Ad Hominem à la Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900)

Master of the argumentum ad hominem

 

I.

 

Academic philosophers, who like to take a serious and professional approach to their discipline, hate ad hominem attacks. 

 

In other words, they believe that when addressing someone else's argument or position, one should always refrain from maliciously (and fallaciously) attacking the person or some attribute of the person who is making the argument. 

 

Always stick to the substance of what they say; don't question their motives, denigrate their character, or insult their looks. 

 

In other words, play the ball, not the man. To do otherwise, is just not cricket; something that even Aristotle appreciated [1]. 

 

 

II. 

Nietzsche, however, was not an academic philosopher. 

 

He may have been the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, when appointed in 1869, aged 24, but he made his name as a philosopher only after resigning from the post ten years later (due to ill health) and becoming a fiercely independent thinker; one who cheerfully attacked his philosophical enemies - from Plato and Socrates to Kant and Hegel - directly employing an abusive model of ad hominem argument.      

 

As a psychologist, as a clinician, and as a genealogist, Nietzsche was far more interested in what made the individual (or an entire people) tick - what forces were at play within them - than in the validity of their arguments, or the falseness of their judgements. He valued those with healthy instincts over those whom he regarded as decadent, or those whose values betrayed their ressentiment.     

As many readers of Nietzsche have noted, his philosophy consists to a very large extent of speculative diagnoses, concerning the virtues and vices of those figures (or those cultures) that most excite his interest. This certainly makes him unusual amongst philosophers. 

There are times when ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious; and there may even be times when it's relevant to question the personal conduct, character, or motives of an opponent. But it's highly debatable if Nietzsche is justified in dismissing Socrates, for example, on the grounds that his being monstrous of face proves he was also monstrous of soul [2]. 

 

Ugliness may be an objection, but is it really sufficient grounds to refute a persons thought?

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Aristotle is credited with first making the distinction between (legitimate) logical arguments and (illegitimate) personal attacks. In his work Sophistical Refutations, Aristotle showed the fallaciousness of placing the questioner rather than their argument under scrutiny. The proper thing for a philosopher to do, he wrote, is not to question the attributes of an intellectual opponent, but to address the weaknesses and ambiguities in their argument. 

      This isn't to say, however, that all ad hominem arguments are fallacious; one might, for example, adopt a dialectical strategy of using an opponents own ideas and assumptions against them. But the term ad hominem was by the beginning of the 20th century almost always linked to a logical fallacy and today, except within very specialised philosophical circles, the term ad hominem signifies an attack on the character of a person in an attempt to refute their argument.

 

[2] See Nietzsche, 'The Problem of Socrates' (3), in Twilight of the Idols. 

 

 

Musical bonus: 'Attack', taken from the debut album by Public Image Ltd. (Virgin Records, 1978): click here. Note this is the remastered version from 2011.