I. Reducing a thinker’s work to his character and disposition has been the fashionable thing to do for a long time now. We say that Nietzsche hated the church because of his daddy issues, or because he was a weakling compensating his inferiority complex with bombastic will-to-power prose. Or, if we are Nietzscheans, we say that the Apostle Paul was a sneaky fraud whose talk about the primacy of love was just his way of gaining power without actually having it in him. Similar theories have surely been advanced for every philosopher, thinker and mystic known to man: fatherlessness, repression & internalization; defense mechanisms, complexes & ticks; provincialism, sexual frustration & disappointment; poverty, carelessness & bad experiences; the list is endless.
This is the longest definition of "ad hominem" I have ever read.
Seriously though, this is a good point to be making, how we short circuit actually engaging with a writer's arguments by just saying "well, they only say that because...". That might be a slightly useful heuristic if we are incapable of engaging with the argument and putting it in the ground, perhaps because we are unfortunately discussing something unfalsifiable, but generally it is a mental trap.
As you say, knowing someone's background can help contextualize their arguments, for instance casting light on their perspective, or highlighting hypocrisy, but generally I think we should be agnostic of the author's "reasons" for writing something and focus on the truth of their arguments. For example, people always fuss that Grotius wrote "The Free Sea" because he was commissioned to write a defense of the Netherlands' capturing of a Spanish ship (if I am recalling the countries correctly) but that is besides the point; sure, it was motivated reasoning, but the reasoning is dead sound in any case. No one points out gaps or leaps of assumption that would normally mark motivated reasoning, but instead just say "Well, he was hired to make an argument" as though that makes the argument invalid.
Perhaps a distinction: psychologizing and the "psychologizing fallacy." I think psychologizing can be helpful in some cases, as it brings a sense of healthy distrust, disabusing one from fanboying over an impressive thinker. However, it's essential to avoid the psychologizing fallacy, where one dismisses someone's views due to presumed unexamined motivations behind those views. Besides, psychologically uncalibrated individuals often focus on aspects of reality that others often overlook.
I agree - why not judge any work based on "merit" or lack thereof as it is presented versus trying to analyze the work based on the author's temperament. Anyhow, this article made me think of another I recently read on the topic of psychiatry, so I'll share the link:
This was really good, Luc, and raises some interesting issues that lead to additional questions (and so on). I'll probably respond via a post. Thanks for giving me some food for thought to really chew on!
Fantasizing about the supposed psychological motivations is a projection and tells much more about the fancier himself. I guess there are a lot of people who would like to publish their questionable musings and pretend it's science.
I do think there is some room for association between a philosopher's arguments and their acts, once one separates allegations from known history. For example, some have claimed that Foucault was a paedophile who abused Arab boys in Tunisia, but isn't it more effective to dismiss much of his work as wishful thinking once we recognise that after one separates mental illness from mental health, most of people he wanted released from insane asylums under the mistaken belief that they simply weren't conforming to societies norms was categorically incorrect, because we now know the overwhelming majority he claimed as heretics and mystics, by diagnosis, were almost certainly suffering from some form of physiological brain defect, with the notable exception of excessive feminine libido.
However, let's look at Rousseau by contrast. Here was a man who, despite his frequent denigration of the West and wildly wrongheaded thoughts on education, decided to leave all of his children to the tender mercies of state orphanages. Surely, this is the mark of the ideologue- no philosopher. Plus, he truly believed that the Enlightenment was a movement from contract to status, when all the empirical evidence points to the reverse- at least until modernity fell to the banal absurdity of postmodernism with its insipid requirement that no falsification occur at all, because all truth is subjective or unknowable.
For those interested in why Rousseau was wrong about education, I would recommend the studies of Richard Tremblay on chronic physical aggression in children. Aggression is not socially constructed, but the ability to exercise self-control is learned through socialisation- surely something of vital interest for those who wish to live in a relatively peaceful society. We are at our most violent and unrestrained at age two. If adult bodies had a similar lack of self-control, we would quite literally tear each other limb from limb.
