Against Critical Thinking in the Liberal Arts

Why more critical thinking isnt the answer to populism and fascism

LESC 2, Freiburg, Germany

Adam Smith, University of Winchester, BA Modern Liberal Arts

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INTRODUCTION

Gillian Rose, in Loves Work, writes of the sparking beginnings of her passion for

philosophy at the age of seventeen in an English grammar school. Though much that

happened there was mere banking she describes her encounter with Platos Republic

and Pascals Penses as beginning to give her an understanding of the aporetic, open

nature of the philosophy she would come to espouse.

The dramatic unfolding of both of these works, the one, a dialogue in which

the assent of the partner is continuously wooed, the other addressed to the

perplexed, solitary soul, were anagogic: invitations to undertake singular

journeys, which deepened and did not seek to placate the burgeoning sadness

of the teenaged soul. Perplexed, aporetic, not dogmatic, they indicated the

difficulty of the way and the routes to essayed. I never discovered in them any

euporia, any easy way or solution, any monologic, imperialist metaphysics.

Philosophy intimated the wager of wisdom - as collective endeavour and as

solidarity predicament.1

If Rose had gone at these books with the sharpened tools of critical thinking at the

ready it is likely she would have found them to be deterministic and authoritarian.

Platos Republic can be read as a fascist, misogynistic dystopia but where is the

1
Rose, 2011, pp.128-9
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educational value for the self in reading it this way? This striving for self-knowledge

and a kindness in the tradition is the difference between a philosophical education

and (what I will refer to as) a purely critical education. The tradition, if read purely

critically, is a bastion of misogyny, racism, colonialism, homophobia and more

bigotry besides. This does a cruel injustice to my own (and many others) experience

of reading the books of the tradition. It certainly does a great unkindness to Roses

educational experience and writing. The tradition, she remarks, is far kinder in its

understanding that to live, to love, is to be failed, to forgive, to have failed, to be

forgiven, for ever and ever2

This paper will seek to explore the educational, philosophical and political basis for

an education grounded in aporetic values of openness, self-knowledge, kindness,

charity and curiosity. Even I must concede that these values seem vague and watery

upon first reading but they have a firm philosophical foundation which this paper

will explore. This paper will outline an image of a philosophical reading of the liberal

arts tradition which is critical of, and antithetical to the banking concept of

education, as outlined by Paolo Freire and the critical thinking pedagogy which has

become dominant in British education in response to this. Finally this paper will

demonstrate that a philosophical, aporetic education is not one which is solely

introspective and anti-social, but one which stands opposed, and creates students

equipped to oppose, the rising spectre of far-right populism in Europe.

2
Rose, 2011, p.105
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THE PROBLEM OF CRITICAL THINKING

One of the most outspoken modern critics of critical thinking pedagogy has been

David Hayes of Bard College Berlin. His paper Against Critical Thinking Pedagogy

argues that in an age of skeptical thinking by default enforced critical thinking leads

to vague, thin beliefs in students. Here Hayes goes some way to define what is meant

by critical thinking pedagogy and the initial problems with using a dialectic,

oppositional mode of debate to attack all texts.

A successful class would be one in which the students got into the debate.

Their uncritical tendency to stay attached to their own opinions is indeed

undermined. What it is replaced by, however, is the pleasure of attacking and

defending opinions, whatsoever they happen to be and whosoever happens to

hold them.

Through the critical debate, the students take a distance from something, but

also get closer to something else. Because this is the pleasure the exercise is

offering, the students learn the debate mode of relation to material. Some

questions the students typically do not learn to ask include: did the material

about which we debated in fact possess two sides? Are these sides truly of

sufficiently opposite character such that the defense of one naturally entails

the attack of the other? How did we find and identify those sides in the first
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place? Not through debatebut then, how? How did the material look to us

because we approached it as an issue to be debated, and what does it look like

when it is approached in some other way?3

Hayes identifies critical thinking pedagogy as an aggressive force where ideas are

pitted against each other in order to establish which one is more true and right or to

expose the prejudices which exist in the author of a text. He references an empirical

study of self-described critical thinkers who use these sorts of forceful words when

describing their cognitive and educational methods. One of the main themes of that

study was the emphasis on conflict, whether in terms of an aggressive pedagogy, the

stimulation of alternative ideas, or resistance to critical thinking4. It might be

thought that an aggressive mode of thought would be exactly what is need to go out

into the world and tackle the aggression and simplicity offered by populist political

movements. Certainly this paper does not seek to try and make the liberal argument

that a quiet, measured stance will somehow overcome loud, dangerous ideas. Rather

it will look at how the response to fascism and populism must be founded on

something more than just a mode of thought, no matter how aggressive that might

be. It must be founded on a real engagement with the tradition which is rooted in the

difficulty, despair and brokenness of philosophy at the beginning of the twenty-first

century. It is not founded on the aggression for aggressions sake of the critical

thinking mode of thought.

