Doxa and Cognitive Breaks

Marc Angenot
French Language and Literature, McGill

We judge each other in exactly the same way:

we each consider the other as being a lunatic.
Saint Jerome on the polemics between Christians and pagans

Are public languages (as opposed to esoteric, i.e., scholarly or disciplinary

discourses) that coexist in a given state of society to be distinguishedbeyond their
diverging points of view, the clash of data retained or set aside, the disparity of their
objectives as well as of the interests that fuel themby their incompatible cognitive and argumentative characters? The author suggests that such breaks may divide at a
given point the topography of public opinion. For heuristic ends he outlines three
degrees of argumentative breaks: () a weak form, in which the impression of insurmountable disagreement is supercial, the conict between the individuals in question being attached to mannerisms of thinking and expression; () argumentative
impasses that are linked to presuppositions and premises resolutely placed beyond
any doubt; () nally, and most radically, certain ways of reasoning about the world,
of nding connections and meaning in it, of perceiving a direction over the course
of things, of posing oneself as a subject in society and history, and legitimizing this
worldview, no longer dier only in their presuppositions, premises, and the basic axiology, but in the very rules dening the arguableto the point that some of these
ways of reasoning will appear, to those who remain on the outside, as unintelligible,
unacceptable, and arising from a crazy type of logic.

Abstract

Poetics Today : (Fall ). Copyright by the Porter Institute for Poetics and
Semiotics.

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The Problem

There are a number of interrelated problems that one encounters in most

works on political ideologies, on the doxa, and on the argumentation in
public languages. These problems do not appear to have been dealt with
systematically by discourse analysts, specialists in rhetoric, or other social
scientists. These problems have certainly been debated by several contemporary philosophers, but the responses and solutions they have oered us,
considered as they surely must be within the history of major modern philosophical issues, are contradictory. I will restrict myself to dening the problem, discussing a number of conceptions, confronting certain key cases,
outlining some paths to follow, and nally proposing a sort of working programbut nothing like any denitive conclusion.
The problem I am considering may be expressed in the following question. Are public discourses that coexist in a given state of society (distinguished from esoteric, that is, scholarly or disciplinary discourses) to be demarcatedbeyond their divergence in viewpoints, in the data retained or
set aside, in their objectives as well as the interests that fuel themby their
incompatible cognitive and argumentative characters? If this is the case, are such
cognitive incompatibilities and heterogeneities exceptional or common?
My question boils down to the possibility of distinguishing a category
of dierences unlikely to be resolved through discussion: seemingly insurmountable conicts in which the very rules of debate and the fundamental
assumptions do not form a common ground and in which, as Saint Jerome
says in the epigraph to this essay (, :), the adversaries end up by
regarding one another as lunatics.
In the terms used by Ernst Bloch ( []) in his famous essay of
the s on the Nazi mentality, Erbschaft dieser Zeit: are there among us
some discursively and argumentativelyhence socially and civically
noncontemporaries living in some sort of cognitive noncontemporaneity
(Ungleichzeitigkeit)? Or, transposing onto the common doxa a concept derived from the epistemology of science, should we assume that there may
be epistemological breaks dividing, at given points in time, the topography of
public opinion?
To start with a simple intuition that is, I believe, widely shared, it seems
to me that dialogues of the deaf are, in public life, the rule rather than the
exception. But rhetorical studies persist in considering as the norm debates
between people who ultimately share the same rationality and for whom,
if one is rationally optimistic, the sharpest dierences arise not from cognitive deafness but from sheer misunderstanding. It seems obvious to me that
public disagreements often go beyond contentious facts, diering points of

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view, unshared values and principles. My adversary does not appear to belong to my mental universe. He or she seems not to clash with me by his
or her choice of arguments alone, or his or her hierarchy of values, but by
his or her very way of deciphering the world and arguing about it, by the
logic of his or her reasoning.
The situation I am touching on here echoes a question that has become
very important in philosophy, that of the unity or the diversity of reason,
of the possible convergence or the irreparable divergence of rationalities. It
seems to me that contemporary rhetorical theory, both classical and contemporary, turns a deaf ear to these speculations and continues to base its
analyses on the Aristotelian axiom of the unity of reason. The opposite idea
of diversity is nowhere recognized: neither by the older rhetoric, whose
paradigm was that of a rationally acceptable topical repertory (although
not without latent contradictions) that dened the order of the probable
and a periphery of fallacies used by the simpleminded and of sophisms manipulated by exceedingly clever rhetors; nor by the new rhetorics of the
twentieth century (those of Cham Perelman, Stephen Toulmin, and others,
which also deal with deviant and abnormal reasonings as accidents or aberrations); nor by the epistemological models that, from Thomas Kuhn to
Michel Foucault, devise successions of paradigms or epistemes but neglect
synchronic and enduring incompossible coexistences of paradigms within disciplinary elds; nor, at least in a theorized form, by the sociologists of the
media, of political life, and of public opinion; nor, nally, by the rationalist philosophers, who with a certain optimistic voluntarism, establish, as
does Jrgen Habermas, rules for open and democratic discussion. None of
these seem to envisage as a heuristic premise the hypothesis that everyone in
society does not necessarily think in the same manner, that everyone shares
neither the same reason nor the same logic.
Most recent studies of paralogisms, sophisms, and fallacies limit themselves to taxonomies and typologies of errors in reasoning, deliberate or
involuntary, without rst recognizing that there exists dynamics of un-reason,
that a bad reason is always followed by a number of other ones. Furthermore timeless and formal rhetorical taxonomies place defective reasonings
between the simple and naive erroroccasioned by a surreptitious conceptual shift, a faulty apprehension of data, an inappropriate manipulation of
a toposand deliberate sophistry designed to mislead. Hence they circumvent the historical and sociological approach that calls for integrating such
sophistrywhich is neither naive and occasional error nor manipulation
meant to misleadwithin collective facts of false consciousness and alienation.

