Against Argument

For years when I taught freshman composition, I centered the class around argument, the form of writing that I took to be at the heart of academic discourse and intellectual life generally. I assigned my students arguments to read. During class discussions, we tried to understand how these arguments worked and didn’t work, we produced counterarguments, then we produced counterarguments to our counterarguments and so on.

In this way, I was confident that we could develop the kind of mental agility required to see an issue from multiple perspectives and learn how to put ourselves into the mindset of a person who sincerely holds any given position. If I had a moral agenda, it wasn’t often that I admitted it. Instead, I stuck to the terms with which I was comfortable, attempting to explain that such a practice was both rhetorically effective and intellectually admirable. It was rhetorically effective because if we can pre-empt our interlocutor’s criticism, we can lessen its thrust. It was intellectually admirable because it is only by subjecting our views to serious criticism that we find reason to change them such that they are, to our minds, the most defensible views on offer, which, after all, is the point of intellectual life—to pursue the truth.

Argument, then, becomes a kind of virtuous muscle, one that freshman writing serves to exercise through repetition. Approached that way, the subject of an argument is incidental to the formal moves by which the argument proceeds. It didn’t matter in my classes if we were arguing about current events or social policy or historical interpretation as long as we were applying our critical method and practicing the skills of effective argumentation. Amid every argument, I asked, “Are we persuaded? If not, why not?” And from there the argument continued. There was always more to say, another perspective to consider. If in theory this was a means of approaching truth, in practice we never seemed to arrive.

Maybe from the standpoint of the classroom, it’s no problem not to achieve consensus. But thinking of the individuals in the room and the number who came away from our discussions embracing various versions of epistemological relativism, I began to wonder if I were engaged in a Socratic process that succeeded in undercutting my students’ intellectual assumptions but left them adrift in the seas of claim and counterclaim. They got better at taking different perspectives and arguing disinterestedly from various sides on a given issue, but were they losing sight of their own perspectives, of which positions they actually held?

Maybe this is a disorienting but necessary phase in intellectual growth during which we must strip down before building back up. But were we building back up? Wouldn’t any attempt to build be immediately subjected to the forces of critical examination that would prevent any genuine growth? Wasn’t our entire discourse at risk of being ironized into cynicism? Weren’t we, in short, well on our way down the road to sophism—or law school?

Everything’s an Argument

A few years back, the book Everything’s an Argument was passed around my department. In it, Andrea A. Lunsford and John J. Ruszkiewicz take the familiar line that every utterance is to some degree rhetorical in the sense that it aims at having some effect on its audience. Call that aim a form of argument (usually informal), and there you have it. But if we understand argument so broadly that everything is an argument, suddenly nothing is an argument. To say that “Hi, how’s it going?” is an argument “that your hello deserves a response,” as Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz propose, is to define “argument” as only a rhet/comp professor would. It is to have picked up one of Maslow’s hammers in grad school and set out in search of nails.

What’s so off-putting about this position (one attested to by no less an essayist than Meghan O’Gieblyn in her book Interior States) is not that it’s pedantic and dorky, but that it’s dehumanizing. It treats people as merely self-interested actors making “arguments” to the world in our continuing attempts to effect change for the sake of our personal benefit. But what human, full of feeling, would allow themselves to be so flagrantly reduced? If we were actually to reach this point, we writing teachers might just as well give up the ghost and walk across campus to beg admittance to the economics department.

At its basis, every genuine argument makes the same point: “My way of thinking about things is superior to your way of thinking about things.” But don’t we have more interesting things to say than “I’m right and you’re wrong”? Don’t we want to?

Maybe anyone who believes that everything is an argument deserves to. Maybe, as far as they are concerned, everything is. And maybe those of us who think language is capable of something more are also right. Everything, in other words, can be an argument. But it doesn’t have to be. And the question is which world you’d rather live in.

The Writing Life

To think of all those classroom hours arguing for the importance of argument, each one followed by a return to my desk, where argument was largely incidental to my writing life, is to think of myself as I thought of so many of my teachers: adults whose careers depended on their not admitting to themselves that much of what they said was bullshit. From the comfort of my desk, what I knew myself to be engaging with was inquiry, was practice, was the honorable and mysterious pursuit of art. Sometimes I did engage in argument, but afterward I always felt like I needed a shower.

Allow me an example: On the issue of mountain lion conservation, I am a rank partisan. When our state governor pays someone to tree a cougar for him so that he may mosey along at his convenience and shoot it point-blank, you can count on me to write a letter to the editor attempting to get my fellow Montanans to see him as a selfish and entitled individual. But I’d be lying if I said saving mountain lions was my only motivation to write such letters. There’s also my wanting to demonstrate my moral and intellectual superiority. Look at me, I’m always saying. Not bad, eh.

While I stand by the righteousness of my views, I’m deeply aware that operating in this mode does not bring out the best in me. It’s a needy and power-hungry side of myself that seeks victory. To that end, I will seek out information and arguments that support the position I am already committed to. I write to win.

Even writing about writing in this mode makes me want to distance myself from my aggression and work toward something gentler in myself. My yoga teacher, Sara Clary, says that yoga is a conversation. The poses ask questions that the body answers. Such a conversation, I recognize, cannot be rushed. And neither can such a conversation be concluded. The conversation of yoga, like all good conversations, is ongoing.

That is the way writing sometimes is, too. When we engage with the process of writing as the goal of writing, we are free to explore and express through language, free to proceed by association and intuition, free to accept ourselves as we are, free to trust, free to receive, free, period. Instead of writing being a means of affecting change in the world, a means always pointed toward some future end, it can be experienced as something like an end in itself. Approached that way, writing may lead us to some final product or otherwise produce some tangible worldly result, or it may not. And either is beside the point, which is simply to write and be curious about what results.