3
Hayes, 2015, p.320
4
Hayes, 2015, p.319
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In the study used by Hayes, the academics agree on the mode of thought and

classroom behaviour required to be critical but disagree on the purpose of this

critical thinking pedagogy beyond the hope that critical thinking will lead to student

agency and ownership of the learning process5. What is entirely less clear, not only

in this study but in the mind of the students and teachers, is when the aggressive play

of idea against idea transfers into ownership and agency. In the light of

postmodernity where irony and play have come into the classroom it might be said

that the whole point of the exercise is to demonstrate, ad absurdum, the baselessness

of any claim to knowledge, truth or power. It is not difficult to identify fascism as a

bad thing but it is much harder to find a position from which to fight fascism when

the only tools you have are destructive rather than constructive.

Hayes argues that critical thinking, as a tool, is not inherently a bad thing but its use

in the university classroom has led habitual dishonesty in practice6. This is, he

argues, because the exercise of critical thinking for its own sake creates a situation in

which students are encouraged to find prejudice rather than meaning in a text.

Neither the time nor the non-critical engagement is available in a lecture or seminar

to effectively dig beneath the surface prejudices of a text (some of which may be

invented or imposed by critical thinking itself). Hayes argues, much of what ends up

getting hit are straw men versions of the actual objects, and many of the greatest

objects are in fact poorly understood as a set of propositions or a series of assertions.

So, approaching them in such a spirit will be grossly distorting7. Whereas Roses

5
Hayes, 2015, p.319
6
Hayes, 2015, p.321
7
Hayes, 2015, p.321
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engagements with philosophical texts can be seen as honest on a very basic level, the

engagement that Hayes identifies is fundamentally dishonest and also distorting. It

does not provide the student with the space, time or inclination to engage with texts

in the canon in a way which would make them philosophical thinkers outside the

classroom.

In the formative stage of life, which education is most definitely a part of, it seems

perverse to try and teach with a pedagogy which assumes a fully-formed critical

faculty and world view. Rather, educators should seek to build a setting in which

students are able to come to philosophy, art, literature, and the canon as a whole,

and allow themselves to be formed within, rather than in opposition to, these great

works. Critical thinking pedagogy, argues Hayes, attacks the most basic of

requirements in the encounter with texts, art-objects, and the opinions of others: the

principle of charity in interpretation8. This charity is not charity in the sense of

giving out of pity or duty, it is a charitable recognition that we can and should learn

from philosophy rather than seek to prove that it is bunk. Gillian Rose argues in

Loves Work that the destruction of the philosophical mode of thought in favour of

the baseless vacuity of postmodernity is to do away with a real understanding of the

world. To destroy philosophy [...] would leave us resourceless to know the difference

between fantasy and actuality, to discern the distortion between ideas and their

realisation. It would prevent the process of learning, the corrigibility of experience9.

At heart here is an educational belief that critical thinking pedagogy represents a

false resolution, an all too easy answer, to the difficulty of life. A philosophical,

8
Hayes, 2015, p.321
9
Rose, 2011, p.127
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charitable education gives the student the opportunity to develop an aporetic

understanding of life. What does this philosophical education look like?

WHAT IS APORETIC, PHILOSOPHICAL EDUCATION

Rose, in Paradiso, describes what it is to be a philosopher and this is a good place to

describe what it might mean to build a philosophical education and philosophical

teachers:

To be a philosopher you need only three things. First, infinite intellectual eros:

endless curiosity about everything. Second the ability to pay attention: to be

rapt by what is in front of you without seizing it yourself, the care of

concentration - in the way you might look closely, without touching, at the

green lacewing fly, overwintering silently on the kitchen wall. Third,

acceptance of pathlessness (aporia): that there may be no solutions to

questions, only the clarification of their statement. Eros, attention,

acceptance.10

How is it that eros, attention and acceptance can be bought into a classroom setting

which is currently so dominated by aggression, critique and prejudice? Rose, was

writing Paradiso whilst receiving treatment for terminal cancer and she uses the

oft-made analogy between medicine and philosophy in order to explore an aporetic,

philosophical worldview in contrast to a deterministic one. Postmodernism, argues

10
Rose, 1999, p.42
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Rose, is despairing rationalism without reason11. A philosophical education ought

to tend toward allowing honest despair in the classroom whilst also encouraging

students to work toward centering their own self-knowledge and confidence.

