Critical thinking has been fetishised by people in education. In a way, critical thinking just means thinking. And who is against thinking? Everybody likes it. We might not practise it enough, but we say we like it.
Sometimes, critical thinking is just criticism. Almost a decade ago, I wrote a piece called On the Limits of Critical Thinking. I pointed out that critical thinking shouldn’t just be critique. This builds on work I did years ago in a book called The Ironist’s Cage. In the late 1980s and 1990s, I was concerned about the way in which irony became the default mode of address for intellectuals in the United States, and not only in the United States.
The trouble with irony
Irony is a powerful tool, but it’s also an easy way of not engaging with others. It creates distance in such a way as to take the pressure for legitimation off anybody’s argument. I don’t need to legitimate my own argument if my mode of address is just to be ironic about yours. Irony never self-legitimates. So when I wrote about the limits of critical thinking, I was really building on that idea: criticism is not enough.
Today, in literature departments around the world, this has become something of a trope. Rita Felski, a wonderful literary critic at the University of Virginia, has written a book about the limits of critique, and others have chimed in. This is interesting, because students at universities do learn to become suspicious of orthodoxy. This is good; they become suspicious of people with power and money. But if all they learn is to become more and more suspicious then this is bad, because suspicion is not nourishing. Suspicion is not enough.
Engaging with a text
I ask my students to take quotations from our reading and to comment on them. Invariably they write: ‘Aristotle said this; I disagree.’ Every time, I have to tell them, ‘I don’t care if you agree with Aristotle. Nobody cares. You shouldn’t care if I agree with Aristotle. Whatever you thought of Aristotle, or Rousseau or Mary Wollstonecraft, let’s treat the text as if the text has something to teach us, rather than as if the text was something we have to dominate. Let yourself be open to the text, rather than taking it as an opportunity to show how smart you are.’
That’s the background for my turn towards what I call “critical feeling”. What I mean by “critical feeling” is a mode of engagement, with people or with texts, that is connective, sympathetic, emotional and not stupid. In other words, you can give yourself to a film, or a work of music or a painting even if you ultimately withdraw your support; you withdraw your affection, you say it’s wrong, this thing you thought you loved.
Why critical feeling matters
Someone who’s practised in critical feeling can see something from someone else’s point of view. It’s trying, as we say in American liberalism, to stand in their shoes, to feel what it’s like to face eviction during a pandemic, or to be a person of religious faith when you yourself don’t have that faith. It’s not being afraid to give yourself to forms of art that might not be popular.
I had never been to an opera before I went to graduate school; I had never listened to an opera. In a class with Carl Schorske, an extraordinary historian of Vienna, we listened to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. I thought that this was rich people’s music; I wasn’t going to want to listen to this!
Schorske opened my ears, and my heart and my body to what was happening in the music and in the libretto. It was an enormous gift. Not that I became a Wagnerian, but suddenly my capacity for getting pleasure in the world and understanding a different point of view had increased. That’s part of what we do and what we should do in education: we should increase the capacity of our students to find pleasure and insight into things that they might not find congenial.
I teach a course called Philosophy in the Movies. It’s somewhat modelled on Stanley Cavell’s work on old Hollywood cinema and philosophy. We watch some very classic American movies and some that are more obscure, like Random Harvest, which is an amazing melodrama from 1942.
When the students begin to watch, they think that the film is going to be really corny. But by the end, many of them are in tears. They clapped at the denouement. That is critical feeling. Afterwards, they can say that a certain aspect was really manipulative, or that the film would have been more effective this way or that way. They can still think and be critical. But they experienced the power of the art. They experienced why these ideas were compelling to some people.
When they read Jane Austen, I want them to think about why this is compelling to so many people. Even if you decide later that it’s not your thing, you can put yourself in a position where Jane Austen’s text bowls you over. Because if it doesn’t, it’s not Jane Austen’s fault; it’s your fault. You could open yourself to that. A critical feeler opens herself or himself to points of view and modes of experience that they thought they would not find congenial. They may ultimately have trouble with the work, or be critical of it, but they are capable of experiencing its intensity.
Occupying another position
I teach Maggie Nelson’s book of autotheory, The Argonauts, in my virtue class. The book starts off with bawdy, sexual language. It’s about a queer marriage and a real pregnancy. It’s also about deconstruction, psychoanalysis and all kinds of other things. Maggie Nelson is a great writer. If you open yourself up to this text, you begin to feel the questions that she’s thinking about, from her perspective – a pregnant woman married to a man who is a transsexual, who has his own kids and who’s an artist, just like her. You begin to be able to occupy positions that are not your own.
It’s harder to occupy positions with which you have little experience, so it’s harder to occupy the position of someone with a different gender. But is it harder to occupy a position of another gender or someone who lived 600 years ago? I don’t know; I would never presume to say you understand it as they do. But I do ask my students to try.
When inappropriate feels right
I ask my students to read How to Be Gay by David Halperin, a text based on a course he used to give in Michigan. It’s very offensive; it’s meant to be offensive to bourgeois civil-rights-oriented gay people who want to fit into society. He argues that being gay also means being anti-normative and iconoclastic. Marriage is the last thing you should want.
It’s a pretty wild text – great stuff. And the students will say, ‘I think this is inappropriate.’ That’s the phrase. I think this is inappropriate. And I’ll say, ‘That’s why we’re reading it: it’s inappropriate. Put yourself in a position where that feels like the right thing to say. What position is that? You can leave the position later, but put yourself in a position where that feels like the right argument to make.’
I asked my students to do a thought experiment: would you give a pill to someone to erase their traumatic memory? One student raised his hand. He said, ‘Professor Roth, I think this is an inappropriate question for me because I’ve never had this experience.’ I told him that no one has had this experience. The pill doesn’t exist. It’s a thought experiment. Do it. Use your imagination.
And he said okay. He just needed a push, because he had been taught that he can’t occupy the perspective of another person who is of a different race, or different gender or different sexuality. I said, ‘Of course, you can’t occupy the position you had yesterday. But you can try. And you can be aware of the failure, you can be aware of the proximity, you can talk about it with other people and you can try to feel what it’s like as well as think about what it’s like.’ By doing that, our repertoire of feeling and of thinking is expanded.
