I was very interested to read Elizabeth Scalia’s piece about truth, relativism, and critical thinking. And I see from the lively responses to the post that I was not the only one. Personally, whenever I hear the phrase “critical thinking,” I tend to break out in a bit of a sweat. I do not like the phrase. Whenever people use it, I tend to think they mean . . . something else. Why? Well, it’s a long story. Have you got a minute–or, rather twenty minutes?
Let me start with Otto von Bismarck, a chap who would also have cast a cold eye upon the phrase “critical thinking,” had he ever chanced to encounter it. “We must never,” Bismarck warned, “look into the origins of laws or sausages.” Sage advice, I’ve always thought, but how much at odds it is with the dominant current of modern thought, which is to say Enlightenment thought, which is to say the sort of thought that champions phrases like “critical thinking.” 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 as its motto the imperative “Sapere Aude”: “Dare to know!” 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.
Bismarck’s observation cautions reticence about certain matters; it implies that about some things it is better not to inquire too closely. What Walter Bagehot said about the British monarchy—“We must not let in daylight upon magic”—has, from this point of view, a more general application. The legend “Here be monsters” that one sees on certain antique maps applies also to certain precincts of the map of our moral universe.
Enlightened man, by contrast, is above all a creature who looks into things: he wants to “get to the bottom” of controversies, to dispel mysteries, to see what makes things “tick,” to understand the mechanics of everything from law to sausages, from love to society. Who has the better advice, Bismarck or Kant?
Of course, it is not a simple choice. For one thing, it might be argued that Kant’s own attitude toward the imperative “Dare to Know!” was complex. In a famous passage toward the beginning of The Critique of Pure Reason, for example, Kant tells us that he was setting limits to reason in order to make room for faith. Exactly what Kant meant by this . . . what to call it? this admission? this boast? this concession? Well, whatever Kant meant by his invocation of faith, it has been an abiding matter of debate. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that Kant’s “critical philosophy” is itself a monument of Enlightenment thought, as much in its implied commendation of the “critical attitude” as as in the specific philosophical bureaucracy he recommends.
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 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 search for the phrase “critical thinking” using the Google search engine brings up 2,290,200 references in .08 seconds. The first match, 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?)
Everywhere you look, in fact, you will find the virtues of “critical thinking” extolled: Colleges and universities claim to be stuffed with the thing, and even high schools— even, mirabile dictu, primary schools —brag about instilling the principles of “critical thinking” in their charges. There’s “critical thinking” for bankers, for accountants, for cooks, gardeners, haberdashers, and even advanced toddlers. A couple of summers ago, my wife and I took our son, then 5 years old, to an orientation meeting for parents considering sending their children to a local kindergarten. School officials enthusiastically told us about how they would bring the principles of critical thinking to Sally’s play pen and little Johnnie’s sport. Absolutely everyone is enjoined to scrutinize his presuppositions, reject conventional thinking, and above all, to be original and/or “creative.” (Ponder, if your stomach is strong enough, a “Creative Critical Thinking Community.”)
To some extent, we owe the infestation of “critical thinking” to that great twentieth-century movement to empty minds while at the same time inflating the sense of self-importance, or, to give it its usual name, Progressive Education. It was John Dewey, after all, who told us that “education as such has no aims,” warned about “the vice of externally imposed ends,” urged upon his readers the notion that “an individual can only live in the present.” (The present, Dewey said, “is what life is in leaving the past behind it,” i.e., a nunc stans of perfect ignorance.)
The first thing to notice about the vogue for “critical thinking” is that it tends to foster not criticism but what one wit called “criticismism”: the “ism” or ideology of being critical, which, like most isms, turns out to be a parody or betrayal of the very thing it claims to champion. Criticismism is an attitude guaranteed to instill querulous dissatisfaction, which is to say ingratitude, on the one hand, and frivolousness, on the other. Its principal effect, as the philosopher David Stove observed, has been “to fortify millions of ignorant graduates and undergraduates in the belief, to which they are already only too firmly wedded by other causes, that the adversary posture is all, and that intellectual life consists in ‘directionless quibble. ’”
The phrase “directionless quibble” is from Jacques Barzun’s The House of Intellect, and a fine book it is, too, not least in its appreciation of the ways in which unanchored intellect can be “a life-darkening institution.” I suggest, however, that the phrase “directionless quibble” is not entirely accurate, since the habit of quibble cultivated by “critical thinking” does have a direction, namely against the status quo. The belief, as Stove puts it, “that the adversary posture is all” is at the center of “critical thinking,” of criticismism. Lionel Trilling spoke in this context of “the adversary culture of the intellectuals.” I well remember the day I received word of a long article in Teachers College Record, a journal from Indiana University which describes itself as “the voice of scholarship in education.” The featured article is a 30,000 word behemoth by a professor of “inquiry and philosophy” called “Ocularcentrism, Phonocentrism and the Counter Enlightenment Problematic: Clarifying Contested Terrain in our Schools of Education.” I am too charitable to subject you to a sample of its almost comically reader-proof prose (you can see for yourself here), but it is worth pausing to note that such work is absolutely typical in the academic establishment today. It really is “the voice of scholarship,” or what’s become of scholarship.
How we got here is makes for a long story. I’d like to dip into a few chapters of that story and then speculate briefly about what an alternative might look like.
It seems obvious that criticismism is a descendant or re-enactment of the Enlightenment imperative “Dare to Know!” In this sense, it is a precursor or adjunct of that “hermeneutics of suspicion” that the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur invoked when discussing the intellectual and moral demolition carried out by thinkers like Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. It would be hard to exaggerate the corrosive nature of these assaults. Often, indeed, what we encounter is less a hermeneutics of suspicion than a hermeneutics of contempt. The contempt expresses itself partly in a repudiation of the customary, the conventional, the habitual, partly in the cult of innovation and originality. Think, for example, of John Stuart Mill’s famous plea on behalf of moral, social, and intellectual “experiments in living.” Part of what makes that phrase so obnoxious is Mill’s effort to dignify his project of moral revolution with the prestige of science—as if, for example, his creepy relationship with the married Harriet Taylor was somehow equivalent to Michael Faraday’s experiments with electro-magnetisim. You see the same thing at work today when young hedonists in search of oblivion explain that they are “experimenting” with drugs.
It is worth pausing over Mill’s brief on behalf of innovation. You’ve heard it a thousand times. But familiarity should not blind us to its fatuous malevolence. Throughout history, Mill argues, the authors of such innovations have been objects of ridicule, persecution, and oppression; they have been ignored, silenced, exiled, im¬prisoned, even killed. But (Mill continues) we owe every step of progress, intellectual as well as moral, to the daring of innovators. “Without them,” he writes, “human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist; it is they who keep the life in those which already exist.” Ergo, innovators—“developed human beings” is one phrase Mill uses for such paragons —should not merely be tolerated but positively be encouraged as beacons of future improvement. David Stove called this the “They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus” argument. In a penetrating essay in his book Cricket Versus Republicanism (1995), Stove noted that “the Columbus argument” (as he called it for short) “has swept the world.”
With every day that has passed since Mill published it, it has been more influential than it was the day before. In the intellectual and moral dissolution of the West in the twentieth century, every step has depended on conserva¬tives being disarmed, at some critical point, by the Columbus argument; by revolutionaries claiming that any resistance made to them is only another instance of that undeserved hostility which beneficial innovators have so regularly met with in the past.
The amazing thing about the success of the Columbus argument is that it depends on premises that are so obviously faulty. Indeed, a moment’s reflection reveals that the Columbus argument is undermined by a downright glaring weakness. Granted that every change for the better has depended on someone embarking on a new departure: well, so too has every change for the worse. And surely, Stove writes, there have been at least as many proposed innovations which “were or would have been for the worse as ones which were or would have been for the better.” Which means that we have at least as much reason to discourage innovators as to encourage them, especially when their innovations bear on things as immensely complex as the organization of society. As Lord Falkland admonished, “when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not change.”
The triumph of Millian liberalism—one of the main “active ingredients” in “critical thinking”—shows that such objections have fallen on deaf ears. But why? Why have “innovation,” “originality,” etc., become mesmerizing charms that neutralize criticism before it even gets started when so much that is produced in the name of innovation is obviously a change for the worse? An inventory of the fearsome social, political, and moral innovations made in this past century alone should have made every thinking person wary of unchaperoned innovation.
One reason that innovation has survived with its reputation intact, Stove notes, is that Mill and his heirs have been careful to supply a “one-sided diet of examples.” You mention Columbus, but not Stalin, Copernicus, but not the Marquis de Sade, Socrates, but not Robespierre. Mill never missed an opportunity to expatiate on the value of “originality,” “eccentricity,” and the like. “The amount of eccentricity in a society,” he wrote, “has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained.” But you never caught Mill dilating on the “improvement on established practice” inaugurated by Robespierre and St. Just, or the “experiments in living” conducted by the Marquis de Sade.
Still, in order to understand its world-conquering success, one has to go beyond simple credulity and an abundance of one-sided examples. Flattery comes into it. Mill was exceptionally adroit at appealing to his readers’ moral vanity. When he spoke (as he was always speaking) of “persons of decided mental superiority” he made it seem as though he might actually be speaking about them. Mill said that there was “no reason that all human existence should be constructed on some one or some small number of pat¬terns.” Quite right! Even if persons of genius are always likely to be “a small minority,” still we must “preserve the soil in which they grow.” Consequently, people have a duty to shun custom and nurture their individual “self-development” if they are not to jeopardize “their fair share of happiness” and the “mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable.”
Mill’s blandishments went even deeper. In On Liberty, Mill presented himself as a prophet of individual liberty. He has often been regarded as such, especially by liberal academics, who of course have been instrumental in propagating the gospel according to Mill. And “gospel” is the mot juste. Like many radical reformers, Mill promised almost boundless freedom, but he arrived bearing an exacting new system of belief. In this sense, as Maurice Cowling argues, On Liberty has been “one of the most influential of modern political tracts,” chiefly because “its purpose has been misunderstood.” Contrary to common opinion, Cowling wrote, Mill’s book was
not so much a plea for individual freedom, as a means of ensuring that Christianity would be superseded by that form of liberal, rationalising utilitarianism which went by the name of the Religion of Humanity. Mill’s liberalism was a dogmatic, religious one, not the soothing night-comforter for which it is sometimes mistaken. Mill’s object was not to free men, but to convert them, and convert them to a peculiarly exclusive, peculiarly in-sinuating moral doctrine. Mill wished to moralize all social activity. . . . Mill, no less than Marx, Nietzsche, or Comte, claimed to replace Christianity by “something better.” Atheists and agnostics, humanists and free-thinkers may properly give thanks to Mill.
This tension in Mill’s work—between Mill the libertarian and Mill the moralistic utilitarian—helps to account for the vertiginous quality that suffuses the liberalism for which On Liberty was a kind of founding scripture. Mill’s announced enemy can be summed up in words like “custom,” “prejudice,” “established morality.” All his work goes to undermine these qualities—not because the positions they articulate are necessarily in error but simply because, being customary, accepted on trust, established by tradition, they have not been subjected to the acid-test of his version of the utilitarian calculus.
The tradition that Mill opposed celebrated custom, prejudice, and established morality precisely because they had prevailed and given good service through the vicissitudes of time and change; their longevity was an important token of their worthiness. Let us by all means acknowledge, as Edmund Burke acknowledged, that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” Still, Burke was right to extol prejudice as that which “renders a man’s virtue his habit. . . . Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.”
Mill overturned this traditional view. Indeed, he was instrumental in getting the public to associate “prejudice” indelibly with “bigotry.” He epitomized what the German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer called the Enlightenment’s “prejudice against prejudice.”
