Angenot Doxa

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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

Abstract Are public languages (as opposed to esoteric , i.e., scholarly or disciplinarydiscourses) that coexist in a given state of society to be distinguished—beyond 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 them—by their incompatible cogni-

tive 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 insur-

mountable disagreement is superficial, the conflict between the individuals in ques-

tion being attached to mannerisms of thinking and expression; () argumentative

impasses that are linked to presuppositions and premises resolutely placed beyondany doubt; () finally, and most radically, certain ways of reasoning about the world,

of finding 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 differ only in their presuppositions, premises, and the basic axi-

ology, but in the very rules defining the ‘‘arguable’’—to 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.

Poetics Today : (Fall ). Copyright © by the Porter Institute for Poetics andSemiotics.


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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 inpublic languages. These problems do not appear to have been dealt withsystematically by discourse analysts, specialists in rhetoric, or other socialscientists. These problems have certainly been debated by several contem-porary philosophers, but the responses and solutions they have offered us,considered as they surely must be within the history of major modern philo-sophical issues, are contradictory. I will restrict myself to defining the prob-lem, discussing a number of conceptions, confronting certain key cases,outlining some paths to follow, and finally proposing a sort of working pro-

gram—but nothing like any definitive conclusion.The problem I am considering may be expressed in the following ques-

tion. Are public discourses that coexist in a given state of society (distin-guished from esoteric , that is, scholarly or disciplinary discourses) to be de-marcated—beyond their divergence in viewpoints, in the data retained orset aside, in their objectives as well as the interests that fuel them—by theirincompatible cognitive and argumentative characters ? If this is the case, are suchcognitive incompatibilities and heterogeneities exceptional or common?

My question boils down to the possibility of distinguishing a categoryof differences unlikely to be resolved through discussion: seemingly insur-mountable conflicts in which the very rules of debate and the fundamentalassumptions do not form a common ground and in which, as Saint Jeromesays in the epigraph to this essay (–, :), the adversaries end up byregarding 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 ussome discursively and argumentatively—hence socially and civically—‘‘noncontemporaries’’ living in some sort of cognitive noncontemporaneity(Ungleichzeitigkeit )? Or, transposing onto the common doxa a concept de-rived from the epistemology of science, should we assume that there maybe 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 seemsto me that ‘‘dialogues of the deaf ’’ are, in public life, the rule rather than theexception. 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 differences arise not from cogni-tive ‘‘deafness’’ but from sheer misunderstanding . It seems obvious to me thatpublic disagreements often go beyond contentious facts, differing points of


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Angenot • Doxa and Cognitive Breaks 515

view, unshared values and principles. My adversary does not appear to be-long to my ‘‘mental universe.’’ He or she seems not to clash with me by hisor 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 . Itseems to me that contemporary rhetorical theory, both classical and con-temporary, turns a deaf ear to these speculations and continues to base itsanalyses on the Aristotelian axiom of the unity of reason. The opposite idea

of diversity is nowhere recognized: neither by the older rhetoric, whoseparadigm was that of a rationally acceptable topical repertory (althoughnot without latent contradictions) that defined the order of the probableand a periphery of fallacies used by the simpleminded and of sophisms ma-nipulated by exceedingly clever rhetors; nor by the ‘‘new rhetorics’’ of thetwentieth century (those of Chaïm Perelman, Stephen Toulmin, and others,

which also deal with deviant and abnormal reasonings as accidents or aber-rations); nor by the epistemological models that, from Thomas Kuhn toMichel Foucault, devise successions of paradigms or epistemes but neglectsynchronic and enduring incompossible coexistences of paradigms within disci-plinary fields; nor, at least in a theorized form, by the sociologists of themedia, of political life, and of public opinion; nor, finally, by the ‘‘rational-ist’’ philosophers, who with a certain optimistic voluntarism, establish, asdoes Jürgen Habermas, rules for open and democratic discussion. None of these seem to envisage as a heuristic premise the hypothesis that everyone insociety does not necessarily think in the same manner, that everyone sharesneither the same reason nor the same logic.

Most recent studies of paralogisms, sophisms, and fallacies limit them-selves to taxonomies and typologies of errors in reasoning, deliberate orinvoluntary, without first recognizing that there exists dynamics of un-reason,that a ‘‘bad reason’’ is always followed by a number of other ones. Further-more timeless and formal rhetorical taxonomies place defective reasoningsbetween the simple and naive error—occasioned by a surreptitious concep-tual shift, a faulty apprehension of data, an inappropriate manipulation of a topos—and deliberate sophistry designed to mislead. Hence they circum-

vent the historical and sociological approach that calls for integrating such‘‘sophistry’’—which is neither naive and occasional error nor manipulationmeant to mislead—within 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 cen-tury, Joseph de Maistre coined a famous maxim: there are necessarily sev-eral ways of being in the wrong, but there is only one way of being in theright. But being the reactionary and theocrat he was, he did not considerthe unity of reason in stating this axiom but rather the unity of faith andrevelation.The philosophers’ secular reason conferred on this religious pre-tension unity and exclusivity. It followed that those who did not think likethem were placed outside of rationality—belonging to another time, pos-sibly, or victims of prejudice, but definitely unreasonable. In our late moder-

nity, all this has been changed for a type of relativism that has engenderedits own dogma: to each his own truth.

