Splitting the Cartesian Hair

Abstract

It may be useful to think of doubt and belief as games; it certainly takes the pressure off for those of us who were raised in the old existentialist order. However, they are not games that play very well on the prairie. In the evening of my life as a rhetorician, I am haunted by the voices of two students: first, Sam, who came from a farm in southern Minnesota, who turned up in my first-year composition course. When I asked him to support an argument with several points of evidence, he broke a term’s laconic silence to state: “You shouldn’t ask a man his reasons. That’s insulting. You better assume he has them.” Then Arlo, selfidentified as a right-wing libertarian, who resisted Rogerian rhetoric, the believing game writ large. I had asked him to lay out a fellow student’s position supporting gun control and try to find common ground. He steadily refused. “If I laid out my opponent’s argument sympathetically,” he said, “I’d be honor-bound to consider changing my mind.” These students haunt me not because their positions are comic, though they are, or unassailable, which they are not, but because they cast the shadow of a kind of black mass in the church of our profession. The anthropologist and philosopher Loren Eiseley, in the later years of his own professional journey, was tormented by a kind of trickster figure, “masked and demonic,” which rose up to mock his every pretension. In his essay “The Star Thrower,” Eiseley associates this apparition with “the trickster as I have seen his role performed among the remnant of a savage people long ago.” Perhaps in southern Minnesota, for all I know. This is how Eiseley characterizes the figure he calls “a jokester present at the most devout of ceremonies”: This creature never laughed; he never made a sound. Painted in black, he followed silently behind the officiating priest, mimicking, with the added flourish of a little whip, the gestures of the devout one. His timed and stylized posturings conveyed a derision infinitely more formidable than actual laughter. (175)