For Mill, established morality is suspect first of all just because it is established. His liberalism is essentially corrosive of existing societal arrangements, institutions, and morality. At bottom, Mill’s philosophy is a kind of inversion of Alexander Pope’s optimism: “Whatever is, is suspect” might have been Mill’s motto. He constantly castigated such things as the “magical influence of custom” (“magical” being a negative epithet for Mill), the “despotism of custom [that] is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement,” the “tyranny of opinion” that makes it so difficult for “the progressive principle” to flourish. According to Mill, the “greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history because the sway of custom has been complete.”
Such passages reveal the core of moral arrogance inhabiting Mill’s liberalism. Liberty was always on Mill’s lips; a new orthodoxy was ever in his heart. There is an important sense in which the libertarian streak in On Liberty is little more than a prophylactic against the coerciveness that its assumption of virtuous rationality presupposes.
Such “paradoxes” (to put it politely) show themselves wherever the constructive part of Mill’s doctrine is glimpsed through his cheerleading for freedom and eccentricity. Mill’s doctrine of liberty begins with a promise of emancipation. The individual, in order to construct a “life plan” worthy of his nature, must shed the carapace of inherited opinion. He must learn to become adept at “critical thinking,” to subject all his former beliefs to rational scrutiny. He must dare to be “eccentric,” “novel,” “original.” At the same time, Mill notes, not without misgiving, that
As mankind improve, the number of doctrines which are no longer disputed or doubted will be constantly on the increase; the well-being of mankind may almost be measured by the number and gravity of the truths which have reached the point of being uncontested. The cessation, on one question after another, of serious controversy is one of the necessary incidents of the consolidation of opinion—a consolidation as salutary in the case of true opinions as it is dangerous and noxious when the opinions are erroneous.
In other words, the partisan of Millian liberalism undertakes the destruction of inherited custom and belief in order to construct a bulwark of custom and belief that can be inherited. As Mill put it in his Autobiography (posthumously published in 1873),
I looked forward, through the present age of loud disputes but generally weak convictions, to a future . . . [in which] convictions as to what is right and wrong, useful and pernicious, [will be] deeply engraven on the feelings by early education and general unanimity of sentiment, and so firmly grounded in reason and in the true exigencies of life, that they shall not, like all former and present creeds, religious, ethical, and political, require to be periodically thrown off and replaced by others.
So: a “unanimity of sentiment” (a.k.a. custom) is all well and good as long as it is grounded in the “true exigencies of life”—as defined, of course, by J. S. Mill.
Mill’s utilitarianism provides one major model for criticismism. Another is found in the work of that modern Thrasymachus, Friedrich Nietzsche. In a celebrated epigram, Nietzsche wrote that “we have art lest we perish from the truth.” His disturbing thought was that art, with its fondness for illusion and make-believe, did not so much grace life as provide grateful distraction from life’s horrors. But Nietzsche’s real radicalism came in the way that he attempted to read life against truth.
Inverting the Platonic-Christian doctrine that linked truth with the good and the beautiful, Nietzsche declared truth to be “ugly”—a statement that, even now, has the capacity to bring one up short. Suspecting that “the will to truth might be a concealed will to death,” Nietzsche boldly demanded that “the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question.” This ambition to put truth itself under the knife of human scrutiny is as it were the moral source of all those famous Nietzschean formulae about truth and knowledge—that “there are no facts, only interpretations,” that “to tell the truth is simply to lie according to a fixed convention,” etc.
As Nietzsche recognized, his effort to provide a genealogy of truth led directly “back to the moral problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are ‘not moral’?” Nietzsche’s influence on contemporary intellectual life can hardly be overstated. “I am dynamite,” he declared shortly before sinking into irretrievable madness. He was right. In one way or another, his example is an indispensable background to almost every destructive intellectual movement the last century witnessed: Deconstruction, post-structuralism, just about anything followed by the word “studies” (gender studies, science studies, post-colonial studies): all trace a large part of their pedigree to Nietzsche’s obsession with power, in particular his subjugation of truth to scenarios of power. Foucault’s insistence that truth is always a coefficient of “regimes of power,” for example, is simply Nietzsche done over in black leather. And where would our deconstructionists and poststructuralists be without Nietzsche’s endlessly quoted declaration that truth is “a moveable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms”?
The philosopher Richard Rorty summed up Nietzsche’s importance when he enthusiastically observed that “it was Nietzsche who first explicitly suggested that we drop the whole idea of ‘knowing the truth. ’” Add a dollop of Marx for the appropriate degree of politization and presto: you have the formula for contemporary redactions of critical thinking.
Conceptually, such signature Nietzschean observations as “everything praised as moral is identical in essence with everything immoral” add little to the message that Thrasymachus was dispensing twenty-five-hundred years ago. They are the predictable product of nominalism and the desire to say something shocking, a perennial combination among the intellectually impatient. Nietzsche’s real radicalism arises from the grandiosity of his hubris. His militant “God is dead” atheism had its corollary: the dream of absolute self-creation, of a new sort of human being strong enough to dispense with inherited morality and create, in Nietzsche’s phrase, its “own new tables of what is good.” This ambition is at the root of Nietzsche’s goal of effecting a “transvaluation of all values.” It is also what makes his philosophy such an efficient solvent of traditional moral thought.
Truth vs. life: it was Nietzsche’s startling conclusion that science was at bottom allied with nihilism because of its uncompromising commitment to truth. “All science,” he wrote, “has at present the object of dissuading man from his former respect for himself.” In order to salvage life from science “the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question.” It is one of the curious features of Nietzsche’s mature thought that he wished to question the value of truth while upholding honesty as his one remaining virtue. Traditionally, the moral virtues have been all of a piece. For example, Aquinas observes that “nearly all are agreed in saying” that the moral virtues are interconnected, that “discernment belongs to prudence, rectitude to justice,” and so on. It is worth asking whether honesty, sundered from the family of virtues, remains a virtue—whether, in the end, it even remains honest. Untempered by other virtues, honesty functions not so much to reveal truth as to expose it. Is that honest?
Nietzsche clung to honesty after abandoning the other virtues because it allowed him to fashion the most ruthless instrument of interrogation imaginable. Difficulty, not truth, became his criterion of value. Thus he embraced the horrifying idea of the Eternal Recurrence primarily because he considered it “the hardest possible thought”—whether it was also true didn’t really matter.
Nietzsche opposed honesty to truth. He looked to art as a “countermovement to nihilism” not because he thought that art could furnish us with the truth but because it accustomed us to living openly with untruth. Ultimately, Nietzsche’s ideal asks us to transform our life into a work of art. Accepting Schopenhauer’s inversion of the traditional image of man, Nietzsche no longer finds human life dignified in itself: if man is essentially an expression of irrational will, then in himself he is morally worthless.
This is the dour irony that attends Nietzsche’s effort to burden man with the task of creating values rather than acknowledging them. And it is here, too, that Nietzsche’s aestheticism and his rejection of morality intersect. For Nietzsche, man is not an end in himself but only “a bridge, a great promise.” In order to redeem that promise, man must treat life with the same imperiousness and daring that the artist brings to his work. If, as Nietzsche argued, “life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, . . . and at least, at its mildest, exploitation,” then it is hardly surprising that the perfect aesthete will also be the perfect tyrant.
Nietzsche never tired of pointing out that the demands of traditional morality fly in the face of life. One might say, Yes, and that is precisely why morality is so valuable: it acknowledges that man’s allegiance is not only to life but also to what ennobles life—that, indeed, life itself is not the highest court of appeals. But for Nietzsche the measure of nobility is the uninhibited pulse of life: hence his penchant for biological and physiological metaphors, his invocation of “ascending” and “descending” forms of art and life. He defines the good as that which enhances the feeling of life. If “to see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more,” then violence and cruelty may have to be granted the patent of morality and enlisted in the aesthete’s palette of diversions. In more or less concentrated form, Nietzsche’s ideal is also modernity’s ideal. It is an ideal that subordinates morality to power in order to transform life into an aesthetic spectacle. It promises freedom and exaltation. But as Novalis points out, it is really the ultimate attainment of the barbarian.
The impulse of criticismism comes in a variety of flavors, from bitter to cloyingly sweet, and it can be made to serve a wide range of philosophical outlooks. That is part of what makes it so dangerous. One of the most beguiling and influential American practitioners was Richard Rorty, who until his death in June of 2007 was probably the most influential American academic philosopher of his generation. Once upon a time, Rorty was a serious analytic philosopher. Since the late 1970s, however, he increasingly busied himself explaining why philosophy must jettison its concern with outmoded things like truth and human nature. According to him, philosophy should turn itself into a form of literature or—as he sometimes put it—“fantasizing.” He was set on “blurring the literature-philosophy distinction and promoting the idea of a seamless, undifferentiated ‘general text, ’” in which, say,
Aristotle’s Metaphysics, a television program, and a French novel might coalesce into a fit object of hermeneutical scrutiny. Thus it is that Rorty believes that “the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress.”
As almost goes without saying, Rorty’s attack on philosophy and his celebration of culture as an “undifferentiated ‘general text’” earned him many honors. Indeed, Richard Rorty was widely regarded as he regarded himself: as a sort of secular sage, dispensing exhortations on all manner of subjects, as readily on the op-ed page of major newspapers as between the covers of an academic book of philosophical essays. The tone was always soothing, the rhetoric impish, the message nihilistic but cheerful. It has turned out to be an unbeatable recipe for success, patronizing the reader with the thought that there is nothing that cannot be patronized.
Rorty did not call himself a utilitarian or a Nietzschean. That might be too off-putting. Instead, he called himself a “pragmatist” or, in the last decade of his life, a “liberal ironist.” What Rorty wanted, as he explained in his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, is “philosophy without epistemology,” that is, philosophy without truth. In brief, Rorty wanted a philosophy (if we can still call it that) which “aims at continuing the conversation rather than at discovering truth.” He can manage to abide “truths” with a small “t” and in the plural: truths that we don’t take too seriously and wouldn’t dream of foisting upon others: truths, in other words, that are true merely by linguistic convention: truths, that is to say, that are not true. What he could not bear—and could bear to have us bear—was the idea of Truth that is somehow more than that.
Rorty generally tried to maintain a chummy, easygoing persona. This was consistent with his role as a “liberal ironist,” i.e., someone who thinks that “cruelty is the worst thing we can do” (the liberal part) but who, believing that moral values are utterly contingent, also believes that what counts as “cruelty” is a sociological or linguistic construct. (This is where the irony comes in: “I do not think,” Rorty wrote, “there are any plain moral facts out there . . . nor any neutral ground on which to stand and argue that either torture or kindness are [sic] preferable to the other.”)
Accordingly, one thing that was certain to earn Rorty’s contempt is the spectacle of philosophers without sufficient contempt for the truth. “You can still find philosophy professors,” he witheringly continued, “who will solemnly tell you that they are seeking the truth, not just a story or a consensus but an honest-to-God, down-home, accurate representation of the way the world is.” That’s the problem with liberal ironists: they are ironical about everything except their own irony, and are serious about tolerating everything except seriousness.
As Rorty was quick to point out, the “bedrock metaphysical issue” here is whether we have any non-linguistic access to reality. Does language “go all the way down”? Or does language point to a reality beyond itself, a reality that exercises a legitimate claim on our attention and provides a measure and limit for our descriptions of the world? In other words, is truth something that we invent? Or something that we discover?
