| | Subject: ad hominem
> I wasn't endorsing going off on wild, shouting, curse-laden tirades against devout Christians or Marxists. [Jon]
I was responding to the wider idea, not your form of it.
>Ayn Rand herself often eloquently and powerfully identified the ugly motives at the base of various irrational, vicious doctrines. If there's evidence that people are guilty of such motives, I don't think identifying it is wrong; I think it's a requirement of justice.
She asserted that holding these doctrines was not done by people who actually believed them, was not done innocently. She never -proved- it. She knew she herself could not hold false ideas and philosophers and that was her grounds for presuming what was in the minds of Jesus, Plato, Kant, Hume, Marx, and their modern, less intelligent followers.
This tendency to attack the person was appropriate and necessary for a character in a novel who was clearly dealing with a Toohey or a Taggart or a Keating or a Lilly Rearden. But to assume the originator of an irrational, vicious doctrine was always a monster, that "Dewey was a Toohey"...or, worse, that gullible college students who become professors indoctrinated by these ideas made plausible... are evil and don't thoroughly believe the doctrines requires proof.
I, of course, agree that Objectivists should not treat each other this way, but my view goes beyond that: don't call intellectual adversaries names in print, period. (If the adversary happens to literally be a killer like OBL or Hitler, that is a different matter. But to know the motives of Peter Singer or Richard Rorty or Kant, I would have to do an awful lot of reading and offer a great deal of proof.)
You will be much more effective at crushing and discrediting these people if you don't resort to the fallacy of ad hominem. One of the major reasons Rand's nonfiction is a lot less effective than it might have been is her use of invective and ad hominem.
Her immediate followers, Branden and then Peikoff, did us no favors by imitating this rhetorical style. One reason OPAR - the first book to put Objectivism fleshed out between the covers of a book and thus extremely important and which Peikoff invested ten years in - vanished without a trace in terms of impact and credibility, is that he included this approach right in the middle of the most philosophical paragraphs or discussions. And it was grating because it came out of left field. Rand could partially get away with it because she made it plausible.
I realize I am in a clear minority of Objectivists on the ad hominem issue (even probably among TOC people not just ARIans!)- all of whom imbibed this attitude with their Rand's milk from the very first, in the novels and reinforced in nearly every nonfiction essay or lecture series. But the questions to always ask when someone attacks motives or has insight into the evil soul or another are:
How do you know, are you a psychologist? Did you know the person? What's your proof?
Do you think libertarians or environmentalists or global warming nuts or linguistic analysts you've met who subscribe to some deeply non-Objectivist or anti-philosophical idea are deliberately doing it to subvert what they know to be true?
This was Ayn Rand's single biggest mistake, and it was a psychological one, not a philosophical one.
(Edited by Philip Coates
on 3/06, 10:38am)
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