Against Persuasion
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Highlights
- Knowing takes radical collaboration: an openness to being persuaded as much as an eagerness to persuade.
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Philosophers arenât the only ones who love wisdom. Everyone, philosopher or not, loves her own wisdom: the wisdom she has or takes herself to have. What distinguishes the philosopher is loving the wisdom she doesnât have. Philosophy is, therefore, a form of humility: being aware that you lack what is of supreme importance.
- Socrates did not write philosophy; he simply went around talking to people.
- So I withdrew and thought to myself: âI am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.â
- Socrates seemed to think that the people around him could help him acquire the knowledge he so desperately wantedâeven though they were handicapped by the illusion that they already knew it.
- but his knowledge of his own ignorance has been improved, made more precise.
- He sought to map the terrain of his ignorance, to plot its mountains and its rivers, to learn to navigate it.
- Most people steer conversations into areas where they have expertise; they struggle to admit error; they have a background confidence that they have a firm grip on the basics. They are happy to think of other peopleâpeople who have different political or religious views, or got a different kind of education, or live in a different part of the worldâas ignorant and clueless. They are eager to claim the status of knowledge for everything they themselves think.
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More and more our politics are marked by unilateral persuasion instead of collaborative inquiry. If, like Socrates, you view knowledge as an essentially collaborative project, you donât go into a conversation expecting to persuade any more than you expect to be persuaded. By contrast, if you do assume you know, you embrace the role of persuader in advance, and stand ready to argue people into agreement. If argument fails, you might tolerate a state of disagreementâbut if the matter is serious enough, youâll resort to enforcing your view through incentives or punishments.
- His politics of humility involved genuinely opening up the question under dispute, in such a way that neither party would be permitted to close it, to settle on an answer, unless the other answered the same. By contrast, our politicsâof persuasion, tolerance, incentives, and punishmentâis deeply uninquisitive.