Twice a month, The duty challenges enthusiasts of philosophy and the history of ideas to decipher a topical issue based on the theses of a prominent thinker.
In the left corner, the defenders of Amira Elghawaby, unable to imagine that support for secularism could be anything other than the philosophical pretext that xenophobes of all stripes give themselves to finally justify their obsession with the Other. In the right corner, their detractors, incapable of imagining that the fight against Islamophobia, however documented daily, could be anything other than the latest ruse of the great Canadian multiculturalist plot. If this sad fight that takes the place of a “debate” will have taught us only one thing, it is that the “emotional polarization” (namely the tendency, present everywhere on social networks, to immediately disqualify our interlocutors by presuming their intentions and viewing them as unworthy enemies) undermines the very possibility of any democratic dialogue.
Perhaps we should turn here to Michel de Montaigne, who very closely experienced an even more serious affective polarization. A Catholic noble in a family largely converted to Protestantism, mayor of Bordeaux in a region of France with a strong Huguenot predominance, he was at the forefront of witnessing the religious troubles of his century. Despite his intention to stay above the fray, he will often be caught in the crossfire. One example among many: during a trip to Paris in 1588, he had his way blocked and robbed by a band of Protestants, only to be imprisoned in the Bastille by Catholics in retaliation for a decision by the king. of Navarre favorable to the Protestants. In such a busy context, “I was skinned on all hands”, in other words, he received blows from all sides. One thing is certain, next to the Saint-Barthélemy massacre, which he will also witness, Montaigne would no doubt find that our virtual fights on Twitter resemble a game of tennis.
Despite his time, Montaigne will have taught us to resist, in the midst of intellectual turmoil, the temptation of fanaticism: allergic to any kind of ideological intransigence or stubbornness, he will always have bet on intellectual humility. It is in this same spirit of tolerance that he writes “On the art of conferring”, chapter of the Trials in which he warns us against our tendency to view debate as a combat sport: for Montaigne, the exchange of ideas is much more an opportunity to take a critical look at oneself than to be right about oneself. ‘other. For if any exchange of ideas necessarily involves a certain “agonistic” aspect (from the Greek agon, which means “competition”), it would be a mistake to reduce it to its only conflicting dimension: it would rather be necessary to see in it the possibility of self-rectification and, thus, of progressing. In this sense, the debate would be less a fight against the other than a fight against oneself, which obliges us to “think against ourselves”. While the virtual spaces in which we “debate” today are structured in such a way as to offer no incentive for the kind of openness proposed by Montaigne – nothing attracts less likes that concession and nuance—the ethics of Montanian discussion could perhaps serve as a lesson to us.
Rule 1: keep your ideas at bay. A fine psychologist, Montaigne recognizes that we tend to assert our opinions as if it were a question of defending our person in death. When the contrary opinion is perceived as a threat to our ego, the slightest contradiction arouses a defensive reaction. Thus, our spontaneous protests in the face of contradiction very often betray an intolerance of otherness: “For it is a tyrannical bitterness not to be able to tolerate a way of seeing which differs from one’s own. The solution then is not to fall in love with our beliefs, but to keep them at a healthy distance: “ [L]Opinions find in me an ill-suited ground to penetrate and to grow deep roots. We must therefore practice defending ideas without necessarily identifying with them. Of course, if my dignity or my rights are attacked, it will be impossible and even useless to try to depersonalize the debate. But otherwise, I must not cling to each of my convictions as if my integrity depended on it: I will then be more inclined to amend myself, and therefore to progress, since my ideological opportunity cost will be lower.
Rule 2: welcome contradiction. If the other only reinforces my convictions by sending me back my own reflection, there is no point approaching them: “Unison is a perfectly boring thing when conferring. This is why Montaigne enjoins us to adopt a hospitable attitude to opposing opinion: “When someone is contrary to me, they arouse my attention, not my anger: I advance towards the one who contradicts me, who educated. Because on condition that I open myself to it sincerely, the other informs me about himself while serving as a mediating authority between me and me: I learn to understand myself better in and through the confrontation with what I am not. In the same way that travel, for Montaigne, makes it possible at the same time to go to meet the other and to discover oneself as otherness in and through the gaze of this other, an honest intellectual exchange gives rise to this same dialectic. by which I accept to be disoriented to better familiarize myself with myself. Contradiction is thus a condition of introspection.
Rule 3: doubt everything, especially yourself.Drawing inspiration from ancient skepticism (and in particular from the neo-Pyrrhonism in vogue at his time), Montaigne recommends philosophical doubt as a way of immunizing oneself against dogmatism. But it is not a question of using doubt to flush out received ideas in others, which remains altogether too easy. For Montaigne, the task imposed on us by the skeptical attitude is much more difficult: it is a question of remaining suspicious in relation to one’s own tendency to adhere too quickly and too resolutely to what may seem visibly convincing. So we must cultivate a certain distrust of our own claims to truth. This is because critical thinking passes first and foremost through self-criticism. For Montaigne, in fact, skepticism is not a doctrine, but a ethos, a philosophical temperament which, obliging us to a certain intellectual prudence, protects us against our propensity to prefer the comfort of certainty to the efforts of introspection. By doing “What do I know? his philosophical mantra, Montaigne invites us in a way to lower our expectations of ourselves. Because it is precisely our pretension which, according to him, makes us stupid: “Is there anything so determined, resolute, disdainful, contemplative, serious, serious as the donkey? No need to specify that such skepticism is a thousand miles from the dishonest appeals to “doubt” of our “free thinkers” who, today, pretext and co-opt skeptical discourse to better hide their own dogmas.
Hence the importance of rule 4: choose your interlocutor carefully. Obviously, the dialectical tango is danced in pairs. Even the greatest “lecturer” will be powerless in front of a stubborn person: “it is impossible to deal in good faith with a fool”, since the greatest stupidity stems less from ignorance than from obstinacy. So we don’t have to convert obtuse minds, or “go and preach to the first passer-by and dictate […] the folly of the first encountered”. Rather, we must avoid at all costs “the pedant”, the worst fool there is according to Montaigne. It is that the pedant, whose arrogance is the opposite of the humility advocated by the author of Trials, seeks only to have an effect by parading his knowledge and stunning us with rhetorical artifice. He has nothing to do with the truth: the subject under discussion is only a pretext. But this “heavy head” has wisdom only for appearances: he is not in search of knowledge, but of recognition and power, and we therefore have nothing to expect from him. There is a certain wisdom in being able not only to recognize a good interlocutor, but, above all, to know how to recognize the sophistical wolves disguised as philosophical sheep: “I like to dispute and to discourse, but it is with few men, and for me: because to serve as a spectacle for the great and to show off one’s spirit and cackle at will, it is a very unseemly job for a man of honor. »
It goes without saying that the openness and humility advocated here are as difficult as they are rare, and Montaigne himself admits that he is not always up to it: “When the argument is troubled and out of order, I attach myself to shape with resentment and without measure, and I throw myself into a stubborn, mischievous and imperious way of debating which I have to blush afterwards. This being so, the ethics of Montanian discussion could perhaps serve as a corrective to the toxic climate so decried today: not with a view to ironing out any difference of opinion by seeking at all costs harmony or the golden mean. , but in order to teach us to live better with our disagreements. Indeed, our current problem is not the presence of contradictory political convictions in the public space: after all, democratic societies are distinguished precisely by their desire to create a public sphere of “conference” which can allow and even encourage the clash of opposing ideas. Our problem stems rather from an inability to see democratic debate as anything other than a merciless struggle.
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