Contemporary philosophical schools clash in an endless debate on thisquestion of the unity of reason and on the possibility of a true or valid cogni-tion among universalism, objectivism, communitarianism, and relativism.Some postmodern philosophers, such as Jean-François Lyotard (), con-trasted two orders of divergence. One is litigation, in which people do notget 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 thatmilitary treason is a crime); the other is the situation in which a différend (disputation) occurs: there it is no longer possible to speak about degrees of disagreement since no common axiomatic base would enable measurementand no referee’s rule acceptable to the two sides can arbitrate their quarrel.Lyotard’s reflection on litigations and différends was developed against thephilosophers of democratic debate à la Habermas, whose starting point—too optimistic and axiomatic in the eyes of Lyotard—is the possibility forevery citizen of goodwill to attain a common ground with his or her adver-saries and to reach a rational compromise.

In this polarized debate, philosophers of the new rhetoric intervene tobreak the deadlock. Manuel Maria Carrilho, with his recent subtle essayRhétoriques de la modernité (), comes to mind. For Carrilho, whose thoughtcan be related to that of the thinker of problematology, the Belgian MichelMeyer, 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 century—a crisis that exhausted itself in its struggle to estab-lish necessity and universality as the ultimate foundations of philosophicalreasoning.

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 one’s opinion, and the will to truth, are foundational

to communication in human societies, but Carrilho objects to Habermas’sestablishment of the norm as the criterion of argumentation. The appeal tosuch an ideal norm pretence distances itself excessively from both actual,often enigmatic, opaque, and unresolved situations of debate and from anempirical world that can also be grasped through conjectures, analogies,tropes, and figures and not exclusively through logical clarifications, whichare not necessarily within the reach of everyone’s 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. Carrilhostrives to give a meaning to a notion of relativism that is neither ‘‘tribalism,’’‘‘secessionism,’’ nor ‘‘solipsism,’’ whose avatars can be observed in variouscontemporary intellectual movements. Nor does he feel obliged to embracethe alternative of pure rationalist positivism. Summing up the debate onthe incommensurability of paradigms (Kuhn versus Hilary Putnam) and re-turning to the discussion of Lyotard’s ‘‘philosophy of the différend,’’ HilaryCarrilho elaborates on his vision of the philosophical field in terms of con-flictual pluralism. He successfully shows that the concept of ‘‘relativism’’(which in many instances serves as a ‘‘noise of disapproval’’) is quite poly-semic and sees a hyperbolic and forced interpretation in the Lyotardianconception of a coexistence of absolutely heteronomous, irreducible, anduntranslatable ‘‘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 differencesof opinion?

An Omnipresent Problem and Some Diagnoses

The problem of the cognitive diversity of conflicting opinions and ideo-logical systems is dealt with by many contemporary researchers in specificanalyses and case studies. But it is never dealt with clearly as a full-fledgedtheoretical problem. Whether they are studying religious beliefs or secularideologies, 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 thegreat ideological aberrations of the century now behind us—fascism, anti-Semitism, Stalinism, various brands of nationalism—end up somehow in-dicating that we are not simply faced with a particular vision of the world,


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or with specific beliefs, but with a sui generis way of thinking, a special turnof mind that appears to result from a specific 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 GustaveLe Bon (, ) and other crowd psychologists of the s or to theshaky conjectures made by early psychoanalysts that claimed they could putmass ideologies on their couches. In any case, every recent book on anti-Semitism allows itself—without claiming any nosographic rigor but merelybecause it is suggestive—the 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 betterdescribed, judges Michel Winock in a footnote at the very beginning of hisEdouard Drumont & Cie (). ‘‘Mental alienation’’ and ‘‘paranoid’’ appearas early as the second page. These words are thrown around as metaphori-cal suggestions, unavoidable catachreses that should not be taken literally.The historian has no intention of substituting for a postmortem psychia-trist, and he knows that the man Drumont in his time appeared no morepathological than the majority of his contemporaries.What Winock wishesto touch on is precisely what I am speaking of: namely, that an anti-Semite isnot 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 man-ner—just like the patient in what French psychiatrists in the late nineteenthcentury simply used to call ‘‘la folie raisonnante’’ (reasoning madness).Theanti-Semite is someone who convinces himself or herself and launches ona 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 Léon Poliakov ()to Zeev Sternhell () and Pierre-André Taguieff (), is indeed notonly an ideology (a set of ideological themes, contents, slogans) but also aspecial way of directing one’s thinking and of persuading others. Anxiety-ridden and conspiratorial, as Poliakov once remarked, this way of thinkingis 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 theRoman Catholics in the –s. But if it is not absolutely alone in itsirrationality, in its epistemology of a ‘‘diabolical causality,’’ it does not con-flict any less with the ‘‘ordinary’’ ways of reasoning. Poliakov’s 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 re-sentment 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 can-not be confirmed through direct observation, a huge secret conspiracy mustbe presumed, and one must convince oneself of its existence as soon as thehypothesis has been considered. As resentment gets tangled up in its owncontradictions and its claims and rancors remain outwardly unintelligible,the conspiracy can only be endlessly reconfirmed in its eyes.

