Ideas in tension

The essayist Joseph Joubert wrote, "It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it." Sometimes the wisdom is in the debate itself, or at least in the perception of two or more alternatives. "A wise man of our own time," wrote Gilbert Highet, "was once asked what was the single greatest contribution of Greece to the world's welfare. He replied 'The greatest invention of the Greeks was men and de. For men means 'on the one hand,' and de means 'on the other hand.' Without these two balances, we cannot think."

However – or, to borrow a phrase, on the other hand – Lee Siegel warned that if we always silo ideas that are in tension and focus on the resulting dichotomies, we will never be able to make connections, find common ground, and help each other move forward. He wrote:

"Now just about every political debate comes down to one phrase: economic policy.

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What we never hear about in the popular media – where intellectual discussion once took place – is debate over fundamental meanings, or essential definitions, or connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena. Those are the elements of an idea, which is the challenge consciousness makes to concrete reality. When Archimedes said, 'Give me a lever that is long enough, and I will move the world,' he was talking about how you can think your way into a new actuality.

Instead of ideas, we have 'issues,' which are the way the world tricks consciousness into believing that things never really change. Because an issue has two sides to it, both sides will still be there whichever one prevails. The 'issue' – consider abortion – never goes away. But an idea – e.g. the issue of abortion is more fundamentally about the social limits of sexual pleasure, not merely about reproductive rights – leaps beyond the two sides of an issue into the essential condition from which they spring. It makes you stop to think, instead of provoking you to start to argue. An issue is the place where ideas run out of steam.

As a result of our yapping, endlessly banal, issue-dominated culture, the intellectuals, who work with ideas the way a Realtor works with property, are out of work."

Matthew E. May presented this insight: "When U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said generations ago that ‘I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity,’ he meant that to find elegance, you must appreciate, embrace, and then travel beyond complexity." The judge's comment favors the assumption that there is a problem to be solved. He says that a simple solution is better than a complex solution, but it would be even worse to arrive at no conclusion at all.

On the third hand, analytic philosophical inquiry itself – whether it is content to remain in a perpetually unsatisfied debate or whether it progresses toward a conclusion – may not be the best way to find truth. Robert M. Pirsig wrote:

Once it's stated that "the dialectic comes before anything else," this statement itself becomes a dialectical entity, subject to dialectical question.

Phaedrus would have asked, What evidence do we have that the dialectical question-and-answer method of arriving at truth comes before anything else? We have none whatsoever. And when the statement is isolated and itself subject to scrutiny it becomes patently ridiculous. Here is this dialectic, like Newton's law of gravity, just sitting by itself in the middle of nowhere, giving birth to the universe, hey? It's asinine.

Sources

Joseph Joubert, quoted in the Montreal Gazette. The Week, April 4, 2014, p. 15.

Gilbert Highet. Man's Unconquerable Mind. New York: Columbia University Press, 1954. p 19-20.

"The Intellectual Crash of 2009." Lee Siegel. TheDailyBeast.com. March 25, 2009.

Matthew E. May, In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing. New York: Broadway Books, 2009. p. 25.

Robert M. Pirsig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (1974) New York: Bantam, 1975. p. 385.

The wisdom of your enemies

"Remember the good things that you hear, and do not consider who says them," counseled Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. The source of an apparent pearl of wisdom is often irrelevant. Yeats highlighted our universal connection: "If what I say resonates with you, it's merely because we are both branches on the same tree."

Those who appear to be "enemies" may be better understood as social critics who have important feedback to give us. Jeff Schmidt wrote:

"Professionals generally avoid the risk inherent in real critical thinking and cannot properly be called critical thinkers. They are simply ideologically disciplined thinkers. Real critical thinking means uncovering and questioning social, political and moral assumptions; applying and refining a personally developed worldview; and calling for action that advances a personally created agenda. An approach that backs away from any of these three components lacks the critical spirit."

Nikki Stern noted the tendency to ostracize even those allies who attempt to understand the true enemy:

"[William] Bennett [in his 2002 book Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism] focused on [Ward] Churchill's statement [describing World Trade Center workers as "little Eichmanns"] in order to launch an attack against 'terrorist sympathizers.' The group included those who were trying to understand the underlying ideology that motivates terrorism."

Rollo May pointed out that brave, nonconformist thinking is often an especially effective deliverer of wisdom. "The authentic rebel knows," he wrote, "that the silencing of his adversaries is the last thing on earth he wishes: their extermination would deprive him and whoever else remains alive from the uniqueness, the originality, and the capacity for insight that these enemies – being human – also have and could share with him. ... We would lose not only our enemies' good ideas, but the restraints they give us as well." Consider that we sometimes inflate the value of what our friends say, and are inclined to discount what our enemies say; so, if our enemies seem to be telling us something true and good, that counterintuitive situation is an indicator of the rightness of what they are saying.

The musician Jascha Heifetz said: “No matter what side of an argument you're on, you always find some people on your side that you wish were on the other side.” To understand this, one might refer to a phrase circulated on the Internet in 2015: "You're not wrong, you're just an asshole," to which someone coined the fake German word Waltersobchakeit, based on the character Walter Sobchak from the movie "The Big Lebowski." To paraphrase it one more time, the tone in which a statement is delivered can make a true or moral statement seem unpalatable, or, vice versa, a false or immoral statement seem appealing. It is important to cultivate a proper tone. Alfred North Whitehead said, "It is a disease of philosophy when it is neither bold nor humble, but merely a reflection of the temperamental presuppositions of exceptional personalities."

To add yet another dimension: One's history of perceiving a person as generally saying things that are good (or bad) may serve as a reason to forgive (or to refuse to forgive) a one-time deviation from their norm. There is no known word for this.

Sources

Thomas Aquinas, quoted by Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex, New York: Harper and Row, 1968. p 15.

William Butler Yeats

Jeff Schmidt. Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) Kindle Edition.

Nikki Stern. Because I Say So: The Dangerous Appeal of Moral Authority. Bascom Hill Books, 2010. p. 47.

Rollo May, Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1972. p 237.

Jascha Heifetz, quoted in the Associated Press. Quoted in The Week. Aug. 9, 2013. p. 15.

Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality. (Originally 1929.) Part 1, Chap. 1, Sect. 6. New York: Harper, 1960. p 24.