The main current of Western culture has overwhelmingly endorsed the latter view. But Rorty firmly endorsed the idea that truth is merely a human invention. He wanted us to drop “the notion of truth as correspondence with reality altogether” and realize that there is “no difference that makes a difference” between the statement “it works because it’s true” and “it’s true because it works.” He told us that “Sentences like . . . ‘Truth is independent of the human mind’ are simply platitudes used to inculcate . . . the common sense of the West.” Of course, Rorty was right that such sentences “inculcate . . . the common sense of the West.” He was even right that they are “platitudes.” The statement “The sun rises in the east” is another such platitude.
Rorty looked forward to a culture—he calls it a “liberal utopia”—in which the “Nietzschean metaphors” of self-creation are finally “literalized,” i.e., made real. For philosophers, or people who used to be philosophers, this would mean a culture that “took for granted that philosophical problems are as temporary as poetic problems, that there are no problems which bind the generations together in a single natural kind called ‘humanity.’”
Rorty recognized that most people are not yet liberal ironists. Many people still believe that there is such a thing as truth independent of their thoughts. Some even continue to entertain the idea that their identity is more than a distillate of biological and sociological accidents. Rorty knew this. Whether he also knew that his own position as a liberal ironist crucially depended on most people being non-ironists is another question. One suspects not. In any event, he was clearly impatient with what he refers to as “a particular historically conditioned and possibly transient” view of the world, that is, the pre-ironical view for which things like truth and morality still matter. Rorty, in short, was a connoisseur of contempt. He could hardly have been more explicit about this. He told his readers in the friendliest possible way that he wanted them to “get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity, where we treat everything—our language, our conscience, our community—as a product of time and chance.”
In short, what Rorty wanted was philosophy without philosophy. The “liberal utopia” he envisioned is a utopia in which philosophy as traditionally conceived has conveniently emasculated itself, abandoned the search for truth, and lives on as a repository of more or less bracing exercises in fantasy. In his book Overcoming Law, the jurist and legal philosopher Richard Posner criticizes Rorty for his “deficient sense of fact” and “his belief in the plasticity of human nature,” noting that both are “typical of modern philosophy.” They are typical, anyway, of certain influential strains of modern philosophy. And it is in the union of these two things—a deficient sense of fact and a utopian belief in the unbounded plasticity of human nature —that the legacy of Nietzsche bears its most poisonous fruit.
The cognitive pessimism espoused by figures such as Rorty has moral as well as intellectual implications. When Rorty, expatiating on the delights of his liberal utopia, said that “a postmetaphysical culture seems to me no more impossible than a postreligious one, and equally desirable,” he perhaps spoke truer than he purposed. For despite the tenacity of non-irony in many sections of society, there is much in our culture that shows the disastrous effects of Nietzsche’s dream of a postmetaphysical, ironized society of putative self-creators. And of course to say that such a society would be as desirable as a postreligious society amounts to saying also that it would be just as undesirable.
Like his fellow liberal ironists, Rorty takes radical secularism as an unarguable good. For him, religion, like truth—like anything that transcends our contingent self-creations—belongs to the childhood of mankind. Ironists are beyond all that, and liberal ironists are beyond it with a smile and a little joke.
But of course whether our culture really is “postreligious” remains very much an open question. That liberal ironists such as Richard Rorty make do without religion does not tell us very much about the matter. In an essay called “The Self-Poisoning of the Open Society,” the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski observes that the idea that there are no fundamental disputes about moral and spiritual values is “an intellectualist self-delusion, a half-conscious inclination by Western academics to treat the values they acquired from their liberal education as something natural, innate, corresponding to the normal disposition of human nature.” Since liberal ironists like Richard Rorty do not believe that anything is natural or innate, Kolakowski’s observation has to be slightly modified to fit him. But his general point remains, namely that “the net result of education freed of authority, tradition, and dogma is moral nihilism.” Kolakowski readily admits that the belief in a unique core of personality “is not a scientifically provable truth.” But he argues that, “without this belief, the notion of personal dignity and of human rights is an arbitrary concoction, suspended in the void, indefensible, easy to be dismissed,” and hence prey to totalitarian doctrines and other intellectual and spiritual deformations.
The Promethean dreams of writers such as Nietzsche and Rorty depend critically on their denying the reality of anything that transcends the prerogatives of their efforts at self-creation. Traditionally, the recognition of such realities has been linked to a recognition of the sacred. It is a mistake typical of intellectuals to believe that this link can be severed with impunity. As Kolakowski notes elsewhere, “Culture, when it loses its sacred sense, loses all sense.”
With the disappearance of the sacred . . . arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization—the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is “in principle” an endlessly flexible thing, and that to deny this flexibility and this perfectibility is to deny man’s total autonomy and thus to deny man himself.
It is a curious irony that proponents of criticismism from from Mill and Nietzsche to Richard Rorty are reluctant children of the Enlightenment. Remember Kant’s motto for the Enlightenment: sapere aude, “Dare to know!” For the proponent of “critical thinking,” the liberal ironist, and other paragons of disillusionment, that motto has been revised to read “Dare to believe that there is nothing to know.” The Enlightenment sought to emancipate man by liberating reason and battling against superstition. It has turned out, however, that when reason is liberated entirely from tradition—which means also when it is liberated entirely from any acknowledgment of what transcends it—reason grows rancorous and hubristic: it becomes, in short, something irrational.
Philosophy itself has been an important casualty of this development. It is no accident that so much modern philosophy has been committed to bringing us the gospel of the end of philosophy. Once it abandons its vocation as the love of wisdom, philosophy inevitably becomes the gravedigger of its highest ambitions, interring itself with tools originally forged to perpetuate its service to truth.
It is an axiom of criticismism that the extent of our disillusionment is a reliable index of our wisdom: the idea that somehow the less we believe the more enlightened we are. There is, however, an curious irony here. For there is an important sense in which philosophy must contribute to the reduction of human experience. At least, it must begin by contributing to it, and this for the same reason that philosophy cannot proceed without a large element of doubt. There is something essentially corrosive about the probing glance of philosophy: something essentially dis-illusioning. If our goal is a human understanding of the world, then the activity of philosophy must itself be part of what philosophy investigates and criticizes.
Yet if philosophy begins by interrogating our everyday understanding of the world, all of its fancy conceptual footwork is for naught if it does not in the end lead us to affirm a fully human world. It is a delicate matter. In one sense, philosophy is the helpmeet of science. It aids in the task of putting our conceptual household in order: tidying up arguments, discarding unjustified claims. But in another sense, philosophy peeks over the shoulder of science to a world that science in principle cannot countenance. The problem is that we do not, cannot, inhabit the abstract world that science describes. Scientific rationality replaces the living texture of experience with a skeleton of “causes,” “drives,” “impulses,” and the like.
The enormous power over nature that science has brought man, is only part of its attraction. Psychologically just as important is the power it gives one to dispense with the human claims of experience. How liberating to know that kindness is just another form of egotism! That beauty is merely a matter of fatty tissues being ar¬ranged properly! That every inflection of our emotional life is nothing but the entirely predictable result of glandular activity! Just another, merely, nothing but . . . How liberating, how dismissive are these instruments of dispensation—but how untrue, finally, to our experience.
In this sense, scientific rationality is a temptation as well as an accomplishment because inherent in its view of the world is an invitation to forget one’s humanity. It is this Promethean aspect of science that links it with evil. As the Austrian novelist Robert Musil observed, the feeling that “nothing in life can be relied on unless it is firmly nailed down is a basic feeling embedded in the sobriety of science; and though we are too respectable to call it the Devil, a slight whiff of brimstone still clings to it.”
Reason allows us to distinguish between appearance and reality; but our reality turns out to be rooted firmly in the realm of appearance. As the English philosopher Roger Scruton observed,
The scientific attempt to explore the “depth” of human things is accompanied by a singular danger. For it threatens to destroy our response to the surface. Yet it is on the surface that we live and act: it is there that we are created, as complex appearances sustained by the social interaction which we, as appearances, also create. It is in this thin top-soil that the seeds of human happiness are sown, and the reckless desire to scrape it away —a desire which has inspired all those “sciences of man,” from Marx and Freud to sociobiology—deprives us of our consolation.
Consolation? Indeed, more: it threatens to deprive us of our humanity. In Plato’s phrase, philosophy turns out in the end to be an effort to “save the appearances.”
We all of us inhabit a world irretrievably shaped by science; we know that the sun does not really move from east to west, just as we know that the stars are not really hung like lamps from the sky. And yet, and yet: we recognize the legitimacy of that reality—our reality—every time we wake and find that the sun, once again, has risen. Enlightenment is a grand idea. But Bismarck was right about laws and sausages.
Well said. You’ve done Bismarck honor, probablya bit more honor than his crude remark deserves. Still, ou’re right about critical thinking.” It is certainly the most overused item of an entire glossary of content-free terms used today in with-it education circles.
I would avoid any suggestion, however, that its use is limited to liberals and other self-identified children of Enlightenment. At this moment, the heaviest users of truly content-free “critical thinking” and “critical analysis” language are creationists (hardly liberals) who keep trying, desperately, to get around the establishment clause. Having failed since 1925 to ban outright the teachinhg of (what they still insist on calling) “Darwinim,” next failed to justify equal time for something at first called “creation science’ and then “Intelligent Design Theory,” they now attempt (at this moment, hotly in Louisiana)to “improve” science education by demanding critical thinking on evolution (to be assisted, of course, by appropriate anti-evolution tracts).
As I keep remarking, the right has learned a great deal from the left these last thirty years.
All this earth-shaking “philosophical” excitement and what do we get from it? A rationale supporting the liberal platforms and projects du jour. Something of a come-down.
These developments among philosophers also have a great deal to do with normal people holding philosophy in contempt. Anyone with a mortgage and children will ignore both Michel Foucault and anyone who thinks that Foucault has anything useful to say.
All life is maya.
I am too charitable to subject you to a sample of its almost comically reader-proof prose (you can see for yourself here), but it is worth pausing to note that such work is absolutely typical in the academic establishment today. It really is “the voice of scholarship,” or what’s become of scholarship.
I clicked on the link and got this:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error ’80040e07′
Syntax error converting the varchar value ’11546)’ to a column of data type int.
/Content.asp, line 50
Is this the voice of scholarship? Things really have gone downhill.
If a participant in a forensics match among atheists argues for the existence of God, is he still a devil’s advocate?
“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate
I think it is important to point out that in a certain sense the very critical thinking movement opponent right now is not just analytic philosophy but also French Post-structuralism. After all it also inverts the liberal humanist paradigm. At first it rode front seat with critical theory but the later thinkers in it are just dubbed “later term capitalists”.In a certain way it echoes the true nature of nihilistic thought.
So are you the side of classical truth and beauty or are you for keeping up appearances? Where do you stand?
In this sense, it is a precursor or adjunct of that “hermeneutics of suspicion” that the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur invoked when discussing the intellectual and moral demolition carried out by thinkers like Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche.
Don’t throw Darwin into that mix. I’ll have none of this blood libel against Western Civilization. Darwin’s great contribution to our culture is now part and parcel of western tradition, Roger. You’re the criticismist if you want to argue against it.
And I note your potshot against the bogeyman of nominalism, a bogeyman that goes back to medieval church debates. If you, like Richard Weaver, want to go that far back to document the decline of civilization, then good luck in reversing things. But once again, nominalism is pretty much the tradition. You Platonists are the hip dissidents with the French cigarettes as far as that is concerned.