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The Quarrel of the Philosophers

At the dawn of modernity, philosophers thought in terms of the unity of

reason, the righteous, and the true. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Joseph de Maistre coined a famous maxim: there are necessarily several ways of being in the wrong, but there is only one way of being in the
right. But being the reactionary and theocrat he was, he did not consider
the unity of reason in stating this axiom but rather the unity of faith and
revelation.The philosophers secular reason conferred on this religious pretension unity and exclusivity. It followed that those who did not think like
them were placed outside of rationalitybelonging to another time, possibly, or victims of prejudice, but denitely unreasonable. In our late modernity, all this has been changed for a type of relativism that has engendered
its own dogma: to each his own truth.
Contemporary philosophical schools clash in an endless debate on this
question of the unity of reason and on the possibility of a true or valid cognition among universalism, objectivism, communitarianism, and relativism.
Some postmodern philosophers, such as Jean-Franois Lyotard (), contrasted two orders of divergence. One is litigation, in which people do not
get along but accept certain premises and base their disagreement on these
very common premises (such as the Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards who,
in spite of their deep contentions, commonly accepted the premise that
military treason is a crime); the other is the situation in which a dirend
(disputation) occurs: there it is no longer possible to speak about degrees of
disagreement since no common axiomatic base would enable measurement
and no referees rule acceptable to the two sides can arbitrate their quarrel.
Lyotards reection on litigations and dirends was developed against the
philosophers of democratic debate la Habermas, whose starting point
too optimistic and axiomatic in the eyes of Lyotardis the possibility for
every citizen of goodwill to attain a common ground with his or her adversaries and to reach a rational compromise.
In this polarized debate, philosophers of the new rhetoric intervene to
break the deadlock. Manuel Maria Carrilho, with his recent subtle essay
Rhtoriques de la modernit (), comes to mind. For Carrilho, whose thought
can be related to that of the thinker of problematology, the Belgian Michel
Meyer, rhetoric has reverted back to philosophy to settle permanently
within it and to put an end to the crisis of subject and reason that haunted
the nineteenth centurya crisis that exhausted itself in its struggle to establish necessity and universality as the ultimate foundations of philosophical
reasoning.
The rhetorical turn in philosophy, inseparable from a theory of contin-

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gency, pluralism, and problematicity, is presented by Carrilho as a solution,

or at least a way out from the modern crisis of reason. The will to rationally
validate and objectify ones opinion, and the will to truth, are foundational
to communication in human societies, but Carrilho objects to Habermass
establishment of the norm as the criterion of argumentation. The appeal to
such an ideal norm pretence distances itself excessively from both actual,
often enigmatic, opaque, and unresolved situations of debate and from an
empirical world that can also be grasped through conjectures, analogies,
tropes, and gures and not exclusively through logical clarications, which
are not necessarily within the reach of everyones thought and language.
Nevertheless, Carrilho is not inclined to endorse the cognitive nihilism or
Pyrrhonism of the disciples of Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. Carrilho
strives to give a meaning to a notion of relativism that is neither tribalism,
secessionism, nor solipsism, whose avatars can be observed in various
contemporary intellectual movements. Nor does he feel obliged to embrace
the alternative of pure rationalist positivism. Summing up the debate on
the incommensurability of paradigms (Kuhn versus Hilary Putnam) and returning to the discussion of Lyotards philosophy of the dirend, Hilary
Carrilho elaborates on his vision of the philosophical eld in terms of conictual pluralism. He successfully shows that the concept of relativism
(which in many instances serves as a noise of disapproval) is quite polysemic and sees a hyperbolic and forced interpretation in the Lyotardian
conception of a coexistence of absolutely heteronomous, irreducible, and
untranslatable rules of the rhetorical game. After all does not Lyotard
want to convince his reader? Hence does he not admit a common logic in the
very act of demonstrating the impossibility of an arbitration of dierences
of opinion?
An Omnipresent Problem and Some Diagnoses

The problem of the cognitive diversity of conicting opinions and ideological systems is dealt with by many contemporary researchers in specic
analyses and case studies. But it is never dealt with clearly as a full-edged
theoretical problem. Whether they are studying religious beliefs or secular
ideologies, analysts are bound to clash on premises, cognitive paradigms,
or a hermeneutics of the situation that appear to them not to proceed from
what they would consider common sense. All the works that analyze the
great ideological aberrations of the century now behind usfascism, antiSemitism, Stalinism, various brands of nationalismend up somehow indicating that we are not simply faced with a particular vision of the world,