I wonder where all of this psychologizing comes from. It seems to me to imply certain presupposed notions about human nature, which are implicitly reinforced by it's application. Maybe this whole psychoanalytic worldview needs to be investigated on it's merits.
This is the longest definition of "ad hominem" I have ever read.
Seriously though, this is a good point to be making, how we short circuit actually engaging with a writer's arguments by just saying "well, they only say that because...". That might be a slightly useful heuristic if we are incapable of engaging with the argument and putting it in the ground, perhaps because we are unfortunately discussing something unfalsifiable, but generally it is a mental trap.
As you say, knowing someone's background can help contextualize their arguments, for instance casting light on their perspective, or highlighting hypocrisy, but generally I think we should be agnostic of the author's "reasons" for writing something and focus on the truth of their arguments. For example, people always fuss that Grotius wrote "The Free Sea" because he was commissioned to write a defense of the Netherlands' capturing of a Spanish ship (if I am recalling the countries correctly) but that is besides the point; sure, it was motivated reasoning, but the reasoning is dead sound in any case. No one points out gaps or leaps of assumption that would normally mark motivated reasoning, but instead just say "Well, he was hired to make an argument" as though that makes the argument invalid.
Perhaps a distinction: psychologizing and the "psychologizing fallacy." I think psychologizing can be helpful in some cases, as it brings a sense of healthy distrust, disabusing one from fanboying over an impressive thinker. However, it's essential to avoid the psychologizing fallacy, where one dismisses someone's views due to presumed unexamined motivations behind those views. Besides, psychologically uncalibrated individuals often focus on aspects of reality that others often overlook.
I agree - why not judge any work based on "merit" or lack thereof as it is presented versus trying to analyze the work based on the author's temperament. Anyhow, this article made me think of another I recently read on the topic of psychiatry, so I'll share the link:
https://drrimatruthreports.substack.com/p/psychiatry-rotten-to-the-core-so
In general much of psychiatry practices today seem to be "pill-based" and self-contradicting.
BK
This was really good, Luc, and raises some interesting issues that lead to additional questions (and so on). I'll probably respond via a post. Thanks for giving me some food for thought to really chew on!
Fantasizing about the supposed psychological motivations is a projection and tells much more about the fancier himself. I guess there are a lot of people who would like to publish their questionable musings and pretend it's science.
I do think there is some room for association between a philosopher's arguments and their acts, once one separates allegations from known history. For example, some have claimed that Foucault was a paedophile who abused Arab boys in Tunisia, but isn't it more effective to dismiss much of his work as wishful thinking once we recognise that after one separates mental illness from mental health, most of people he wanted released from insane asylums under the mistaken belief that they simply weren't conforming to societies norms was categorically incorrect, because we now know the overwhelming majority he claimed as heretics and mystics, by diagnosis, were almost certainly suffering from some form of physiological brain defect, with the notable exception of excessive feminine libido.
However, let's look at Rousseau by contrast. Here was a man who, despite his frequent denigration of the West and wildly wrongheaded thoughts on education, decided to leave all of his children to the tender mercies of state orphanages. Surely, this is the mark of the ideologue- no philosopher. Plus, he truly believed that the Enlightenment was a movement from contract to status, when all the empirical evidence points to the reverse- at least until modernity fell to the banal absurdity of postmodernism with its insipid requirement that no falsification occur at all, because all truth is subjective or unknowable.
For those interested in why Rousseau was wrong about education, I would recommend the studies of Richard Tremblay on chronic physical aggression in children. Aggression is not socially constructed, but the ability to exercise self-control is learned through socialisation- surely something of vital interest for those who wish to live in a relatively peaceful society. We are at our most violent and unrestrained at age two. If adult bodies had a similar lack of self-control, we would quite literally tear each other limb from limb.
I wonder where all of this psychologizing comes from. It seems to me to imply certain presupposed notions about human nature, which are implicitly reinforced by it's application. Maybe this whole psychoanalytic worldview needs to be investigated on it's merits.
To be honest, you are the only person I have ever seen saying that Nietzsche hated the church because of some “daddy issues”.
In any case, Nietzsche himself did not have an issue of psychologizing at all.