Nice essay. I once saw Richard Rorty hold forth at a panel at the American Political Science Association annual meeting. It was a sort of dog and pony show. There was a graduate student in the audience who hung on his every word, guffawing at every joke. Someone in the audience asked a perfectly good question, to which Rorty responded with a witty ad hominem of the sort “anyone who wonders about that is a fool.” The graduate student was howling. This performance would (or should) be unacceptable by normal academic standards, inasmuch as derision does not take the place of thought. But unfortunately, there was nothing self-contradictory about Rorty’s behavior (and that of his acolyte): he wasn’t playing the truth-seeking game, so he didn’t have to abide by its rules. Still more unfortunate, Rorty has spawned many imitators, although none are quite so successful as he was in getting money and honor from institutions that continue to regard themselves as searching for the light of truth.
Wow, that essay is a bagel for the mind.
When I encounter a Rortian engaging in one of these “mature tantrums”, my wish would be to put them in charge of managing a task, say, building a bridge. Let the practical act of managing the accpomplishment of a task aid them in changing their own mental diapers.
After hearing enough of their non-arguments spouted by a bunch of slackers putting the project behind schedule, I’m betting the Rortian discovers a clearer head.
“professing to be wise, they became fools” Romans I
So, after pointlessly ceding Mill to the left before feebly attempting to take him down via empty ad hominems (along with Kant), you would leave us with what? Ultra-montanism? Or pure feudalism?
Dear Mr. Kimball,
I refrained from commenting yesterday because I was overwhelmed. I had thought myself reasonably well read in philosophy but you conveyed more meaning in this column than I ever gleaned from my tedious studies. Thank you, sir.
Regards,
Roy
“Anyone with a mortgage and children will ignore both Michel Foucault and anyone who thinks that Foucault has anything useful to say.”
Unfortunately, these same people don’t take the effort to eliminate the admirers of Michael Foucault from our cultural and intellectual institutions. They consider it to be something abstract and not particularly relevant to their own lives. This indifference has cost us dearly. So much so, we may not be able to save Western Civilization.
The overuse of ‘critical thinking’ is matched by the overuse of the term ‘elite’. However, the mean of critical thinking hasn’t changed whereas the mean of elite has.
I’m a graduate student at a state university, and I can tell you what “critical thinking” means to academics.
Our “critical thinking rubric” can be found here:
http://wsuctprojectdev.wsu.edu/ctr_docs/CIT%20Rubric%202006.pdf
If you read this you will find that it includes all the post-modern crap–you’re supposed to think about whether your text is written by a privileged white male, for example. All the academic shibboleths are to be kowtowed to.
Anything broad enough to include both physics and women’s studies is going to be nonsense–such as where it says you are supposed to “integrate different disciplinary and epistemological ways of knowing”. So, when a feminist philosopher says that E = mc^2 is a gendered equation because the speed of light is privileged over speeds that women might find more relevant, and if I am scornful about that statement in a paper, then I am supposed to fail at critical thinking.
“It is an axiom of criticismism that the extent of our disillusionment is a reliable index of our wisdom: the idea that somehow the less we believe the more enlightened we are.”
Thanks for that. It has always amused me how very much philosophers who believe there is nothing to say have to say about it. Why does it even occur to someone who “discovers” that there is no meaning to write a big book to prove it and to spend the rest of life talking, in words yet, about it? How many people have made an academic career of asserting, day after day, that nothing can be asserted? And what – other than “I am so profound as to peer into an abyss lesser minds dare not contemplate” – is the point?
With respect to the “tension in Mill’s work—between Mill the libertarian and Mill the moralistic utilitarian,” Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote an excellent essay on “The Two Mills,” in Commentary or perhaps in your own New Criterion, but I couldn’t find a link to it.
I am in the process of taking three, mandatory, on-line courses for my school district. Their buzzword for critical thinking is “higher order thinking,” abbreviated “H.O.T.”.
Not defined, vague, few examples (none in my area), no information on how it is to be achieved, but constantly held up as the ideal.
It is usually associated with being some kind of social nuisance: letters to the editor, educating elementary school kids about the dangers of kite flying or driving without seat belts, monitoring streams for pollution and then reporting on it, etc.
By the way, thank you. This well-written and informative article has been an antidote to 60 hours (so far) of dreadful coursework and badly written, progressive indoctrination.
It is amazing to me how much bad philosophy and bad instructional pedagogy is also badly written.
** How the Invisible Hand kills off “designer” gods” **
Methodologically, whenever so-called *sacred* writings make claims about the natural world, they are subject to exactly the same forces of refutation as any other empirical claim. There is no “executive privilege” for God.
>> The Invisible Hand writes its own script.
Complex systems can and do arise from simple events, including random events.
The first adequate theoretical explanation of the emergence of earth-bound empirical complexity from simple events in a determinate context arises (I think) from the Scottish economic philosopher, Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations (1776).
Smith’s famous unintended “invisible hand”, which is microeconomic capitalism, arises from simple economic exchanges in a context of fair competition among self-interested vendors and buyers. The market is an emergent (abstract) complex entity which arises from a sum-over of simple exchanges conditioned by their “environment.”
There is no need for a ‘god of economics’ to design the microeconomic market — under specified mechanisms of exchange. It forms itself. (There’s a large literature on “self-organizing systems.”)
>> Speciation by descent, not by divine fiat.
Darwin solved a supposedly insuperable empirical puzzle for a very wide (not universal) set of events in the history of life: how do new life forms arise. Darwin refrained from publicizing his answer for 15 years.
Darwin knew how maligned, even shunned he would be by Society — he was after all a bona fide *gentleman* quite aware of the perks of his class and the esteem earned by his vast and thoroughly *respectable* empirical research which occupied him in support of his novel theory.
Forced to come out in 1858, Darwin did not refer to his view with the already suspect term “evolution” but as “descent with modification.” What was so radical, so disturbing to his contemporaries? His mechanism for “descent with modification”, “natural selection”.
What makes natural selection so uncomfortable? In operation, it has no goal and achieves no purpose. Speciation is a random trial-and-error process dependent upon differential reproductive success — in a determinate ecological setting. (Darwin proposed no account of the origin of life . . . as the title of his great work makes clear — On the origin of species. 1859.)
Life in its multitudinous forms requires no spiritual force, no élan vital, no teleological principle, no purpose, no design.
A designer for evolution is as superfluous as a designer for economics. And for exactly the same reason.
bipolar2
© 2008
As entertaining and informative as Roger Kimball’s piece is, it entirely misses the point of “critical thinking” in Scalia’s piece and in general. Critical thinking is not criticismism; it is simply the basic discipline for distinguishing valid, effective arguments from those less so.
And wouldn’t it be a good thing if American citizens were able to recognize emotional appeals, ad hominem attacks, poisoning the well, invalid syllogisms, straw man attacks and the like when they encounter them in political speeches, magazines, and web sites?
Roger, I suspect that JS Mill would agree with everything you’ve said… Except your contention that that’s what he meant.
All great philosophers (and commentators) understand that their ideas will be increasingly perverted after their deaths, — by lesser minds with conscious and unconscious agendas — when they are no longer around to prevent or correct this.
Lots of funny stuff here:
- Rorty and Foucault foster total incoherence, – get the “right” answers or fail the crit thinking course,
- say nothing at great length (hey, that’s Obama’s strategy),
- dreadful academic courses,….
If critical thinking retains any serious meaning, isn’t it pretty much “reason” or “application of logic?”
The effort to think things through and come up with better arguments than those presently available.
The gender of an equation, indeed.
I am reminded of that wonderful epic about a short kid riding across America on the back seat of a motorcycle – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – written from the perspective of the front seat driver.
The ability to recognize false arguments, and to refute them, is severely lacking in most college studies today. I except the hard sciences, where the main point is that a hypothesis is testable and if true will produce the same result upon testing regardless of the one doing the testing.
Perspective matters, but mostly to the individual doing the looking. Just ask the short kid sitting behind his dad for almost the entire ride, unable to see anything but his dad’s jacket.
Reality is what will bite your ass whether you’re looking out for it or not. I once interrupted a Nobel winner during his lecture to ask him to stop blocking the overhead projector, as we could not see what he was talking about. It did no good, he soon shifted back to standing in the way of his own words. Nobody else bothered to stop him again.
And a logical objective argument using facts and leading to a rational conclusion won’t always win against a good zinger from the authoritarian at the head of the lecture hall.
Excellent piece Mr. Kimball. I am reminded of Seth Benardete’s anecdote about Rorty:
“I knew Rorty. He was in the philosophy department.He must have entered the same year that Bloom had, at sixteen, I think. He seemed to have an extraordinary case of Weltschmerz, from a early age. But it wasn’t clear there was any basis for it. It looks consistent with his later thinking. When he came to philosophy, it provided the proof of his despair. He now had an argument for his psychological state, which he then expresses in the book. It’s an amazing match.”
From: J. S. Mill ‘On Liberty’ (Chapter 4)
“As a first instance, consider the antipathies which men cherish on no better grounds than that persons whose religious opinions are different from theirs, do not practise their religious observances, especially their religious abstinences.
To cite a rather trivial example, nothing in the creed or practice of Christians does more to envenom the hatred of Mahomedans against them, than the fact of their eating pork. There are few acts which Christians and Europeans regard with more unaffected disgust, than Mussulmans regard this particular mode of satisfying hunger. It is, in the first place, an offence against their religion; but this circumstance by no means explains either the degree or the kind of their repugnance; for wine also is forbidden by their religion, and to partake of it is by all Mussulmans accounted wrong, but not disgusting.”
——–> Comment: JS Mill would no doubt have fully approved of multiculturalism. Following his argument, it would be ok to stone an adulteress to death. He goes on to say…..
—————————————–
“It also appears so to me, but I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.”
—–> Comment: no comment
———————————–
“No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk…..”
—–> Comment: (!!)
——————————-
“If civilization has got the better of barbarism when barbarism had the world to itself, it is too much to profess to be afraid lest barbarism, after having been fairly got under, should revive and conquer civilization. A civilization that can thus succumb to its vanquished enemy must first have become so degenerate, that neither its appointed priests and teachers, nor anybody else, has the capacity, or will take the trouble, to stand up for it. If this be so, the sooner such a civilization receives notice to quit, the better. It can only go on from bad to worse, until destroyed and regenerated (like the Western Empire) by energetic barbarians.”
—–> Comment: Here’s the other side of Mill. This visionary paragraph should be pasted prominently in all public places in the USA.
——————————————
Full text of Mills ‘On Liberty’ (chapter 4) can be found online at:
http://www.serendipity.li/jsmill/on_liberty_chapter_4.htm
I recall an essay written by Walter Lippman written back in the 1920s in which he said that there are some things that are true and passed on by tradition that cannot clearly be proved or proved at this time; but we should keep them, especially since they seem to have been tested by human history and passed the test. He was particularly referring to the tendency of the Roaring Twenties to thrown aside traditional morals. Some proof that the tradition was correct became evident when the Depression struck. And experiments of free love by the Soviet Union went so badly that the Soviet Union shifted to what some called a kind of strict Puritanism.
I recall an essay in the Catholic magazine America or Commonweal where the author strongly asserted that education and getting educated correctly assumes that there are truths and tradition that are worth passing on and that the student must learn. I believe it was a President of Harvard who expressed a quite different emphasis when he said that our institution does not aim to inculcate wisdom.
One might also note that some psychologists say that one should not treat a child too far above the stage at which the child has arrived. I think Piaget said one should not be more than about one stage above where the child is. I mention this because the article speaks of schools that advertise that they teach five-year-olds critical thinking. A version of this is to say that parents who constantly and as a method offer their children choices are giving the child too heavy a burden; and one might add that sometimes this has the assumptions both that the various choices are equal when they are not and that the parents’ values and opinions are not of any more value than those of the child.