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or with specic beliefs, but with a sui generis way of thinking, a special turn
of mind that appears to result from a specic mental engineering.
Psychopathological characterizations, for example, can be encountered here
and there in all the writings of the historians of anti-Semitism. Of course,
these historians do not theoretically endorse their categories of ideological
madness out of fear of reverting to positivistic explanations of a Gustave
Le Bon (, ) and other crowd psychologists of the s or to the
shaky conjectures made by early psychoanalysts that claimed they could put
mass ideologies on their couches. In any case, every recent book on antiSemitism allows itselfwithout claiming any nosographic rigor but merely
because it is suggestivethe license to place a label on such and such a
theme of propaganda or such and such a conspiratorial argument as being
paranoid or the like. A Paranoiac is how Edouard Drumont is better
described, judges Michel Winock in a footnote at the very beginning of his
Edouard Drumont & Cie (). Mental alienation and paranoid appear
as early as the second page. These words are thrown around as metaphorical suggestions, unavoidable catachreses that should not be taken literally.
The historian has no intention of substituting for a postmortem psychiatrist, and he knows that the man Drumont in his time appeared no more
pathological than the majority of his contemporaries. What Winock wishes
to touch on is precisely what I am speaking of: namely, that an anti-Semite is
not simply someone who harbors odious political convictions and a vicious
vision of certain groups. The anti-Semite is someone who has applied himself
or herself to reasoning, and who even reasons tremendously but in a weird mannerjust like the patient in what French psychiatrists in the late nineteenth
century simply used to call la folie raisonnante (reasoning madness). The
anti-Semite is someone who convinces himself or herself and launches on
a crusade to persuade others of the Jews harmful role with arguments that
appear to him or her as quite convincing where they could be, for the majority of others, twisted and specious.
Anti-Semitism, according to all its analysts, from Lon Poliakov ()
to Zeev Sternhell () and Pierre-Andr Taguie (), is indeed not
only an ideology (a set of ideological themes, contents, slogans) but also a
special way of directing ones thinking and of persuading others. Anxietyridden and conspiratorial, as Poliakov once remarked, this way of thinking
is close to other obsessional ideologies, like the hatred for the Jesuits in the
time of Louis-Philippe or the rhetoric of the anti-Masonic crusade of the
Roman Catholics in the s. But if it is not absolutely alone in its
irrationality, in its epistemology of a diabolical causality, it does not conict any less with the ordinary ways of reasoning. Poliakovs concept of
diabolical causality claims to bring to light the cognitive core that inheres

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in anti-Semitism and other ideologies of that ilk. These ideologies of resentment are the great storytellers of conspiracy reasonings (see Angenot
). The enemies they have fashioned tirelessly weave treacherous webs
and will not rest until they set their snares. As these malicious intrigues cannot be conrmed through direct observation, a huge secret conspiracy must
be presumed, and one must convince oneself of its existence as soon as the
hypothesis has been considered. As resentment gets tangled up in its own
contradictions and its claims and rancors remain outwardly unintelligible,
the conspiracy can only be endlessly reconrmed in its eyes.
Not all modern researchers have resorted to medical metaphors in
dealing with extreme ideologies. False consciousness was what certain
Marxists diagnosed in both fascist and Stalinist persuasions from the s
to the ssee the work of Joseph Gabel (), for example. But this
Marxist-Hegelian term also suggests a discrepancy with ones authentic relationship to the world, an alienation from an authentic consciousness.
It also refers to ways of thinking and mentalities that are foreign to cognitive health and that explain certain reprehensible adherences and extravagant collective beliefs. Indeed, the Stalinist is also painted as being
schizophrenic by Gabel in his pioneering works on the schizophrenia of
bureaucratic states (the concept was drawn from Minkowskys [] nosographic meaning).1
Three Degrees of Cognitive Incompatibility

If the idea of cognitive diversity in public life can be accepted in a heuristic way, the next and more concrete question becomes that of degrees
and thresholds of cognitive gap. We are obviously not faced here with a
simple alternative: either a rational community of thinking or an insurmountable break. Such a binarism would itself be attached to somewhat
rigid and Manichaean forms of thinking. Rather, the sociological and typological question is that of deciding what, in a given state of society, may
. I might have discussed within this contextthis article remains a sketchthe two major
breaks that traditionally x the boundaries and the unity of adult and civilized reason,
namely: that of primitive thinking (a category judged today as being prejudiced and illusory,
for primitive reasoning uses, in a specic context, the same rational improvised approach
as you and me) and that of the childs reasoning, dealt with and periodized according to age
in Jean Piagets genetic psychology. I believe it is the linguist Andr Martinet who, in his
discussion on the arbitrariness of the sign, recalls a child saying: Dad, how did we nd out
the suns name? What does one answer? The childs reason and the structuralist linguists
reason do not belong to the same logical world. One can always reply to this little girl or boy
that we could not ask the Sun its name because it is too far away and too hot, and so we had
to invent it, but this unsatisfying explanation is far from being an adequate explanation of
the concept of the linguistic sign in Ferdinand de Saussures Course on General Linguistics!

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form a signicant dierence between an ideological community and the prevailing doxa. What threshold should we adopt? An occasional fallacy or
blind spot does not apparently constitute a signicant cognitive dierence.
The predominance of certain argumentative schemes can be striking, but
does it cut o those who have a predilection for them from those who never
have recourse to such schemes?
The reduction of a vast corpus to a few preferred argumentative schemes
is always an impressive and useful endeavor. Albert O. Hirschman (),
in studying what he called the rhetoric of reaction, reduced its argumentation over two centuriesfrom Edmund Burke writing against the French
Revolution to the present timeto three recurrent argumentative schemes:
Innocuity, Jeopardy, Perversity. One can, however, object that these argumentative schemes are not at all specic to this sector of reactionary ideologies. The argument of the perverse eect, for example, is a basic component (and a breakthrough) of early sociological thinkingunless one would
include all of this thinking, beginning with Auguste Comte and Herbert
Spencer, in the rhetoric of reaction.
Others have spoken of frameworks of thinking, that is, barriers and
censures that set for a social group or an ideological sect the limits on
the thinkable and the arguable. For others still, insurmountable misunderstandings between individuals depend on presuppositions so deeply inscribed that they resist objectifying. Hence the Socratic, maieutic rule of
requiring debaters to return, layer by layer and proposition by proposition,
to the ultimate premises. But such dierences of opinion are nevertheless
resolvedagainst whatever resistance or at whatever expense and eort
since the repressed presuppositions can be brought to consciousness, objectied, and subjected to debate.
I would suggest, for heuristic purposes, that we can think of three degrees
of argumentative breaks:
. It is rst of all advisable to set out a weak form, in which the impression of insurmountable disagreement is only apparent and supercial:
there the conict between the individuals, even if it lasts, is attached
to mannerisms of thinking and expression, to poorly deciphered pragmatic games, misinterpreted for psychological or cultural reasons.2
. Let us next set out the case of argumentative impasses that are linked
to presuppositions and premises so resolutely placed beyond any
. You Just Dont Understand () and Thats Not What I Meant ()we recognize these
titles of two recent American feminist best-sellers by the linguist Deborah Tannen: Men and
women using the same words never mean exactly the same things; they resort to opposite
pragmatic tactics, and the verbal connections between the two sexes from this point on are
woven with misunderstandings.

