Perry calls this ultimate stage of development “commitment in relativism.” It is a position not unlike the one that Stanley Fish represents in “Condemnation without Absolutes.” While it remains an ideal more than a realistic possibility for most people, it is a worthwhile aspiration for teachers of argument to hold out for their students. Those who achieve commitment in relativism acknowledge the impossibility of perfect certitude balanced by their need to act on imperfect knowledge. They are at once strongly committed to their principles and aware that no set of principles is infallible or incorrigible. Knowledge, they have come to understand, is a never-ending process not an ultimate possession, and the price one pays for that knowledge is doubt and self-questioning. Having weaned themselves from absolutes, having accepted the necessity of choosing the best from among imperfect alternatives and having taken responsibility for those choices by advancing them in the world, those committed in relativism are perfectly capable of not only condemning positions hostile to their own, but of putting themselves in the shoes of their adversaries and achieving some level of identification with them.
Of course there is no readily apparent way of getting students who are mired in relativism (where most entry-level college students find themselves according to Perry) all the way to commitments in relativism in a single class. Few students will get close to this last stage by the conclusion of their college careers. But so long as the goal is clear, and our methods of teaching and our manner of interacting with our students are congruent with that goal, we have a better chance of nudging students along toward something more satisfying to them and to us than if we operate in a vacuum.1 If we prefer Fish’s argument to Leo’s, so long as our preferences our grounded in the imperatives of our discipline and of our pedagogical model, we should feel free to share that preference with our students along with the reasons for our preference.
Leo and Fish Part III: The Elements of Argument
One of the first challenges we face when introducing our notion of argument to students is dispelling the faulty assumptions about argument they bring with them into our classrooms. They have, after all, acquired their own notions of argument long before they began formal study of the matter. They have seen arguments conducted in their homes and schools, read about them in books and newspapers, viewed them on television, listened to them on radio and watched them in movies countless times by the time they walk into classrooms where we presume to teach them how to write arguments. Given the random way in which students acquire early knowledge of argument, it is not surprising that they may need to be “untaught” some assumptions before the teaching can begin. In the case of the Leo-Fish essays, the first thing that may strike students as odd is the fact that the two essays do not speak directly to each other in a clash of ideas. While the Leo and Fish essays appeared on the same day, October 15, 2001, dealt with the same phenomenon, and arrive at strikingly different conclusions via strikingly different routes, they appear to have been written in ignorance of each other. Neither offers a point-by-point refutation of the other, and when they contradict each other, it is more a case of a random intersection of contrary ideas than an intentional posing of opposites.
When we claim that most important arguments of the day are carried on in a similarly indirect fashion, many students are, not surprisingly, puzzled. Their personal experience with argument is likely to incline them toward a “debaters’ model” of argument, as a direct contest of opposing ideas carried out between two (or a few) people bent on winning. One attends to such arguments for their entertainment value—the possibility that they might end violently gives them an edge—or to figure out on which side one might throw in one’s lot. One would neither engage in nor attend to such arguments—or the faux versions of same featured on TV news shows and talk radio—in order to evaluate the arguments carefully, winnow out the least persuasive ones, and fashion new arguments from opposing arguments. The dominant model of argument is not, in brief, a dialectical model so much as it is a zero-sum game model, veering toward a contact sport, that does not invite active participation of those who attend to it or a search for higher truths of those who engage in it.2
Our preferred model of argument elevates the search for better ideas over what Burke calls “advantage-seeking.” But like Burke, we acknowledge that at least some element of advantage-seeking is to be found in every argument, no matter how civil the arguers’ tone, no matter how accommodating they may be of opposing views. No one argues purely to discover better ideas, and it is important early in the semester when weaning students from their overly agonistic models of argument, not to overstate the high-mindedness of our own enterprise and thereby to set them up for further disillusionment. Argument, after all, typically involves some investment of one’s ego and one’s heart as well as one’s mind and one’s judgment. Most of us undertake the risks of argument—the risk of alienating people, of arousing opposition, of missing the point and having that fact pointed out, not always kindly, in a public setting—only if our fondest beliefs or self-interests are at stake. Even the most selfless of arguers wishes, if not to win an argument, to at least “get it right.” To lose an argument, or even to have one’s argument called into question, may well require one to go back and reexamine beliefs that anchor one’s identity. So argument is risky, in part because we are seeking advantage for our interests and beliefs or are striving to prevent others from winning an advantage for their interests and beliefs. But that said, most of us—even, or perhaps especially, terrorists—truly believe that in serving our interests larger interests are served and that in forwarding our beliefs we are working toward truth and justice for others. To be sure, all of us find ourselves sometimes serving as apostles of, if not injustice, ideas that are, at best, the least unjust of a bad lot. But there is a certain nobility in even this pursuit and students should be reminded of this fact early in the semester.
What provokes the arguments of Fish and Leo is an event, 9/11, that caused many Americans to alter their perceptions of and assumptions about the world. Until September 11, 2001, no foreign power had managed to invade the country or kill significant numbers of American citizens on American soil in centuries. After 9/ll, our sense of invulnerability and of our role in the world required reexamination while our beliefs about the rest of the world’s attitude toward us had to be radically revised. In sum, the events of 9/11 represent a classic instance of what in rhetoric is referred to as an “exigence.” According to Lloyd Bitzer, who coined the term forty years ago as part of his revisionist look at the rhetorical situation, “Any exigence is an imperfection marked by urgency; it is a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is other than it should be” (304). An exigence cannot be, in the language of debate, an “inherent” problem, some unchangeable aspect of the human condition, say, that defies solution; and it cannot be a problem that can be solved directly by extra-verbal means. “An exigence is rhetorical when it is capable of positive modification and when positive modification requires discourse or can be assisted by discourse” (304). The terrorist of attack of 9/11 demanded “discourse” of every one of us, whether we mulled over our responses in silent soliloquies or submitted them aloud or in print for public scrutiny. What did we make of the attack? How should we respond, as a nation and as individuals? Most Americans tried to articulate their feelings about the attack and to find some way of forming an ethical judgment of it. We often looked to trusted pundits like Leo, and academics