The Historical Formation of the Institutional Framework of Critical Thinking: Economic, Religious, Artistic and Virtual Dimensions

Abstract

The article is devoted to the revealing of social and institutional preconditions for the emergence and development of critical thinking. An example of successful economic institutions shows that the task of criticism is not so much be a supervisor and police-officer who punishes deviations from the norm, as a mentor, inspi­ration, who is contributing to the new values, criticizing the inadequacy of the old one. Criticism is needed not only for the destruction of obsolete, inefficient, and of­ten dysfunctional forms of sociality, but even more important for reflection on new forms of sociality – namely in the mode of social constructivism. It should move away from the stereotype of the fundamental dogmatic character of the religious thought as incompatible with criticism: a study of religious history shows that the establishment of dogmas was always the result of violent and usually long religious controversy tenets born with critics and criticism needed as a means of combating its alternatives. Aesthetic criticism and art history, in our opinion, provide valuable clues to the aspect of the institutional framework of critical thinking. An art and art criticism are extremely powerful – when we take into account not Realpolitik, ie, the policy of brute force and coercion, and the scope of symbolic capital and symbolic power. Virtual social networks are a response to public demand and the search for a more varied and free from doctrinal templates mechanisms for col­lective criticism. How this answer is satisfactory and adequate – issues yet to be clarified, since the potential of the virtual dimension of the institutional framework of critical thinking has not fully outlined – neither organizational nor conceptu­ally. The concept of the ethos conveys the unreducible character of communica­tive communities life world to conceptual and semantic grounds for understanding. This ethos can be transferred only to a set of values and hierarchy of specific com­munities and communication can never acquire universal distribution, though the ethos of several communities and could provide a basis for the formation of a nar­row value, but in terms of generalized ethos of their understanding. The concept of ethos expresses the spirit of criticism that institutionalizes the social reality no less than it relies on certain institutional principles.