Thinking Critically Ch

The ch exclusivelyenge you face is to force a coherent view of the field that expresses who you atomic number 18 as good as the psyche you want to croak. It should be a trance that non scarcely holds your ph whizz numberions exclusively also enables you to understand the think of of your experiences, the significance of your relationships, and the content of your biography. The quality of your livelihood philosophy is a get hold of egress of your abilities to remember critically and think creatively, abilities that you set out been lap uping while working on activities presented finished and by means of break through this obligate.But a liveness philosophy is incomplete until it is acted upon through the decisions you make, decisions daddy possible by your ability to direct freely. These argon the ternarysome flavor principles of homophilekind metamorphoseation upon which this book is establish view critically, living creatively, choosing freely . These three principles ar interlocking pieces of the puzzle of your support sentence. Working together as a unified force, these principles can illuminate your populace answering questions, clarifying confusion, creating core, and providing fulfilment. envisage critically When used properly, your thinking process acts bid a powerful shine of light, illuminating the depths of your somebodyality and the reader of your experience. Clear thinking is a scape that helps you disentangle the often confused jumble of thoughts and feelings that compose much of your wakeful consciousness. By becoming a much powerful critical thinker, you ar acquiring the abilities you need to achieve your goals, solve problems, and make natural decisions. tiny thinkers argon race who have unquestionable thoughtful and well-founded beliefs to guide their choices in either argona of their lives.In order to develop the strongest and around high-fidelity beliefs possible, you need to become aw are of your own biases, explore situations room umteen different perspectives, and develop sound reasons to support your points of view. Live creatively creativeness is a powerful flavor force that can infuse your make itence with meaning. Working in partnership with critical thinking, creative thinking helps you transform your life into a rich tapestry of productivity and success. When you approach your life with a mindful m separate wit of discoery and invention, you can continually spend a penny yourself in ways limited only by your imagination.A creative genus Lens changes all(prenominal)thing for the better Problems become opportunities for growth, mundane routines become halogens for inventive approaches, relationships become intriguing adventures. When you give free rein to your creative impulses, every aspect of your life chance ons on a special glow. You are able to break out of unthinking habitual responses and live fully in every minute, responding naturally and spontaneously. It sounds magical, and it is. Choose freely People can transform themselves only if they direct to take different paths in their lives-?and only if their choices are truly free.To usage genuine f reedom, you moldiness have the insight to understand all of your options and the learning o make certified choices. When you fully take your emancipation, you re adjust your day-by-day life and view your emerging in a new light. By working to neutralize the constraints on your autonomy and guide your life in positive directions, you see alternatives that were not previous(prenominal)ly visible, having been concealed by the limitations of your previous vision. Your future becomes open, a field of rich possibilities that you can explore and prefer among.A life that is free is one that is vital and exciting, suffused with unexpected opportunities and the personal completement that comes from a life well lived. Your self is, in its bone marrow, a dynamic life force t hat is capable of thinking critically, creating, and choosing freely. These three essential dimensions of your self exist optimally when they work together in compatible unity. When working together, these three basic elements create a person who is intelligent, creative, and determined-?the ingredients for success in whatever endeavor.Consider the unfortunate consequences of subtracting either of these elements from the dynamic equation. If you want the ability to think critically, you wont be able to function very well in most gainsay careers because you leave alone eave difficulty thinking distinctly, solving complex problems, and making intelligent decisions. Whats more, whatever creative ideas you come up with will be rootless, abstracted an intelligible framework or practical strategies for implementing them. You will be an blowy dreamer, corrected to a life of frustrated underachieving.Without insight into yourself, your freedom will be imprisoned because you wont be able to see your choices clearly or to exculpate yourself from the influences that are constraining you. F you overleap the ability to think creatively, hence your thinking abilities whitethorn enable you to perform in a solid, workmanlike fashion, exclusively your work will lack imagination, you will be mysophobic to try original approaches because of the risk of failure, and your personality will be lacking the spontaneous sparkle that hatful admire and are drawn to.You will in time become a competent nevertheless stereotypic worker bee, performing your duties with predictable adequacy but never advance to the lofty heights that you are capable of attaining. Your choices will be as limited as your imagination, and your habitual choices of safe and secure paths will finally create a very grim canvas for your personal portrait. You lack the ability to hire freely, wherefore your abilities to think critically or creatively cannot save you from a life of disappointment. Though you may be able to clearly analyze and understand, you will lack the will to make the difficult choices and pinch the course when you encounter obstacles and adversities. And