07 Feb The Art of Always Being Right (A.C. GRAYLING)
In an ideal world discussion and debate would be aimed at truth, or at least agreement. In such a world the desire of every well-intentioned person would be to identify worthwhile goals and the best means of attaining them; and they would strive to solve problems by co-operation, and to overcome disagreements and conflicts.
But the real world is anything but ideal, and in it people strive not to reach truth, but to win arguments; nor do they seek what is best for everyone, but only what is best for themselves. For the great majority of people self-interest is a more powerful motivator than altruism, and as a result they grab any means to get their noses ahead in the competition of life.
So insistent is the human desire to win that almost as soon as the philosophers of classical Greece began to undertake serious enquiry into the nature of things, so also began the art of rhetoric, which is the technique of winning arguments independently of truth or merit.
Nothing has since changed. In Parliament and the press, our adversarial system of challenge and accusation, defence and counter-attack, requires that anyone engaged in public life has to be fully equipped with the skills of rhetoric. To admit a political charge or a tabloid smear story is unthinkable; every tool of casuistry has to be brought into play to defend oneself—wriggling out of a tough corner, evading questions, answering with plausible vagueness, deflecting, twisting and dodging, and trying to sound honest while being the opposite. Such is the stuff of discourse in much political and public life, which as a result is too often not an arena of debate but of debasement
The people who invented the dubious art of argument-winning even if it means ‘making the worse case seem the better’ were the Sophists of ancient Greece, despised by Socrates and his equally famous pupil Plato because they cared nothing for truth, and (even worse, in Socrates’ view) charged fees to teach their tricks.
The Sophists were never short of clients, because success in their ancient city states depended on oratorical skills. Every adult male was a member of the governing body, and each had to undertake his own legal cases when need arose. A class of script-writers arose who, for a fee, would provide speeches for any occasion; but that did not reduce the premium on rhetoric, which rapidly came to be organised as a science by its first teachers.
Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the great philosophers of the nineteenth century, recognised all the tricks and dishonesties of rhetoric at work in his own way because he had a profound scholarly grasp of rhetoric’s classical tradition. He saw it at work in the specious arguments of politicians and pretenders of all kinds, and in response wrote his acidulous ‘Art of Always Being Right’.
This startling little tract presents itself as an instruction booklet on how to beat any adversary in debate. ‘Controversial dialectic,’ Schopenhauer wrote, deliberately suppressing any tincture of irony, ‘is the art of disputing, and of disputing in such a way as to hold one’s own, whether one is right or wrong.’ And as if to make his readers doubly sure that he meant this in deadly earnest, he added, ‘in debating we must put objective truth aside, or rather, we must regard it as an accidental circumstance, and look only to the defence of our own position and the refutation of our opponent’s.’
Of course Schopenhauer’s real intention was to alert his readers to the tricks that others—from politicians to partisan newspapers, from advertisers to sellers of various forms of snake-oil—are only too keen to use. Under the guise of teaching ‘chicanery’ (his own later word for rhetoric), he effectively taught how to recognise it and therefore defend against it. And his incisive little book remains a valuable tool to this end today.
The debating tricks Schopenhauer describes are various. Make your opponent angry, attack him rather than his argument; ask him so many different questions that you confuse him; when he denies a proposition, put it in its converse form so that he affirms it; use subtle distinctions and arcane definitions to obscure the issue; make your opponent agree to a number of true propositions and then insert among them the proposition you wish him to accept; quickly distract your opponent from any line of argument that you can see will defeat you, by introducing alternative lines of thought—and so on and on, for dozens of sly tricks aimed at winning the argument no matter what.
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 honourable, we should in every debate have no other aim than the discovery of truth. We should not in the least care whether the truth proves to be in favour of the opinion which we had begun by expressing, or of the opinion of our adversary. That we should regard as a matter of no importance, or, at any rate, of very secondary consequence.
But, as things are, it is the main concern. Our innate vanity, which is particularly sensitive in reference to our intellectual powers, will not allow that our first position was wrong and our adversary’s right.
The way out of this difficulty would be simply to take the trouble always to form a correct judgement.
For this a man would have to think before he spoke. But, with most men, innate vanity is accompanied by loquacity and innate dishonesty. They speak before they think; and even though they may afterwards perceive that they are wrong they want it to seem the contrary. The interest in truth, which may be presumed to have been their only motive when they stated the proposition alleged to be true, now gives way to the interests of vanity.
At any rate, the temptation to do so is very great. The weakness of our intellect and the perversity of our will lend each other mutual support. Generally, a disputant fights not for truth, but for his proposition, as though it were a battle on life and death. He sets to work whether right or wrong.
Actually, as we have seen, he cannot easily do otherwise. As a rule, then, every man will insist on maintaining whatever he has said, even though for the moment he may consider it false or doubtful.( Machiavelli advises his Prince to make use of every moment that his neighbour is weak to attack him; otherwise his neighbour may do the same).
The Art of Always Being Right
A. C. Grayling
