Arthur Schopenhauer and Soren Kierkegaard "The Art of Being Right"
Channel: Craig Campbell
Date: 2012-08-08

Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860, was a German philosopher who wrote several books about the primacy of the will in everyday life.  This is the preface to his 1831 essay "The Art of Controversy (or The Art of Being Right)". It's a guidebook for "intellectual fencers". He was a follower of Aristotle in his thinking but differed from him in some of his conclusions. He was against the ideas expressed by Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Hegel. This essay deals with logic (objectivity) and dialectics (subjectivity). Aristotle says, "Logic or Analytic is the method of arriving at true conclusions while Dialectic is the method of arriving at conclusions that are accepted or pass current as true." Rhetoric and Dialectic aim at persuasion. Analytic and Philosophy aim at the truth according to the philosophers.

Soren Kierkegaard used some of Schopenhauer's ideas in his thinking. 

"The dialogue [Protagoras] is aware of a lack of conclusion-indeed it seems to take a certain pleasure in the fascinating game of demolition and does not relish only an annihilation of the Sophist. Socrates himself says, "The present outcome of our conversation seems, like a human being, to approach us and to laugh at us and, if it could speak, would say: 'What strange people you are, Socrates and Protagoras.' " That is, after the two antagonists have tried every kind of grappling, following Protagoras's abandonment of his epideictic discourse, in that Socrates asks the questions at first and Protagoras answers, and then the latter asks the questions and the former answers, and finally Socrates once again is the questioner and Protagoras the answerer, and thus, to use a possibly illuminating expression, they have repeatedly weighted the salt with each other, there is the curious turn that Socrates defends what he has wanted to attack and Protagoras attacks what he has wanted to defend. The whole dialogue is reminiscent of the well-known argument between a Catholic and a Protestant that ended with their convincing each other, so that the Catholic turned Protestant, and the Protestant turned Catholic, except that here the ridiculous is taken up in the ironic consciousness. 

Kierkegaard's note: The anecdote I refer to here provides the second form of an ironic negative result, for here the irony is due to arriving at an actual conclusion. But since the actual conclusion is wholly personal and as such is neutral to the idea, and since the Catholic convert presumably will in turn have the same persuasive power over the newly hatched Protestant as the latter had over him in the first lap, and so on, we perceive the possibility of a never-ending dispute that for the disputants is at all times convincing despite the fact that neither of them has a conviction at any time. There is only the relation of correspondence between them, so that the moment A is Catholic B becomes Protestant, and the moment B becomes Catholic A becomes Protestant, which means, of course, that neither of them changes his habitus [inner disposition] but each of them changes his suit [Habit]. 
Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, Hong 1989 p. 56-57

Here is a link to "The Art of Controversy" from librivox.org and a link to Kierkegaard's book Philosophical Fragments. 

http://librivox.org/the-art-of-controversy-or-the-art-of-being-right-by-arthur-schopenhauer/

http://www.religion-online.org/showbook.asp?title=2512