Sleepykid

Arte Retorica

Beautifully written blog post on rhetoric and politics.

Any one of us can be wrong: as the American Pragmatists teach us, ideas are social constructs; the best ones can only be arrived at by a free interchange of rational and informed discourse. Impassioned discourse is not out of place, so long as it makes room for reason and a free exchange of information. Let’s agree to leave aside, for the sake of argument, the details of whatever absolute Truths we may think to be privy to: the undeniable human fact is that there is not presently the remotest possibility of universal agreement on such points; to deny, with Platonic assurance, that the only Truth worth considering is absolute, unarguable, eternal, is to assure our continued demise and ultimate destruction. We must engage, if we are to avoid that fate, in the sophistic (and pragmatic, moral, life-enhancing) practice of dissoi logoi, the informed and open discussion of opposing arguments—lest the better ones be passed over or completely frozen out of consideration.