In the opening chapter of his Self-Consuming Artifacts, Stanley Fish distinguishes between rhetoric and dialectic.
While rhetoric “satisfies” readers that “mirror[s] and present[s] for approval the opinions its readers already hold”, dialectic is unsettling for it “requires of its readers a searching and rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe in and live by.” Fish adds that a dialectical work does not simply proclaim the truth “but asks that its readers discover the truth for themselves.”
This made me wonder what the dialectical books in my own reading history had been, works that had challenged the assumptions of my worldview and had motivated me to seek truth in a new way. I came up with short list that follows (note: I’m omitting the Bible, the book of books that stands as the primary lens through which I view the world).
They include:
- Cornelius Van Til’s apologetical work, particularly as excerpted and commented on in Greg Bahnsen’s Van Til’s Apologetic
- James K. A. Smith’s view of educational formation in Desiring the Kingdom
- Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of traditional morality in The Genealogy of Morals
- Northrop Frye’s approach to literary criticism (it can be pursued with science rigor) and literary evaluation (it’s worthless) in Anatomy of Criticism
- James Baldwin’s scathing look at the complicity of the Christian church in America’s troubled history with race in The Fire Next Time
- C.S. Lewis’s representation of academic moral cowardice in That Hideous Strength
- David Foster Wallace’s examination of addiction and depression in Infinite Jest