This afternoon I had a spirited e-mail correspondence with a friend about the legitimacy of ad hominem arguments. He decried their use whereas I expressed openness to their use in some cases and within certain limits. Here, I turn to Robert C. Solomon’s essay, “Nietzsche ad hominem: Perspectivism, personality and ressentiment,” in The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, edited by Bernd Magnus & Kathleen Marie Higgins:

An ad hominem argument, as everyone learns in any Introductory Logic or Basic Composition course, is an attack directed “against the person” instead of addressed to his or her thesis or argument. To so attack the person is to commit a common elementary fallacy, albeit “informal.” Nevertheless, this fallacy is frowned upon almost as routinely as it is actually used, in philosophy as in politics and virtually every other human endeavor where people care more about winning the argument than obeying the rules of academic etiquette.

But are ad hominem arguments really fallacies? Or do they provide fair grounds for rejecting or at least being suspicious of the views or opinions of a person? The answer to the second question is, “of course they do,” and the answer to the first is, at least, “not always.” To recognize someone as a compulsive liar is to be suspicious, at least, of their most sincere-sounding pronouncements. To recognize that someone has a personal interest or investment in a case (e.g. a scientist hired by the Tobacco Institute to disprove the link between smoking and cancer) is good reason to be deeply suspicious of the supposed “objectivity” of the research, no matter how painstakingly pure the experimental methodology. It is true, of course, that such suspicions do not show such pronouncements or the conclusions of such research to be false. But the entanglements of truth and method, knowing and the knower, is such that the ad hominem argument is often – at least as a practical matter – conclusive. The thesis may be in fact be true, but in the absence of arguments from other, less suspicious parties, we may be rightly no longer willing to listen.

It is often said that the problem with an ad hominem argument is that it reduces a (possibly good) thesis or argument to the faults and foibles of its promulgator, thus eliminating or eclipsing our search for the truth. A cheap argument (“he’s drunk” or “she’s just an undergraduate”) may have this unfortunate effect, but a well-wrought ad hominem insight may explain what many pages or hours of analysis and textual exegesis will not. (“I seek to comprehend what idiosyncrasy begot that Socratic equation of reason, virtue, and happiness: that most bizarre of all equations, which, moreover, is opposed to all the instincts of the earlier Greeks.”) Ad hominem arguments expand, they do not limit, the field of philosophical argumentation. Instead of restricting the focus to mere thesis, antithesis and argument, the ad hominem approach brings in the motives, the intentions, the circumstances and the context of those who have a stake in the outcome. Or, in Nietzschean metaphor, ad hominem arguments make us look at the soil and the seed as well as the plant from which the flower grows. It allows us to see what is not being said or argued, the limitations of a position as well as its possibilities. (“The Socratic virtues were preached because the Greeks had lost them.”)

Philosopher Merold Westphal:

Central to the hermeneutical theory of Paul Ricoeur is the thesis of the autonomy of the text. . . . This autonomy is not a total independence. It does not banish the author, and by implication the original context and original audience, to irrelevance. Ricoeur is quite explicit about this:

Not that we can conceive of a text without an author; the tie between the speaker and the discourse is not abolished, but distended and complicated. . . . The text’s career escapes the finite horizon lived by its author. What the text says now matters more than what the author meant to say, and every exegesis unfolds its procedures within the circumference of a meaning that has broken its moorings to the psychology of the author.

Indeed, “the ‘world’ of the text may explode the world of the author.”

* * *

If we ask why meaning “escapes” the immediate context of the author and the original audience, Ricoeur gives us two reasons beyond the obvious empirical fact that legal, literary, and religious texts are regularly interpreted differently by different interpreters in different circumstances. One is the polysemy of language, even ordinary language. By polysemy, Ricoeur means simply that meaning is contextual, that words have different meanings in different contexts. The meaning of a text cannot be determined by a passive, merely mirroring intuition but only by an active interpretation. The role of the author’s context is not “abolished” but “complicated” by the role of the reader’s context, which inevitably becomes part of the hermeneutical circle in which interpretation occurs. While this is true of ordinary discourse, it is especially true of metaphorical language.

