Recapitulating our Philosophical Happy Hour on the history, nature, meaning, and importance of dialectic.
A few key insights derived from our Happy Hour:
First, outside rare situations, Aristotelian dialectic has become almost impossible in the US (and many other countries as well). This near-impossibility has rendered many persons not only unfamiliar with the practice, but also uncomfortable with its encounter—even when there is no hostility intended. What has caused this state of affairs? Simply answered, as to the immediate cause: we lack meaningful common opinions, or, what has the same result in practice, are disinclined to communicate those beliefs which might allow us to discover such meaningful commonalities.
Second, the remote causes of this condition are many and complex. They include mass media, geographical and social mobility, a pre-existent acceptance of radical individualism, and—more recently—a fear of being “cancelled” because of our opinions’ irreconcilability to the supposedly common opinion. These causes have produced a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, we have a greater cultural homogenization of common and popular knowledge than at any point in history. On the other hand, that knowledge is of less weight than any commonly held before. Everyone knows Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, that there are military conflicts involving Ukraine and Russia, Iran and Israel, perhaps that the New York Knicks won the NBA Championship: but for most Americans, the direct ramifications of these events and individuals are, on a personal level, nil.
Third, this extensive common knowledge-about-nothing shows how deeply our society has fallen under the sway of a “rhetorical” mode of communication. Put otherwise, the “common” consists only in what has been communicated through mass media. Only those positions espoused to the many can be discussed in a public forum. An important aside not discussed in the Happy Hour but relevant: this “rhetorical” domination remains true even under the conditions of algorithmically “loosened” social media. Content filtration algorithms which favor some narratives and disfavor others, for instance (as experienced in various election cycles or concerning medical information, e.g., with COVID-19), exhibited a top-down control of what was shown to be “common”. Such an apparatus was long in place with centralized media control of television. But even in the “loosened” algorithms of present-day X.com, as the prime example, “powerful” accounts are still able to control the narratives by the recommendation-algorithms’ favorable weighting of certain metrics at which they inevitably excel.
Fourth, this “rhetorical” mode seems to be “rhetoric” only in a defective sense of that term. This “seeming” touches on a distinction between Aristotle’s treatment of rhetoric and that found in the Roman tradition, exemplified by Cicero and Quintilian. For the latter thinkers, “rhetoric” names an intellectual practice inseparable from moral virtue. The rhetorician, to perfect and thus truly possess his art, must be virtuous. Aristotle is more ambiguous: the skills of rhetoric may be put to virtuous or vicious ends. I believe both are correct, but in want of a distinction. The skills, put to a vicious end, turn those efforts into what today we call “propaganda”—an effort to persuade without relating the operations of reason to truth. Ours is a propagandized society: opinions tends toward the reflection of what popular figures say. There may be more diversity among those popular figures—but as exercising a propagandistic modality of communication, there is not a dialectical effort to discover what is true. A clear sign of this: the unwillingness to discuss or debate the first principles upon which the rest of their arguments depend.
Fifth, this effort to discover what is true, or what seems most reasonably to be closest to the truth, is what characterizes true dialectic. Oftentimes, dialectic takes on a “pugilistic” form: it may become a kind of combat, carried out in words, as opposed opinions are pitted against one another, with arguments being proposed and rejected, distinguished, attacked, and so on. But just like sparring is undertaken to improve the abilities of each combatant, so too dialectical disputation leads each towards the refinement and strengthening of opinion.
Sixth, consistency and trust are essential to advancing in the long and difficult trajectory required by many dialectical endeavors. The absence of interpersonal consistency—fostered not only by our geographical and social uprootedness but especially by the digital medium of the internet, where joining and leaving most communities is frictionless—makes it impossible for one person to dialectically move another out of a deeply held opinion or into one strongly resisted. Moreover, we cannot have trust in any medium where we do not live with and share in life with the other person.
Relatedly (let us call this “6a”, as it were), in many environments where there are contrary opinions of merit, a third essential element appears: namely, authority. Political and ethical quandaries, were consensus the only means to action, would more often than not end in compromise. This does not mean authority ought to override the dialectic; it needs truly to hear what is said, even if it consistently chooses one opinion over another, or none of those that were offered at all. This authority, too, to earn trust, must be consistent in its dealings with dialectical partners.
Seventh, and finally, the retrieval of dialectic requires a re-training in our habits. That is, more than any absence of common opinions, or the confidence to express them, we suffer an absence of common habits, a common willingness to hear the opinions of others, to have our own challenged, to refine our beliefs in light of what others might say. As with so much else wrong in our world, today, we have lost the matter of dialectic—and thus the art by which it is refined—because we lack humility. Until we recognize that truth is not a possession but a light, we will continue to stumble in the darkness.
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