Bourdieu in support of Whitehead

Lee Braver forwarded this quote to me back in early July, but I just dug it up from my inbox now. I guess I get too much email.

Anyway, this passage is from Bourdieu (normally not one of my heroes, but I like this one):

“Logical criticism inevitably misses its target: because it can only challenge the relationships consciously established between words, it cannot bring out the incoherent coherence of a discourse which, springing from underlying mythic or ideological schemes, has the capacity to survive every reductio ad absurdum”

Outline of a Theory of Practice, 158)

Most of Whitehead’s best remarks on the nature of philosophy come very early in Process and Reality. Read the introductory sections, and you’ll already have his central thoughts on the topic.

The point is not that “argument is worthless,” the point is that it has a subordinate role in philosophy, which I would (and will) argue has more in common with rhetoric than with dialectic. I suppose it was McLuhan who really caused me to see rhetoric as the art and science of the background behind all explicit dialectical and perceptual figure. But Aristotle is really the first great thinker of this, and there is a reason that he spent as much as half of the day teaching his students rhetoric. It wasn’t because “people are fools and sometimes need to be tricked rather than argued with reasonably.” It was because the enthymeme, or implicit argument, is at least as powerful as the explicit one. Nothing is more pointless than watching a bunch of aggressive people trump each other in argument. One isn’t always left with very much afterward.