The second reason is at least as important as the first. . . Meaning is contextual in the sense that the meaning of parts of a text is dependent on the meaning of the whole, and the meaning of a whole text is dependent on various larger wholes––linguistic and cultural––to which it belongs. Interpretation is construal rather than intuition for the simple reason that no one, neither the author nor the reader, is in actual possession of the whole that would give fully final and determinate meaning.

* * *

Does this mean that anything goes, that a text can mean whatever any audience takes it to mean? Hardly! Ricoeur has already insisted that the role of the author is not “abolished” but only “complicated” by the plurality of invisible readers. Nothing in his analysis suggests that Dad might rightly hear Mom’s “Only two more days till Christmas” as the announcement that she has just won the lottery and he will soon be driving that long-coveted Porsche. . . Ricoeur writes:

If it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal. . . . The text is a limited field of possible construction. . . . It is always possible to argue for or against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them, and to seek for an agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our reach.

Ricoeur’s hermeneutics develops a dialectic of belonging and distanciation. By belonging he means the embeddedness of (human) author and reader alike in contingent and particular horizons, contexts, and perspectives to which the meanings they put or find in a text are relative. . . By distanciation Ricoeur means the adoption of methods of testing interpretations that render the reader as objective as possible and that treat the text as an object to be explained. . . . Ricoeur thinks that objectifying methods are an indispensable “guardrail” to interpretation, a necessary protection against lapsing into an “anything goes” attitude. But he also thinks they should be the tail wagging the dog. To make the text an object to be explained with the help of some method for the sake of objectivism in interpretation and to identify this task as the whole hermeneutical task is to treat the text like “a cadaver handed over for autopsy” and to act “as though one were to give the funeral eulogy of someone yet alive. The eulogy might be accurate and appropriate, but it is nonetheless ‘premature,’ as Mark Twain might have put it.”

– Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church

Philosopher Merold Westphal:

According to familiar versions of theism, God is Creator, and the world has all and only those features that God (intended to) put there; if there is a certain indeterminacy due to creaturely freedom, that is only because God (intended to) put creaturely freedom in the world. Similarly, according to the view our trio [Roland Barthes, Michael Foucault, Jacques Derrida] wishes to dispute, the author is Creator of the text; it has all and only those meanings that the author (intended to) put there. In other words, it is a very particular kind of human author whose death is being announced, namely, one who never existed in the first place. Real authors do not create meaning in the way God created the world. They are neither the Alpha (pure, unconditioned origin) of meaning nor the Omega (ultimate goal) of interpretation. For this reason interpretation cannot be understood as deciphering, for in deciphering the meaning is already there, fixed and final (author as Alpha), though disguised by code, and the task is to discover and reproduce the author’s meaning (author as Omega).

* * *

. . . the author banished is only the (fictitious) author who is owner of language, the author who in godlike sovereignty is the creator of language but is not conditioned by the language(s) that have always preceded, made possible, and limited the work of the author.

* * *

. . . the finitude of the author will be mirrored in the finitude of the reader, who will be no pure origin of meaning but will be conditioned by prior meanings, including those that stem from the author as well as those that stem from the reader’s own grammatical-historical location.

Here the author and reader are cocreators of textual meaning. This is a genuine threat to hermeneutical objectivism, for there are many readers (including the same reader at different times and in different circumstances) and many traditions of reading, so the notion of the meaning of the text becomes highly problematic. When the text is understood as giving rise to meaning at the site of conversation between author and reader, there will be different meanings because there will be different conversations.

* * *

Having let the reader get a camel-like nose in the tent, let us now ask if we are on a slippery slope to a relativism where “anything goes” and where the text becomes a wax nose that can mean anything to anyone. Undoubtedly so, if that is the only alternative to allowing the author to be Absolute Monarch of Meaning or Divine Dispenser of Determinacy. But we have already learned in Logic 101 not to infer authorial irrelevance from the denial of authorial sovereignty. Or, to use a political analogy, the president of the United States does not rule by divine right with unconditioned authority. He is under constraints by Congress and the courts. But only a muddle-headed monarchist would complain that as president he has been banished to utter irrelevance and plays no significant role in the enactment and enforcement of laws in the United States.

