Life of the Mind – Page 4 – Maverick Philosopher

Alan Dershowitz, Thomas Nagel, and David Benatar

What do these three have in common besides uncommon intellectual penetration and the courage to speak and write publicly on controversial topics?

Each has been viciously attacked by ideologues. Dershowitz and Nagel have been attacked from the Left and Benatar from the Right and the Left.

It is all over for the West if we don't punch back hard against the the forces of dogmatism and darkness in defense of free speech and open inquiry.

Alan Dershowitz

I have already said a bit in defense of the Harvard law professor. I now invite you to listen to his account of how a Martha's Vineyard woman wants to stab him through the heart, presumably because he has not aligned himself with the anti-Trump crowd. He speaks so well in his own defense that there is no need for me to say more.

Thomas Nagel

Another classical liberal who has ignited the rage of the Left is Thomas Nagel, the distinguished NYU philosopher. He has impeccable liberal and atheist credentials and yet this does not save him from the wrath of ideologues who think his 2012 Mind and Cosmos (Oxford UP) and other of his works give aid and comfort to theism. Simon Blackburn attacks him in a New Statesman article that suggests that if there were a philosophical index librorum prohibitorum, then Nagel's 2012 book should be on it. The article ends as follows:

There is charm to reading a philosopher who confesses to finding things bewildering. But I regret the appearance of this book. It will only bring comfort to creationists and fans of “intelligent design”, who will not be too bothered about the difference between their divine architect and Nagel’s natural providence. It will give ammunition to those triumphalist scientists who pronounce that philosophy is best pensioned off. If there were a philosophical Vatican, the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index [of prohibited books].

The problem with the book, Blackburn states at the beginning of his piece, is that

. . . only a tiny proportion of its informed readers will find it anything other than profoundly wrong-headed. For, as the title suggests, Nagel’s central idea is that there are things that science, as it is presently conceived, cannot possibly explain.

Blackburn doesn't explicitly say that there ought to be a "philosophical Vatican," and an index of prohibited books, but he seems to be open to the deeply unphilosophical idea of censoring views that are "profoundly wrong-headed." And why should such views be kept from impressionable minds? Because they might lead them astray into doctrinal error. For even though Nagel explicitly rejects God and divine providence, untutored intellects might confuse Nagel's teleological suggestion with divine providence.

Nagel's great sin, you see, is to point out the rather obvious problems with reductive materialism as he calls it. This is intolerable to scientistic ideologues since any criticism of the reigning orthodoxy, no matter how well-founded, gives aid and comfort to the enemy, theism — and this despite the fact that Nagel's approach is naturalistic and rejective of theism!

So what Nagel explicitly says doesn't matter. His failing to toe the party line makes him an enemy as bad as theists such as Alvin Plantinga. (If Nagel's book is to be kept under lock and key, one can only wonder at the prophylactic measures necessary to keep infection from leaking out of Plantinga's tomes.)

Blackburn betrays himself as nothing but an ideologue in the above article. For this is the way ideologues operate. Never criticize your own, your fellow naturalists in this case. Never concede anything to your opponents. Never hesitate, admit doubt or puzzlement. Keep your eyes on the prize. Winning alone is what counts. Never follow an argument where it leads if it leads away from the party line.

Treat the opponent's ideas with ridicule and contumely. For example, Blackburn refers to consciousness as a purple haze to be dispelled. ('Purple haze' a double allusion, to the eponymous Jimi Hendrix number and to a book by Joe Levine on the explanatory gap.)

What is next Professor Blackburn? A Naturalist Syllabus of Errors?

Another philosophical ideologue who has attacked Nagel is Brian Leiter. David Gordon lays into Leiter with justice, and Keith Burgess-Jackson has this to say about the Nagel bashers:

The viciousness with which this book [Mind and Cosmos] was received is, quite frankly, astonishing. I can understand why scientists don't like it; they're wary of philosophers trespassing on their terrain. But philosophers? What is philosophy except (1) the careful analysis of alternatives (i.e., logical possibilities), (2) the questioning of dogma, and (3) the patient distinguishing between what is known and what is not known (or known not to be) in a given area of human inquiry? Nagel's book is smack dab in the Socratic tradition. Socrates himself would admire it. That Nagel, a distinguished philosopher who has made important contributions to many branches of the discipline, is vilified by his fellow philosophers (I use the term loosely for what are little more than academic thugs) shows how thoroughly politicized philosophy has become. I find it difficult to read any philosophy after, say, 1980, when political correctness, scientism, and dogmatic atheism took hold in academia. Philosophy has become a handmaiden to political progressivism, science, and atheism. Nagel's "mistake" is to think that philosophy is an autonomous discipline. I fully expect that, 100 years from now, philosophers will look back on this era as the era of hacks, charlatans, and thugs. Philosophy is too important to be given over to such creeps.