Not all modern researchers have resorted to medical metaphors indealing with extreme ideologies. ‘‘False consciousness’’ was what certain

Marxists diagnosed in both fascist and Stalinist persuasions from the sto the s—see the work of Joseph Gabel (), for example. But thisMarxist-Hegelian term also suggests a discrepancy with one’s authentic re-lationship to the world, an alienation from an ‘‘authentic’’ consciousness.It also refers to ways of thinking and mentalities that are foreign to cog-nitive ‘‘health’’ and that explain certain reprehensible adherences and ex-travagant 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 Minkowsky’s [] noso-graphic meaning).1

Three Degrees of Cognitive Incompatibility

If the idea of cognitive diversity in public life can be accepted in a heu-ristic way, the next and more concrete question becomes that of degreesand thresholds of cognitive gap. We are obviously not faced here with asimple alternative: either a rational community of thinking or an insur-

mountable break. Such a binarism would itself be attached to somewhatrigid and Manichaean forms of thinking. Rather, the sociological and typo-logical question is that of deciding what, in a given state of society, may

. I might have discussed within this context—this article remains a sketch—the two majorbreaks that traditionally fix 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 specific context, the same rational improvised approachas you and me) and that of the child’s reasoning, dealt with and periodized according to agein Jean Piaget’s genetic psychology. I believe it is the linguist André Martinet who, in his

discussion on the arbitrariness of the sign, recalls a child saying: ‘‘Dad, how did we find outthe sun’s name?’’ What does one answer? The child’s reason and the structuralist linguist’sreason do not belong to the same logical world. One can always reply to this little girl or boythat we could not ask the Sun its name because it is ‘‘too far away and too hot,’’ and so we hadto invent it, but this unsatisfying ‘‘explanation’’ is far from being an adequate explanation of the concept of the linguistic sign in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course on General Linguistics !


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form a significant difference between an ideological community and the pre- vailing doxa. What threshold should we adopt? An occasional fallacy orblind spot does not apparently constitute a significant cognitive difference.

The predominance of certain argumentative schemes can be striking, butdoes it cut off those who have a predilection for them from those who neverhave recourse to such schemes?

The reduction of a vast corpus to a few preferred argumentative schemesis always an impressive and useful endeavor. Albert O. Hirschman (),in studying what he called the ‘‘rhetoric of reaction,’’ reduced its argumen-tation over two centuries—from Edmund Burke writing against the FrenchRevolution to the present time—to three recurrent argumentative schemes:

Innocuity, Jeopardy, Perversity. One can, however, object that these argumen-tative schemes are not at all specific to this sector of reactionary ideolo-gies. The argument of ‘‘the perverse effect,’’ for example, is a basic compo-nent (and a breakthrough) of early sociological thinking—unless one wouldinclude all of this thinking, beginning with Auguste Comte and HerbertSpencer, in the rhetoric of reaction.

Others have spoken of ‘‘frameworks’’ of thinking, that is, barriers andcensures that set for a social group or an ideological ‘‘sect’’ the limits onthe thinkable and the arguable. For others still, insurmountable misunder-standings between individuals depend on presuppositions so ‘‘deeply’’ in-scribed 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 differences of opinion are neverthelessresolved—against whatever resistance or at whatever expense and effort—since the ‘‘repressed’’ presuppositions can be brought to consciousness, ob-

jectified, and subjected to debate.I would suggest, for heuristic purposes, that we can think of three degrees

of argumentative breaks:. It is first of all advisable to set out a weak form, in which the impres-

sion of insurmountable disagreement is only apparent and superficial:there the conflict between the individuals, even if it lasts, is attachedto mannerisms of thinking and expression, to poorly deciphered prag-matic games, misinterpreted for psychological or cultural reasons.2

. Let us next set out the case of argumentative impasses that are linkedto presuppositions and premises so resolutely placed beyond any

. You Just Don’t Understand () and That’s Not What I Meant ()—we recognize thesetitles 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 oppositepragmatic 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 ableto deconstruct them and no debate will end up problematizing themor making room for the point of view and the values of the adversary.