Hermeneutically this means that the death of the absolute author is not the absolute death of the author. Authorial meaning is still important. Although interpretation is not deciphering as the mere reproduction of a prior, fixed, encoded meaning, there will be a reproductive aspect to interpretation. . . . “Not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well” [Hans-Georg Gadamer].

– Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church

Philosopher Merold Westphal:

Just for the record, except for a recent pizza ad, I can’t find anyone who espouses an “anything goes” philosophy. Nietzsche, for example, whose perspectivism is a radical version of relativism, surely doesn’t think Platonism or Christianity are just as good as his will-to-power naturalism. So I propose that we recognize the “anything goes” objection as the bugaboo it is and practice a fifty-year moratorium on the use of that phrase.

– Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church

In a review of sociologist Christian Smith’s ambitious work, What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up, D. Michael Lindsay, president and professor of sociology at Gordon College, defines critical realism:

Smith advances his understanding of personhood through the theoretical scaffolding of critical realism. Critical realism, which is much more popular in European sociology and in the humanities in North America than in the social sciences here, seeks to provide a via media between positivist empiricism and postmodern constructionism, which represent the two prevailing epistemological poles of contemporary social science. Positivist empiricism makes the mistake of conflating what’s real with what is observable; critical realism distinguishes between the two, insisting that a great deal of reality exists independent of humans’ consciousness of it. This line of thought draws an analogy with modern scientific discoveries: Just because scientists could not observe protons in the 17th century did not make protons any less real. So it may be with other dimensions of reality, such as divine inspiration or miraculous healings. To fully understand human personhood, Smith suggests, we have to make room for things such as intuition, even revelation, regardless of our ability to measure and test such things.

By the same token, critical realism critiques the postmodern claim that everything in life is socially constructed, that all we know and experience in the world is the product of humans’ making. Instead, there are dimensions of reality that exist independent of our efforts. This point most naturally comports with an orthodox Christian understanding of the world, one where God endows the world and humanity with certain things that humans did nothing to generate on their own.

– “An Ambitious Sociology” (Books & Culture, November/December 2011)

Thomas Dumm, professor of politics at Amherst College, writes:

To be human is to risk being alone in a way that is unbidden and unwanted. And we may also note that while we are alive, we humans search for what we imagine our world to be. It is true that from the start of our lives and for our lives’ duration, we seek others to comfort us, harm us, ignore us, and move us onto our paths through and out of life. Loneliness is deeply entangled in all paths of life because it reveals in sharp profile some of the most important limits of who we are and how we are with each other. It may be said that loneliness is fundamental to the very constitution of our selves.

Amedeo Modigliani, "Head of a Young Girl" (1916)

There are moments when we find it astonishing, this life. We are astonished at least in part because we know of no other life and yet we retain a capacity to be amazed by the singularity of this one. It seems as though each of us is endowed with the ability to think of our life as being this life, and we are able to do so without any direct experience of other lives with which we may make a comparison. The endowment of this life is a core paradox of our existence that motivates great religious thoughts, generates extraordinary imaginative energies, and underwrites profound philosophical discourses. Yet for much of the living of it, we try to avoid thinking about this life. We move about the world obscurely ashamed of our presence, embarrassed by our unbidden participation in the search for meaning beyond the conventions handed down to us. We intuit that to face this life at the most basic level would be to experience a sort of sublime terror. Many of us would do almost anything, even deny our own life, to avoid that feeling. We cling to the familiar, even as a part of each of us remains acquainted with a strangeness inside ourselves. The world of our familiar takes on many modes that are deeply rooted in the rhythms of the everyday, and we say to ourselves that this is the world we live in. Yet this world remains largely unthought. It is as if we are condemned to see life retrospectively. In such moments, life itself seems like a broken clock that can be taken apart and truly known only when it no longer keeps time.