Burgess-Jackson puts his finger on the really important point, namely, the politicization of philosophy. This is part and parcel of the Left's politicization of everything.

David Benatar

The Right too has its share of anti-inquiry ideologues, and Benatar's anti-natalist views have drawn their ire and fire. I come to his defense in the following entries:

A Defense of David Benatar Against a Scurrilous New Criterion Attack. The piece begins:

By a defense of Benatar, I do not mean a defense of his deeply pessimistic and anti-natalist views, views to which I do not subscribe. I mean a defense of the courageous practice of unrestrained philosophical inquiry, inquiry that follows the arguments where they lead, even if they issue in conclusions that make people extremely uncomfortable and are sure to bring obloquy upon the philosopher who proposes them.

Mindless Hostility to David Benatar

Jordan Peterson Throws a Wild Punch at David Benatar

I end on a personal note. When I met Benatar in Prague in late May at the Anti-Natalism Under Fire conference, I found him to be a delightful man, friendly and chipper, receptive to criticism, open for dialog and not the least bit arrogant and self-important in the manner of some academics. He said to me, "Are you the Maverick Philosopher?" Apparently someone had informed him of the series of posts I have written on his work.

Those posts are collected in the Benatar and Anti-Natalism categories. I focus on his The Human Predicament.

My series of posts on Nagel's Mind and Cosmos can be found in the Nagel, Thomas category.

On the Road with Peter Wust

Both Pyrrhonists and dogmatists aim at and achieve a sort of psychological security: the former by ceasing to inquire and by living more or less adoxastos, without beliefs; the latter by the rigid and unquestioning holding of contentious beliefs. The dogmatists hold on, the skeptics let go. The former live tenaciously, clinging to their tenets; the skeptics live or try to live without beliefs and tenets. (The Latin tenere means to hold.)

What the two opposing groups have in common is that they cease inquiry. The dogmatist, secure in his dogmas, feels no need to inquire. "We don't seek the truth; we have the truth." The Pyrrhonian skeptic, despairing of finding truth, and sick of the agitation consequent upon discussion and debate, gives up inquiry. "We don't seek the truth; the truth is not to be had."

Neither form of doxastic security is to be recommended.

Peter Wust in his excellent but largely forgotten Ungewißheit und Wagnis (1937), speaking of dogmatists and skeptics, writes that:

Beide wollen sich von dem Zustand des Unterwegsseins befreien . . . (UW 236)

Both want to free themselves from the state of being on the way . . .

. . . when man, here below, is and must remain homo viator.

In this world we are ever in statu viae, on the road, coming from we know not where, headed for we know not where. The Whither and Whence remain shrouded in darkness, and the light that guides us is but a half-light. On this road there is no rest from inquiry. Rest, if rest there be, lies at the end of the road.

Why Be Consistent? Three Types of Consistency

A reader inquires:

This idea of the necessity to be consistent seems to be the logician's "absolute," as though being inconsistent was the most painful accusation one could endure. [. . .] What rule of life says that one must be absolutely consistent in how one evaluates truth? It is good to argue from first principles but it can also lead one down a rat hole.

Before we can discuss whether one ought to be consistent, we need to know which type of consistency is at issue. There are at least three types of consistency that people often confuse and that need to be kept distinct. I'll call them 'logical,' 'pragmatic,' and 'diachronic.' But it doesn't matter how we label them as long as we keep them separate.

1. Logical or Propositional Consistency. To say of two propositions that they are consistent is to to say that they can both be true, where 'can' expresses logical or broadly logical possibility. To say of two propositions that they are inconsistent is to say that they cannot both be true, where 'cannot' expresses logical or broadly logical impossibility.