. Finally, at a still more radical level, certain ways of reasoning aboutthe world, of finding connections and meaning in it, of perceiving a di-rection in the course of things, of posing oneself as a subject in societyand history, and of legitimizing this worldview, will no longer differonly in the presuppositions, the premises, the basic axiology.They willdiffer on the very rules defining the ‘‘arguable,’’ so much so that, tothose 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 reflection on pathos and logos and‘‘the logic of emotions’’ (La Logique des sentiments [] is the title of an essayby the French philosopher and psychologist Théodule Ribot at the begin-ning of the last century). There is no doubt that psychological or psychoso-cial motives underlie the choice of argumentative schemes, the persistencein never questioning some presuppositions and certain emotional shortcutsin reasoning. But these alleged motives do not form a separate categoryfrom the cognitive paradigms and reasonings, since the latter always con-ceal an affective ‘‘dimension.’’ The ‘‘logic of emotions,’’ inseparable fromthe 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 basisof any discussion.This term refers to Antonio Gomez Moriana’s () ex-cellent analysis of the meeting of Don Quixote and the merchants, an analy-sis that highlights cognitive conflicts as an object of novelistic irony from thebirth of this literary genre. Don Quixote requires the merchants he meetson his way to acknowledge that Dulcinea del Toboso is the most beauti-ful woman in the universe. The merchants, who have never seen her, arestunned by such chivalrous swagger, but as they belong to a modern, mer-

cantile, and practical mentality, they ask the noble knight to produce acameo or a portrait of the fair lady so they might be able to judge on actual

. It goes without saying that we are defining ideal types and that, in practice, these threecategories 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 acquireno 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 ‘‘ar-chaic’’ Don Quixote’s logic of feudal honor stands opposed to an emerging‘‘experimental’’ logic. This comic episode is presented by Cervantes, at thebeginning of modern times, as the encounter of two noncontemporary (un- gleichzeitig ) 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 aparticular ‘‘program’’ of reflections and procedures. One of its central con-cerns, even before Karl Mannheim ( []) gave a name to this pro-gram, has been the diverse forms of reasoning at work in a society, formsthat, according to Mannheim, were to be interpreted in relation to specificforms of social experience. Thus,Vilfredo Pareto at the turn of the centuryin his Les Systèmes socialistes (–); Max Scheler transposing Nietzschein a sociological essay on resentment, Vom Umsturz der Werte; and Mann-heim himself in his famous work, Ideologie und Utopie ( [])4 asso-ciate ways of reasoning and arguing with certain social groups with certain‘‘interests’’ connected to specific ideological or religious communities. Therecent works by the French sociologist Raymond Boudon on L’art de se per-suader des idées douteuses, fragiles ou fausses () and Le juste et le vrai ()insightfully pursue this sort of problematic.

These sociological analyses highlight a basic conflict: between the com-munity’s use of certain ways of reasoning and the truthfulness and rationality of theargumentative types encountered there in association with specific social

experiences and interests, with their blind spots, their denials, their recur-ring paralogisms. The nature of this conflict has received very diverse andnever quite satisfactory explanations from the thinkers and sociologists Ihave just mentioned. Many assimilate, in a typically relativistic fashion, ap-propriateness and use to the psychological well-being of the social group.They dissociate the usefulness of a given ‘‘mythical’’ construct from any ref-erence to truth (which is what Sorel and Mannheim did in the final analy-sis). Others go even further in radical relativism.They claim that there exist

only ‘‘programs of truth,’’ which succeed one another in history without anytranscendental critique being able to show that one was ‘‘better’’ than the

. Mannheim’s own main source of inspiration is undoubtedly Sorel and his concept of ‘‘myth’’ in La décomposition du marxisme () and particularly Réflexions sur la violence ([]).


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other or an ‘‘improvement’’ over another. An example of this can be foundin Paul Veyne’s essay Les Grecs ont-ils cru à 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 reason-ings. Let us take the case of the thought of resentment according to Nietzscheand Scheler—a good example of an ideological persuasion centered arounda reasoning that is generally judged as fallacious and, in the context of anysingle 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 reachingtheir full potential, rebelling against the injustice of this situation: there is

no resentment in this. For resentment there must be a sophistic inversion thatleads to a very different conclusion: I do not accomplish anything, thereforeI possess transcendental qualities; others succeed where I fail, therefore theirsuccess is due to unfair advantages, and the predominant values (to which Iattribute my apparent failure) are therefore impostures and deceptions. Suchis the core of a thought of resentment. One will immediately notice that thesociologist of knowledge and the historian of ideas will have to find strongprocedures of objectivation so as to avoid being accused of presumption—in American politico-militant jargon, this is called blame the victim—when‘‘attacking’’ ideologies that are by nature grudge-bearing and paranoid.

The thought of resentment has been defined since Nietzsche’s Genealoof Morals as a ‘‘mode of production’’ of values, a ‘‘servile’’ positioning withregard to values. It is a production that seeks to define itself by means of underhanded and sophistic argumentations.The rhetoric of resentment ap-pears to serve three concomitant ends. By demonstrating the current situa-tion to be downright injustice, it lays the ground for the inversion of values,explains the group’s 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 domi-nated one’s mode of being. Finally, it devalues the values that the domi-nant 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 froma tacit axiom: this world in which I feel my weakness and suffer setbacksand difficulties is not the real one. There is something ‘‘diabolically’’ simple in

the reasonings of resentment. In ‘‘ordinary’’ logic, failures urge you to goback to the original hypotheses and correct them; this is even the golden

. ‘‘The morality of slaves,’’ Nietzsche (: ) wrote in On the Genealo of Morals , ‘‘opposesfrom the outset a ‘no’ to whatever does not form a part of itself, which is ‘different’ from it,

which is its ‘non-I’: and it is this no which is its only creative act.’’


