Why Argument Matters by Lee Siegel

Author:Lee Siegel
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780300244267
Publisher: Yale University Press

* A related issue is the absence of agreement about what should be used as a generic pronoun. See my earlier footnote.

2

the argument of art

In a fanciful essay about his travels in Italy, the poet Heinrich Heine describes encountering an ancient lizard who is on intimate terms with the stones upon which he likes to take the sun. The lizard explains to the poet that the stones believe God will one day turn himself into a stone so that he will then, the stones say, be able to “save them from their stiffness.” Sooner or later, in other words, everyone thinks that even the most dissimilar elements of reality will come to look and think as they do.

By now some readers must want to make the argument that I, having made my living arguing in print, have refashioned reality in the shape of a single, all-encompassing argument.

Just as, so this argument would go, Lenin reduced history to the dynamic of kto kvo—who [doing something to] whom—I see argument everywhere, from a newborn’s first cries to declarations of love to the ferocious attention to and caring for an aspect of reality that impels me to make a case for or against it. Why, some readers must want to exclaim, he probably finds argument in the way organisms evolve to adapt to their environment! Well, I do in fact see the process of natural adaptation reflected in argument—a good argument adapts to the motion of its counterargument, sometimes even mirroring it. Right now I am making an effort to adapt to a skeptic’s arguments the way Darwin’s finches grew a particular beak to adapt to their environment’s challenges.

Certainly argument as quarrel, dispute, or debate is a specific occasion. But argument in the broadest and deepest sense, as making a case for something, is, as I have tried to show, the way even a neutral-seeming statement holds its own.

I say, this very second, to my wife and children, “I am going to the store.” No argument in that. Or is there? In making that statement I have eliminated the possibility of not going to the store. I have to go. If I suddenly decide not to, I must explain why. If I leave and don’t go the store, I have to explain why I didn’t when I return. If I leave and don’t go to the store but come home and say I went, I have to wrestle with the fact that I lied. Even if my conscience is clear, I will be aware of a reality that refutes my original statement that I might someday have to confront.

Overthinking? You’d have to make a case for that, too. Anything new that comes into existence arrives, as Evelyn Underhill put it in Mysticism, in the teeth of all arguments. An argument, by definition, seeks to make an abstraction concrete. This makes the reverse also true. Any reality that has sprung into being must make an argument for why it exists. How much do you want for your square?

Now art seems to be an exception.

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