Morris on Schopenhauer on Winning Arguments
Errol Morris, the film maker who made one of my all-time, top-ten favorite films ("The Thin Blue Line"), writes a blog ("Zoom") for the New York Times. Recently he wrote a multi-part essay on lying ("Seven Lies about Lying"). In a post-essay essay ("More Lying") he discusses some ideas about truth and lies with his readers.
Towards the end of that conversation, Morris comments on some excerpts from Schopenhauer, remarks that I found worth making a note of here. I hope I can be forgiven for quoting at more length than is my habit.
In 1831, Arthur Schopenhauer published “The Art of Controversy” ["Die Kunst, Recht zu Behalten"], also translated as “The Art of Being Right”. Schopenhauer at the outset wryly comments, “A man may be objectively in the right, and nevertheless in the eyes of bystanders, and sometimes in his own, he may come off worst… If the reader asks how this is, I reply that it is simply the natural baseness of human nature. If human nature were not base, but thoroughly honorable, we should in every debate have no other aim than the discovery of truth…”
Schopenhauer’s premise was a simple one. There are two ways to win an argument. There is logic and there is dialectic. Since no one ever wins an argument with logic, he moves on quickly to dialectic — to 38 nasty ways to win an argument any way you can. Most (if not all of them) involve tergiversation, deception, chicanery, manipulation, insincerity, hyperbole, out-right lying and probably a number of other similarly descriptive concepts that I can’t think of offhand. Here’s a sample:
#14: Claim victory despite defeat. “When your opponent has answered several of your questions without the answers turning out favorable to the conclusion at which you are aiming, advance the desired conclusion, although it does not in the least follow, as though it had been proved, and proclaim it in a tone of triumph.” [Here’s how I would describe it. After you have been made to look utterly ridiculous, look your opponent directly in the eye and say, “I’m glad you have come around to my way of thinking.”]
#21: Meet him with a counter-argument as bad as his. “When your opponent uses a merely superficial or sophistical argument and you see through it, you can refute it by setting forth its captious and superficial character; but it is better to meet him with a counter-argument which is just as superficial and sophistical, and so dispose of him; for it is with victory that you are concerned, and not with truth.”
#36. Bewilder your opponent with mere bombast. “You may also puzzle and bewilder your opponent by mere bombast; and the trick is possible, because a man generally supposes that there must be some meaning in words…”
And my favorite:
#38. The Ultimate Strategem. “A last trick is to become personal, insulting, rude, as soon as you perceive that your opponent has the upper hand, and that you are going to come off worst. It consists in passing from the subject of dispute, as from a lost game, to the disputant himself, and in some way attacking his person.”
Schopenhauer reminds us that people (at best) lie all the time. Ask yourself if Schopenhauer’s strategies remind you of the healthcare debate. There is no evidence for a sinister big-government scheme to euthanize the grannies of America. But those convinced otherwise are certainly not going to be won over with logic. As Barney Frank suggests, we would do better to pass Health Care legislation and to stop arguing with the furniture.
[Errol Morris, "More Lying", Zoom / New York Times, 25 August 2009.]
In: All, Plus Ca Change..., The Art of Conversation