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rule of scientific method. In ideologies of resentment, failure does not proveanything; on the contrary, failures transmute themselves into as many addi-tional proofs that one is right and that decidedly ‘‘the others’’ will always put

spokes in one’s wheels. A system in which denials of experience never serveto cast a doubt on the axioms, but instead reinforce them, is an impregnablesystem.

Resentment is admittedly not the only recurrent form of false conscious-ness in modern societies. The notion of ‘‘unhappy consciousness’’ can beseen as complementary to it. In contemporary ideology, an analysis of thisargumentative type is found in Le Sanglot de l’homme blanc by Pascal Bruck-ner (): the guilt-inducing reasonings in Third World activism paral-

lel the resentment viewed as reasoning that serves a grudge. Resentmentis therefore one of many cases of false consciousness in social life: modesof alienation, bad conscience, self-hatred, puritanism, or contemptus mundi .These psychosocial mechanisms seem synergetic, apparently stimulatingone another. As an affective and cognitive position, resentment thus com-plements not only the restrained rationality of technocrats, the cynicism of the sated, the contemporary avatars of social Darwinism (transfiguring the‘‘struggle for life’’ paradigm into a principle that legitimizes social violence)but also double games, bad and the already-mentioned unhappy conscious-ness, 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 objec-tive interests and to a ‘‘historical’’ role associated with class, and on theother hand , to alienations and attitudes of false consciousness. The vari-

ous Marxisms since Franz Mehring and Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanovhave found themselves describing class-related ways of thinking and valuesystems: peasant ‘‘mentalities’’ (the word often recurs in this phrase, thetaciturn farmer not really having access to articulate thought) or ‘‘pettybourgeois’’ worldviews, for instance. This stood as a discovery for suchMarxist critics of the s as Emmanuel Berl and Paul Nizan. They de-scribed the petty bourgeois intellectual as one characterized by movingback 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 regret-table limit of consciousness: the middle class is a class caught between twofires, hence, able neither resolutely to take the side of the proletariat nor totake full advantage of the benefits provided by the upper bourgeoisie.They


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likened it to a boat tossed back and forth on the waves of history, condemnedto chronic indecision, incapable of holding onto ‘‘something real.’’ It wouldprobably be appropriate to develop (but outside of the voluntarist and his-

toristic framework in which it originated) this partly obsolete reflection onrhetoric and social classes.

A Question That Haunts Modernity

Intellectual modernity since Voltaire and Denis Diderot arises from the self-evident given that not everyone shares the same way of thinking. In an eraof rationalist monism, this amounted to saying that only some people rea-

son according to universal logic, while others talk nonsense out of stupidityand hatred of reason itself and of progress.This was the attitude of the pro-ponents of the Enlightenment who were faced with the vile ‘‘obscurantismof religion.’’ The philosophers’ religious adversary had to be argumenta-tively suppressed for the good of society and the progress of morals, butthe adversary was not technically refutable (if refuting him or her involvednot just having him or her condemned at the Tribunal of Reason, but alsomaking oneself heard by him or her, making our hostility intelligible tohim or her). By abandoning dialogue, one can demonstrate to reasonableminds, one’s peers, that the adversary’s reasoning (or rather what in his orher mind stands for reasoning), his or her fallacious apologetics, his or herconstant petitio principii, his or her absurd ‘‘proofs’’ by appeal to miraclesand prodigies, his or her intolerance are all outside the realm of reason. Onecan speak against such a senseless system, satirize it, and endeavor to destroyit with words, but it is futile to speak with such an adversary. It is impossibleto find a common ground from which to initiate the discussion, since suchground 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

first manifested itself in, or as, the conflict of Faith and Reason.The hopelessdialogue of the deaf between Catholics and Republicans in France, between‘‘free thinkers’’ and ‘‘supporters of the clergy’’ throughout the nineteenthcentury may appear outdated today, but in what has become its folkloricdimension, 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 ele-ment for the secular satirical press in the nineteenth century (Angenot :–). That discourse included the chaste hymns for convent girls, thepious apologetics, ‘‘So you are an Atheist, but do you know this is very seri-ous 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 itstemporal 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 theMasons; the theme of the Judeo-Masonic Eiffel Tower contrasted with theSacré-Coeur de Montmartre watching over Paris. Everything in the FrenchCatholic press one century ago aimed at maintaining something like a com-bative archaism, striving to deepen its incompatibility with the republican‘‘positivistic’’ mentality.6

