https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/13/thinking-critically-about-critical-thinking/
“We must never,” Bismarck is said to have warned, “look into the origins of laws or sausages.” Sage advice, I’ve always thought (and no pun intended with that “sage”)—but how much at odds it is with the dominant current of modern thought, which is to say Enlightenment thought.
Immanuel Kant, a great hero of the Enlightenment, summed up the alternative to Bismarck’s counsel when, in an essay called “What is Enlightenment?,” he offered Sapere Aude, Dare to know!, as a motto for the movement. Enlightened man, Kant thought, was the first real adult: the first to realize his potential as an autonomous being—a being, as the etymology of the word implies, who “gives the law to himself.” As Kant stressed, this was a moral as well as an intellectual achievement, since it involved courage as much as insight: courage to put aside convention, tradition, and superstition (how the three tended to coalesce for Enlightened thinkers!) in order to rely for guidance on the dictates of reason alone.
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? Boast? 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 in the “Copernican revolution” he sought to bring about in philosophy.
Today, we can hardly go to the toilet without being urged to cultivate “critical thinking.” Which does not mean, I hasten to add, that we are a society of Kantians. Nevertheless, what we are dealing with here is an educational watchword, not to say a cliché, that has roots in some of the Enlightenment values that Kant espoused. It’s a voracious, quick-growing hybrid. A Google search for the phrase “critical thinking” brings up 102 million results in 0.62 seconds. One of the first matches, God help us, is to something called “The Critical Thinking Community,” whose goal is “to promote essential change in education and society through the cultivation of fair-minded critical thinking.” (Why is it, I wonder, that the conjunction of the phrase “critical thinking” with the word “community” is so reliably productive of nausea?)
