Immunity Preserves the Self

Charles Paine calls this book "The Resistant Writer" because he sees writing courses being taught to build students' immunity against bad arguments. When we teach argumentation, we often teach it from the Aristotelian view, explaining the concepts of logos, ethos, and pathos. This angle "demystifies" rhetoric. We can analyze it and deprive it of its power--show the students what an emotional appeal looks like so they won't fall for it.

Paine contrasts this with a Ciceronian model. The Ciceronian model is a positive model of rhetoric, which concentrates on how to persuade through language. It encourages social involvement.

This is the key to Paine's argument. Aristotle's model teaches us to distance ourselves, while Cicero's asks us to join in. This distance is intended to protect our selves from outside influence. We want to preserve ourselves exactly as we are. This is likened to a modern (opposed to post-modern) view of immunity. A modern view of immunity has the physical self being protected by the immune system, keeping out invaders.

But this view of the immune system doesn't work--that's not what defines a healthy immune system. To be healthy, we don't need an immune system to fight off all invaders, we need an immune system that responds appropriately to threats and non-threats. An overactive immune system is just as dangerous as an underactive immune system.

Correspondingly, too strong a defense against bad rhetoric may be just as bad as too weak a defense. We do our students harm if we make them too ready to reject ideas--too firm in keeping their identities untroubled by outside influences.

Thinking back to taking the Self and Free Will as an undergrad, these aren't unfamiliar concepts, though their application to composition theory is new to me. In Free Will, there was a bit of controversy about what the "self" was--am I some kind of mystical agent/mind/soul who is above causation, simply acting out my will on the physical world (see Roderick Chisholm)? Am I constituted of my actions (see Robert Kane)? Is my self the parts of my personality that I endorse (see Harry Frankfurt)?

I really always felt that these models, all of them, made my self less than I was. I feel myself to be everything--all my actions, all my beliefs, all my desires. Even the little things, like being in the mood for a Dr Pepper. It takes everything to be me.

This conception of the self (which is not so much common) means that my self is constantly changing. I'm not the me I was yesterday, or even five minutes ago. This forces me to believe in degrees of identity. Some of my beliefs, for instance, are not fundamental to my sense of self. When I found out my orange strawberry banana juice was mostly actually apple juice, there was a sense in which I changed, but not in a major way. I still interact with the world mostly the same as I did before, except where juice cocktails are concerned.

But some beliefs and desires are more basic. An Amy who wore makeup, for instance, though it seems like a small thing, would probably require a pretty different foundation...a different way of thinking about myself or human beauty.

If we think of the self as fluid, if we think of parts of ourselves as more important than others, then we don't have to be so scared of influence. We shouldn't be scared of change, because we change all the time. The parts of us that are easily influenced aren't the important parts anyway.

So I think it may be as much about our approach to the "self" as it is our approach to rhetoric. And I think maybe Paine is saying this, but I lost him when he got into the practical problems of building up resistance by exposing the students to new ideas.