I am blogging but not wearing a hat. My blogging is obviously consistent with my not wearing a hat since both propositions are true. But my blogging is also consistent with my wearing a hat since it is possible that I both be blogging and wearing a hat. But I am blogging now and I am not writing now are inconsistent since they cannot both be true. The first proposition entails the second, which implies the impossibility of the first being true and the second false.

P1. Human fetuses have a right to life which cannot be overridden except in rare cases (e.g. threat to the life of the mother).

P2. Capital punishment for certain offences is morally justified.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Why is Friendship So Fragile Among Intellectuals?

A certain commie and I were were friends for a time in graduate school, but friendship is fragile among those for whom ideas matter. Unlike the ordinary non-intellectual person, the intellectual lives for and sometimes from ideas. They are his oxygen and sometimes his bread and butter. He takes them very seriously indeed and with them differences in ideas. So the tendency is for one intellectual to view an ideologically divergent intellectual as not merely holding incorrect views but as being morally defective in so doing.

Why? Because ideas matter to the intellectual. They matter in the way doctrines and dogmas mattered to old-time religionists. If one's eternal happiness is at stake, it matters infinitely whether one 'gets it right' doctrinally. If there is no salvation outside the church, you'd better belong to the right church. It matters so much that one may feel entirely justified in forcing the heterodox to recant 'for their own good.'

The typical intellectual nowadays is a secularist who believes in nothing that transcends the human horizon. But he takes into his secularism that old-time fervor, that old-time zeal to suppress dissent and punish apostates. It is called political correctness.

And as you have heard me say more than once: P.C. comes from the C. P.

……………

The above is excerpted from a longer entry, A Red-Diaper Baby I Once Knew: Anecdotes Illustrating Leftist Illusions.

Once More on the Bogus Aristotle ‘Quotation’

The indefatigable Dave Lull delivers again.

But first Uncle Bill's lessons for the day:

1) Be skeptical of all unsourced quotations.

2) Do not broadcast unsourced quotations unless you are sure they are correct.

3) Verify the sources of sourced quotations.

4) Correct, if you can, incorrect 'quotations.'

5) Do not willfully mis-attribute! Or, like Achmed the Dead Terrorist, I KEEL you!

6) Don't use 'quote' as a noun; it is a verb.

Mr. Lull send us to Aristotle and accuracy where the following comment clarifies matters:

Robin Smith said…

You are correct that this quotation, in the form that seems to be all over the Internet now, is not a quotation from Aristotle: it's not even a loose translation of Nicomachean Ethics 1094b23-25. The English translation from which it has descended is as follows (I'm not sure whose this is):

"It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible."

In fact, this isn't a great translation, but at least it gets the sense right. Notice that the first eight words match the beginning of the spurious quote exactly (actually, the corresponding Greek is just two words, (pepaideumenou esti), one of which (esti) means "it is" and the other one of which (pepaideumenou) is translated "the mark of an educated mind". Since it's distinctive of this translation to supply "mind" instead of "man" or "person", I'm sure that's the source. In bouncing about the Internet, Aristotle's own quote has been transmogrified into something quite different that evidently resonates with many people. Just for the record, I am an academic in a philosophy department, I specialize in Aristotle, and I've published translations of some of Aristotle's works. –Robin Smith

I believe this is the Robin Smith I met at a Plato conference back in 1980. I am indeed blessed with, and grateful for, a good memory. You would expect that of a Platonist, right?

“No Man is a Hypocrite in His Pleasures”

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 95:

Johnson: "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures."

The Johnson in question is Samuel Johnson. Translator Bloom informs us that James Boswell's Vie de Samuel Johnson (Life of Samuel Johnson) was published in France in 1954. So it looks as if Camus was mining it for ideas.

In a second footnote we read:

Camus adapted this quote into [his novel] The Fall: "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures; have I read that or did I think it, my dear compatriot?"

Camus knew the answer, but that didn't stop him from passing on both the thought and its formulation as his own. Is that unseemly for a novelist? Can one plagiarize in a work of fiction? An interesting question.

What the Johnsonian saying means interests me more. Does it mean that no man preaches a pleasure he does not practice? An example would be a high school teacher who preaches the pleasures of the life of the mind to his students but spends his leisure hours at the racetrack. But on this reading the saying comes out false.

