I’ll never forget the old guy who asked me, at an APA interview: “suppose I wanted to slap you, and suppose I wanted to slap you because I thought you were giving us really bad answers, and I mistakenly believed that by slapping you I’ll bring out the best in you. Am I blameworthy?”.
When he said “suppose I wanted to slap you”, his butt actually left his chair for a moment and his hand was mimicking a slap in the air.
Since that event – which happened back when I was a frightened youngster with all the social skills of a large rock – I have thought many times about the connection between philosophy and rudeness – especially the connection between philosophical debating and rudeness. It seems to me that the connection between philosophical argument and rudeness is similar to the connection between fighting a war and immorality. Surprisingly precise analogies can be drawn between the soldier in a just war and the philosophical arguer in pursuit of the truth. Let me explain.
A soldier who is fighting, even for a just cause, is in a precarious situation, with regard to morality, because he has lost, of necessity, the basic moral inhibition against killing people.
A philosopher who is arguing with another, even in pursuit of truth, is in a precarious situation with regard to politeness, because she has lost, of necessity, the basic civil inhibition against correcting people.
Having lost, of necessity, the inhibition against killing people, some soldiers find themselves shedding other moral inhibitions – and committing war crimes.
Having lost, of necessity, the inhibition against correcting people, some philosophers find themselves shedding other social inhibitions – and being terribly, terribly rude.
That’s just the nature of inhibition loss.
I do not wish to be a philosophical pacifist. I think arguing – including, naturally, correcting and being corrected – is something for which there is no substitute in philosophy. I remember it whenever a beginner graduate student asks me how to anticipate objections or simply how to “see” the arguments for the other side of one’s view, which, as per Mill, is important if we want to understand our own view at all. I tell her that we humans are pretty bad at imagining what having the opposite view would be like (more on the badness of our imagination some other time), and thus there is no substitute for talking to someone who disagrees with you and who can “pressure” you hard to come up with answers to her arguments. Someone who pretends to disagree is not enough, as the same lack of imagination makes us bad at the pretending. You need the real thing. Argue for the opposite view if you wish – and see how much your writing, even as you do so, even as you do so casually, is guided and improved by imagining an interlocutor who deeply disagrees. For real philosophical writing, as opposed to a post like this one, nothing short of talking to a real disagreeing interlocutor will do (note: I am not going to argue from the ambiguity of the words “argument” and “disagreement” because I’m not monolingual).
http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2016/04/is-polite-philosophical-discussion-possible.html
posted by f.sheikh