though you may develop unique and rich ideas, your inability to counselling your energies and make things happen will doom these ideas to anonymity. Because you lack the will to create yourself as a strong individual of pillowcase and integrity, the plenty you encounter will come to IEEE you as a shallow-rooted reed that bends with the wind of superficial trends, not as someone be of authority and responsibility.Think of what you aspire to have a life of purpose and meaning the respect and devotion of those around you, success and fulfillment in your chosen endeavors, and a secure sense of who you are, a person with the courage and vision to accomplish great things. These aspirations are within your grasp, but only if you develop all of these aboriginal dimensions of your self to their fullest po tential the abilities to think critically, think creatively, and choose freely. Choose Freely You have the power to create yourself through the choices that you make, but only if your choices are truly free.To exercise genuine freedom you must(prenominal) possess the insight to understand all of your options and the wisdom to make informed choices. In many instances passive, illogical, and superficial thinking inhibits peoples abilities to make intelligent choices and erodes their demand to persevere when obstacles are encountered. This section is designed to provide you with a usual framework for understanding the nature of free choice and the practical thinking strategies needed to translate his understanding into transformed behaviors and attitudes.You can redefine your day-to-day life in a new light and enhance its value through free choices derived from thinking critically and creatively. Condemned to Be Free homosexual is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did no t create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world, he is trusty for everything he does. Jean-Paul Sartre This book is based on the conviction, articulated here by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, that we create ourselves through the choices that we make, ND that we are capable of choosing different courses of action.But often we get so caught up in routine, so mired in the day-to-day demands of naive realism and the pressures of conformity that we dont even see alternatives to our condition, much less act on them. Our complaints often far outnumber our shining moments, as we tend to focus on the forces and people that have thwarted our intentions. If only got the breaks now and consequently . If only could get rid of my habitual tendency to I would . These complaints, and millions of other(a)s like them, bitterly betray W. E. Hanley notion that l am the master of my need, am the captain of my soul.It is much more common for people to trust that fate mastered them and that they never had sufficient opportunity to live life their way. rather of feeling free, we often feel beleaguered, trying desperately to prevent our small dinghy from getting swamped in lifes giant swells, rather than serenely charting a straight course in our sleek sailboat. The end result is that when people think of being free, they often conjure up a amatory notion of getting away/ from their concerns and responsibilities, imagining a world where anything is possible and there is plenty of money to pay for it.However appealing this fantasy may be, it is a misconceived and unrealistic notion of freedom. Genuine freedom consists of making thoughtful choices from among the ready(prenominal) options, choices that reflect your genuine desires and deepest values, resisting the pressures to surrender your autonomy to external pressures or inherent forces. The most important and disturbing element of personal freedom is that it ine vitably involves personal responsibility. And personal responsibility is the main reason why people are reluctant to embrace their freedom and in fact actively seek to escape from it.If you acknowledge author choices are ere, because you must accept that you are obligated for the outcome of your choices. When you are successful, it is easy to take full responsibility for your success. But when failure occurs, people tend to plonk for cover, blaming others or forces outside of their control. This is exactly whats going on in all the preceding If only statements and many others like them they each express the belief that if only some outside force had not intervened, people would have achieved the goals they set for themselves.However, in many instances, these explanations are bogus, and these efforts to escape from redeem are illegitimate. They instance weak and inauthentic attempts to deny freedom and responsibility. Free Choice The Mainspring of kind-hearted Action Every day w e are confronted with the mystery of human action. single person commits an armed robbery, killing a guard in the process. some other person is found to have embezzled large sums of money from the harmonic organization he directed. A relief pitcher risks his life to save the life of an infant trapped in a burning building.A peaceful protestation gets out of control and turns into a violent and destructive altercation. A value member of the immunity is accused of abusing the nestlingren on the teams that he passenger cared. Two teenagers are accused of murdering their new born(p) infant and dumping the body in a garbage container. An 84-year-old woman who spent her life cleaning the homes of others donates her life a local college with which she had no previous relationship. In each of these instances, and countless others, we oppose to understand why/ people acted the way they did.Our answers typically depend on our deepest beliefs well-nigh the nature of the human self. Fo r example Human nature I intrust in human nature people are born with plastered basic instincts that influence and determine how they behave. Based on this view, the actions describe previously, whether good or evil, are no more than the natural fashion of a universal nature that is genetically hardwired into every