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doubt, to such a fundamental axiology, that no maieutics will be able

to deconstruct them and no debate will end up problematizing them
or making room for the point of view and the values of the adversary.
. Finally, at a still more radical level, certain ways of reasoning about
the world, of nding connections and meaning in it, of perceiving a direction in the course of things, of posing oneself as a subject in society
and history, and of legitimizing this worldview, will no longer dier
only in the presuppositions, the premises, the basic axiology.They will
dier on the very rules dening the arguable, so much so that, to
those who remain on the outside, some of these ways of reasoning
will appear unacceptable, unintelligible, arising from a crazy type
of logic and not simply from a unilateral or poorly deduced one.3
Pathos and Logos

I seem to be leaving aside the vast area of reection on pathos and logos and
the logic of emotions (La Logique des sentiments [] is the title of an essay
by the French philosopher and psychologist Thodule Ribot at the beginning of the last century). There is no doubt that psychological or psychosocial motives underlie the choice of argumentative schemes, the persistence
in never questioning some presuppositions and certain emotional shortcuts
in reasoning. But these alleged motives do not form a separate category
from the cognitive paradigms and reasonings, since the latter always conceal an aective dimension. The logic of emotions, inseparable from
the logic of interests in social life, is in fact the whole of natural logic.
Preliminary Requirement: Reciprocity of Perspectives

It is generally accepted that reciprocity of perspectives forms the minimal basis

of any discussion. This term refers to Antonio Gomez Morianas () excellent analysis of the meeting of Don Quixote and the merchants, an analysis that highlights cognitive conicts as an object of novelistic irony from the
birth of this literary genre. Don Quixote requires the merchants he meets
on his way to acknowledge that Dulcinea del Toboso is the most beautiful woman in the universe. The merchants, who have never seen her, are
stunned by such chivalrous swagger, but as they belong to a modern, mercantile, and practical mentality, they ask the noble knight to produce a
cameo or a portrait of the fair lady so they might be able to judge on actual
. It goes without saying that we are dening ideal types and that, in practice, these three
categories may intersect and accumulate.

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evidence. To which the Man of La Mancha replies with passion that if he

were to show them a portrait of Dulcinea, they would obviously acquire
no merit in admitting the fact and that it behooves them to recognize the
charms of the lady upon his word. In this dialogue of the deaf, the archaic Don Quixotes logic of feudal honor stands opposed to an emerging
experimental logic. This comic episode is presented by Cervantes, at the
beginning of modern times, as the encounter of two noncontemporary (ungleichzeitig) mental universes that must remain absurd to one another.
Argumentative Clashes as Divergences of Interests

The sociology of knowledge is not a sector of sociology proper, but rather a

particular program of reections and procedures. One of its central concerns, even before Karl Mannheim ( []) gave a name to this program, has been the diverse forms of reasoning at work in a society, forms
that, according to Mannheim, were to be interpreted in relation to specic
forms of social experience. Thus, Vilfredo Pareto at the turn of the century
in his Les Systmes socialistes (); Max Scheler transposing Nietzsche
in a sociological essay on resentment, Vom Umsturz der Werte; and Mannheim himself in his famous work, Ideologie und Utopie ( [])4 associate ways of reasoning and arguing with certain social groups with certain
interests connected to specic ideological or religious communities. The
recent works by the French sociologist Raymond Boudon on Lart de se persuader des ides douteuses, fragiles ou fausses () and Le juste et le vrai ()
insightfully pursue this sort of problematic.
These sociological analyses highlight a basic conict: between the communitys use of certain ways of reasoning and the truthfulness and rationality of the
argumentative types encountered there in association with specic social
experiences and interests, with their blind spots, their denials, their recurring paralogisms. The nature of this conict has received very diverse and
never quite satisfactory explanations from the thinkers and sociologists I
have just mentioned. Many assimilate, in a typically relativistic fashion, appropriateness and use to the psychological well-being of the social group.
They dissociate the usefulness of a given mythical construct from any reference to truth (which is what Sorel and Mannheim did in the nal analysis). Others go even further in radical relativism.They claim that there exist
only programs of truth, which succeed one another in history without any
transcendental critique being able to show that one was better than the
. Mannheims own main source of inspiration is undoubtedly Sorel and his concept of
myth in La dcomposition du marxisme () and particularly Rexions sur la violence (
[]).

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other or an improvement over another. An example of this can be found

