Going Out in Style

Seeing our blog nears its finale, I find myself sentimental.  I must share, posting after Kim is my favorite.  Your questions provoke the writing mind. (-:

Particularly, this stands out: “Does believing or should-be-believing matter at all if we don’t have someone to believe with or to tell our belief to, judge our belief against, etc?”

I had not before devoted much to recognizing how large a role community plays in rhetoric.  After all, if the opinions, consensus, and camaraderie of others were irrelevant, persuasion would go job-searching.  There would be no need to convince others if creating larger networks and taskforces was unneeded.  Rhetoric therefore, is not only evidenced in every interaction and knowledge-making process, but is also the result of intrinsic drives towards shared goals and purposes.  We want to agree with each other—otherwise persuasion would cease to exist.  Argument, generally seen as representing human strife and disparity, actually evidences a desire to see the same together, to concur.  *insert head nod to Jim Corder.* 

Which sounds all good, until Perelman writes, “All intellectual activity which is placed between the necessary and the arbitrary is reasonable only to the degree that it is maintained by arguments and eventually clarified by controversies which normally do not lead to unanimity” (p. 159).  For those having difficulty untangling P’s multi-layered sentences, what he seems to say is, “We measure the reasonableness of thinking (and thus knowledge) to the extent we debate it, usually ending in disagreement anyway.”  Real hopeful guy, this Perelman.  Before unwrapping the quote, I want to call out his spectrum-ends of “necessary” and “arbitrary.”  It’s a curious binary, different from others we have thus encountered.  Rather than proposing two fundamentally opposed ways of thinking (square vs. groovy, rhetoricus vs. seriousus, etc.), Perelman presents the opposing ends of what we think.  At first, this seems viable because we can distinguish between those which are necessary thoughts (to find food, for example) and those which are arbitrary (is the dress white or blue?)  But soon the line blurs—is intellectual activity surrounding the concept of gravity arbitrary or practical?  Yes, gravity is a conception based on human observation and subjective reasoning, but it also plays out practically: “ouch, shouldn’t have tried to fly off my dresser.”  I doubt intellectual activity will ever be definable on a neat, linear, spectrum.  Nice effort though, Perelman. 

What was I going to say before my tangent?  Perelman writes that thoughts and perceptions (intellectual activity) are only as reasonable (I read that as worthy) as we keep discussing them.  Which makes sense, because the age-old conversations, the ones we keep having over and over again (existentialism vs. essentialism, role of logic, acceptable epistemologies, do souls exist, etc.) carry great weights in meaning.  If singular agreement could be easily found, it would have.  So I’m thinking “yeah dude, I hear you” until he writes that those intellectual concepts are eventually clarified through irreconcilable disagreement.

What does the inability to find agreement clarify if not that both sides are correct simultaneously?  Perhaps Perelman meant just that.  For example, that nature and nurture both determine behavior and personality.  These huge questions are clarified not by absolute disagreement, but by recognizing that the two opposing answers are likely not polar opposites, but a simultaneous, multi-dimensional, “stacked” answer.  That rational thinking and romantic thinking are two methods of understanding, both “true” in their own right.  It goes against human intuition to imagine that two objects can occupy the same space at the same time, but that’s exactly how we find clarity to complex questions—understanding how both sides can simultaneously exist in the answer slot.  If humankind, inherently desiring agreement, can stand adamantly opposed, how can it not mean that both sides contain truth? 

It's easy to throw punches at Perelman for his sentence-layering, which requires intense front-loading of information before delivering the punch line which then subsequently changes all the previous clauses.  Yet he communicates through a retrospective, reframing, method.  Call it dense, but isn’t that how knowledge works?  As we accrue understanding, it causes what came before and seemed confusing to now enter the light.  And then we know.