Theologian and now-Bishop Edward Braxton is just one person who has said that our culture and thinkers in particular overdo the Ricoeur hermeneutics of suspicion and underdo the Ricoeur hermeneutics of belief. In The Wisdom Community, he said that the tendency of elite critics and connoiseurs of the art to use the blank slate approach (another phrase the author could have used) tend to prevent themselves from being able to appreciate a work of art (in any of the arts) because of this overemphasis. This seems to have been a point of Gadamer in his positive presentation of prejudice. One could argue that rather than trying to approach a work of art (or anything) without any preconceptions, as if that is the better approach, one should bring all one’s background and the tradition to bear on the experience.
A way to describe two extremes regarding producing a work of art would be as follows: 1) One’s work of art should be absolutely original. Time magazine once had an essay on the idea of being avant-garde and pointed out that this can be overdone and then ultimately becomes both a rat-hole and an impossibility, not to mention leading some artists to overemphasize the new and original and neglect to include what would have made their work better and, indeed, part of the being-renwed tradition. 2) I think it was T.S. Eliot who said that each new poem is trying to re-write the previous poems that existed. He didn’t actually say that it would simply be a repetition of the old. He did mean that the poem should take into account and integrate what had preceded; and that the new poem would certainly not be absolutely original, but rather would speak to common experiences over the ages. One could, however, take this as pretty much at the other extreme, with good art actually incorporating elements of both originality and tradition.
Bible translator, Fr. Ronald Knox, included in his Essays in Satire an analysis of humor. He argued that good and real humor has to assume that some things are true and even sacred–against the views of Rorty that nothing is sacred (except maybe his own views). Knox argued that valuable humor has to have a point and maybe even refuse to mock certain things because they are held sacred. (A column in the Chicago Tribune once dealt with the death threats against S.Rushdie for what was considered blasphemy about Muhammed. The author didn’t defend the death threats. But he lamented the fact that the West tended not to take anything so seriously that it would get upset. An example was the Christ in piss art. One could add the point Time made about the avant-garde; their modus operandi requires them to become more and more extreme in order to be different and in order to get attention; hence, some artists and museums deliberately seek the more and more shocking, indeed, shock either for its own sake or to get viewers.) I thought of Knox’s point when movie critic, James Arnold, predicted that Laugh-In would not last nearly as long as Hee-Haw would. Arnold said that Laugh-In actually offered political criticism based on standards, whether one agreed with the particular standards or not; Hee-Haw was simply corny one-liners. The prediction was correct. I think Knox and Arnold would say that American humor too often neither tries to make a point nor holds anything sacred (indeed, like some artists, it may simply resort to shock, starting with bad language–the easy way out). At least one can argue that the Daily Show and the Colbert Report do try to make a point and do hold some things sacred, no matter how contorted an effort it might take to see this. It certainly is ironic that it took Saturday Night Live to force reporters to stop going easy on Obama. What is especially surprising about that is that Saturday Night Live has always been at its worst when it adopts the adolescent total mocking and shock approach of adolescent humor–but not regarding Hillary and Obama, it turned out. Incidentally, some argue that the U.S. itself has long had the rebellious attitude of the adolescent. (Further points on the adolescent attitude follow a bit later in these comments.)
One brilliant crotchety prof had the habit of responding to any mention of something new by saying: They tried that in the past. And he’d cite the instance. And most likely he’d say it failed. This could be T.S. Eliot carred to an extreme. On the other hand, Fr. James Donohue once wrote a sonnet on Relativity. He described the multiple motions of the cosmos and our multiple understandings of those motions. And he concluded with the words: “There’s nothing old under the sun.” If this were taken as meaning that the new in no way includes the old, that would be the extreme of the avant-garde approach. (He did not intend that kind of extreme and the words by themselves do not affirm that extreme.)
One could say that the views Kimball rejects are those of the adolescent, who challenges everything (if not that of the child who says No to everything in the primitive stage of affirming independent identity). Twain mocked the adolescent, including in himself, who thought his father was totally stupid when he himself was an adolescent and then couldn’t believe all his father had learned in the few years between then and the time he himself became an adult. I suppose there are even those who would say that Twain himself ended up in the kind of nihilism that the author below says is the upshot of the way of thinking he rejects–criticizing criticismism!
One could also use another idea of Ricoeur. I rename Ricoeur’s first stage of First Naivete “Attachment.” (It’s emphasizes the hermeneutics of belief.) The second stage can be called Doubt; I would call it “Critical Detachment” or “Critical Distance.” The third stage is Second Naivete; I would call it “Critical Attachment.” The form of “Critical Thinking” criticized below (Criticismism) is an isolated and exclusive second stage.
Theologian John-Baptist Metz identified “emancipation” as a clear theme and goal of the modern liberal democratic approach. He would agree that by itself alone, this is the second stage in need of the third stage of integration or re-integration of the sacred. (Others have said it this way: There is freedom from; there is also a need for freedom for.) Metz also says that there is a wisdom of the poor from which the moderns always need to learn; and some of that wisdom is found in tradition from the past. Marxist Bloch attempted to identify this wisdom in stories and fairy tales in the tradition, where, for example, the underdog’s position is affirmed. (Karl Stern once defended teaching fairy tales in school–despite the fact that some of them are considered gruesome–even strictly on the grounds of their assisting human development; he said that if fairy tales were eliminated from schools, it would drastically increase the need for psychiatric help for students, since the fairy tales help children deal with important human realities and forces, inner and outer.)
American haiku writer, Fr. Raymond Roseliep, also wrote poems in other forms. And in one of those poems he began by describing how his whole world was alive with religious experience and imagery when he was a child. He described making room in his desk for his Guardian Angel. He described a nun serving up religion in ice cream cones, so to speak. These, of course, are the “Magic Years” identified by Freiberg (sp?) in her book with that title. Roseliep ends the poem by saying that when he grew older, he put all those things aside–”too many things aside.” Since the reader knew that Roseliep was both a Catholic priest and a poet, the reader knew and Roseliep intended the reader to know that he had gone on to Ricoeur’s third stage. The thinkers criticized by the author below stayed at the second stage and want others to do so also.
Some years ago, prominent Yale theologian Thomas Driver surprised some people when he came out in favor of a modulated magical approach to the world. He said that it was better to believe in magic than not to do so. Belief in magic, he said, was at least a doorway to the Sacred. There is some resemblance between Driver’s shift and what happened to Harvey Cox. His fame came from extolling the Secular City and its qualities (qualities that in some ways the author below would criticize or at least see as inadequate). Later he praised ritual, festival, liturgy in The Feast of Fools. Theologian Rosemary Haughton noted the strong resistance in some secular humanism to anything that suggests in any way anything other than the scientistic view of the world. She said that even if there is a Loch Ness monster, that really has no weight regarding the question of whether religion is true; and yet some secular humanists (e.g., those who write in the Skeptic magazine or call themselves Humanists) adamently attack these kinds of possibilities (the kind shown on some shows on the History Channel or the Travel Channel or the Discovery Channel or the National Geographic Channel). The Catholic magazine, America, also made this point about extreme attempts at thought suppression when it noted that atheist Ann Gaylor wanted to ban science fiction from public schools. The reason, they and she noted, was that it might give the students the idea that it is in some way plausible that some truth different from scientism might exist. I recall atheist Ann Gaylor mocking religion on the original Crossroads show by mentioning the talking donkey of Balaam’s story. Tom Braden said: The trouble with you, is that you don’t know how to read. He meant that her literalist approach blinded her to some truths. Self-described “fallen away atheist” and current agnostic, Donald Kaul, a Des Moines Register columnist, said during the creationist debate (before the Intelligent Design debate) that both the creationists and their opponents at a debate took the Bible literally; and the creationists said it was true and their opponents said it was false. Kaul dismissed both of them by saying: They deserve one another. He didn’t like their closed minds.
Theologian Gregory Baum is not very favorable to post-modernism and deconstructionism because he says it tends to say that there is no truth. I also recall talking to a teacher of literature who said that at meeting of the Modern Language Association, it was almost impossible to get the members to actually discuss a work, e.g., a poem. The reason was that they were too preoccupied with identifying racist, sexist, and classist cautions needed before interpreting what the poem might actually mean. There is an irony here: Nietzche and Rorty offer art (untrue as it is by some of their definitions) as a way beyond what they call the false assumptions of Western civilization that there really is truth. But at these meetings, they couldn’t even get to the art itself. And, of course, they didn’t focus on the truth either, as thought of by Western civilization. Thomas Wolfe once said that New York teachers of post-modernism and deconstructionism had come to realize it was a dry hole and were going off at nights to study the New Biology (likely E. Wilson et al.) However, one might fear that they then ended up in a kind of dogmatic biological reductionism. This would mean that they had entertained both sides of Mill: First, total freedom from any tradition; indeed, a kind of relativistic version of multi-culturalism; Second, a rigid demystifying ideology that should be taught to everyone from the cradle on, with other views being banned from the schools.
The book Master Thinkers traced a continuity of emphasis among some major thinkers of the past 200 years. It argued that these thinkers were primarily interested in power, as the article below also says. It also argued that the ultimate aim of these thinkers was self-creation. All of these thinkers were males. An irony is that there are some biologists who say a point will come in the future when males are no longer needed for reproduction. So the females would have a kind of self-creation. Indeed, a tendency in aspects of the feminist movement was to adopt the goal of self-actualization that they learned from males and from primarily male thinkers. Results for some from this emphasis included a de-emphasis on qualities and attitudes traditionally better appreciated and realized by females: relationships, community, parenting, monogamous marriage….
The book Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg has analysis similar to Kimball, especially regarding the rigid and dogmatic side of Mills. One could say that the Master Thinkers’ goal of power found expression in the enacted ideologies of Communism, Nazism, Fascism, and some forms of Socialism.
I myself would not have set up the choice as being between reality and appearances, as the end of the article below does. I think it’s better to take into account what some Europeans refer to as a differentiation of consciousness. The use of “appearances” still might suggest too much that it really isn’t true. The differentiation of consciousness approach does not affirm that only one field of consciousness is actually true. Now in academia, this would involve affirming that all the various sciences and arts have some truth to offer.
More directly and more simply addressing the point might be the analysis by Jesuit theologian, Fr. Bernard J.F. Lonergan. He affirms the thought-worlds of Transcendence (cf. religion and theology), Theory (especially science, but all of academia–see previous paragraph), and Common Sense. The first is the human and the universe as related to God and/or the Sacred; the Second is the objects of the universe as related to one another (a point Galielo first made so clearly); the Third is the universe as related to humans’ daily experience. All three are valid and true. Applied science put humans into space. When the Challenger exploded, Ronald Reagan did not read a science text or news report to the people; he cited poetry and religious sentiments. I myself would say that Common Sense might have told the scientists not to launch a rocket during a storm. I would even say that the maverick scientist on the investigating panel who used a glass and O-rings to suggest why the rocket blew up was probably using more Common Sense than theoretical physics. But in any case, when people went on with their lives by eating, working, and playing, that was the world of common sense. I would also say that the opinion of people that the sun rises (cf. the end of the article below) is an opinion of Common Sense that has some validity in the world of Common Sense. Another way to say this is that a human is dealing with reality and with the truth in the following activities: worship; listening to a prof teaching; eating in the cafeteria. Regarding the world of Common Sense and its truth and validity, seeking physcial nourishment from worship won’t work; seeking physical and even psychological nourishment from lectures won’t work; one has to eat.