in Paul Veynes essay Les Grecs ont-ils cru leurs mythes? ().
In many cases, the alleged psychosocial usefulness of a given rhetorical
apparatus appears to be in inverse relation to the rationality of the reasonings. Let us take the case of the thought of resentment according to Nietzsche
and Schelera good example of an ideological persuasion centered around
a reasoning that is generally judged as fallacious and, in the context of any
single individual, related to various types of reasoning madness.
Knowing that your merits are denied by the whole wide world, colliding
with malevolent people and obstacles that block your talents from reaching
their full potential, rebelling against the injustice of this situation: there is
no resentment in this. For resentment there must be a sophistic inversion that
leads to a very dierent conclusion: I do not accomplish anything, therefore
I possess transcendental qualities; others succeed where I fail, therefore their
success is due to unfair advantages, and the predominant values (to which I
attribute my apparent failure) are therefore impostures and deceptions. Such
is the core of a thought of resentment. One will immediately notice that the
sociologist of knowledge and the historian of ideas will have to nd strong
procedures of objectivation so as to avoid being accused of presumption
in American politico-militant jargon, this is called blame the victimwhen
attacking ideologies that are by nature grudge-bearing and paranoid.
The thought of resentment has been dened since Nietzsches Genealo
of Morals as a mode of production of values, a servile positioning with
regard to values. It is a production that seeks to dene itself by means of
underhanded and sophistic argumentations.The rhetoric of resentment appears to serve three concomitant ends. By demonstrating the current situation to be downright injustice, it lays the ground for the inversion of values,
explains the groups condition by rejecting ad alteram partem all its failures,
further justifying recourse to unrealistic tactics to change this condition.
This rhetoric also legitimizes a status of victim, which becomes the dominated ones mode of being. Finally, it devalues the values that the dominant ones hold dear by showing them up as chimerical, arbitrary, ignoble,
usurped, and prejudicial.5 In this way, the ideology of resentment reasons,
even develops very long chains of reasoning, but it does so by starting from
a tacit axiom: this world in which I feel my weakness and suer setbacks
and diculties is not the real one. There is something diabolically simple in
the reasonings of resentment. In ordinary logic, failures urge you to go
back to the original hypotheses and correct them; this is even the golden
. The morality of slaves, Nietzsche (: ) wrote in On the Genealo of Morals, opposes
from the outset a no to whatever does not form a part of itself, which is dierent from it,
which is its non-I: and it is this no which is its only creative act.

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rule of scientic method. In ideologies of resentment, failure does not prove

anything; on the contrary, failures transmute themselves into as many additional proofs that one is right and that decidedly the others will always put
spokes in ones wheels. A system in which denials of experience never serve
to cast a doubt on the axioms, but instead reinforce them, is an impregnable
system.
Resentment is admittedly not the only recurrent form of false consciousness in modern societies. The notion of unhappy consciousness can be
seen as complementary to it. In contemporary ideology, an analysis of this
argumentative type is found in Le Sanglot de lhomme blanc by Pascal Bruckner (): the guilt-inducing reasonings in Third World activism parallel the resentment viewed as reasoning that serves a grudge. Resentment
is therefore one of many cases of false consciousness in social life: modes
of alienation, bad conscience, self-hatred, puritanism, or contemptus mundi.
These psychosocial mechanisms seem synergetic, apparently stimulating
one another. As an aective and cognitive position, resentment thus complements not only the restrained rationality of technocrats, the cynicism of
the sated, the contemporary avatars of social Darwinism (transguring the
struggle for life paradigm into a principle that legitimizes social violence)
but also double games, bad and the already-mentioned unhappy consciousness, puritanism of the pure soul, social phobias of all types.
Class Consciousness

I do not claim to exhaust in this paragraph the multiple conceptions of

the ways of class knowing, linked, on the one hand, to supposedly objective interests and to a historical role associated with class, and on the
other hand, to alienations and attitudes of false consciousness. The various Marxisms since Franz Mehring and Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov
have found themselves describing class-related ways of thinking and value
systems: peasant mentalities (the word often recurs in this phrase, the
taciturn farmer not really having access to articulate thought) or petty
bourgeois worldviews, for instance. This stood as a discovery for such
Marxist critics of the s as Emmanuel Berl and Paul Nizan. They described the petty bourgeois intellectual as one characterized by moving
back and forth, indecision, the search for compromises: one whose class
roots trace back to his or her inability to settle on the good side, that of
the revolution. An infrastructural explanation was given to this regrettable limit of consciousness: the middle class is a class caught between two
res, hence, able neither resolutely to take the side of the proletariat nor to
take full advantage of the benets provided by the upper bourgeoisie. They

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likened it to a boat tossed back and forth on the waves of history, condemned
to chronic indecision, incapable of holding onto something real. It would
probably be appropriate to develop (but outside of the voluntarist and historistic framework in which it originated) this partly obsolete reection on
rhetoric and social classes.
A Question That Haunts Modernity

Intellectual modernity since Voltaire and Denis Diderot arises from the selfevident given that not everyone shares the same way of thinking. In an era
of rationalist monism, this amounted to saying that only some people reason according to universal logic, while others talk nonsense out of stupidity
and hatred of reason itself and of progress. This was the attitude of the proponents of the Enlightenment who were faced with the vile obscurantism
of religion. The philosophers religious adversary had to be argumentatively suppressed for the good of society and the progress of morals, but
the adversary was not technically refutable (if refuting him or her involved
not just having him or her condemned at the Tribunal of Reason, but also
making oneself heard by him or her, making our hostility intelligible to
him or her). By abandoning dialogue, one can demonstrate to reasonable
minds, ones peers, that the adversarys reasoning (or rather what in his or
her mind stands for reasoning), his or her fallacious apologetics, his or her
constant petitio principii, his or her absurd proofs by appeal to miracles
and prodigies, his or her intolerance are all outside the realm of reason. One
can speak against such a senseless system, satirize it, and endeavor to destroy
it with words, but it is futile to speak with such an adversary. It is impossible
to nd a common ground from which to initiate the discussion, since such
ground could only be that of rational argumentation and the opponent has
placed himself or herself elsewhere and outside it.
It is important to remember that the question of the argumentative break
rst manifested itself in, or as, the conict of Faith and Reason.The hopeless
dialogue of the deaf between Catholics and Republicans in France, between
free thinkers and supporters of the clergy throughout the nineteenth
century may appear outdated today, but in what has become its folkloric
dimension, it is the founder of a memory of modernity. In my book Mil
huit cent quatre-vingt-neuf, I analyzed the clerical Catholic discourse from
the point of view of its noncontemporaneousness as a ready-made comic element for the secular satirical press in the nineteenth century (Angenot :
). That discourse included the chaste hymns for convent girls, the
pious apologetics, So you are an Atheist, but do you know this is very serious for you? Do you know that you absolutely cannot be saved if you re-