This is one way we come to know ourselves. But this way of knowing kills its object and violates what would seem to be our paramount responsibility of caring for ourselves. The care of the self is always related to how we know ourselves, how we explore and whether we decide to investigate the grounding of our life. And yet this care has another end in mind than knowing; it entails an acknowledgement of the very limits of what we may know while appreciating that there may still be an unknown that must remain unknown. How deeply we go in pursuit of this form of caring is not settled by rules, not by the commands of various orthodoxies. Moreover, we cannot absolve ourselves of this obscure responsibility of caring for ourselves by consigning this work to philosophers. As a matter of basic human right and responsibility, philosophizing is not an activity that is limited to those who are designated as philosophers. The thinking person, as Emerson suggests in his essay on the American scholar, is anyone who faintly remembers the wholeness of the world that we can only experience partially. While we can never overcome this partiality, we still seek ways to endure it and to find something certain or energizing about our selves from within its bounds. We try different therapies that would comfort us in the face of our shattered condition or that would help us to cope with or evade the harm we otherwise would suffer.

Loneliness is one of the ways we experience partiality. We can never experience the world as a whole because we are mortal. We are fated to seek assurances for our existence, even though such assurances can never overcome basic doubt. We negotiate a path through this life with others, both with those who are far outside of us and with those who have penetrated our interiors. We hear voices composed of the fragments of those others, we speak, we listen, we touch and are touched, and we always fail to achieve an understanding that would allow us to rest. Our unending desires remain unsatisfied. Yet our failures, as inevitable as they are, also shape whatever our successes may be. We move through life, and our lives are shaped by these movements.

When the reach of our selves to others becomes so fragmented and confused that we find ourselves arrested, or halted, or otherwise blocked from contact with them and from ourselves, we become lonely. We may thus think of loneliness as the experience of unhappy removal from a life lived in common with others.

– Loneliness as a Way of Life (Harvard)

When Collin Hansen is not serving as the editorial director for The Gospel Coalition, he moonlights as a coroner and undertaker. With apodictic certainty, he recently declared that “postmodernism is dead” by means of suicide. And the neo-Calvinist munchkins cheered, “Ding, Dong! The Witch is dead.” What’s the evidence for his report? An art exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. According to its curators, postmodernism barely reached adulthood, living only for twenty years (1970-1990).

To his credit, Mr. Hansen recognizes the pluriform character of postmodernism as it’s manifested in philosophy, ethics, literature, and art – not to mention other areas. But this recognition is not accompanied by a textured understanding of postmodernism. No thinkers or texts are mentioned which makes me wonder if Mr. Hansen could spot a postmodernist staring him in the face. The Gang of Five  – Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, and Rorty – is never invoked. Instead, we’re told that Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code is an “artifact from the era.” If that’s a representative artifact, then good riddance to postmodernism! Other artifacts of a more serious nature, such as the plays of Samuel Beckett or the stories of Jorge Louis Borges, are not mentioned because, presumably, they’re inconvenient to the morality tale that Mr. Hansen wants to tell. We can bury postmodernism because Dan Brown is “a scholar poseur” who “pass[ed] off his irresponsible money grab as speaking truth to power.”

In the vaguest and vacuous of descriptions, we’re told that postmodernism is – or, excuse me, was – “a hyper-modernism, not a radically new enterprise”, the “prodigal son” of modernism, and “universal human despair apart from God.” Mr. Hansen seems to dismiss postmodernism for its absence of criteria and yet no criteria is given for postmodernism. Isn’t that ironic? Without specification, postmodernism functions as a bogeyman in the imagination of anxious Christians, as philosopher Merold Westphal has observed:

At varying degrees along a spectrum that runs from mildly allergic to wildly apoplectic, they are inclined to see postmodernism as an enemy of the gospel of Jesus Christ, frequently on the short list of the most dangerous anti-Christian currents of thoughts at the beginning of the new millennium. Relativism, nihilism, cynicism, anything goes. It is in terms like these that postmodern philosophy is portrayed as the enemy of all things bright and beautiful.