Or does it mean that no man indulges in a pleasure that he does not enjoy? This is true, and so this is what I take Johnson to be saying. Consider the pleasure of smoking a fine cigar, a La Gloria Cubana, say. No one indulges in this pleasure if he does not like cigars.

A hypocrite in his pleasures would then be a man who indulged in pleasures he did not enjoy. But this is much closer to algolagnia than it is to hypocrisy.

Should we say that Johnson's aphorism is flawed? Well, it got me thinking and is insofar forth good.

It got me enjoying the pleasures of the life of the mind which I both preach and indulge in.

The Pyrrhonian as Epistemic Wimp

What is so bad about the strife of systems, controversy, conflict of beliefs? Are they always bad, never productive? Is it not by abrasion (of beliefs) that the pearl (of wisdom) is formed? At least sometimes?

Doxastic conflict can be mentally stimulating, a goad to intellectual activity. We like being active. It makes us happy. Happiness itself is an activity, a work, an ergon, taught Aristotle. It is not a passive state. There is the joy of movement: running, hiking, climbing, dancing. The joy extends to mental movement. We like problem-solving in our homes, in our jobs, in the aethereal precincts of mathematics and philosophy and science. We like puzzles of all sorts. We like to test our wits as much as we like to test our muscles. The rest after the test is the keener, the keener the test. Mental disturbance, the aporetic predicament, can be enlivening and exhilirating. Damn me, but there must be a way out, a way forward, a work around, a solution! Engineers and chess players and route finders know what I am talking about.

It is equally true that conflicts of belief can be troubling, painful, depressing, unmooring. Cognitive dissonance can induce extreme mental suffering. ('Doxastic dissonance' is a better name for it.) We want certain knowledge, but the indications are many that it is out of reach in this life. We are thrown back on that miserable substitute, belief. Belief butts up against counter-belief. The joys of dialectic transmogrify into acrimonious division.

So Sextus and the boys are on to something. They see the problem, not that their their diagnosis, let alone their cure, can be reasonably endorsed. Unfortunately, they see the problem onesidedly. They see what is bad about belief and the conflicts of belief. But they ignore the good. Insofar forth they could be called epistemic wimps.

This fits well with the decadence of the late Hellenic schools of Greek philosophy. Things went south after the passing of the titans, Plato and Aristotle. Social and cultural decline brought with it a turn away from pure theory and a concern with the practical and therapeutic. The desire for knowledge gave way to a desire for freedom from disturbance.

That is a peace not worth wanting as I argued the other day.

I now hand off to the Franz Brentano, Vier Phasen der Philosophie.

Reading Now: When Reason Goes on Holiday (Encounter, 2016)

Neven Sesardić is a Croatian philosopher, born in 1949. He has taught philosophy at universities in Croatia, the United States, Japan, England, and Hong Kong. An earlier book of his is Making Sense of Heritability (Cambridge U. P., 2005).

“Gripping, thoroughly researched and documented, judiciously argued, and alternately depressing and infuriating, Sesardić’s courageous book offers the astounding spectacle of some of the greatest minds of the past century―including Carnap, Einstein, Gödel, and Wittgenstein―adopting odious political views, supporting Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, for simplistic and plainly fallacious reasons. More shocking still is the story of how prominent journals, encyclopedias, and the American Philosophical Association itself have sacrificed academic integrity on the altar of political activism. Great philosophers repeatedly reveal themselves as terrible thinkers when it comes to morality and politics, plunging headlong into complex controversies without drawing elementary distinctions or differentiating degrees of good or evil.” ―Daniel Bonevac, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin

The book arrived yesterday. Flipping though it, I was surprised and pleased to find a quotation from one William Vallicella on p. 168. This is from a letter that protests a proposed group resolution on the death penalty:

What then could justify the APA in taking sides on the sort of broadly philosophical issues that tend to become bones of contention in the political arena? . . . Furthermore, by what principle was the death penalty chosen as the topic of an APA resolution rather than, say, partial-birth abortions? Should the APA endorse a package of positions, issuing pronunciamentos on the Balanced Budget Amendment, handgun control and ebonics? If not, why not? (William Vallicella).