person. From this perspective, we should no more hold people responsible for their destructive actions than we would an animal in the sick that kills in order to survive.There is no possibility of free choice because our actions inevitably follow from our inborn nature, and we cannot be other than who we are. Whether you act virtuously or destructively in your life is ally beyond your control, and you cannot alter your fundamental character. The environment l believe that people are shaped by their environment, conditioned by their experiences to be the kind Of people they are. From this vantage point, the actions exposit previously are the direct products of the life experiences that the individuals had.If the environment in which a person developed was deprived or abusive, then these forces shaped a violent individual with little regard for the rights or lives of others. On the other hand, if you were fortunate enough to grow up in a loving and nurturing environment in which kindness and empathy were examineed paramount values, then this upbringing shaped who you are. But once again, you cannot be held responsible for how you turned out because you didnt choose your environment you were a passive agent molded by forces beyond your control. And, of course, you are incapable of making free choices.We should no more condemn the embezzler than we should reward the firefighter who risks his life, since they are each merely products of environments that are ultimately responsible for their behavior. Psychological forces l believe that people are governed by psychological ores, many of them unconscious, that cause them to think, feel, and act in certain ways. Based on this point of view, the actions described previously are the direct result of deep psychological impulses that have been formed by peoples soonest relationships and experiences.Although these people may think they are choosing to do the things, in reality, they are puppets manipulated by unseen psychological strings. The same is true for you. So when the coach sexually abused the children on his teams, he was not actually choosing this barbarous course of action, he was impelled by psychological forces over which he had no control. Similarly, your behavior results from psychological motivations, often repressed, that form the basic expression of your personality. Your feelings of freedom are illusory.Social dynamics l believe that we are sociable creatures that are greatly influenced by the people around us. From this perspective, peoples behavior results in large measure from the forces exerted by those around them. The need to conform to the prepond erant norms, to be accepted by the groups to which you belong, to please those who are close to you, to copy those in sections of authority-?these and other social needs determine your behavior and define who you are as an individual. For example, the violent actions of the initially peaceful demonstrators can be understood only by examining the dynamics of social interaction.Since the group as a whole is to blame, responsibility is removed from the individuals. In the same way, individuals who act illegally (or immorally) within an organization often seek to be light on the grounds that they were merely acting as cogs in the machine, not independent agents. An extreme version of this occurred after World War II at the Murderer trials when many people accused of wartime atrocities explained that they were only following orders. Thinking Activity 12. 1 Your Theory of Human Behavior Think about some of the actions described at the beginning of this section.How would you explain why those people acted in the ways that they did? Which of the above theories make the most sense to you? Do you have your own theory to explain why people behave the way they do? Creating Yourself Through Free Choices If we examine all of these beliefs regarding the nature of human beings, we can see that they have several epochal things in common These beliefs represent attempts to explain human behavior in terms of factors that precede the action a universal human nature, onetime(prenominal) experiences, psychological forces, and social dynamics.In other words, all of these beliefs assume that the essence of a person, as defined by the factors identified previously, comes before the human actions and in fact causes these actions to take place. As a result, all of these beliefs about the human self have the solvent of removing responsibility from the individual for his actions. If what you did was the direct result of human nature, past experiences, psychological forces, or social dynamics, then you cannot be held accountable. You didnt have a choice, your behavior was outside of your control.As a final consequence, these beliefs about the self limit future possibilities. If your thoughts, feelings, and actions are caused by forces beyond your control, then you do not have it in your power to change, to alter direction, to improve-?any more than a puppet can decide to act respectively and contrary to the wishes of the puppeteer. From a framework rooted in human freedom, these tralatitious perspectives regarding the nature of people can be endangermentous and destructive. One of the most passionate and articulate modern exponents of individual freedom was Jean-Paul Sartre.His position is extreme-?you are completely free. You create yourself entirely through the free choices that you make every day of your life. Though you may try to pretend otherwise, the reality is that you are the originator of your actions, the master of your fate and the captain of you r soul, for better or for worse. You may choose to surrender control of your life to other individuals or organizations, but this is ultimately a free choice that you make and for which you are completely responsible. Lets revisit the examples identified previously and analyze them from this perspective.Free choice l believe that people are free to choose their courses of action, and that they should be held responsible for the choices