The New York Sophist

From the 1906 version of An Introductory Course in Argumentation by Francis Perry. He’s why he arranged the textbook the way he did:

In the first place, the student is practiced in the processes of argumentation without the added difficulty of research. No teacher of narration begins his work by demanding that a student write a historical romance requiring serious preliminary study of the period in which it is placed — he begins, rather, with simple pieces of work exercising the student’s power of imagination on material that lies within his experience. The beginner in the study of argumentation should, in like manner, be set to work to exercise his reasoning power on familiar material. This is not a loss, but a gain. Even advanced students, when allowed to write at the start on subjects upon which they must ‘read up’ develop little power to argue; they too often count their work done when they have gathered from a  book and summarized the arguments of another. The student required to argue on material already at his command finds pleasure in turning it over, seeing it in new lights, in new relations, with new significance, and argument seems to him serviceable and pleasant work. I do not, however, advocate suiting endeavor to power, and at the close of the course the student is instructed in methods of research with the epxectation that he will be ready to encounter added difficulties. (5-6)

This seems like sound pedagogy to me for debating, and makes a hell of a lot of sense for teaching WUDC debate. However, I think I used to do this when I taught American Policy debate (I’d always start with the motion “Resolved: We should go to the movies.” You can teach any policy debate theory concept in a tiny amount of time if you make people work with this).

I think this pedagogy isn’t really followed much today – whenever people think of debate or the teaching of debate they think “facts first” or set up a component for finding information first then use the debate as a technology of dissemination. This might be good for teaching research skills, but as Perry rightly points out, this backgrounds debate to an instrument of teaching research, and risks ruining the whole thing.

Since it was written in 1906, the “switch-side” movement did not exist. Perry is a “convictionist” debate coach – helping students refine beliefs they come to by other means. He continues:

The subject is further simplified by leaving persuasion out of consideration until the student understands conviction. This too, is a gain; the student who begins by suiting his argument to the hearer too often comes to value sophistry above thoroughness and accuracy; like a sharp bargainer he prides himself more on a fraudulent victory than on an honest one. (6)

Contrary to Perry’s conventional use of the terms “persuasion” and “sophistry,” his style of teaching debate might actually be more properly “sophistic” in the sense that the debate teacher becomes a hired adviser, irrelevant of position or stance of the client. Switch-side debate, after reading Perry, struck me as more properly “Platonic” due to a heavy investment in the theory behind dialectic. Socrates often worked from assigning positions, although they were derived from statements of conviction from those participating in the dialogue. Plato assigned positions in writing each dialogue. The extant sophistic speeches, minus Encomium for Helen, were not produced this way, but used a kernel of conviction (i.e. “I didn’t kill that person, I am innocent”) as the start of constructing the speech they were hired to write for Athenian courts. I wonder if the convictionists are onto something here. We don’t know that much about how they taught; we do know a bit about what they believed they were teaching.

I am assuming that the portrait we get of Melvin Tolson from The Great Debaters is a two dimensional caricature designed to serve the familiar plot of film rather than advance our understanding of the issue unraveled. Tolson is the convictionist’s convictionist in the film – but surely he was more strategic in his teaching than what the film depicted. Can we consider Tolson’s methods sophistic? Not properly, no – he is much more like Socrates in the film. But that is most likely a device for our entertainment benefit. Tolson might be the first modern debate coach in the sense that he thought he was teaching students the “right way to think” about politics, ethics, and the world or debate as “truth finding” – something we see far too much of in contemporary coaching methods in the US. I don’t think convictionists would agree that this is the right way to teach debate either. I think their position, if Perry is a good example, is a bit more nuanced than that. As I have it from these short passages, it seems like it is “Find out what the student believes and is interested in. Explore the structure of it. Have them speak about it. Have them consider effective ways of presenting it. Then go research it further.”

I wonder what other pedagogical insights we have lost from the dominance of the switch-side theory. Is there value in perusing a project to recover the convictionist teaching methods?

This picture is a rare treat from Zemanta, the software I use that helps me make these posts look (supposedly) more professional. But in the end usually the images and links suggested are not appropriate, or I just don’t like them.

But this one is quite good. Here we see the perfect image of the debating subject.

He’s confidence, convicted, almost enraged. Overcertain of himself and his position. He’s literally standing on literature. And in his hand is the one page of preparation he’s done for this debate. We encounter him at a point where the preparation is no longer needed, it’s crumpled in his hand – passion, reason, the truth, certainty – have taken over. His opponent is doomed to defeat.