A final point from Lonergan: He gives in his book Insight and in Method in Theology that belief is an essential component of human living. (He adapted ideas on this from Cardinal Newman.) Even in the case where a person theoretically prove all kinds of things about reality and truth, on a practical basis one has to act out of belief. Theologian, Fr. Matthew Lamb, gives the example of an experiment in Berlin several decades ago where an experimental community (which, ironically, was faddish at the time), adopted as its rule that no practice would be require or adopted that had not been shown to them by their own experience together to be what they should do. It was a total failure. One could say it’s impossible to live without belief and tradition. One could even suspect that the experiment died from what Fr. John Tilp called “paralysis of analysis.” But one could also say that there is nothing wrong with belief, even in the non-religious sense. Lonergan provides some criteria for good belief. They include the criterion that the authority whose truth one believes in in a particular instance is a good authority in that area or subject. Kimball is a good authority, even though it’s also true that one can learn from him based on his reasoning and, dare I say, critical thinking.
I recall an essay written by Walter Lippman written back in the 1920s in which he said that there are some things that are true and passed on by tradition that cannot clearly be proved or proved at this time; but we should keep them, especially since they seem to have been tested by human history and passed the test. He was particularly referring to the tendency of the Roaring Twenties to throw aside traditional morals. Some proof that the tradition was correct became evident when the Depression struck. And experiments of free love by the Soviet Union went so badly that the Soviet Union shifted to what some called a kind of strict Puritanism.
I recall an essay in the Catholic magazine America or Commonweal where the author strongly asserted that education and getting educated correctly assumes that there are truths and tradition that are worth passing on and that the student must learn. I believe it was a President of Harvard who expressed a quite different emphasis when he said that our institution does not aim to inculcate wisdom.
One might also note that some psychologists say that one should not treat a child too far above the stage at which the child has arrived. I think Piaget said one should not be more than about one stage above where the child is. I mention this because the article speaks of schools that advertise that they teach five-year-olds critical thinking. A version of this is to say that parents who constantly and as a method offer their children choices are giving the child too heavy a burden; and one might add that sometimes this has the assumptions both that the various choices are equal when they are not and that the parents’ values and opinions are not of any more value than those of the child.
Theologian and now-Bishop Edward Braxton is just one person who has said that our culture and thinkers in particular overdo the Ricoeur hermeneutics of suspicion and underdo the Ricoeur hermeneutics of belief. In The Wisdom Community, he said that the tendency of elite critics and connoiseurs of the arts to use the blank slate approach (another phrase Randall could have used) tend to prevent themselves from being able to appreciate a work of art (in any of the arts) because of this overemphasis. This seems to have been a point of Gadamer in his positive presentation of prejudice. One could argue that rather than trying to approach a work of art (or anything) without any preconceptions, as if that is the better approach, one should bring all one’s background and the tradition to bear on the experience.
A way to describe two extremes regarding producing a work of art would be as follows: 1) One’s work of art should be absolutely original. Time magazine once had an essay on the idea of being avant-garde and pointed out that this can be overdone and then ultimately becomes both a rat-hole and an impossibility, not to mention leading some artists to overemphasize the new and original and to neglect to include what would have made their work better and, indeed, part of the being-renewed tradition. 2) I think it was T.S. Eliot who said that each new poem is an attempt to re-write the previous poems that existed. He didn’t actually say that it would simply be a repetition of the old. He did mean that the poem should take into account and integrate what had preceded; and that the new poem would certainly not be absolutely original, but rather would speak to common experiences over the ages. One could, however, take this as pretty much at the other extreme. Good art actually incorporates elements of both originality and tradition.
Bible translator, Fr. Ronald Knox, included in his Essays in Satire an analysis of humor. He argued that good and real humor has to assume that some things are true and even sacred–against the views of Rorty that nothing is sacred (except maybe his own views). Knox argued that valuable humor has to have a point and maybe even refuse to mock certain things because they are held sacred. (A column in the Chicago Tribune once dealt with the death threats against S.Rushdie for what was considered blasphemy about Muhammed. The author didn’t defend the death threats. But he lamented the fact that the West tended not to take anything so seriously that it would get upset. An example was the Christ in piss art. One could add the point Time made about the avant-garde; their modus operandi requires them to become more and more extreme in order to be different and in order to get attention; hence, some artists and museums deliberately seek the more and more shocking, indeed, shock either for its own sake or to get viewers.) I thought of Knox’s point when movie critic, James Arnold, predicted that Laugh-In would not last nearly as long as Hee-Haw would. Arnold said that Laugh-In actually offered political criticism based on standards, whether one agreed with the particular standards or not; Hee-Haw was simply corny one-liners. The prediction was correct. I think Knox and Arnold would say that American humor too often neither tries to make a point nor holds anything sacred (indeed, like some artists, it may simply resort to shock, starting with bad language–the easy way out). At least one can argue that the Daily Show and the Colbert Report do try to make a point and do hold some things sacred, no matter how contorted an effort it might take to see this. It certainly is ironic that it took Saturday Night Live to force reporters to stop going easy on Obama. What is especially surprising about that is that Saturday Night Live has always been at its worst when it adopts the adolescent total mocking and shock approach of adolescent humor–but not regarding Hillary and Obama, it turned out. Incidentally, some argue that the U.S. itself has long had the rebellious attitude of the adolescent. (Further points on the adolescent attitude follow a bit later in these comments.)
One brilliant crotchety prof had the habit of responding to any mention of something new by saying: They tried that in the past. And he’d cite the instance. And most likely he’d say it failed. This could be T.S. Eliot carried to an extreme. On the other hand, Fr. James Donohue once wrote a sonnet on Relativity. He described the multiple motions of the cosmos and our multiple understandings of those motions. And he concluded with the words: “There’s nothing old under the sun.” If this were taken as meaning that the new in no way includes the old, that would be the extreme of the avant-garde approach. (He did not intend that kind of extreme and the words by themselves do not affirm that extreme.)
One could say that the views Kimball rejects are those of the adolescent, who challenges everything (if not that of the child who says No to everything while at the primitive stage of affirming independent identity). Twain mocked the adolescent, including in himself, who thought his father was totally stupid when he himself was an adolescent and then couldn’t believe all his father had learned in the few years between then and the time he himself became an adult. I suppose there are even those who would say that Twain himself ended up in the kind of nihilism that Randall says is the upshot of the way of thinking he rejects–thus criticizing criticismism!
One could also use another idea of Ricoeur. I rename Ricoeur’s first stage of First Naivete “Attachment.” (It emphasizes the hermeneutics of belief.) The second stage can be called Doubt; I would call it “Critical Detachment” or “Critical Distance.” (It emphasizes the hermeneutics of suspicion.) The third stage is Second Naivete; I would call it “Critical Attachment.” The form of “Critical Thinking” criticized by Randall(Criticismism) is an isolated and exclusive second stage.
Theologian John-Baptist Metz identified “emancipation” as a clear theme and goal of the modern liberal democratic approach. He would agree that by itself alone, this is the second stage in need of the third stage of integration or re-integration of the sacred. (Others have said it this way: There is freedom from; there is also a need for freedom for.) Metz also says that there is a wisdom of the poor from which the moderns always need to learn; and some of that wisdom is found in tradition from the past. Marxist Bloch attempted to identify this wisdom in stories and fairy tales in the tradition, where, for example, the underdog’s position is affirmed. (Karl Stern once defended teaching fairy tales in school–despite the fact that some of them are considered gruesome–even strictly on the grounds of their assisting human development; he said that if fairy tales were eliminated from schools, it would drastically increase the need for psychiatric help for students, since the fairy tales help children deal with important human realities and forces, inner and outer.)
American haiku writer, Fr. Raymond Roseliep, also wrote poems in other forms. And in one of those poems he began by describing how his whole world was alive with religious experience and imagery when he was a child. He described making room in his desk for his Guardian Angel. He described a nun serving up religion in ice cream cones, so to speak. These, of course, are the “Magic Years” identified by Freiberg (sp?) in her book with that title. Roseliep ends the poem by saying that when he grew older, he put all those things aside–”too many things aside.” Since the reader knew that Roseliep was both a Catholic priest and a poet, the reader knew, and Roseliep intended the reader to know, that he had gone on to Ricoeur’s third stage. The thinkers criticized by Randall stayed at the second stage and want others to do so also.
Some years ago, prominent Yale theologian Thomas Driver surprised some people when he came out in favor of a modulated magical approach to the world. He said that it was better to believe in magic than not to do so. Belief in magic, he said, was at least a doorway to the Sacred. There is some resemblance between Driver’s shift and what happened to Harvey Cox. Cox’s fame came from extolling the Secular City and its qualities (qualities that in some ways Randall would criticize or at least see as inadequate). Later he praised ritual, festival, liturgy in The Feast of Fools. Theologian Rosemary Haughton noted the strong resistance in some secular humanism to anything that suggests in any way anything other than the scientistic view of the world. She said that even if there is a Loch Ness monster, that really has no weight regarding the question of whether religion is true; and yet some secular humanists (e.g., those who write in the Skeptic magazine or call themselves Humanists) adamently attack these kinds of possibilities (the kind shown on some shows on the History Channel or the Travel Channel or the Discovery Channel or the National Geographic Channel). The Catholic magazine, America, also made this point about extreme attempts at thought suppression when it noted that atheist Ann Gaylor wanted to ban science fiction from public schools. The reason, they and she noted, was that it might give the students the idea that it is in some way plausible that some truth different from scientism might exist. I recall atheist Ann Gaylor mocking religion on the original Crossroads show by mentioning the talking donkey of Balaam’s story. Tom Braden said: The trouble with you, is that you don’t know how to read. He meant that her literalist approach blinded her to some truths. Self-described “fallen away atheist” and current agnostic, Donald Kaul, a Des Moines Register columnist, said during the creationist debate (before the Intelligent Design debate) that both the creationists and their opponents at a debate took the Bible literally; and the creationists said it was true and their opponents said it was false. Kaul dismissed both of them by saying: They deserve one another. He didn’t like their closed minds.
Theologian Gregory Baum is not very favorable to post-modernism and deconstructionism because he says it tends to say that there is no truth. I also recall talking to a teacher of literature who said that at meeting of the Modern Language Association, it was almost impossible to get the members to actually discuss a work, e.g., a poem. The reason was that they were too preoccupied with identifying racist, sexist, and classist cautions before feeling free to determine what the poem might actually mean. There is an irony here: Nietzche and Rorty offer art (untrue as it is by some of their definitions) as a way beyond what they call the false assumptions of Western civilization that there really is truth. But at these meetings, they couldn’t even get to the art itself. And, of course, they didn’t focus on the truth either, as thought of by Western civilization. Thomas Wolfe once said that New York teachers of post-modernism and deconstructionism had come to realize it was a dry hole and were going off at nights to study the New Biology (likely E. Wilson et al). However, one might fear that they then ended up in a kind of dogmatic biological reductionism. This would mean that they had entertained both sides of Mill: First, total freedom from any tradition; indeed, a kind of relativistic version of multi-culturalism; Second, a rigid demystifying ideology that they require be taught to everyone from the cradle on, with other views being banned from the schools.
The book Master Thinkers traced a continuity of emphasis among some major thinkers of the past 200 years. It argued that these thinkers were primarily interested in power, as Randall also says. It also argued that the ultimate aim of these thinkers was literal self-creation. All of these thinkers were males. An irony is that there are some biologists who say a point will come in the future when males are no longer needed for reproduction. So the females would have a kind of self-creation. Indeed, a tendency in aspects of the feminist movement was to adopt the goal of self-actualization that they learned from males and from primarily male thinkers. Results for some from this emphasis included a de-emphasis on qualities and attitudes traditionally better appreciated and realized by females: relationships, community, parenting, monogamous marriage….
The book Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg has analysis similar to Kimball, especially regarding the rigid and dogmatic side of Mills. One could say that the Master Thinkers’ goal of power found expression in the enacted ideologies of Communism, Nazism, Fascism, and some forms of Socialism.