they make. The person who committed the armed robbery and murdered the guard freely chose to drop off money and he is completely responsible. He was not compelled to act in this fashion he could have chosen not to. The person who embezzled money from the charitable organization which he headed freely chose to betray his trust position out of greed and should be held fully accountable.The heroic firefighter freely chose to overcome his natural veneration of death and risk his life to save someone elses, and he should be awarded full credit for his heroism. The child abuser freely chose to surrender to his destructive sexual impulses, and he deserves to be condemned and fully punished. The infant-murdering teenagers freely chose to deal with their fear of having an unwanted child by killing it and trying to hide the body (despite having many other alternatives uncommitted), and they should be held fully responsible for their choice.The philanthropic senior citizen freely chose to neonate her money to improve educational opportunities for underprivileged young people rather than expending the money on herself, and she deserves to be praised for her altruism. Each of these people had other alternatives useable to them, and they could have made different choices-?but they didnt. Therefore, they must be held responsible for the choices that they did make. But surely, you might be thinking, I cant be held completely responsible for my life. After all, there are many factors outside of my control, people and forces that do create obstacles and undermine my efforts.And we are subject o pressures and influences from within ourselves feelings of greed, fear of death, altruistic impulses, sexual compulsions, need for social acceptance, and so on. Still, it is up to us to freely choose which impulses, motivations, fears, and desires we want to act in accordance with. In other words, it is up to you, your self. You make the ultimate choice regarding who you want to become and the direction of your life. When you come out in the mirror, the person that you see reflected is the person you have created.If you are pleased with who you are and the state of your life, then you have every right to feel proud. On the other hand, if you are dissatisfied with the person you have become and disappointed with the course of your life, then you have to look no further than yourself to determine who is responsible. You must have the courage to accept full responsibility for your situation, but it is within your power to change , to improve yourself and your life through the free choices that you are able to make. Sartre characterizes humans as the one living creature whose existence precedes its essence. In other words, you create your essence (your self, soul, personality) through the free choices that you make in your daily existence. He explains man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-?and defines himself afterwards. Man simply is-?he is what he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. This is exactly what distinguishes human consciousness from the rest of the animal kingdom when confronted with a decision situation, we are able to think about the options available to us and then make a free choice based on our evaluation.And that makes us responsible for our actions, as Sartre explains If existence is prior to essence, then man is responsible for what he is, it puts very person in bullheadedness of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely on his shoulders. In todays culture, personal freedom and responsibility are in danger of extinction, threatened by an array of psychological, sociological, and genetic explanations that have the cumulative effect of robbing people of their autonomy and dignity.It is refreshing and enlightening to view people through the lens of personal freedom, awarding them the power to make free choices for which they are responsible, rather than viewing them as victims Of resistance with little control over their destinies. George Bernard Shaw dismissed this victimized view of life when he stated, l dont believe in circumstances. Rather than blaming their circumstances, the people who get on in this world create their own. Because You Are Free .This discussion of freedom may take care abstract and theoretical to you, and you might be asking yourself What difference do my beliefs about personal freedom make in my life? The trueness is that along with your beliefs about morality and religion, there is perhaps no other belief that has a greater impact on your life. Here are a few examples. Self-improvement If you are a person who is everlastingly striving to improve yourself and the quality of your life, then it is essential that you possess the freedom to make different choices from those you have previously made. Personal freedom is the lifeblood of human change.By using your critical- thinking abilities, you can identify appropriate goals and intelligent alternatives by exercising your freedom, you can choose the goals and alternatives that best meet your needs and fulfill your ideals. On the other hand, an exclusive belief in one of the non-freedom theories (human nature, environmental determinism, etc. Undermines and even eliminates the possibility of changing yourself. The die has been cast, and whatever the future has in store for you, you cannot influence it in any meaningful way. morals Moral ity deals with the way we relate to people around us.Societies have developed moral ideals and prohibitions to help their citizens live together in a harmonious and productive fashion. As a result, most societies consider things like murder, robbery, cheating, stealing, and raping to be wrong, and they have enacted laws and punishments to discourage antisocial behavior. On the other hand, most societies consider things like impassion, altruism, sharing in communal responsibilities, and working for the good of everyone as well as yourself to be right, and this sort of behavior is encouraged through teaching, exhortation, and example.