Critical Thinking

Abstract:My aim in this essay is to take seriously the idea that the activity of criticism entails a distinct form of thinking. I develop my argument through an engagement with Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's What is Philosophy?, a text in which the two authors look back on their life's work to interrogate fundamental aspects of their shared discipline. For my purposes, to pose and answer the question "What is criticism?," two components of the book's project seem especially important. The first is that it is not just a book about philosophy but about thinking, and about the specific practices that characterize different forms of thought. Deleuze and Guattari hold up philosophy alongside science and art as three ur-forms of thought. Significantly, these three forms of thought can be seen to serve as the three major coordinates marking contemporary debates about criticism. What happens, I want to ask, when we subtract from criticism its affinities with these other practices of thought? What remains of criticism once we identify its specific differences from science, art, and philosophy? My claim is that the distinctiveness of critical thinking can be found precisely in its difference from these three other major practices. Secondly, What is Philosophy? is a book designed to interrogate the doxa of its authors' discipline. In a similar way, the aim of my own essay is to push against the institutional doxa of "critical thinking" by drawing out the virtues of a genuinely critical thinking.