Debate is a threatening apparition.

But this model is not real, nor is it ever really what transpires in the best debating. It’s a model that is attractive to a lot of people because it displays the things that are most attractive to us: Holding power, domination, forcing our will upon others, in short – getting what we want.

But what is it that we want? Debate is threatening, but if directed in another way, the threat is turned toward who wants.

Here is a koan from the zen tradition. Well not really a koan but I think it could work well as one. I think it provides a better model of the debating subject than our friend up there.

The monkey is reaching
For the moon in the water.
Until death overtakes him
He’ll never give up.
If he’d let go the branch and
Disappear in the deep pool,
The whole world would shine
With dazzling pureness.

 I like this poem a lot. Just like the man in the image, the monkey is reaching for the reflection of the moon on the surface of the water. Like the debater, he reaches for something that is just an effect of forces beyond his comprehension.

Dissapearing in the pool – the substance that makes the reflection of the moon possible – is a better alternative. Why? This is no more a literal disappearance than the moon is a literal moon. To replace one with the other would accomplish nothing.  Hakuin is trying to get us to think about the relationship we have to desire and to the material world around us. Most of the things we want are either not really there, or we can’t attain them the way that we think we can.

Grasping at the image without awareness of how that image is coming to you is what we do all the time. I am guilty of it, and so are you. The trick is to be aware of it – and Hakuin’s solution is for us to realize that we are all immersed in it already – just let go, stop trying to grasp things, and attend to immersion.

This poem has a lot of application to teaching debate. The point of debating for the student should (and does whether you want it to or not) clash with the point of debating for the teacher. The student wants to win and grabs for the image of victory. The teacher knows (or should know) that any attempt to grab it will fail. The debate teacher knows that the whole universe glitters like the moon in the water once the student grasps the water and not the image the water supports.

The stakes are of course, much higher than that. The poem suggests that the image of the moon haunts the monkey until death. This is the same with victory – it will haunt the student until they die if they can’t connect with the substance. Debate’s only contribution to our lives it it’s ability to let us see, just for a bit, the constructed and arbitrary nature of human identity. In terms of the poem, the self is also a reflection in the water that we grasp at, hoping to achieve.

The biggest challenge facing the debate director is that of the power of narrative. The subject is under direct assault by the decisions rendered in a debate. Debate threatens the coherence of the narrative of the self. And just like beings immersed in fluid who move quickly away from alien substances dropped on a slide, we move quickly away from words that could unravel our concept of self.

The student wants to add the narrative of “debater” to their story, but only considers that part a tale of victory. But nike is not arete. Debate only offers arete. It only offers the continual making and remaking of the self as an excellent being. Of course, this doesn’t happen in tournaments, but tournaments are a place where we can call attention to the limited potential we have of grasping the moon in the water. Instead of trying to grab excellence as a thing, we should realize that becoming consubstantial with that thing is the only way such excellence could be apprehended.

Look at the image again. The debater; the moon on the water. Do you reach for this image? Or do you reach for what allows this image such sway over our lives? Is the image of the powerful debater attractive like the moon at night? Or does everything glow with that rhetorical potential? Do you seek wins or victory? Your reflection is right there.

This picture is a rare treat from Zemanta, the software I use that helps me make these posts look (supposedly) more professional. But in the end usually the images and links suggested are not appropriate, or I just don’t like them.

But this one is quite good. Here we see the perfect image of the debating subject.

He’s confidence, convicted, almost enraged. Overcertain of himself and his position. He’s literally standing on literature. And in his hand is the one page of preparation he’s done for this debate. We encounter him at a point where the preparation is no longer needed, it’s crumpled in his hand – passion, reason, the truth, certainty – have taken over. His opponent is doomed to defeat.

Debate is a threatening apparition.

But this model is not real, nor is it ever really what transpires in the best debating. It’s a model that is attractive to a lot of people because it displays the things that are most attractive to us: Holding power, domination, forcing our will upon others, in short – getting what we want.

But what is it that we want? Debate is threatening, but if directed in another way, the threat is turned toward who wants.

Here is a koan from the zen tradition. Well not really a koan but I think it could work well as one. I think it provides a better model of the debating subject than our friend up there.

The monkey is reaching
For the moon in the water.
Until death overtakes him
He’ll never give up.
If he’d let go the branch and
Disappear in the deep pool,
The whole world would shine
With dazzling pureness.