Argument cuts in another direction. Whereas writing practice is the domain of the curious, argument is the discourse of the insecure. The persuasive writer is necessarily defensive, knowing that his position requires all the support it can muster and that it will never be enough. (Just look at me here, making this argument against argument. What will it take to convince you? What will it take to convince myself?)

Changing My Mind

Back to the classroom. The reasons to teach argument are obvious. Argument is useful. Argument is the easiest kind of writing to teach. Argument is easy to evaluate and critique.

But the reasons not to teach argument (or not to teach so much of it) are obvious, too. Argument is (too) easy. Argument as such is vacuous. Argument is a small part of what writing can be. Why limit a class unnecessarily?

Sometimes in class I will ask my students to think of the most important things they’ve changed their minds about and what made them change. I find this a beneficial exercise to conduct on myself as well. When I do, what I find is that rarely have I changed my mind about something I consider important in direct response to an argument. Even in moments when I’ve acquiesced in the face of an argument I could not effectively rebut, the defeat hasn’t really changed my mind as much as allowed me a retreat from which to determine where my argument let me down and how I can improve it for future encounters.

No one, that is, has successfully talked me into or out of my political commitments, my moral concerns, or my religious sympathies. And yet in all those arenas I have had my mind changed, and I consider these changes among the most profound factors in my self-identity.

What, then, has changed my mind? Feelings, first. The reasons my politics have shifted now and again always trail my intuitions and my sympathies. And when they shift again, the causes will be the same. In other words, no matter how astute a self-observer I can be, I will always be playing catch-up to my mysterious self. If that begs the question of intuitions and sympathies, we can go there. Relationships—whether mediated or, especially, personal—have their way with me. Other people—their sensibilities, their concerns, their humanity—rub off on me. Is this logical? Not strictly. It is, though, as far as I can tell, inescapably human.

I drop my guards when my interlocutors relate to me as a person and not as the beneficiary of some correct position they will impart to me. My mind is changed most, and most lastingly, by those who exhibit no interest in changing it.

But if such experiences change my mind more effectively than argument, what is argument for?

I won’t deny the formal beauty of a good argument. There is something intellectually and aesthetically satisfying in seeing someone proceed from sound premises to justified conclusion. Nor will I deny that it is useful in certain conscribed contexts when someone is aiming for dispassionate judgment, often with a forced choice to follow (courtrooms, certain academic spaces, voting booths). But these are narrow and purposeful applications where things can be settled to some reasonable extent. So much of life, though, remains unsettled. And there, in the unsettled, is where we live most of the time.

Against Argument?

In a liberal arts seminar I teach, where the focus is less on writing per se than on how to engage academically with diverse material in diverse disciplines, we read Ruth Grant’s “The Ethics of Talk.” In it, Grant lays out a case for the classroom as a site for dialogue rather than debate. The distinction being that “Unlike debate, a dialogue is a conversation in which different opinions are critically evaluated, distinctions are made, and argument and evidence are put forward with a view to reaching agreement on whatever comes to light as most reasonable—and with the expectation that something new and better will come to light.”

Often in the classroom, something better does come to light. When things go well, through the indomitable process of democratic engagement, whereby we speak amicably and listen generously, each of our narrow perspectives is subsumed in the discussion itself. As the teacher, I try to step back and listen less to the individuals than to the dialogue in toto. What I hear are voices unconcerned with being right (or, worse, being seen as being right) and sincere in their expressions of what they understand. Everyone plays their part, and the conversation goes on.

If this is argument—and I think it is—then it is a mode of argument I can get behind. Consider: By examining ideas in the light of reason, we guide ourselves toward clarity and compassion. We don’t aspire to convergence or persuasion but to understanding. We learn to take pleasure in the very fact of the range of opinions on offer. We let our own minds be changed as cognitive empathy pulses through our discourse.

As inspiring as this might be to humanities types like me, it is awfully far removed from the standard academic discourse, where argument is understood as a site of victory and defeat. And yet so often we insist on training students to write the very things that no one (ourselves included) would ever like to read. We should not forget when speaking of academic writing that it is nearly bad by definition, considering that academic is often used to mean “impractical,” “useless” or “inane.”

That is how it is, but not how it has to be. As a writing teacher, a middle ground is available to me that neither kowtows to argument nor dismisses it. What I have in mind is a humanistic form of argument, one that isn’t preoccupied with staving off criticism but that allows, even seeks, vulnerability on the part of its author. That is the synthesis I aspire to, the one in which the student risks thinking aloud, risks an opinion that might be contentious and that they might not hold in perpetuity. Give me writing that explores. Give me students with the courage to think one thing and then another. Give me a classroom that is a shared space of cultivation.

In fact, and along those same lines, I must admit that I came to this essay with only the vaguest sense of what I intended to write. All I really want to do is test out some ideas and see where they lead. As I have been writing this essay, I have been refining my positions all the while. Troubled by the role of argument in the writing classroom, I have been attempting to discover my attitude toward it. But I trust the writing. I trust that it will lead me to where I want to be, which at least for now is right here: on a note of uncertainty, with nothing resolved, the discussion suspended, awaiting response, ready to be continued.

It is here, in uncertainty, that I aspire to dwell, where argument is a mode of curiosity. As I approach, it is with the voices of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in my ear, proposing their enchanting alternative to the usual martial metaphors we apply to argument: “Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way.” I never imagined myself a dance teacher, but as I begin another new semester, such is the routine I will be attempting to choreograph.