Covid-19, social media scandals, polarization, Trump, Afghanistan…These are times that seem to invoke a lot of confrontation, and the worst part is that people don’t know what confrontation is for, or how to make it fruitful.

Confrontation has always been an essential part of the history of humanity; it is a natural reaction to difference, and avoiding it would make us nothing less than a xenophobic species. Non-confrontational and passive-aggressive attitudes can be more harmful to society than violence in the long run. They tend to boost mediocrity, make poor people be ok with economic injustices, and delay progress. Most of us” are afraid of complaining about what’s right, but, quite frankly, there hasn’t been one significant change in history that didn’t need a big revolution, a big fight, or at least an annoying person confronting the store manager. These people are labeled as “bad people” in many Western cultures, but the reality is that things don’t get done without them. Without some of them, many of us wouldn’t have rights today. 

In Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Conflict and the Logic of Organizational Struggle, J.S. Pearson explains why we must value conflict in a positive way and explains how Nietzsche’s ideal is characterized by a combination of measured and unmeasured conflict. “This species of struggle is analogous to the biological process of digestion, which simultaneously involves 1) a measured struggle to incorporate that which is deemed serviceable to the organism, and 2) an unmeasured struggle to eliminate material deemed redundant or harmful. This dualistic struggle is called ‘organizational conflict’ because both, incorporation and exclusion, form part of a single overarching impetus to establish a healthy organization.” 

For example, when confronting your bandmate for not learning the songs or getting late to soundcheck, you might want to measure your words because you want to give him the benefit of the doubt. You don’t want to lose a bandmate unnecessarily, and maybe it wasn’t his fault in the first place. But if, after trying this, his response still isn’t professional, some elimination process needs to happen without measuring the consequences too much. For those who understand the evident value of confrontation (not those stuck in its rejection because it isn’t kind), these are the fundamental questions we should start focusing on: what are the ideal components for a sensible, fruitful, and non-destructive confrontation? What is our responsibility regarding emotions when approaching confrontation? 

To start looking for the answers to these questions, we need to take an Aristotelian approach and strive for balance. In Taking Responsibility for our Emotions, Nancy Sherman claims that we should be held accountable for the modulation of our emotions and the reactions (and actions) following them. She sustains that even if some situations and biological circumstances might be out of our control, our agency is predominant, and we still need to take responsibility for our emotions. On the other hand, in Moods are not Colored Lenses: Perceptualism and the Phenomenology of Moods, Francisco Gallegos talks about a responsibility to honor the truth shown by our emotions. He sustains that our ethical responsibility is to “listen and ride” our emotions as a horse that enables us to be more attuned with reality and our human needs. In the end, an emotion needs to be taken care of sooner or later, or it will start damaging our psychology as a repressed thought that eventually will show in our actions.

Sherman’s view seems to respond to a more social responsibility, analogous to Nietzsche’s measured struggle. In contrast, Gallego’s view is more attuned with our need to look after our individual emotional needs, even if this means taking social risks. Accordingly, this second view draws an arrow towards Piersen’s unmeasured struggles, committed to eliminating the harmful material. I propose working on balancing these two views to find the ideal structure of an empathetic confrontation. These are the most important components to master this art:

1) Look after your (and your community’s) interests while staying empathetic: “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.” This was a maxim for utilitarianism, but Mill’s instructions to accomplish this were always too ambiguous. In reality, it has always been up to us to figure out what this means in our particular contexts and cultures. Nevertheless, our responsibility to confront whoever insists on getting in the way of our (and our communities) interests, as long as these don’t step on others’ rights, should be a maxim in itself. Sometimes this is what the opponent needs to improve his own life as well; confrontation makes everybody grow in the long run.

2) Work on your language and dialogue skills: Appropriate language is critical for successful confrontation. Having the right intentions but using the wrong words won’t get you very far in your quest for your interests. The idea is to deliver a clear but kind, convincing but empathetic discourse that highlights the other person’s interests as a priority but stays away from negligence. 

3) Practice Stoicism to take care of your mental health: Our responsibility to strictly keep our mental health untouched by the anxiety of social/self-judgment after confrontation should be another maxim in itself. Stoicism is a very efficient way to accomplish this, even though it is often misunderstood as a cold school that neglects emotions and attempts to control them or suppress them. This is a misconception, at least when it comes to Seneca and Epictetus, who defended that you should care and work for what you can control and let go of what you can’t. 

4) Be sensible, rational, practical, and realistic: Our responsibility to strive for a more intelligent and educated confrontation should be another maxim in itself. This shouldn’t need much explanation, don’t just confront people to have more power or for ignorant reasons. A more puzzling additive to this would be striving for a fully developed phenomenological account of people’s emotional realities in confrontation. According to Gallegos “this will require us to identify structures of sense-making that function at an intermediate depth—not so deep as to alter our most basic sense of objective reality, but deep enough to alter our experience of particular objects.” In other words, we must strive not to get too caught up in our own mental movies so that we may remain empathetic. 

5) Take the time!: The previous four points are probably very difficult to master for most people. Nobody can be rational, eloquent, intelligent, and stoic enough to have a successful confrontation that honors their interests every single time; this would entail living in a perfectly fair and predictable world. However, our reality is infested with injustice, contingency, and all kinds of surprises, but you are still entitled and even responsible for “confronting” if you need to. Thus, there is just one antidote for when you feel you aren’t good enough in some (or all) of the four previous points, but you need to host a confrontation: shut up, listen carefully, take the time to dialogue, and ask the opponent to take the necessary time to dialogue as well. Time is a powerful thing that is often overlooked.

*Gallegos, F, (2017). Moods are not Colored Lenses: Perceptualism and the Phenomenology of Moods. Springer Science. (USA)

*Pierson, J.S. (2018). Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Conflict and the Logic of Organizational Struggle. Leiden University. Scholarly Publication. (The Netherlands)

*Sherman, N. (1999). Taking Responsibility for our Emotions. Responsibility. Cambridge University Press. (USA)