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main in this state?; the ideology of the Reign of the Sacred Heart with its
temporal clock: in , the apparition of Jesus to St. Marie Alacoque, in
, the French Revolution: divine wrath and reign of Satan, in , the
promise of salvation to France freed from the Protestants, the Jews, and the
Masons; the theme of the Judeo-Masonic Eiel Tower contrasted with the
Sacr-Coeur de Montmartre watching over Paris. Everything in the French
Catholic press one century ago aimed at maintaining something like a combative archaism, striving to deepen its incompatibility with the republican
positivistic mentality.6
I would like also to refer in this context to Eugen Webers Satan francmaon (), a case study of Lo Taxils imposture in the Catholic milieu in
the s. The aair involved an experimental practical joke developed over several years in keeping with the cognitive break between modern France and the clericals. The antireligious journalist Taxil, an observer
pointed out, had noticed that the Catholic world lived almost entirely outside the ordinary world (Papus : ). Taxil feigned conversion, threw
himself at the feet of some bishops, such as Monsignor Fava of Grenoble,
who was deeply involved in the anti-Masonic crusade, and undertook a
search in a solitary mystication of eight years and a dozen works, designed
to reveal to Catholics the satanic secrets of Free Masonry, the absolute
limits of human credulity (Poliakov : ). He ended up persuading
serious theologians, that our crocodile playing the piano [Satan disguised
as a crocodile, in which disguise he was supposed to appear regularly to
Jules Ferry and other Republican politicians during Masonic rituals], and
Miss Vaughans trips to various planets, were not at all astonishing (Papus
: ). One nds it dicult, a contemporary points out after Taxils
disclosure of the mystication, to understand such naivete and such ignorance of the ways of modern society. The sentiment expressed here is, once
again, that the opponent does not belong to the same world as we.
The Ternary Paradigm of Positivism

The paradigm of incompatible cognitive types coexisting in a given state

of society and dedicated to ghting without understanding each other was
theorized in Western philosophy by Auguste Comte (). He traced
throughout the history of humankind but also, in the nineteenth century,
the competing coexistence of three states of knowledge: two recessive and historically condemnedthe religious and the metaphysicalone in progress
and destined to prevail, namely, positivist thinking.
. On the Social Reign of This Adorable Heart, see Angenot : .

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Doxa and Cognitive Breaks

527

This epistemological model presented by the founder of the religion of

humanity still remains obviously metaphysical, for it is thought out within
the framework of a historical determinism geared toward progress. It is appropriate to reject this ternary paradigm, which has survived for a long
time, perpetuated by the Grand Socialist Narrative, and which was still endorsed by the British critic Raymond Williams (). According to Williams, in modern societies and in the area of public opinion and ideologies,
there coexist three sectors, a dominant one, an emerging one, and a recessive onethe emerging being ipso facto progressive. We should know
that the emerging sector does not always end up establishing itself, that the
recessive one endures, and that the dominant one recuperates, recycles, and
syncretizes.
The Sophisms of Great Expectations

If the rationalist philosophers of Progress have argued for more than two
centuries against religious and reactionary irrationalities and have demonstrated the inevitable collapse of religion, there have also been reactionary sociologists since the nineteenth century who have dissected the
sophistry of progressive ideologies and have also diagnosed there sui generis
ways of thinking, in which, once again, one had to be either inside or outside. Pareto at the turn of the twentieth century devoted two volumes to the
Systmes socialistes in labor movement programs and doctrines. There he
claimed to uncover a way of thinking that was Utopian, rigid, fallacious,
and obviously irrational for those who did not share the militant connivances. The mistake made by many socialists, writes Pareto, is that they
always reason, without realizing it, by antitheses. Having demonstrated
that from one current institution some evils and injustices derive, they jump
to the conclusion that it is necessary to abolish it and put in its place an
institution based on the diametrically opposed principle. This way of reasoning was not specic to modern socialism: it went back a long way, and
Pareto saw it already operating in Thomas Mores Utopia. The reasoning
that More applies more or less knowingly, like the majority of reformers,
appears to be the following: A produces B, which is harmful; C is the opposite of A; therefore, by replacing A with C, we would make B disappear and
the evils which aict society would immediately cease (Pareto ,
:).
The topoi underlying the socialist argumentation did not then arise from
a modern historical dialectics but from a static binary structure that is to
be found in Aristotles Topics. If A is bad, then A is probably good, tertius
non datur (e.g., if capitalism is bad, then collectivism, which is anticapital-

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Poetics Today 23:3

ism, is good). If B is specic to A, what is said of A can be said about B (if

competition is specic to capitalist economy, then it is bad in itself and must
be suppressed); if something is absolutely good, then the more of this thing
the better (if socialization of the means of production is necessary, it is excellent to extend it in everything and everywhere); if one thing is useless, it
must disappear, and so forth. You have to choose between capitalism, with
its injustices and its vices, or collectivism and therefore its justice and benets. Having made a clean break with their present, certain transformations
that advanced capitalist societies (the massive development of university
teaching, the expansion and preponderance of intellectual professions, the
shortening of working hours, family allowances, universal health insurance,
etc.) seem to have been realized as a necessary consequence of the only
proletarian victory: socialist doctrines before in fact speculated about
the future with a constant error of historical insight, traceable to the extent
it was based on the cognitive system and rhetoric that Pareto criticized.
Sorel, criticizing in the same period orthodox socialist doctrine, also dened a sort of militant progressive epistemology, an epistemology particularly incapable of dealing with historical processes and far removed from
any materialistic turn of mind. He qualied this approach as the intellectualistic hypothesis: everything that is rational becomes real, and everything that is desirable appears attainable. The upper class has become
useless, it will disappear, he writes; class distinction is an anachronism, it
will fade away; the political authority of the State in a classless society no
longer will possess a raison dtre, hence it will disappear; the social organization of production following a pre-determined plan is possible and desirable, hence it will be realized, etc. This is the way, he concludes, todays
disciples of Engels speak! (Sorel : ).
The Irrationality of Doxa, the Soundness of the Paradox