I myself would not have set up the choice as being between reality and appearances, as the end of Randall does. I think it’s better to take into account what some Europeans refer to as a differentiation of consciousness. The use of the term “appearances” by Randall still might suggest too much that they really aren’t truths. The differentiation of consciousness approach does not affirm that only one field of consciousness is actually true. In academia, this would involve affirming that all the various sciences and arts have some truth to offer.
Addressing the point more directly and more simply might be the analysis by Jesuit theologian, Fr. Bernard J.F. Lonergan. He affirms the thought-worlds of Transcendence (cf. religion and theology), Theory (especially science, but all of academia–see previous paragraph), and Common Sense. The first is the human and the universe as related to God and/or the Sacred; the Second is the objects of the universe as related to one another (a point Galileo first made so clearly); the Third is the universe as related to humans’ daily experience. All three are valid and true. (Each is tempted to claim exclusive truth.) Applied science put humans into space. When the Challenger exploded, Ronald Reagan did not read a science text or news report to the people; he cited poetry and religious sentiments. I myself would say that Common Sense might have told the scientists not to launch a rocket during a storm. I would even say that the maverick scientist on the investigating panel who used a glass and O-rings to suggest why the rocket blew up was probably using more Common Sense than theoretical physics. But in any case, when people went on with their lives by eating, working, and playing, that was the world of Common Sense. I would also say that the opinion of people that the sun rises (cf. the end of the article of Randall’s article) is an opinion of Common Sense that has some validity in the world of Common Sense. Another way to say this is that a human is dealing with reality and with the truth in the following activities: worship; listening to a prof teaching; eating in the cafeteria. Regarding the world of Common Sense and its truth and validity, seeking physical nourishment from worship won’t work; seeking physical and even psychological nourishment from lectures won’t work; one has to eat.
A final point from Lonergan: He argues in his book Insight and in Method in Theology that belief is an essential component of human living. (He adapted ideas on this from Cardinal Newman.) Even in the case where a person theoretically could prove all kinds of things about reality and truth, on a practical basis one has to act out of belief. One can’t spend one’s time proving everything. Theologian, Fr. Matthew Lamb, gives the example of an experiment in Berlin several decades ago where an experimental community (which, ironically, was faddish at the time), adopted as its rule that no practice would be require or adopted that had not been shown to them by their own experience together to be what they should do. It was a total failure. One could say it’s impossible to live without belief and tradition. One could even suspect that the experiment died from what Fr. John Tilp called “paralysis of analysis.” But one could also say that there is nothing wrong with belief, even in the non-religious sense. Lonergan provides some criteria for good belief. They include the criterion that the authority whose truth one believes in in a particular instance is a good authority in that area or subject. Kimball is a good authority, even though it’s also true that one can learn from him based on his reasoning and, dare I say, critical thinking.
“We must never,” Bismarck warned, “look into the origins of laws or sausages.” Sage advice…
Mmmmmmmmmmm, sage sausage:
http://www.amazon.com/Espositos-Finest-Quality-Sausage-SAUSAGE/dp/B000CQOXKK
Gabriel Hanna,
So, when a feminist philosopher says that E = mc^2 is a gendered equation because the speed of light is privileged over speeds that women might find more relevant, and if I am scornful about that statement in a paper, then I am supposed to fail at critical thinking.
1)I privilege “c” because the universe does.
2)To be scornful of that statement is to be critical. The problem with really existing “critical thinking” is that it is not critical enough. It questions when an assertion comes from a white male because we all know white males have interests. But so do academics or feminists or anyone else.
Too much of what goes by the name of critical thinking is just privileging the customs and prejudices of particular groups. As one of George Bernard Shaw’s characters puts it, “Forgive him, for he is a savage and believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.”
(Or in the words of Mr. Rogers, “Can you say ‘infinite regress?’ Sure you can.”)
More good stuff from Roger Kimball. Anyone who likes it should subscribe to The New Criterion, as I do. I’ve even given a niece & a nephew gift subscriptions. And I have read one of Mr. K’s books, The Long March. (Mr. K, may I have a ride on your sailboat?)
For one thing, it might be argued that Kant’s own attitude toward the imperative “Dare to Know!” was complex. In a famous passage toward the beginning of The Critique of Pure Reason, for example, Kant tells us that he was setting limits to reason in order to make room for faith. Exactly what Kant meant by this . . . what to call it? this admission? this boast? this concession? Well, whatever Kant meant by his invocation of faith, it has been an abiding matter of debate. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that Kant’s “critical philosophy” is itself a monument of Enlightenment thought, as much in its implied commendation of the “critical attitude” as as in the specific philosophical bureaucracy he recommends.
I’m glad you wrote this paragraph, Mr. Kimball, because it contains the explanation of why you manage to get just about everything exactly backwards.
But let I wrote a comment longer than the original article, I’ll just address this one question: What did Kant mean when he said he was “setting limits” — or “denying knowledge” in some translations I’ve heard quoted — in order to make room for faith?
Why, he meant what he said.
He saw that the Enlightenment, in unleashing the power of man’s reasoning mind, was eventually going to discover that reason IS man’s moral sense, that it is how men could discover not only what IS, but what OUGHT to be. As a man of faith, he had a profound emotional fear of that possibility.
He decided to do something about it…. and he did. Far from being a “hero” of the Enlightenment, Kant is its murderer. Contrary to your assertion, he did not “discover” the limits of reason; he invented them. He did the deed by constructing a system of philosophy whose primary goal was constrain reason, to concoct such constraints as if they were a discovery, in order to pass off the idea that reason is “limited” to the so-called “phenomenal” realm of the physical world — and therefore excluded from the “noumenal” realm where such things as morality and spirituality are to be found. The goal was to rationalize the walling off of the “higher” questions, such as morality, from reason, preserving it for the arbitrary dictates of faith — all done in a sufficiently complex manner to enable his like-minded contemporaries to stop moving down the road of Enlightenment without being seen as the emotionalistic reactionaries they were.
For the Enlightenment thinkers of his day, while no doubt groundbreaking intellects, were nonetheless apprehensive about the logical implications of where Enlightenment thought was going. They could see, even as they were moving towards this discovery, that if they continued on this road, reason would not only displace religion in the realm of explaining the natural world as it was doing before their eyes, but would someday do the same in the spiritual one also. Reason would become not only man’s means of discovering what is, but what ought to be.
As men of reason, they were logically beholden to go down that road. But as men of faith, they groundlessly feared that they would lose morality as such, including all spiritual values. They implicitly grasped that a rational morality would be egoistic in its outlook, a notion they despised. They were thusly emotionally predisposed to avoid going down that road, if they could… if someone could just provide a sufficiently well-crafted, plausible rationalization for turning away from that path, for keeping a preserve for the arbitrary in the human mind — they would abort the Enlightenment.
Kant gave it to them, and they did precisely that.
It was Kant who “proved” the limits of reason, thereby stopping the fulfillment of the Enlightenment and saving religion. It was Kant who specifically prevented men from discovering that reason and morality were not discontinuous. That error right there, an error he deliberately sought to entrench, was all he was after.
That is the Kantian Fallacy. What are its fruits, then? What did this Fallacy do to Western thought? It led to everything described in this article, from Richard Rorty and his ilk, to your suggestion, straight ouf of the Dark Ages who feared rational inquiry lest it anger supernatural forces arrayed against us, that we should not question the origins of laws and sausages. It is what shaped our modern age and made it what it is.
If one accepts Kant’s concept of “limited reason”, there are only two ways to go.
The first outgrowth of the Kantain fallacy was the rejection of Kant’s noumenal realm (correctly) as arbitrary, made-up BS which does not exist. Unfortunately, given the Fallacy, this logically lead to the conclusion that since morality is not amenable to reason, then it is not real. Or it’s subjective. Or it’s mere social convention. In all cases, it is arbitrary. This is the line of thinking that we now know as the Left, that includes Richard Rorty among its products. Beholden to its Kantian heritage, this is the movement that no longer values reason, but instead prattles on about “critical thinking”.
Of course, the problem with this line of thinking, is that men need to think about the future. They need to determine which of all the alternatives facing them, are the right ones. They need to look at what is, in order to know what ought to be. Ironically, it is reason that tells us that we need morality, but people stuck in Kant’ box operate on the unquestioned assumption that “critical thinking” is reason… so they conclude, if reason can’t do the job of giving us the “big picture” and tell us what we ought to do, then we need something else in addition to it.
Well, the only “something else” to reason, as Kant knew, is faith — i.e. arbitrary, made-up things. This second branch of post-Kantian thought is the one he wished to see — one that admits into the mind things shich “critical thinking” rejects, but otherwise supplie no alternative guidance. This is the modern, neo-medievalist line of thinking championed by conservatism and the religious faiths. Sharing with the Left the unchallenged assumption that reason is just “critical thinking”, they simply accept that there are things outside its domain — such as morality — which are only accessible to faith.
Both of these “sides” are outgrowths of the same common error — the Kantian Fallacy, the idea that reason is limited, and cannot speak to morality.
It is Kant who reserved the realm of morality for primitive, magical “thinking”, giving rise to the commonly observed paradox between man’s advanced technology versus his primitive (altruist) morality. It is Kant who is ultimately responsible for the unprecedented modern spectacle of advanced technology being used for primitive ends. He is the one who set us upon the path which in all likelihood will culminate with the possession of nuclear weapons by primitive men of faith whose culture hasn’t changed in 1400 years.
When that happens, will you still be sitting here and telling us, Mr. Kimball, not to let in the light of reason to shine upon *their* magical thinking? Will you still be suggesting that we should follow the advice of Otto von Bismarck, the political ancestor of Adolf Hitler?
Had you gone ahead and suggested that we are indeed a society of Kantians, that would have been the only profound thing you got right. For in what other kind of society could you expect to get away with writing as long and erudite an article as this, brazenly counselling us not to leave our eyes open for too long — as if this were never written:
“A “straw man” is an odd metaphor to apply to such an enormous, cumbersome, ponderous construction as Kant’s system of epistemology. Nevertheless, a straw man is what it was—and the doubts, the uncertainty, the skepticism that followed, skepticism about man’s ability ever to know anything, were not, in fact, applicable to human consciousness, because it was not a human consciousness that Kant’s robot represented. But philosophers accepted it as such. And while they cried that reason had been invalidated, they did not notice that reason had been pushed off the philosophical scene altogether and that the faculty they were arguing about was not reason. — Ayn Rand, from Philosophy: Who Needs It “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” p64
“Dare to know” would be an appropriate slogan for us to resurrect, in the name of reason — by that I mean the genuine, unlimited reason, not Kant’s crippled substitute.
in the above, strike “Contrary to your assertion”
from
” Contrary to your assertion, he did not “discover” the limits of reason; he invented them.”
… as it is the likes of Dinesh D’Souza making those claims, not you (at least not in here). The translation you quoted, that has Kant admitting that he was “setting” the limits, rather than discovering them, is indeed Kant’s open admission of intent.
Mill, Rorty, Foucault, who needs these fools. Why would anyone pay attention to the evident untruths they espouse. There is no truth? You have had to go to college to believe that.
In fairness to the term ‘critical thinking’, it has been used often in British philosophy departments to refer to something akin to basic epistemology and logic. I have come to conclude, however, that the situation with “postmodernism” is much more severe in the States than in Europe (at least, in philosophy).
With this qualification in mind, though, I agree wholeheartedly with the conclusions you have drawn against the postmodern ‘group’ (I would hardly want to dignify them with the characterisation as a tradition). Realistically, though, it is a dying line of aberrant thought and I cannot imagine the current generation of students absorbing and then disseminating it with as much vigour as those lost souls that currently teach them.
