Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This essay seeks to address the following question: who could have said why thinking should be critical (as a social and ideological correction before interpretation) in order to be thinking, and why are we supposed to be critically motivated in order to be able to generate thinking? Is the critical dimension a self-evidence of thinking, beyond any engendered criticalness? From the nineteenth and twentieth-century legacy, critical or critique remains once and for all a consequence, rather than being a principle or self-motivated act of thinking. Moreover, critical theory, and some critical experiences, have turned critique towards a new way of thinking via a process of hostile encountering. In the various cultural and political contexts of our world, if we suggest to a child: be critically motivated, or (always) think critically, this does not mean always be inventive; rather it is most often interpreted as: establish a distance from the idea, without involving one’s own personal view. In this way, the concepts of critic and critique (in particular languages, and by means of different socially discursive traditions), and paradoxically even criticism, contaminated the full range of discourses and their attendant practice in thought. At least, the legacy of this concept has been forged under the umbrella of such semantic radiation for decades, in the half of Europe, especially in Southeast Europe, and exactly in the states where the word critique is associated with socially and politically ideological positions, more than to a broad individual imagination.