An entirely dierent set of problems (incompatible, at least at rst sight,

with the type of reection that preceded) developed in parallel in modern
times. Its core is not the axiom of the progress of reason, or the struggle of
the proponents of the Enlightenment against religious prejudices, but, on
the contrary, the fundamental irrationality of any doxa, of any predominant
opinion, of the ideas accepted and endorsed by the majority.
Today as well as yesterday, the ideas that prevail in a state of society
can only be, by the nature of things and the weakness of the human intellect, a rhapsody of prejudices, fallacies, stereotypes, and misinterpretations.
Works of rhetoric, from Aristotle to the present time, examine errors of reasoning as marginal facts appended to a well-formed theory of argumenta-

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529

tion. They do not evaluate the empirical frequency of correct reasonings.

A good many modern minds, paradoxical of course, have maintained that
correct reasoning is and always has been the exception, that, in the prevaling doxa, one can only note the frequency of absurdities and sophisms
and the rarity of solid and rigorous argument.
In an insightful essay, Entretien sur des faits divers (), Jean Paulhan created a character who constantly nds in newspapers forms of reasoning
that are logically bizarre but still familiar, to the point of passing without
question. Thus, for instance, the title of a news item he analyzes is Assassin
for Ten Francs. Barbarians are then among usand barbarisms as well!
The good use of reason is no longer the most common thing in the world;
it is only within the reach of the happy few, those who have subjected their
prejudices to criticism and skeptically scrutinized all the accepted truths.
Here you nd the paradigm that intensies from Descartes to Nietzsche:
that of the solitary Thinker, cut o from the crowd, misunderstood by the
Vulgum Pecus. You also encounter the romantic paradigm of the Artist kept
apart from the Philistine in reciprocal contempt.
At the time of the romantic social prophets, Charles Fourier, with his
triple contempt for the philosophers, the economists, and the moralists of
his age, knew that he alone was in touch with the real and the true and convinced Just Muiron, Victor Considerant, and a handful of other admirers
of this fact. Fouriers work (: lxii) is characterized by an explicit will
to think apart from everyone, to radically separate himself from all other,
uncertain philosophers who, he contends, have never made the least
useful invention for the social body. It is what the author of the Thorie
des quatre mouvements superbly labeled practicing the Ecart absolu, the Absolute Break. Fourier compared himself to Columbus, who swerved from the
known maritime passages in order to discover new lands. The Fourierist
cognitive gap was made possible by a sui generis epistemology based on the
law of universal analogyan epistemology judged by Fourier as being
eminently scientic but whose very disciples believed that they should
distance themselves from it with shame. Fourier was a logothte (according
to Roland Barthes in his Sade, Fourier, Loyola), he was an inventor of logos,
the single proprietor of a specic epistemic formation, a Utopian spirit not
only by his conjectures but rst of all by his extraordinary way of imagining them and of putting into discourse a critique of the present world and
scientic certainties for the future.
In the same age, however, Robert Lyell, the founder of geology, maintained, as far as he was involved in these heroic times of emergence of
positive sciences, that a valid scientic thesis can be recognized a priori by
the fact that it dees common sense! Today, the resistance oered by so-

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called common sense is still denounced by scientists. Read a neo-Darwinian

theoretician like Stephen J. Gould: you will see him constantly underline
the fact that the processes of a nonteleological evolution are strictly unintelligible
and inexpressible in the categories of common sense. How would common sense admit that organs such as wings have evolved over thousands of
years prior to becoming functional? And what end could percent of an eye
or percent of a wing serve in an adaptive logic and in the commonplace
idea of natural selection? Before an ignorant audience, any creationist adversary achieves the easiest victories over the absurdity and the imposture
of evolutionism! 7
The two paradigmsthat of Comte dealing with the competition among
three states of knowledge on an evolutionary axis and that of the cognitive
soundness of paradoxescomplement each other in the sense that the slow
progress of reason can be shown as having been achieved by a small rational and critical minority guiding the masses, who remain likely to revert to
prejudices and to their fundamental irrationality. Such a paradigm serves
to increase the self-esteem of those paradox-loving rational critics. It is also
fundamentally pessimistic since it sees the majority as only capable of nding a simpleminded happiness in myths, platitudes, set idioms, and thoughtlessness and loathing the rational work of disenchantment with the world.
During the nineteenth century, the supposedly rational minority believed
it could count on the scientic and technical rationalization of the world as
its allyincreasingly and forcefully making reason penetrate society and
minds. But since the Frankfurt School, half a century later, we know that
critical minds are no longer certain that technological rationality is a sure
ally of human reason.
To Judge Alone and to Be Prejudiced in a Group

In the paradigm that opposes the critical rational thinking of the happy few
to the doxic paralogisms and stereotypes pervading society, it is the persistence of the latter that calls for an explanation. It is the persistence and
transmission from one generation to another of insane ideas that does.
For the thinkers who have tackled the question, the basis of the explanation is the very fact that irrational beliefs require a community of believers.
While Arthur Schopenhauer and Nietzsche claim to think individually and
. See Yvette Conrys LIntroduction du darwinisme en France () and her rather paradoxical
conclusion that Darwin (in his cognitive originality as a thinker of an evolution without teleology) was not yet introduced into the French scientic milieu at the end of the nineteenth
century because of stubborn cognitive obstacles, of Lamarckian origin, let us say, but also of
common sensical origin.