I would like also to refer in this context to Eugen Weber’s Satan franc-maçon (), a case study of Léo Taxil’s imposture in the Catholic milieu in

the –s. The affair involved an experimental ‘‘practical joke’’ devel-oped over several years in keeping with the cognitive break between mod-ern France and the clericals.The antireligious journalist Taxil, an observerpointed out, ‘‘had noticed that the Catholic world lived almost entirely out-side the ordinary world’’ (Papus : ). Taxil feigned conversion, threwhimself at the feet of some bishops, such as Monsignor Fava of Grenoble,

who was deeply involved in the anti-Masonic crusade, and undertook asearch in a solitary mystification of eight years and a dozen works, designedto reveal to Catholics the satanic ‘‘secrets’’ of Free Masonry, ‘‘the absolutelimits of human credulity’’ (Poliakov : ). He ended up persuading‘‘serious theologians, that our crocodile playing the piano [Satan disguisedas a crocodile, in which disguise he was supposed to appear regularly to

Jules Ferry and other Republican politicians during Masonic rituals], andMiss Vaughan’s trips to various planets, were not at all astonishing’’ (Papus: ). ‘‘One finds it difficult,’’ a contemporary points out after Taxil’sdisclosure of the mystification, ‘‘to understand such naivete and such igno-rance 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 stateof society and dedicated to fighting without understanding each other wastheorized in Western philosophy by Auguste Comte (–). He tracedthroughout the history of humankind but also, in the nineteenth century,

the competing coexistence of three states of knowledge: two recessive and his-torically condemned—the religious and the metaphysical—one in progressand destined to prevail, namely, positivist thinking.

. On the ‘‘Social Reign of This Adorable Heart,’’ see Angenot : –.


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This epistemological model presented by the founder of the religion of humanity still remains obviously ‘‘metaphysical,’’ for it is thought out withinthe framework of a historical determinism geared toward progress. It is ap-

propriate to reject this ternary paradigm, which has survived for a longtime, perpetuated by the Grand Socialist Narrative, and which was still en-dorsed by the British critic Raymond Williams (). According to Wil-liams, in modern societies and in the area of public opinion and ideologies,there coexist three sectors, a dominant one, an emerging one, and a re-cessive one—the emerging being ipso facto ‘‘progressive.’’ We should knowthat the emerging sector does not always end up establishing itself, that therecessive 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 twocenturies against religious and reactionary irrationalities and have dem-onstrated the inevitable collapse of religion, there have also been ‘‘re-actionary’’ sociologists since the nineteenth century who have dissected thesophistry of progressive ideologies and have also diagnosed there sui generis

ways of thinking, in which, once again, one had to be either inside or out-side. Pareto at the turn of the twentieth century devoted two volumes to theSystèmes socialistes’’ in labor movement programs and doctrines. There heclaimed to uncover a way of thinking that was Utopian, rigid, fallacious,and obviously irrational for those who did not share the militant conniv-ances. ‘‘The mistake made by many socialists,’’ writes Pareto, ‘‘is that theyalways reason, without realizing it, by antitheses. Having demonstratedthat 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 aninstitution based on the diametrically opposed principle.’’ This way of rea-soning was not specific to modern socialism: it went back a long way, andPareto saw it already operating in Thomas More’s Utopia. ‘‘The reasoningthat 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 oppo-site of A; therefore, by replacing A with C, we would make B disappear andthe evils which afflict society would immediately cease’’ (Pareto –,

:).The topoi underlying the socialist argumentation did not then arise froma modern historical dialectics but from a static binary structure that is tobe found in Aristotle’s 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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ism, is good). ‘‘If B is specific to A, what is said of A can be said about B’’ (if competition is specific to capitalist economy, then it is bad in itself and mustbe 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 ex-cellent to extend it in everything and everywhere); if one thing is useless, itmust disappear, and so forth. You have to choose between capitalism, withits injustices and its vices, or collectivism and therefore its justice and bene-fits. Having made a clean break with their present, certain transformationsthat advanced capitalist societies (the massive development of universityteaching, the expansion and preponderance of intellectual professions, theshortening of working hours, family allowances, universal health insurance,

etc.) seem to have been realized as ‘‘a necessary consequence of the onlyproletarian victory’’: socialist doctrines before in fact speculated aboutthe future with a constant error of historical insight , traceable to the extentit was based on the cognitive system and rhetoric that Pareto criticized.

Sorel, criticizing in the same period orthodox socialist doctrine, also de-fined a sort of militant progressive epistemology, an epistemology particu-larly incapable of dealing with historical processes and far removed fromany ‘‘materialistic’’ turn of mind. He qualified this approach as the ‘‘intel-lectualistic hypothesis’’: everything that is rational becomes real, and every-thing that is desirable appears attainable. ‘‘The upper class has becomeuseless, it will disappear,’’ he writes; ‘‘class distinction is an anachronism, it

will fade away; the political authority of the State in a classless society nolonger will possess a raison d’être, hence it will disappear; the social organi-zation of production following a pre-determined plan is possible and desir-able, hence it will be realized, etc. This is the way,’’ he concludes, ‘‘today’sdisciples of Engels speak!’’ (Sorel : ).

