Schopenhauer's 38 Dirty Tricks for Winning Any Argument (and Why He Lost) | A 20-Minute Classic

You have almost certainly lost an argument you were right about. Around 1830 Arthur Schopenhauer wrote down why, as a list: thirty-eight tricks for winning a dispute whether you are right or not. He defined the subject in one cold sentence: “Controversial Dialectic is the art of disputing, and of disputing in such a way as to hold one's own, whether one is in the right or the wrong”. The tricks have hardly dated. Stretch your opponent's claim until it breaks. Choose the words before the argument starts: “Of all the tricks of controversy, this is the most frequent, and it is used instinctively.” Play to the audience instead of the expert: “At this the audience laughs.” Lean on what everyone believes: “There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.” And when you are losing, the last trick: “to become personal, insulting, rude”. The man who wrote it quarrelled with his mother, scheduled his lectures against Hegel's and drew five students, and lost a lawsuit to a seamstress. He never published the full list; it came out of his papers after he died. ⚠ Our reading, which you are welcome to fight: this is not a manual for winning. Its real subject is the many ways vanity disguises itself as reasoning, and the last page says so: “scarcely one man in a hundred is worth your disputing with him”. The fair objection, which we argue in the episode: the book's grammar is “you must”, and arguing only with the one in a hundred may be the most convenient trick of all. Source: Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy, translated by T. Bailey Saunders, London, 1896; Project Gutenberg #10731. Public domain. Every quoted line was checked word for word against that file. ⏱ Chapters 0:00 Thirty-Eight Ways To Win 1:18 A Mother Who Would Not Buy It 2:42 Five Students And A Seamstress 4:08 Vanity Is The Engine 5:36 Intellectual Fencing 6:56 The Tricks You Already Use 8:30 Win By Choosing The Word 9:57 Playing To The Crowd 11:21 Let Them Pave 12:51 Half An Ounce Of Will 14:17 The Last Trick 15:46 Our Take 17:17 The Case Against Us 18:39 A Guard, Not A Sword 19:59 How He Won In The End 21:26 The Move With No Number #Schopenhauer #TheArtOfBeingRight #debate #criticalthinking #philosophy #classicliterature #booksummary