Here is a second, later letter of protest (November 2003) that I sent to the A. P. A. before cancelling my membership:

Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?

An important essay by Robert Nozik. (HT: C. Cathcart) Teaser quotation:

Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued people in a society, those with the most prestige and power, those with the greatest rewards. Intellectuals feel entitled to this. But, by and large, a capitalist society does not honor its intellectuals. Ludwig von Mises explains the special resentment of intellectuals, in contrast to workers, by saying they mix socially with successful capitalists and so have them as a salient comparison group and are humiliated by their lesser status.

A Bias of the Intellectual

Robert Paul Wolff:

A rich, complex vocabulary properly deployed is one evidence of a strong mind endowed with a wealth of knowledge. As I was watching portions of Trump’s press conference yesterday, despite being made physically ill by the man, I somewhat reflexively noticed the extraordinary paucity of his linguistic resources. Even when he is talking about something he has prepared himself on, he seems utterly unable to use more than the most primitive vocabulary, inaccurately and banally.

Professor Wolff is down with a bad case of TDS if he is made physically ill by Trump's speech. And yes, the paucity of the Orange Man's linguistic resources cannot be gainsaid. But might it be that we intellectuals have an inordinate respect for verbal intelligence? And an unjustified contempt for those who don't read books?

Among many, myself included, verbal facility is a touchstone of intelligence, or rather of one sort of intelligence, verbal intelligence. Barack Obama has it. He is a master of soaring rhetoric and empty phraseology. By way of exaggerated contrast, George W. Bush couldn't rub a subject and a verb together and come up with a clean sentence in his mother tongue. But there is more to intelligence than the ability to sling words while avoiding syntactic howlers. And when it comes to this 'more,' Obama has proven to be sadly lacking. Obama is an uncommonly good bullshitter and blather-mouth, but the net effect of his presidency has been negative. He lost the Middle East. And to mention only one domestic disaster, his policies, appointments and interventions into local affairs have set back race relations and have led to a terrible spike in inner city violence. The rule of law has been weakened under his administration.

What Exactly is Trumpism?

Another excellent column by VDH. Excerpt:

Trump admires people who make money. He doesn’t buy that those, to take one example, with Ph.D.s and academic titles could have made money if only they had wished—but for lots of reasons (most of them supposedly noble) chose not to. For Trump, credentialed academic expertise in anything is in no way comparable to achievement in the jungle of business.

Instead, in Trump’s dog-eat-dog world, only a few bruisers make it to the top and the real, big money — the ultimate barometer of competence. He sees the “winners” as knights to be enlisted in behalf of the weaker others. He might not quite say that a Greek professor [a professor of Greek] is inherently useless, and he might not worry much about preserving the ancient strands of Western civilization. But he might remind us that such pursuits are esoteric and depend on stronger, more cunning and instinctual sorts, whose success alone can pay for such indulgences. Without Greek professors, the world can still find shelter and fuel; without builders and drillers, there can be no Greek professors. Brain surgery and guided missiles both require lots of money without which decline is inevitable.

……………………

There is an important truth here. The life of the mind is a noble and magnificent thing, and philosophy is the noblest pursuit of them all. The vita contemplativa is an end in itself and the vita activa its handmaiden.

But the spaces of serenity and contemplative repose must be secured by "cunning and instinctual sorts," the rude men who enforce the law and defend us from the barbarians within and the warriors who defend us from the barbarians without. And none of this is possible without the "builders and the drillers."

We intellectuals have a certain amount of justified contempt for the businessmen who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. We are disgusted by the vulgarity, ostentation, and ignorance of types like Trump. And they return the 'compliment.' The truth is that we need each other's virtues.

We need a man like Trump in the White House now after the disasters both foreign and domestic perpetrated by an adjunct law professor and community organizer with no experience of the real world whose only credentials are a gift of gab and a dark skin pigmentation.

Among the Joys of Philosophy

One of the joys of philosophy is purely aesthetic in Kierkegaard's sense: the joy of exploring the highways and byways, the twists and turns of human thought. Included in this are the pleasures of books and quiet and warm lamp light early in the morning and late at night.

Why Keep a Journal?

It was 46 years ago yesterday that I first began keeping a regular journal under the motto, nulla dies sine linea. Before that, as a teenager, I kept some irregular journals.