Rose presents Dr Land and Dr Grove as two incredibly highly trained medical

professionals, each experts in their field but representing two different expressions of

authority within the doctor/patient relationship. The traditional expression of

authority comes in the form of Dr Land who is straightforward with Rose, she

reviews the situation of her cancer and tells Rose: this means your cancer is active;

this means you will become ill; this means you will need more treatment. How long

do you intend to continue working?12. In this way Dr Land seems to view Roses

condition in a simple dichotomy, Rose stands to lose her battle with the disease and

there are no medical solutions to this. When Rose sees Dr Grove she is immediately

put into a different position than with Dr Land. Grove asks who you are and how

you are13 and invites her to give a holistic, narrative account of her illness. The

doctor would have had just the same access to the notes and charts as Dr Land did

and yet they cede some of their traditional position of authority and expertise to Rose

in order that she might explain how her cancer is seen from her own point of view.

Dr Grove, in contrast with Dr Land tells Rose: you are well; you are not dominated

by this disease; we will keep you in this equilibrium. Is there anything you want to do

11
Rose, 1999, p.42
12
Rose, 1999, p.44
13
Rose, 1999, p.44
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that you cannot do?14. For Rose the difference between Dr Land and Dr Grove is the

difference between a sentence of death and one of life.

Here philosophy provides the analogy for medicine. Dr Grove is able to say, I

dont know: I dont know what is causing this or that symptom. I dont know

what will happen next. I dont know when you will die. Dr Grove does not

permit you to transfer your authority to him, and, so, paradoxically, you trust

him more, because that trust is uncoerced and freely bestowed. 15

Dr Grove does not completely diminish their authority but they dont take the

position of total authority that Dr Land does. They are able to admit that there is an

aporia in Roses being and in that gap between knowledge and the unknowable they

give Rose a freedom and self-determination which Land cannot. Dr Groves way is

one of presenting knowledge without arrogating authority but also without

relinquishing it16 and here lies the model of aporetic, philosophical education that I

want to put forward. The critical theory teacher refuses to allow difficulty,

multiplicity and paradox stand in the classroom and have its own truth within the

students experience. They not only have the authority of teacher but also the

aggressive authority which the methodology of critical thinking creates. It invents a

certainty to fill the gap between the self and the world. The aporetic teacher allows

that gap to stand by presenting the world as one in which the student has some, but

not total, authority over their own self-determination.

14
Rose, 1999, p.44
15
Rose, 1999, pp.44-5
16
Rose, 1999, p.45
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Rose calls this educational process autopoeisis, the continuous inventing of the self,

where that self acquires infinite plasticity of boundary, [this] is the gift of the

doctor-philosopher who is skilled in bestowing the truth or reason and the authority

of his discipline onto this patient17. Rose, at the beginning of this paper, made the

claim that the tradition was actually kinder than it was allowed to be by the

deterministic readings of it which lead to the metaphysical emptiness of

postmodernism. In Mourning Becomes the Law Rose articulates an aporetic way of

viewing the tragedy of Enlightenment reason in the 20th and 21st centuries. Ethics

and metaphysics are torn halves of an integral freedom to which they have never

added up18. In this world, a world where the difficulty in the tradition is accepted

and not fixed there can be a fundamentally different type of education to the easy,

but false, solutions offered by critical thinking pedagogy.

HOW CAN SUCH AN EDUCATION OPPOSE POPULISM?

