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argument,
quarrel, discussion, polemics
It’s
generally accepted that the argument is an exchange of diverging
or opposite views. Some attribute a heated or angry tone to this
type of dialogue - which I, in that case, would call a quarrel
rather then argument. But both terms, argument and quarrel, are
technical in nature, they say nothing about the character of an
dialogue.
From
this point of view, I found it very interesting how Michael
Foucault, in an interview in April 1983 at Berkeley, answered the
question "Why is it that you don’t engage in
polemics?" (see the excerpt on the right).
Yet,
keep always in mind what good cynic Mark Twain said about a
dialogue: "It is better to
keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to
open it and remove all doubt." |
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an
excerpt from The Foucault Reader
Paul
Rabinow, editor (2010)
I
like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to
answer them. It’s true that I don’t like to get
involved in polemics. I insist on this difference as
something essential: a whole morality is at stake, the
morality that concerns the search for the truth and the
relation to the other.
In
the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of
reciprocal elucidation, the right of each person are in
some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on
the dialogue situation. The person asking the questions is
merely exercising the right that has been him: to remain
unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more
information. to emphasize different postulates, to point
out faulty reasoning, etc. As for the person answering the
question, he too exercises a right that does not go beyond
the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse
he is tied to what he has said earlier, and by the
acceptance of dialogue he is tied to the questioning of
the other. Questions and answers depend on a game - a game
that is at once pleasant and difficult - in which each of
the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given
him by the other and by the accepted form of the dialogue.
The
polemicist, on the other hand, proceeds encased in
privileges that he possesses in advance and will never
agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights
authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a
just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner
in the search for the truth, but an adversary, an enemy
who is wrong, who is harmful and whose very existence
constitute a threat. For him, then, the game does not
consist of recognizing this person as a subject having the
right to speak, but of abolishing him, as interlocutor,
from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will
be, not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth,
but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has
been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The
polemicist relies on the legitimacy that his adversary is
by definition denied. |
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