The Irrationality of Doxa, the Soundness of the Paradox

An entirely different set of problems (incompatible, at least at first sight, with the type of reflection that preceded) developed in parallel in moderntimes. Its core is not the axiom of the progress of reason, or the struggle of the proponents of the Enlightenment against religious prejudices, but, onthe contrary, the fundamental irrationality of any doxa, of any predominantopinion, of the ideas accepted and endorsed by the majority.

Today as well as yesterday, the ideas that prevail in a state of societycan only be, by the nature of things and the weakness of the human intel-lect, a rhapsody of prejudices, fallacies, stereotypes, and misinterpretations.Works of rhetoric, from Aristotle to the present time, examine errors of rea-soning as marginal facts appended to a well-formed theory of argumenta-


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tion. They do not evaluate the empirical frequency of correct reasonings. A good many modern minds, paradoxical of course, have maintained thatcorrect reasoning is and always has been the exception, that, in the pre-

valing doxa, one can only note the frequency of absurdities and sophismsand the rarity of solid and rigorous argument.

In an insightful essay, Entretien sur des faits divers (), Jean Paulhan cre-ated a character who constantly finds in newspapers forms of reasoningthat are logically bizarre but still familiar, to the point of ‘‘passing’’ withoutquestion. Thus, for instance, the title of a news item he analyzes is ‘‘Assassinfor Ten Francs.’’ Barbarians are then among us—and 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 theirprejudices to criticism and skeptically scrutinized all the accepted truths.Here you find the paradigm that intensifies from Descartes to Nietzsche:that of the solitary Thinker, cut off from the crowd, misunderstood by theVulgum Pecus . You also encounter the romantic paradigm of the Artist keptapart from the Philistine in reciprocal contempt.

At the time of the romantic social prophets, Charles Fourier, with histriple 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 con-

vinced Just Muiron, Victor Considerant, and a handful of other admirersof this fact. Fourier’s work (: lxii) is characterized by an explicit willto think apart from everyone, to radically separate himself from all other,‘‘uncertain’’ philosophers who, he contends, ‘‘have never made the leastuseful invention for the social body.’’ It is what the author of the Théoriedes quatre mouvements superbly labeled practicing the Ecart absolu, the Abso-lute Break . Fourier compared himself to Columbus, who swerved from theknown 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 analogy’’—an epistemology judged by Fourier as beingeminently ‘‘scientific’’ but whose very disciples believed that they shoulddistance themselves from it with shame. Fourier was a logothète (accordingto Roland Barthes in his Sade, Fourier, Loyola), he was an inventor of logos ,the single proprietor of a specific epistemic formation, a Utopian spirit notonly by his conjectures but first of all by his extraordinary way of imagin-ing them and of putting into discourse a critique of the present world and

‘‘scientific’’ certainties for the future.In the same age, however, Robert Lyell, the founder of geology, main-tained, as far as he was involved in these ‘‘heroic’’ times of emergence of positive sciences, that a valid scientific thesis can be recognized a priori bythe fact that it defies common sense! Today, the resistance offered by so-


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called common sense is still denounced by scientists. Read a neo-Darwiniantheoretician like Stephen J. Gould: you will see him constantly underlinethefactthattheprocessesofa nonteleological evolution are strictly unintelligible

and inexpressible in the categories of ‘‘common sense.’’ How would com-mon sense admit that organs such as wings have evolved over thousands of

years prior to becoming functional? And what end could percent of an eyeor percent of a wing serve in an adaptive logic and in the commonplaceidea of natural selection? Before an ignorant audience, any creationist ad-

versary achieves the easiest victories over the absurdity and the ‘‘imposture’’of evolutionism!7

The two paradigms—that of Comte dealing with the competition among

three states of knowledge on an evolutionary axis and that of the cognitivesoundness of paradoxes—complement each other in the sense that the slowprogress of reason can be shown as having been achieved by a small ratio-nal and critical minority guiding the masses, who remain likely to revert toprejudices and to their fundamental irrationality. Such a paradigm servesto increase the self-esteem of those paradox-loving rational critics. It is alsofundamentally pessimistic since it sees the majority as only capable of find-ing a simpleminded happiness in myths, platitudes, set idioms, and thought-lessness and loathing the rational work of disenchantment with the world.During the nineteenth century, the supposedly rational minority believedit could count on the scientific and technical rationalization of the world asits ally—increasingly and forcefully making reason penetrate society andminds. But since the Frankfurt School, half a century later, we know thatcritical minds are no longer certain that technological rationality is a sureally 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 fewto the doxic paralogisms and stereotypes pervading society, it is the per-sistence of the latter that calls for an explanation. It is the persistence andtransmission from one generation to another of insane ideas that does.

For the thinkers who have tackled the question, the basis of the explana-tion is the very fact that irrational beliefs require a community of believers.While Arthur Schopenhauer and Nietzsche claim to think individually and

. See Yvette Conry’s L’Introduction du darwinisme en France () and her rather paradoxicalconclusion that Darwin (in his cognitive originality as a thinker of an evolution without tele-ology) was not yet ‘‘introduced’’ into the French scientific milieu at the end of the nineteenthcentury because of stubborn cognitive obstacles, of Lamarckian origin, let us say, but also of common sensical origin.


