Disagreement and Politics
October 12th, 2009There was some interesting talk on the subject of disagreement during the week. One of the visiting speakers made the point that in order to disagree with something you have to understand it.
One could hardly practice academic philosophy without disagreeing with other philosophers and since we spend so much time disagreeing with each other, certain norms of disagreement have developed in the academy. These norms attempt, for better or for worse, to divide acceptable disagreement from unacceptable disagreement. What makes disagreement acceptable includes the satisfaction of what could be termed an epistemological requirement. This requirement can be understood as a burden placed on the person who disagrees to demonstrate that they know what it is that they disagree with and why it is that they disagree with it (which is not a bad tip for what you have to do when writing a philosophy paper).
Understanding and agreement are interlinked. To understand an argument means to accept that a particular conclusion is supposed to follow from particular premises and how this particular following is supposed to take place. The understanding of an argument always involves an acceptance of how it is supposed to work and this acceptance, no matter how transitory, is a type of agreement. If we can’t accept how an argument is (at the very least) supposed to work then we can’t really claim to understand it. If we just can’t imagine how an argument is even supposed to work then it remains opaque to us and we don’t understand it. Dis-agreement is in this sense the negation of a previous agreement.
Knowing, understanding, and hence some kind of acceptance or agreement of what it is that you disagree with is the only way you can defend your disagreement against others in an academic setting. Academic research is required to be defensible in this way but I don’t think that the epistemological requirement for predicating disagreement on agreement can be generalised outside of the academic context for ethical and political reasons.
Democratic systems can take many different forms and some are more democratic than others. Each form of democratic system stipulates its own criteria for what will count as a legitimately produced political decision. Each system for legitimation is self satisfying. This self legitimisation is not beyond questioning from outside the system but from within the system itself it cannot legitimately deny its own process of legitimisation. This means that a particular democratic system cannot cannot reject disagreement as illegitimate for failing to uphold some kind of epistemological requirement without denying its own definition of democratic legitimacy.
In practical terms this means that when the Irish polis disagreed with the proposal of the Nice Treaty referendum there is no resources within the stipulated democratic system for treating this as the wrong answer or an illegitimate response. Democracy, or any political system, implies a political immunity from an epistemological requirement for disagreement. This is not to say that we can’t disagree with the legitimation processes of a particular political system (I feel strongly that we ought to) but we cannot do so while claiming to operate within that political system.
Derrida writes of the democracy-yet-to-come and this is a democratic ideal that is never fully approximated in any particular democratic system. I think that Derrida would say that to be democractic we cannot content ourselves with the self satisfying legitimation of a system that never fully embodies democracy. We must orient ourselves towards the impossible ideal of democracy and within such an orientation we can criticise the legitimation of a decision within a particular democratic system as being undemocratic from some more ideal sense of what it means to be democratic. However this is not exactly the same as saying that the rejection of the first Nice Treaty referendum in Ireland was the wrong answer. Saying that the disagreement was wrong – on whatever grounds – is still far closer to being undemocratic than it is to being more democratic. Nor is Derrida’s notion of the democracy yet to come beyond the scope of strategic and rhetorical employment – in much the same way that majestic ideals have always been employed for less than majestic purposes.
From what little I know of Habermas I suspect that an affinity could be found in his work for the project of building some kind of epistemolgical requirement into the very structure of a particular democratic system. I am on uncertain ground here but I suspect that this could be understood as an attempt to place a barrier between the demos and the participation of the demos in democracy, a barrier that will divide the demos into the acceptable demos and the unnacceptable demos, a relationship to the demos that is itself undemocratic. Obviously I could be completely wrong in all of this but sometimes one feels compelled to act in spite of a certain degree of ignorance and it can be important to do so rather than to not act at all.
This blogpost is already massive so I’ll postpone a consideration of disagreement in relation to ethics for now (though the point has already been made implicitly to some extent).