Anti-Climacus

LINK: If your interests run to humanitarian intervention and international law (as mine do), you may have run across the work of Fernando Tesón. As it so happens, he's been guest-blogging a little at The Volokh Conspiracy. He's mostly talking about political deliberation (perfect for me, since as it so happens, my dissertation will need to have a focus on deliberation), but I find his postings on the inherent limitations of political art to be interesting. E.g.:

"My claim is not that political art is socially worthless. Rather, it is this: political art cannot count as evidence for the political position it tries to advance. I happen to believe that political positions should be supported by argument, not by force, deceit, or emotion. (Some have blasted me for this, but it is my view...) A work of art is not an argument."

I think that's approximately correct: something that's not an argument can't really be taken for one. In another sense, I think it is important to see argument in politics as something more than merely producing a chain of logic leading inevitably to a conclusion. Thus I'm closer to Finnis when he writes about Shakespeare: "we have a telling witness or advocate (not precisely an argument)." Part of good argumentation is having the correct grounding, and this must come at some point from things that are not themselves arguments. Watching The Sorrow and the Pity (or looking at Guernica) doesn't actually tell you very much about what to think. But if you take the right lessons from them, they can give you an intuition that allows you to recognize better and worse options whenever a problem arises.**

*See also: Robert Nozick on coercive argumentation

**This is not itself an argument, exactly (but you can blame Finnis and Germain Grisez for convincing me that this has to be the right position)