I recently met a real-life Marxist. Though I had long been convinced that none really existed, I felt obligated to assent to the reality of this one, and we had a conversation — a good one. We spoke, mostly, about the relationship between politics and philosophy, and as it came to an end, I said, jokingly, “It was great to meet a real Marxist.” He responded, “I don’t think I’ll ever hear that again, but I really enjoyed talking to you.” Since this encounter, I’ve thought often about the nature of discourse. How ought we to engage with other viewpoints? What sort of attitude towards other thinkers ought we to cultivate?
Fortunately, last week’s op-ed presented me with two helpful illustrations, one from Josiah Lippincott and the other from Ian Andrews. First, Lippincott described non-Hillsdale political science students: “While colleges across America churn out political science students primed to man the machinery of the modern administrative state and fully indoctrinated in the dogmas of the liberal holy trinity of race, class, and gender, Hillsdale stands apart.” I agree that Hillsdale is an incredible college that does indeed stand apart, but this is an arrogant caricature of the students of other institutions. It is just this attitude that prevents genuine engagement with other ideas; it is this that obscures truth with vitriol. But enough about Lippincott.
When one adopts an attitude of derision towards other thinkers, the point of engaging in discussion is twofold: To defend one’s own position and to destroy the other’s. To prepare for verbal combat, we assemble our evidence and analyze our premises. We delineate the steps of our reasoning, checking carefully for fallacies and preparing to smooth over any (inevitable) assumptions. Safe within this impenetrable fortress of argumentation, we begin to dismantle the argument of the other. We criticize false premises, latch onto any hint of a fallacy, and generally eviscerate the argument before it has the chance to, perhaps, breathe a deeper meaning into the structure of the world.
Conceiving of discourse in this way undermines its legitimate co-operative purpose — truth-seeking — in two distinct ways. First, combative debate fails to convince. Minds are not won by cold logic and dry rationality. Proving someone wrong rarely ingratiates him to the cause, and he is more likely to dig in his heels than to convert. Second, when one takes a stand purely in opposition to another’s viewpoint, one’s own views tend to lose their vitality. Ideas and arguments cease to be robust, supple ways of explaining and understanding the world. Instead, they ossify into cop-out explanations of complex issues, groundless talking points, and ideology.
In contrast, Andrews’ most recent op-ed illuminates how we ought to engage with other thinkers. Speaking of the fresh attitude towards his own education that he developed late in his collegiate career, he says, “I felt drawn into a level of contemplation that begged me to look at the world and be dazzled by it….Every moment became a discovery, and every conversation an education.”
According to Andrews, we cannot filter the world through our own image. Truth is there for us if we go out of ourselves to meet it. True education, then, is essentially ecstatic — a going out of oneself. Discourse with others ought to be characterized by an analogous virtue — empathy. When we seek truth together, we must go out of ourselves to meet the other. We must be willing to see the world from his viewpoint and to allow him to explain it in his own terms.
If we would habituate ourselves to this particular attitude of empathy, our thought would become adept at understanding arguments precisely because it would be capable of weighing them from various perspectives. To perhaps give a helpful analogy, consider the way the child determines what a thing is. He does not only stare at it directly. He picks it up and turns it over, holds it, drops it, etc. In the same way, to understand an argument one must turn it over and examine it from other perspectives, not simply stare more intensively.
From this understanding ought to lead confidence and humility as we become more cognizant of the truth of our own understanding, and as we recognize that we are fortunate to participate in it. Only then will we be capable of convincing others of our own ideas.
