, as a motto for the movement. Enlightened man, Kant thought, was the first real adult: the first to realize his potential as an autonomous being—a being, as the etymology of the word implies, who “gives the law to himself.” As Kant stressed, this was a moral as well as an intellectual achievement, since it involved courage as much as insight: courage to put aside convention, tradition, and superstition (how the three tended to coalesce for Enlightened thinkers!) in order to rely for guidance on the dictates of reason alone. 

Today, we can hardly go to the toilet without being urged to cultivate “critical thinking.” Which does not mean, I hasten to add, that we are a society of Kantians. Nevertheless, what we are dealing with here is an educational watchword, not to say a cliché, that has roots in some of the Enlightenment values that Kant espoused. It’s a voracious, quick-growing hybrid. A Google search for the phrase “critical thinking” brings up 102 million results in 0.62 seconds. One of the first matches, God help us, is to something called “The Critical Thinking Community,” whose goal is “to promote essential change in education and society through the cultivation of fair-minded critical thinking.” (Why is it, I wonder, that the conjunction of the phrase “critical thinking” with the word “community” is so reliably productive of nausea?) 

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