The spiritually poor and philosophically thin education offered by a critical thinking

pedagogy means that students dont have a chance to encounter the real world of

difficulty, paradox and multiplicity until they find themselves thrust into it outside of

education. Rose argues that this is akin to keeping children away from toy guns and

fantasy films in order that they arent exposed to the horrors of the world.The child

who is locked away from aggressive experiment and play will be left terrified and

paralysed by its emotions, unable to release or face them, for they may destroy the

17
Rose, 1999, p.45
18
Rose, 1996, p.9
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world and himself or herself19. In this environment the simple answers offered in the

classroom can only be matched by the simple answers offered by populism, students

are not equipped with the faculties to be critical in a genuine way, instead they seek

the comfort blanket of answers and not the honest despair of aporia. Rose writes of

the educator; the censor aggravates the syndrome she seeks to alleviate; she seeks to

rub out in others the border which has been effaced insider herself20.

Paulo Freire argues that populism can be traced directly to the lack of a rounded,

formative education provided to students. People who feel disenfranchised by their

inability to easily make change themselves, by identifying with charismatic leaders,

come to feel that they themselves are active and effective21. Trump, AfD, Le Pen and

Brexit are all labelled as protest votes, implying that the average voter felt

empowered to send a message of effective change through their voting. Either they

did this through the eventual success of a disruptive candidate or through the hope

that such a vote would send a message of dissatisfaction. The frustration behind

populist support arises from the oppression of the masses and the removal of their

ability to act effectively in the traditional political realm, argues Freire. But it also

comes from the educational paucity provided to the masses within this oppressive

system. When their efforts to act responsibly are frustrated, when they find

themselves unable to use their faculties, men suffer22.

19
Rose, 2011, p.126
20
Rose, 2011, p.126
21
Freire, 1972, p.51
22
Freire, 1972, p.51
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The need for easy answers outside of the false-simplicity of the critical thinking

classroom can lead down the route to populism but it can just as easily, and just as

often, lead to apathy. Rose, in Mourning Becomes the Law argues that

postmodernism has latched onto and accelerated an irony of ironies that emerged

from 19th century philosophy. This is the recognition of the inevitable subjectivity of

our positings, and of the ever-painful shifts to further positings of the relation

between subjectivity and objectivity, which always fail to guarantee a sustainable

reality. The phenomenological irony of irony expounds this drama of experience as

intrinsically ironic23. Far from an education which allows students to have real

experiences of texts and ideas, postmodern education encourages only a surface

engagement on a purely critical level. It encourages students to be ironic in their

appreciation of the tradition and to freely adopt and drop positions without asking

how those positions might really play in the difficult divide between self and other.

All of this irony leads to apathy as students come to believe that they can have no

genuine political engagement in the world. Where apathy thrives in those with

humanistic views then it allows anti-humanist, fascist and populist ideas to expand,

and ultimately begin to dismantle liberal, educational and cultural organisations.

Ultimately what can best respond to populism and fascism is not the student with the

best critical thinking faculties. These toxic ideologies are immune to supposedly

rational argument and critique in which the pedagogy of critical thinking is so

strongly rooted. On top of that, as I have shown, the modern ways in which critical

thinking has come to meld with postmodern pedagogy in the classroom has led to

23
Rose, 1996, p.6
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apathy, disengagement and a vacuous form of instrumental education. As Rose

describes it, a despairing rationalism without reason24. Rather we ought to be

striving for a philosophical education, rooted in a modern understanding of the

aporetic nature of knowledge and truth. An education which, like Dr Grove, is able to

accept that there is no solution like the ones peddled by the Trumps, Le Pens and

Farages of this world. Instead what is required is a generation of students endowed

with autopoiesis, that is the ability to self-determine and begin to stake their own

place out in the tradition. The charity of a philosophical liberal arts education is not

infinite, it is not to say that students must treat every writer and work as sacred

vessels in which a great truth is hidden. Rather it is to let writers and works, ancient

and modern, express the fragments of truth about the human experience to the

student in a sympathetic environment. The student may in this way be able to learn

and develop the three faculties of Roses philosopher; intellectual eros, an ability to

listen and an awareness of the aporia of the world. In this way we ought to better

tread the difficult paths of authority, truth, power, politics and ethics with some stake

of our own in an educational metaphysics of our own making and discovering.

24
Rose, 1996, p.7
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Works Cited

Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin

Hayes, D. (2015). Against critical thinking pedagogy in Arts and Humanities in
Higher Education, 14 (4), pp.318-28
Rose, G. (2011). Loves Work. New York: New York Review Books
Rose, G. (1996). Mourning Becomes the Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press
Rose, G. (1999). Paradiso. London: Menard Press

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