Why maintain a journal?

When I was 16 years old, my thought was that I didn't want time to pass with nothing to show for it. That is still my thought. The unrecorded life is not worth living. For we have it on good authority that the unexamined life is not worth living, and how examined could an undocumented life be?

The maintenance of a journal aids mightily in the project of self-individuation. Like that prodigious journal writer Søren Kierkegaard, I believe we are here to become actually the individuals we are potentially. Our individuation is not ready-made or given, but a task to be accomplished. The world is a vale of soul-making; we are not here to improve it, but to be improved by it.

Henry David Thoreau, another of the world's great journal writers, said in Walden that "Most men live lives of quiet desperation." I would only add that without a journal, one's life is one of quiet dissipation. One's life dribbles away, day by day, unreflected on, unexamined, unrecorded, and thus fundamentally unlived. Living, for us humans, is not just a biological process; it is fundamentally a spiritual unfolding. To mean anything it has to add up to something, and that something cannot be expressed with a dollar sign.

I have always had a horror of an unfocused existence. In my early twenties, I spoke of the supreme desideratum of a focused existence. What bothered me about the people around me, fellow students in particular, was the mere aestheticism of their existence: their aimless drifting hither and yon, their lack of commitment, their unseriousness, their refusal to engage the arduous task of self-definition and self-individuation, their willingness to be guided and mis-guided by social suggestions. In one's journal one collects and re-collects oneself; one makes war against the lower self and the forces of dispersion.

Another advantage to a journal and its regular maintenance is that one thereby learns how to write, and how to think. An unwritten thought is still a half-baked thought: proper concretion is achieved only by expressing thoughts in writing and developing them. Always write as well as you can, in complete sentences free of grammatical and spelling errors. Develop the sentences into paragraphs, and if the Muse is with you those paragraphs may one day issue in essays, articles, and chapters of books.

Finally, there is the pleasure of re-reading from a substantial temporal distance. Six years ago I began re-reading my journal in order, month by month, at a 40 year distance. So of course now I am up to October 1976. 40 Years from now I will be at the present, or dead. One.

Circular Definitions, Arguments, and Explanations

In the course of our discursive operations we often encounter circularity. Clarity will be served if we distinguish different types of circularity. I count three types. We could label them definitional, argumentative, and explanatory.

A. The life of the mind often includes the framing of definitions. Now one constraint on a good definition is that it not be circular. A circular definition is one in which the term to be defined (the definiendum) or a cognate thereof occurs in the defining term (the definiens). 'A triangle is a plane figure having a triangular shape,' though plainly true, is circular. 'The extension of a term is the set of items to which the term applies' is an example of a non-circular definition.

B. Sometimes we argue. We attempt to support a proposition p by adducing other propositions as reasons for accepting p. Now one constraint on a good argument is that it not be circular. A circular argument in is one in which the conclusion appears among the premises, sometimes nakedly, other times clothed for decency's sake in different verbal dress. Supply your own examples.

C. Sometimes we explain. What is it for an individual x to exist? Suppose you say that for x to exist is for some property to be instantiated. One variation on this theme is to say that for Socrates to exist is for the haecceity property Socrateity to be instantiated. This counts as a metaphysical explanation, and a circular one to boot. For if Socrateity is instantiated, then it is is instantiated by Socrates who must exist to stand in the instantiation relation. The account moves in a circle, an explanatory circle of embarrassingly short diameter.

Suppose someone says that for x to exist is for x to be identical to something or other. They could mean this merely as an equivalence, in which case I have no objection. But if they are shooting for a explanation of existence in terms of identity-with-something-or-other, then they move in an explanatory circle. For if x exists in virtue of its identity with some y, then y must exist, and you have moved in an explanatory circle.

Some philosophers argue that philosophers ought not be in the business of explanation. I beg to differ. But that is a large metaphilosophical topic unto itself.

Passion and Cogency

Passionate presentation does not add to the cogency of one's arguments. But neither does it detract. One's audience, however, will likely mistake the presence of passion for the absence of reason. So the best policy in most circumstances is to present one's arguments in an emotionally neutral way. Or at least that used to be the best policy. In this age of the short attention span things may be different.