“Don’t let arguing get in the way of the argument!” 

I used to say that to the students in my philosophy classes from time to time.  Sometimes, I would explain what I meant along the following lines:

Our word argument eventually traces back to the presumed Proto-Indo-European root *arg-, which meant “to shine,” like the white metal we call silver, the archaic name of which was argent. Keep that in mind as you go on to consider two very different sorts of conversations, in both types of which we have all been engaged many times, I’m sure. Reflect upon how the two sorts differ from one another. Let that difference itself shine forth!

First, there is that sort of conversation in which the parties involved exchange information concerning their respective views or opinions about the topic under discussion. This is the sort of conversation in which all the parties involved more or less patiently and politely — typically less and less of either, the longer the conversation goes on — tell one another what propositions they hold for true about the given topic. 

In this first type of conversation, listening is often at a minimum, whereas talking is at a maximum. Before the conversation even begins, everyone participating already knows what they think; their individual opinions are already formed before the conversation begins, and what’s at issue is simply to vocalize those opinions. In such a conversation, the real topic of the conversation is those opinions themselves, rather than that about which the communicants have those opinions. 

For example, imagine a small group of people at a cocktail party who fall into conversation about current United States policy toward Russia and the Ukraine. In such cocktail party chatter that policy itself is not really what the chatter is all about. Rather, it focuses on the exchange of the party-goers’ opinions of that policy. When the party is over, everyone comes away knowing quite a bit that they did not know before. Everybody now has new information about what everybody else holds for true. 

However, it is only accidentally, if at all, that any of the cocktailers comes away knowing anything new about US policy. What one essentially acquires from such conversations is just new knowledge of the opinions of the other cocktailers—“new” if one didn’t already know all that even before the start of the conversation, thanks to prior conversations of the same type with the same co-partyers. (We will leave it up to information brokers to determine the exchange-value of such knowledge.) 

In contrast, consider a different type of conversation, one in which the parties involved do not already cling to any cherished opinions about the matter ostensibly under discussion and in which, therefore, the real matter at issue is not the exchange of opinions but is, rather, the genuine exploration of whatever is being addressed. The focus of this second kind of conversation is not, in fact, acquiring any new information at all, most especially any information about the opinions of the other communicants. The focus is instead precisely on exploring the topic at issue in all such opinions, exploring that topic in an effort to acquire new insight into it, rather than information about anyone’s opinions on it (or anything else). 

In sharp contrast to the first type of conversation, the cocktail-party sort, for this second type of conversation what has premium status is precisely attentive listening rather than talking. However, what one is focally listening to is not so much the other persons present as it is what, following the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, founder of 20th century phenomenology, could best be called “the thing itself,” whatever that thing under discussion might be. 

In conversations of this second type, we let whatever we are talking about, that thing itself, hold our attention. We grant it room to unfold itself like a flower at bloom in and through our conversation, building its own case, making its own argument, shining in its own brilliance. 

Arguing with one another just dulls the shine of the thing’s own silvery argument.