Imagine someone holding forth on Christianity whose only knowledge of the subject is Joel Osteen’s Become a Better You, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Mr. Hansen on postmodernism. For a Christian to say postmodernism is dead, without seriously engaging its ideas and artifacts, is tantamount to a New Atheist who pronounces that Christianity is dead. Incline thy ear to neither coroner.

I’m highlighting a few recent messages from the Philosophy Speaker Series at Wheaton College.

April 12, 2011
Jeffrey Brower, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University, on “Aquinas on Human Personhood and Death.”

March 22, 2011
Katherin Rogers, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Delaware, on “Anselm on Free Will.” Click here to listen. She is the author of Anselm on Freedom. 

February 16, 2011
Keith Yandell, Professor of Philosophy of Religion at University of Wisconsin, Madison, on “Is Buddhist Enlightenment Salvation?” Click here to listen. He is a co-author with Harold Netland of Buddhism: A Christian Exploration and Appraisal. 

December 2, 2010
Scott MacDonald, Professor of Philosophy & Christian Studies at Cornell University, on “Medieval Philosophy and the Foundations of Christian Intellectualism: How Augustine Made It Safe for Smart People To Be Christians.” Click here to listen.

November 16, 2010
Caroline Simon, Professor of Philosophy at Hope College, on “Exploring C. S Lewis’ Many Loves.” Click here to listen.

On April 21, 2010
Del Ratzsch, Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College, on “Science and Religion: The Alleged Evolutionary Divide.” Click here to listen. He is the author of Science & Its Limits: The Natural Sciences in Christian Perspective.

God, immorality, duty – how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third.
– George Eliot

G. Eliot. – They have got rid of the Christian God, and now think that they have to hold on to Christian morality more than ever: that is an English form of consistency, and we do not want to blame the moral little females à la Eliot for it. In England, every time you take one small step towards emancipation from theology you have to reinvent yourself as a moral fanatic in the most awe-inspiring way. That is the price you pay there. – For the rest of us, things are different. When you give up Christian faith, you pull the rug out from under your right to Christian morality as well. This is anything but obvious: you have to keep driving this point home, English idiots to the contrary. Christianity is a system, a carefully considered, integrated view of things. If you break off a main tenet, the belief in God, you smash the whole system along with it: you lose your grip on anything necessary. Christianity presupposes that humans do not know, cannot know what is good for them or what is evil, they believe in God who has privileged knowledge of this. Christian morality is a command; it has a transcendent origin; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth, – it stands or falls along with belief in God. – When the English really believe that they ‘intuitively’ know all by themselves what is good and what is evil; and when, as a result, they think that they do not need Christianity to guarantee morality any more, this is itself just the result of the domination of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this domination: so that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, so that no one can see how highly conditioned its right to exist really is. For the English, morality is not a problem yet . . . .
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Like other English “moralists,” Eliot seeks to hold on to Christian morality even while jettisoning its metaphysical base. For Nietzsche, she’s a dimwit because he thinks she ought to have known better – what we would colloquially call “putting two and two together.” Here was someone who had translated Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity – in which Feuerbach argues that “God” is merely an anthropomorphic projection – and David’s Strauss’s Life of Jesus – in which the “historical Jesus” is replaced by the  “ideal Christ” – and still didn’t understand that (to quote Nietzsche) “if you give up Christian faith, you pull the right to Christian morality out from under your feet.” Instead of having both the insight and the courage to go beyond Christian morality (at least on Nietzsche’s read), Eliot merely gives us a sentimentalized version of Christian morality that has no metaphysical basis.
– Bruce Ellis Benson, Pious Nietzsche

How should a person fight his opponent? Here is my favorite strategy:

The opinions of one’s opponents. – To assess the natural quality of even the cleverest heads – to see whether they are naturally subtle or feeble – one should take note of how they interpret and reproduce the opinions of their opponents: for how it does this betrays the natural measure of every intellect. – The perfect sage without knowing it elevates his opponent into the ideal and purifies his contradictory opinion of every blemish and adventitiousness: only when his opponent has by this means become a god with shining weapons does the sage fight against him.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881)