Book Salon and Happy Hour with Agnes Callard

​Read the below passage in advance and come prepared to discuss the question: Are our fights always about an unspoken argument?

​"Typically, if you didn't think that someone was wrong about something, there would be nothing to be fighting over. If you strike or coerce someone in the absence of such a point of contention, you would not see yourself as fighting them, but instead just as using force on them to achieve a goal. When I fight you, I exercise force on you as though I were exercising force on some idea associated with you — I am not just using force on you, but I am using it agonistically, in the context of a contest that aims to "support" or "stand up for" some principle. The disagreement has been displaced from its original home, which was a disagreement over that principle. Instead of actually settling it by argument, we pretend to settle it by way of a zero-sum contest. In a fight, there is always a conflict of interest.

​A Socratic definition of fighting would be something like this: fighting is politicized arguing. Whether we politicize the argument by using physical force, or emotional force, or whether we fight more indirectly, by way of proxies — think of how, in an especially acrimonious divorce, the ex-spouses might use their children to get at each other — what unifies all the fighting that we do is that the fight represents an argument we are not having."