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against everyone, believers only reason well (meaning ill) when they do itcollectively and with connivance, that is, with lazy preconstructed formu-lae, surreptitious shifts, things left unsaid.

The question is not that of the homogeneity of ignorance and bad reason-ing. Quite the contrary. Communities of believers exist and endure only be-cause their members do not possess the same degree of zeal or conviction ascommitted rationalists. They are content to wallow in blind faith, or to har-bor vague, noncompelling doubts, or to rely on a sense of opportunism thatprevents them from carrying their doubts on to their logical conclusions.Ideological parties and sects are coalitions of zealots full of blind fanati-cism 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 effect, 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 mentalitiesof a whole collectivity—in spite of a margin of bad faith and mental re-strictions that explain why such groups can be ‘‘turned around’’ and changecourse overnight. The volatility of ‘‘brainwashing’’ and the reversals in-

volved in joining a sect, such as the Church of Scientology or the Ordre duTemple Solaire (or OTS), fill the libraries with case studies: the possibilityof an abrupt cognitive reeducation is therefore omnipresent in sociologicalresearch, but it is perhaps too brutal to be adequately theorized.

Anarchists and Libertarians

To the speculative derivations of anarchists and libertarians under theFrench 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 com-plete some day. I am not suggesting that the fact of cultivating a differentmanner of thinking, of practicing a certain counterdoxic difference is, initself 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, ina rebellious and conscious manner, against ‘‘the emasculated masses.’’ The

anarchist is someone who has liberated himself or herself from everyoneelse’s prejudices, who can no longer ‘‘be taken for a ride,’’ and who prideshimself or herself on the break that his or her conscious effort has produced.In the anarchist brochures from the belle époque, one constantly encountersthis sense of an epistemic break, to the advantage of the libertarian world.


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The anarchist presumes to think correctly because he or she thinks differentlyfrom everyone else. By contrast, the anarchist proponents added, a social-ist—however revolutionary one imagines himself or herself to be—is not so

different from the ‘‘bourgeois.’’ For he or she continues to think within an‘‘authoritarian’’ framework, in the very categories of the ‘‘old society’’ thathe 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 anarchis-tic writings in this light is that they enable us to measure the limits of thethinkable in a given state of society.

A Heuristic Proposal

I have attempted to show that the question of argumentative breaks keeps turn-ing up and must be raised again. It has hardly been done justice by thepartial analyses and the available concepts, which contradict one anotherand are often archaic. Particularly, they betray a false consciousness par ex-cellence in the certainty of the analyst’s rational superiority vis-à-vis theobscurantism, primitive thinking, or false conscience of the observed sub-

ject.I propose to reverse the traditional approach of rhetorical studies and

the studies of doxa and public opinions. A basic rhetorical task would thenbe the study of argumentative breaks in all their diversity and degrees. Isee the primary task of rhetoric as objectifying and interpreting the hetero-geneity 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 ideo-logical texts. Instead, I would claim that the ways of reasoning and, more

broadly, the ways of ‘‘schematizing’’ the world in discourse are phenomenathat can be observed in their recurrence, dominant characteristics, and effi-cacy. They can be described, distinguished, and classified.

Cognitive Diversity and the Ethics of Tolerance

The question of cognitive and argumentative diversity poses not only atheoretical problem but also a very concrete civic difficulty. Humans of the

twenty-first century no longer believe, as did Voltaire, in the unity of rea-son and in the perverse irrationality of ‘‘obscurantism’’; nor do they believe, with Condorcet and Comte, in the inevitable progress of human thinkingthat passes through qualitatively dissimilar stages to arrive finally at the ulti-mate ‘‘positivist’’ stage. This new century’s multicultural civic life presses


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for expanding as much as possible the limits of our tolerance in the faceof ways of reasoning and debating that our predecessors would have ex-cluded offhand from Reason. Yet the grand principle (à la Habermas) of

public debate, a principle purporting to be ethical, necessary, and civicallybeneficial all at once, open to all without restriction, still conflicts with thetechnical problem I touched upon. I can resign myself to tolerating what isunintelligible 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 beboth harmful and absurd. It can be rational to tolerate these doctrines andeven to put up with social groups whom I may judge to be ‘‘irrational.’’ Butthe fact remains that it is not rational to engage in debate with an oppo-

nent with whom I share neither the basic premises nor the criteria of soundreasoning. What is to be done if this unintelligible opponent, impervious toany hope of initiating dialogue with him or her, also seems to me engagedin a harmful action and if his or her crooked logic seems to prevent him orher from displaying the same tolerance I am striving to show him or her?

I read philosophers, political analysts and moralists, and I must say thatthey offer no good response to this question and generally prefer to ignoreit or to cover it with Noah’s mantle.

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