A Hostile Critic Isn’t Impartial

They complain about our greatest strengths

Argument at the end of the world: Guys by Clker-Free-Vector-Images, city by Brigitte Werner, both Pixabay

As a first-year college student in the late ’90s, strolling through the dusty part of the Religion section of my university library in my spare time, I jotted down a couple passages by Leslie Dewart and Edwin Tenney Brewster on the value of criticism. Predictably, I went on to major in philosophy. Since then, I’ve unpacked and changed my thoughts about arguments.

Seek Out a Critic

Dewart observed that an impartial critic can help us spot our factual and logical errors. We should “speculatively entertain views contrary to ours,” “pursue our acquaintance with foreign ways,” and “beg to share in someone else’s novel experience.” Criticism helps a “good” person to “become conscious of [our] shortcomings” and to “cultivat[e]” the “the appreciation of our own truth, the understanding of our own ways and the development of our own experience.” Hence the proverb: “A good man deserves an enemy to tell him his faults.”

What matters, Dewart said, is that the critic isn’t automatically on your side and thus will be “ferreting out every last weakness” for you. If such a critic doesn’t come to us, we should make an effort seek them out on their “home ground.”