 I like this poem a lot. Just like the man in the image, the monkey is reaching for the reflection of the moon on the surface of the water. Like the debater, he reaches for something that is just an effect of forces beyond his comprehension.

Dissapearing in the pool – the substance that makes the reflection of the moon possible – is a better alternative. Why? This is no more a literal disappearance than the moon is a literal moon. To replace one with the other would accomplish nothing.  Hakuin is trying to get us to think about the relationship we have to desire and to the material world around us. Most of the things we want are either not really there, or we can’t attain them the way that we think we can.

Grasping at the image without awareness of how that image is coming to you is what we do all the time. I am guilty of it, and so are you. The trick is to be aware of it – and Hakuin’s solution is for us to realize that we are all immersed in it already – just let go, stop trying to grasp things, and attend to immersion.

This poem has a lot of application to teaching debate. The point of debating for the student should (and does whether you want it to or not) clash with the point of debating for the teacher. The student wants to win and grabs for the image of victory. The teacher knows (or should know) that any attempt to grab it will fail. The debate teacher knows that the whole universe glitters like the moon in the water once the student grasps the water and not the image the water supports.

The stakes are of course, much higher than that. The poem suggests that the image of the moon haunts the monkey until death. This is the same with victory – it will haunt the student until they die if they can’t connect with the substance. Debate’s only contribution to our lives it it’s ability to let us see, just for a bit, the constructed and arbitrary nature of human identity. In terms of the poem, the self is also a reflection in the water that we grasp at, hoping to achieve.

The biggest challenge facing the debate director is that of the power of narrative. The subject is under direct assault by the decisions rendered in a debate. Debate threatens the coherence of the narrative of the self. And just like beings immersed in fluid who move quickly away from alien substances dropped on a slide, we move quickly away from words that could unravel our concept of self.

The student wants to add the narrative of “debater” to their story, but only considers that part a tale of victory. But nike is not arete. Debate only offers arete. It only offers the continual making and remaking of the self as an excellent being. Of course, this doesn’t happen in tournaments, but tournaments are a place where we can call attention to the limited potential we have of grasping the moon in the water. Instead of trying to grab excellence as a thing, we should realize that becoming consubstantial with that thing is the only way such excellence could be apprehended.

Look at the image again. The debater; the moon on the water. Do you reach for this image? Or do you reach for what allows this image such sway over our lives? Is the image of the powerful debater attractive like the moon at night? Or does everything glow with that rhetorical potential? Do you seek wins or victory? Your reflection is right there.

Anyway, here is a great quote about teaching that I recently found about kensho the Japanese word for the Buddhist concept of “enlightenment” or “getting it” or “realization.” I think the term applies to debate teaching just as well in this quote.

“Don’t misdirect your efforts. Don’t chase around looking for something apart from your own selves. All you have to do is to concentrate on being thoughtless, on doing nothing whatever. No practice. No realization. Doing nothing, the state of no-mind, is the direct path of sudden realization. No practice, no realization – that is the true principle, things as they really are. The enlightened ones themselves, those who possess every attribute of Buddhahood, have called this supreme, unparalleled, right awakening.”

People hear this teaching and try to follow it. Choking off their aspirations. Sweeping their minds clean of delusive thoughts. They dedicate themselves solely to doing nothing and to making their minds complete blanks, blissfully unaware that they are doing and thinking a great deal.

When a person who has not had kensho reads the Buddhist scriptures, questions his teachers and fellow monks about Buddhism, or practices religious disciplines, he is merely creating the causes of his own illusion – a sure sign that he is still confined within samsara. He tries constantly to keep himself detached in thought and deed, and all the while his thoughts and deeds are attached. He endeavors to be doing nothing all day long, and all the while he is busily doing.

But if this same person experiences kensho, everything changes. Although he is constantly thinking and acting, it is totally free and unattached. Although he is engaged in activity around the clock, that activity is, as such, non-activity. This great change is the result of his kensho. It is like water that snakes and cows drink from the same cistern, which becomes deadly venom in one and milk in the other. 

~Hakuin Ekaku, c. 1700

What does this mean? I think it has a great application to what we think we are doing in debate and what we actually do in debate (just like that meme everyone is annoyed by right now).

If you think you are studying how to do civic engagement, how to persuade mass audiences, how to create motives in other human beings by studying debate with the idea of winning tournaments as the goal, you only have part of the story. You might also be creating an impassible barrier to this goal.

If you study debate without these things in mind, but you realize the samsara nature of the tournament cycle, you will be like the cow.