Mr. Kimball, I’m flattered that you mentioned my piece in connection with this excellent exposition. I am also impressed beyond words that you managed to crank this out within a day of its being posted. That is astonishing; it’s downright “mighty”!
Seerak, does your admission that you got the only thing that you excerpted from Mr. Kimball’s article wrong, and that you were actually arguing against Dinesh D’Souza, leave anything of worth in your response? It seems to me that until you offer some sort of proof that pure reason produces a morality that is no less humane than the morality taught by Jesus 2000 years ago, it would be wise to hold off trashing Christian morality in favor of the biodetermined version until we can be sure we are doing no harm.
The proof that a morality derived from scientism (by which I mean the ideological belief system that is to science what criticismism is to criticism) has terrible effects is clear and irrefutable (see the Black Book of Communism). The Marxist elevation of Darwinism (likewise a parody of Darwin’s thought) and the Lamarckian/Darwinist “survival of the fittest” to top billing in the morality parade of Communism and other 20th century totalitarian movements also proves that the old saying is right, the best of intentions point straight to hell.
My steering wheel may not be the optimal way to steer my car, but don’t rip it out and replace it while I’m doing the speed limit on the freeway. Why would anyone want to abandon a working morality, which is of critical importance to civilization as we know it, for another purely on speculation?
On another tangent, I find it more useful to respond to the likes of Rorty with a summary of their blather, a loud raspberry.
Although Kimball’s post ranges over much, I will focus on what I take to be one of its central themes: the extent to which we construct or discover the truths of our moral and natural worlds. The persistence of subjectivity, as Pippen calls it, is a defining characteristic of much of current thought. Rorty and Derrida argue that language go all the way down such that the mind and the world are constructed linguistic artifacts. As Kimball notes, this surfeit of subjective hubris can devolve into quarrelsomeness or what he terms criticismism. Today, some philosophers brag about being the hired guns of the argumentation game where they can hire themselves out and critique any point of view…for a fee, of course.
Yet, not all modernists are constructionists (truth makers), some are truth seekers: structuralists, Heidegger, reductive natural scientists, Platonists, and many post-structuralists view human comportment as a mere dependent variable where we are the constructs of deep binary systems, Cartesian linguistics, Natural Law, the laws of nature, discursive power regimes, or events of Being. The Truth is “out there”, so to speak, and our job is to discover it by reason, revelation, scientific method, or any other means at our disposal. .
So, we have two polar contending worldviews: subjectivism where the truth is constructed and objectivism where the truth is discovered. Strong arguments can be marshaled against both sides. The ambit of subjectivism has steadily ceded territory to the onslaught of objectivist (not to mention reductivist) natural, social and, of late, neuro sciences over the years such that it is in near full retreat into its last redoubt: the freedom of the will, the mysterious works of genius which will defy, untill the end of scientific time, all incursions because it is not of the phenomenal world and thus not subject to the Scylla of Necessity and Causation.
And on the other pole, there is the Charybdis of objective truth which somehow must overcome the subjectivist arguments that our knowledge of the truth is mediated by language and its discursive formations and is further limited by the emerging views that our claims about the moral and natural universes are also mediated by emotively charged neural images, per Damasio and others, which further weakens the quest for the unmediated and pure real that “resides behind” the phenomenal. Perhaps, in this mess we are reduced along with Heidegger to a quietism that enjoys the event of being eventing itself or that revels in the emanations from the Archon.
In an ascent that extends, in part, from Vico, to Schelling, through Heidegger and Kolakowski up to present day poetasters, what we may be witnessing here is the Abendland, the evening time, of both the absolute subjective and objective points of view. As a way station, we may want to consider a solution along the lines proposed by Gadamer, where there is truth but it resides in a tradition that fuses with the prejudices of an interpreting subject into a horizon of a new interpretation that, as in Kierkegaard, is a never ending process. Truth in this approach is understood as a hermeneutic of a tradition. In current day “analytic” philosophy it is similar to epistemic contextualism that “defeats” skepticism by reducing the scope of truth claims to defensible positions or to what I am calling here interpretations within a tradition.
Tradition here embraces all those factors that objectivists point to when they claim that there is no Man, no Humanism, just the ineluctable march of natural, biological and cultural law. And tradition likewise can be seen to include those subjective factors in which, through a process of reproducing a tradition, we appropriate it and reproduce it albeit imperfectly. In short, the appropriation of a tradition is admixed with the prejudices we bring to and it produces an inerasable remainder that some will call the divine spark of freedom, that je ne sais qua, the new, the different, the never before seen or heard that seems to come from an inner darkness of creativity.
To arrive at this rapprochement between these two traditions requires that both eschew reifying their truth claims into Truth claims, since, in both cases, neither side can and never will marshal arguments or evidence that will apodictically prove their cases. These claims are kin to Adorno’s determinate negations in that they are, upon examination, ideological formations because the linguistic assertions are but shorthand for a much thicker experience. In a reversal of Kantian fate, this approach denies universal and necessary knowledge to make room for the faith of our beliefs. We are faith-based beings seeking understanding. It is a fideism due to the Humean fallibility of all phenomenal inference and the intractable problems associated with making numenal assertions (e.g., the existence of free will) in a phenomenal world.
Some may say that this is no reasonable compromise but a phyrric victory of (a false) skepticism because it sacrifices Truth to mere truth. But I argue that as one approaches the abyss of one’s cherished foundations, be they subjectivist or objectivist, one peers, as Gilgamesh did, into an abyss whose secret darkness is heard in the rustlings of the poetess. In this dark night of unknowingness one hears her repeat Schelling’s surmise, “poetry is the organon of philosophy”.
Scalia: you are *far* too easily impressed.
Brent,
I think you are deeply confused as to what it is that is at stake in the debate, you seem to assume that objectivism (which I take you to equate to a belief in what Kimball calls “Truth” in in post) to beliefs such as determinism and the idea “that there is no Man, no Humanism, just the ineluctable march of natural, biological and cultural law.” Weaved around some vague references to Gnostic mysticism and what appears to be some kind of romanticising of nihilism, I cannot see anything buy ramblings that relate little to the topic at hand.
Regards,
Rob.
Sorry, that should be “but ramblings” in my last comment.
Roger, you are simply amazing and I’m glad that I own all your books and read you regularly (I live here in Chicago and know your publisher, Ivan R. Dee).
Anyway, after a quick read-through (I’ll go back and read the piece more carefully and savor its ideas at leisure) the first thing that came to mind is this great Johnson quote (which I may have picked up from one of your essays):
“After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — “I refute it thus.”
Boswell: Life
Seems that some of these windy rebuttals could have been reduced to one sentence: My ox is being gored and I don’t like it.
To some of the commenters who are shouting down Kimball, you probably are missing the point of philosophy (which this is) — have you read Aristotle?
I think it comes down to this. Reality is a veil – and you can’t figure out what makes sausage sauage just by tearing it open or watching it get made. It’s deeper than just the appearance (so much deeper) but the depth is not measured in inches or years.
The interior can only be reached ‘from the inside’ – and thus Bismarck, while a sonufabich in some ways was right – you risk losing Sausage for what it really is by learning more facts about it – facts which don’t so much tell you what makes it sausage as much as how particular sausages ended up where they are now.
Also, to risk being redundant, what I mean is that the entire Truth – which is Reality itself, is not accessible by dissecting and recording and classifying everything. While these have truth to them, they are only part of it. When we, like the Enlightenment thinkers, think that this is all there is, we will eventually – having mistaken a section or mode of Truth for the whole thing, find it lacking and discard it for mere feelings or experiences.
The Mad Prophet was right in on sense, I think, that the appearances are important – but wrong in that Truth is against Life. If you define truth to mean merely – as I said above – discursive facts and analysis, you may find that this killing part of truth (the Law which brings Death) is against life.
This truth is incomplete because it lacks beauty – since beauty is about the ‘true depth’ of appearances. Beauty does not stand on its own, but is a result of truth and virtue. When any of the three are defined narrowly enough to be consistent they become incomplete (because of our limitations) and thus one heads down the path to butchering Wisdom in the service of one’s own personal gods.
The beauty in a particular tree, for instance, can not be understood either by an emotion or fantasy, nor by precise measurement of all of its parts and processes. The first describes either a reaction to beauty that might occur, or the human ability of imagination, and the second reveals that there is a pattern of sorts behind it.
Having severed Truth and Virtue and Beauty, it seems obvious that you would on one hand have fantasy (which is beauty without truth) romanticism (which is beauty without virtue) and rationalism (which is truth severed from both virtue and beauty.) Virtue without truth becomes a kind of egoism, and virtue without beauty eccentricism.
The enlightenment cut the body of philosophy – of wisdom – into pieces. It’s no surprise the maggots started to gather.
I think both Buber and Marcel distinguished between a problem and a mystery. For a problem, one has the answer; Lonergan would say: there are no further relevant questions on that problem; one has virtually unconditioned truth regarding that problem. Even though some truth can be discerned and affirmed regarding a mystery, there are always further important questions, more to be pursued and elucidated. As Karl Rahner argued, the ultimate mystery is Mystery itself, God.
Both in the case of problems and of mysteries, it is the knower–a subject and therefore, by that definition, subjective– who knows. When the knower asks the right questions and affirms the answers that thus emerge, objective truth is attained, no matter how partial. Thus, true subjectivity is objectivity.
The splitting of truth, virtue, and beauty adverted to by RiverC is made worse by a narrow definition of truth, e.g., reductionism or the refusal to acknowledge other paths to the truth–scientism eliminating common sense and transcendence, for instance; or any of the three degrading or eliminating the other two.
This is very interesting. I’m reminded (vividly) of Chesterton and Lewis. Specifically, this line by Chesterton.
‘To preach egoism is to practice altruism.’ (in reference to Nietzsche) — G. K. Chesterton, _Orthodoxy_
In fact, this entire issue is one of the central themes of Chesterton’s work, and insofar as he follows that work, of Lewis.
Bismark’s position is ironic in the extremem given the skill of Karl von Clausewitz in what he called “critical analysis.” If you don’t care to read vom Kreig, you can get a strong taste in Philip Bobbitt’s new Terror and Consent and his previous book, The Shield of Achilles. (Both valuable reads, but not for the intellectual lightweight.)
How prolific.
Is “critical thinking” not simply the more recent euphemism for “reason”?
Is it not simply a term of defence against the constant threat we face from baseless presumptions? “cutting the crap”?
In practical matters the absence of “critical thinking” leads to very real failures precisely because false assumptions are allowed to be implemented.
Beyond the mundane nuts and bolts of day to day functionality, the term also expresses an antidote to the constant threat of unsubstatiated superstition imposed upon us all in the form of expectations and laws derived from myths, i.e., reason.
It seems likely that, absent that threat, the term would have no need to, and would probably not, exist.
Is the author irritated at the thought processes “critical thinking” implies or simply annoyed by the term?
If the latter – all this simply because a reasonably descriptive phrase is over-used and trite?
…unlikely, yet possible – (therapy recommended)
If the former, it begs the question: should we endeavor to discover and define our reality in increasingly accurate, real, and precise terms or bask in the more comfortable and false certainty of our imaginations?
This age-old conflict shall continue so long as there are those incapable of understanding, appreciating or even accepting reality and yet, possess the all-too primal need to assert themself as knowlegable, significant, superior, important, etc. – and – insist on imposing their will on others.
(I always find that incredible and astoundingly arrogant.)
Again – “critical thinking” is but an arrow in our quiver against such tyrany. Embrace it, make it your own, love it.
Peace
Roger “The sound and the fury” Kimball.