Angenot

Doxa and Cognitive Breaks

531

against everyone, believers only reason well (meaning ill) when they do it
collectively and with connivance, that is, with lazy preconstructed formulae, surreptitious shifts, things left unsaid.
The question is not that of the homogeneity of ignorance and bad reasoning. Quite the contrary. Communities of believers exist and endure only because their members do not possess the same degree of zeal or conviction as
committed rationalists. They are content to wallow in blind faith, or to harbor vague, noncompelling doubts, or to rely on a sense of opportunism that
prevents them from carrying their doubts on to their logical conclusions.
Ideological parties and sects are coalitions of zealots full of blind fanaticism and recruits who operate on tactical adherence and the censoring of
disagreements they willingly impose upon themselves for good reasons.
What is at stake here are the limits of the discourse eect, that moment in
which the forms of discourse, carried by an ideological hegemony, endowed
with a power of seduction and permeation serving to ignite latent passions,
become historical forces capable of molding the attitudes and mentalities
of a whole collectivityin spite of a margin of bad faith and mental restrictions that explain why such groups can be turned around and change
course overnight. The volatility of brainwashing and the reversals involved in joining a sect, such as the Church of Scientology or the Ordre du
Temple Solaire (or OTS), ll the libraries with case studies: the possibility
of an abrupt cognitive reeducation is therefore omnipresent in sociological
research, but it is perhaps too brutal to be adequately theorized.
Anarchists and Libertarians

To the speculative derivations of anarchists and libertarians under the

French Third Republic, I can only devote a few lines. These merely set a
date and sketch the problematics of a research project that I hope to complete some day. I am not suggesting that the fact of cultivating a dierent
manner of thinking, of practicing a certain counterdoxic dierence is, in
itself and a priori, a clue that one thinks in the direction of the future
and that one has completely broken with the order of things. Nevertheless,
there was a sense of happiness pervading the anarchistic way of thinking and
writing. The anarchist is someone who claims to think on his or her own, in
a rebellious and conscious manner, against the emasculated masses. The
anarchist is someone who has liberated himself or herself from everyone
elses prejudices, who can no longer be taken for a ride, and who prides
himself or herself on the break that his or her conscious eort has produced.
In the anarchist brochures from the belle poque, one constantly encounters
this sense of an epistemic break, to the advantage of the libertarian world.

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Poetics Today 23:3

The anarchist presumes to think correctly because he or she thinks dierently

from everyone else. By contrast, the anarchist proponents added, a socialisthowever revolutionary one imagines himself or herself to beis not so
dierent from the bourgeois. For he or she continues to think within an
authoritarian framework, in the very categories of the old society that
he or she believes should be rejected: a far cry from the anarchistic thinker,
who begins by wielding the ax in this forest of authoritarian prejudices
which obsess us (Kropotkin : ). The reason for studying anarchistic writings in this light is that they enable us to measure the limits of the
thinkable in a given state of society.
A Heuristic Proposal

I have attempted to show that the question of argumentative breaks keeps turning up and must be raised again. It has hardly been done justice by the
partial analyses and the available concepts, which contradict one another
and are often archaic. Particularly, they betray a false consciousness par excellence in the certainty of the analysts rational superiority vis--vis the
obscurantism, primitive thinking, or false conscience of the observed subject.
I propose to reverse the traditional approach of rhetorical studies and
the studies of doxa and public opinions. A basic rhetorical task would then
be the study of argumentative breaks in all their diversity and degrees. I
see the primary task of rhetoric as objectifying and interpreting the heterogeneity of mentalities and the sociological phenomenon of the ongoing
dialogues of the deaf. This is not to confuse the argumentative forms of
discourse with some immanent psychology that underlies doxic and ideological texts. Instead, I would claim that the ways of reasoning and, more
broadly, the ways of schematizing the world in discourse are phenomena
that can be observed in their recurrence, dominant characteristics, and ecacy. They can be described, distinguished, and classied.
Cognitive Diversity and the Ethics of Tolerance

The question of cognitive and argumentative diversity poses not only a

theoretical problem but also a very concrete civic diculty. Humans of the
twenty-rst century no longer believe, as did Voltaire, in the unity of reason and in the perverse irrationality of obscurantism; nor do they believe,
with Condorcet and Comte, in the inevitable progress of human thinking
that passes through qualitatively dissimilar stages to arrive nally at the ultimate positivist stage. This new centurys multicultural civic life presses

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Doxa and Cognitive Breaks

533

for expanding as much as possible the limits of our tolerance in the face
of ways of reasoning and debating that our predecessors would have excluded ohand from Reason. Yet the grand principle ( la Habermas) of
public debate, a principle purporting to be ethical, necessary, and civically
benecial all at once, open to all without restriction, still conicts with the
technical problem I touched upon. I can resign myself to tolerating what is
unintelligible to me if good reasons show that it is dangerous, in spite of
everything, to exclude from public life doctrines that appear to me to be
both harmful and absurd. It can be rational to tolerate these doctrines and
even to put up with social groups whom I may judge to be irrational. But
the fact remains that it is not rational to engage in debate with an opponent with whom I share neither the basic premises nor the criteria of sound
reasoning. What is to be done if this unintelligible opponent, impervious to
any hope of initiating dialogue with him or her, also seems to me engaged
in a harmful action and if his or her crooked logic seems to prevent him or
her from displaying the same tolerance I am striving to show him or her?
I read philosophers, political analysts and moralists, and I must say that
they oer no good response to this question and generally prefer to ignore
it or to cover it with Noahs mantle.
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Woods, John, and D. N. Walton
Argument: The Logic of the Fallacies (Toronto: McGraw Hill).