Construction and Criticism

 There is a--sometimes helpful--caution against defining ourselves by what we are against, rather than what we are for. This dichotomy, however, if left unchallenged, can undermine our ability to develop our positive views.

The dichotomy often works through a spatial metaphor of where our attention is directed. Are we focused on our opponent's views or our own? What is wrong or what is right? I want to challenge this dichotomy. In doing so, I will be able to explain part of what is right in the caution noted above.

Suppose you direct your attention only at developing your own positive view, completely apart from criticizing others' views. No one is proposing we do this, of course, but it is a helpful limit case. If you were to do this, it seems, the only resources you could draw from would be those you already possessed. If you encountered a view you initially disagreed with, you would lack any way to engage with it. You could not, per hypothesis, criticize it, nor could you--since you disagree with it--adopt it as a resource. Perhaps you could find views you were unsure of or initially accepting of, but these could only fill in gaps you recognized.

 On the other hand, suppose you only criticized others' views, with no positive view of your own. From what standpoint could you do this? You need some kind of viewpoint on the opposing view to level a coherent critique on it from. Even if you are attempting to level the claim that the opposing view is incoherent on its own terms, you must develop a positive view of how the elements of the view can or cannot hang together and how they might interact.

My view is that the construction of a positive view always occurs through criticism of opposing views. There are two claims here: if you criticize a view, you will thereby be developing an opposed positive view, however minimal, and if you seek to develop a positive view, you will need people who disagree to enable you to develop that view.

When we criticize a view, then, whether we like it or not, we are developing an alternative view partially informed by this resistance. If we do this at too abstract a level, rather than engaging charitably with other views, we are prone to have our views defined by what our opponents oppose. This danger arises, however, not from focusing on resisting what is bad, but from failing to resist them as fellow human seekers of truth. On the contrary, our very pursuit of truth requires that we criticize other views in order to suss out what in them is right and clarify our own views in comparison to them.

If you think this way, it motivates an increase in articulated disagreement the more similar an alternative view is to one's own, since the very similarity forces more clarity in one's own articulation, whereas an obviously different view requires minimal work to articulate the difference.

This is one of the reasons it is so irritating to hear deconstruction chastised for tearing down: tearing down, done at a sufficient level of detail, is a way of constructing one's own views. Finding what was wrong with an old view is an essential part of constructing a new one. Framing the right question is halfway to finding the solution.