Abstract

Rhetoric and philosophy have long attended to the conditions, dynamics, and relative benefits of debate. Antiquity's deep concern for the relationship between debate and city-serving pedagogy remains an open question. In part through a shared commitment to argumentation theory, rhetoric and philosophy have agreed on and sparred over debate's constitutive and performative role in truth seeking, critical understanding, and collective action. With different and shared idioms, they have touted debate as a fundament of public life, investigated how debate may productively trouble norms of publicity, and reflected on whether the “problem” with the public lies with its reductive affection for debate as antagonism or its self-serving aversion to debate as the risk of confronting the limits of one's own worldview.The ongoing debate about debate is timely and perhaps pressing. Inside and outside academe, there is an audible lament over the collapse if not death of debate—gone is a force for critical inquiry and progressive engagement. And yet, if the eulogy is not premature, there are many who find no cause to mourn—gone is a modernist relic, a promise of rational deliberation that has so often delivered neither reason nor meaningful engagement. So too, the idea that debate can inform collective judgment let alone engender ethics-making consensus is now often seen as proof of its hegemony and evidence of its colonizing designs. As its “enlightened” terms, rules, and conditions are found demeaning, marginalizing, and hostile, debate increasingly stands without apparent standing.If debate takes shape and proceeds within arguments, the constellation of a claim, evidence, and warrant feels increasingly distant if not simply anachronistic, all the more so in the onslaught of reductive, trending, and hermetically sealed assertions of belief, many of which are justified by narrative appeals to experience that refuse question. To the extent that it requires a shared referent and proceeds only as participants are willing in principle to change their minds, the very premise of debate strikes many—on the right and the left—as not only naïve to the exigence of so-called deep division but also an unjustifiable intrusion. In academic and public life, appeals to consider “both sides” of issues are heard as morally suspect and frequently written off as so much neoliberalism at the same time that calls to promote the “free expression” of debate are condemned for their ulterior motives if not outright hypocrisy. Calls to find common ground in the name of undertaking productive disagreement are deemed heretical by all sides. And yet, if these criticisms of debate are themselves open to criticism, if they are not hysterical, the attending dilemma is how to assess their merits without undertaking precisely that which they have ruled out of order. Absent an answer, a solution that has so far proved elusive, the idea of debate is increasingly reduced to strife and conflict (one of the “original” definitions of the term) in which only difference abides. And, with the art of rebuttal deemed bullying and the dynamics of clash held out as violence, what may appear is a kind of vacuum, itself a form of stasis, into which pours endless dialogues and quickly forgotten conversations.This P&R Forum is addressed to the contemporary (im)possibility of debate. Has debate become impossible? What are the conditions of its possibility? What are the costs? Is the impossibility of debate an advance or a setback? Is it time to defend, abandon, or reinvent debate? What is at stake in debate's (im)possibility? Written by a distinguished group, one that includes several individuals who have long-standing and deep ties to academic debate, the essays that compose the forum offer intersecting, overlapping, and often conflicting replies to these questions—including the suggestion that they are perhaps the wrong questions. Within and across the pages that follow, there is provocative agreement, curious divergence, and instructive disagreement. The question of debate is an opening in which to discern and grapple with experiences of expression, the potential of speech, habits of engagement, the complexity of lived and conceptual stasis, the cost of sovereign self-certainty, and the contested truths of ethical life.