My book club has recently given me the occasion to reread Plato’s dialogues. In the character of Socrates, his student Plato applies critical thinking par excellence to perplexing issues of ethics and morality, aesthetics, physics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Through a process now known as the Socratic method, we are taught to question our deepest assumptions about life. In reading the dialogues, we witness a thoroughly reasoned analysis of assumptions under strict rules of logic and rational inquiry. The wise Socrates counsels: the unexamined life is not worth living.
To quote the 20th century mathematician, logician, and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”1 Plato is the father of the Western intellectual tradition, and the supreme value that higher education places on rational thought lies at the center of this tradition. As Socrates’ life draws to an end, Phaedo reports his mentor’s retrospective on living virtuously: “The true moral ideal, whether self-control or integrity or courage, is really a kind of purgation from all emotions, and wisdom itself is a sort of purification.”2 Here we find reason as the sine qua non of the good life, that human choices, decisions—indeed how we should live—ought to be firmly guided by logic, rational standards, and evidence; that is, by critical thinking.
I would like to think critically about this assumption. That humans possess higher-order cognitive capacities is not in dispute; that we are guided or even have the potential to be guided by reason alone is dubious. Thinking, even thinking critically, is an imperfect process, thoroughly connected to individual emotions, social milieus, and personal experiences. In his uniquely iconoclastic way, the 19th century thinker Friedrich Nietzsche assaults the shrine of reason thusly: “Insanity in individuals is something rare--but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.”3
While we might want our institutions, departments, organizations, and the individuals who comprise them to operate on rigorous rational standards, they do not. As Dr. John Baldwin explains in his column for this issue of Leading and Learning, one can never expect that all the tough calls can be resolved by reason. In the academy, reason is our default, but emotional arguments are not won through logical rigor. Effective leaders are superb critical thinkers, but they also exhibit emotional and social intelligence. I invite you to read Dr. Baldwin’s advice on circumspect decision making in organizations that are often times anything but rational.
As a philosophy teacher years ago, I was keen to hear students’ reasoned arguments about an issue. I consistently expunged any language from a student’s comment about how he or she felt: “Give me your argument; I don’t care about your emotions.” I hope I have learned better since then. Prof. Rob Jenkins wisely guides us in his article on classroom strategies for developing critical thinking skills to help students feel that their viewpoints are worth considering. Critical thinking in the classroom—and the clinic or patient-care setting—is a difficult skill that requires development over time. Teachers must encourage the heart as they develop the head.
As leaders and teachers, we should give attention to developing and applying critical thinking skills. However, we ignore the emotional and social context of critical thinking at our own peril. Our champion of critical thinking, Socrates, has something to teach us here as well. He knew that the societal and political cards were stacked against him. After making an eloquent, logically valid, and sound defense, the Athenian jury condemned him to death. True, the vote was a close one, but the outcome remained the same. I leave the analogies, metaphorically or otherwise, to the reader!
