ad hominem and the author

Whether philosophical anthropology is a subject matter or not, imagine for a moment that it forms a series of three courses, each for one of the last three years of a four-year degree.
I will suppose that one of those course will treat of "existence" and will have to address itself to the writings of "existentialists". Suppose that my tone in my own lectures is mocking.  How might I proceed?
I would almost certainly begin with the curious exchange between Bryan McGee and Iris Murdoch in which both seem to share the assessment that La Nausée by J-P Sartre is a great novel.  Matters could only be worse if they had gone on the agree that "L'Etranger" by Camus is even finer.
Camus was not a philosopher, but the course must consider those writers within the western tradition who have insight into the human condition (in truth we publish the book's title and author on the course list to ensure enrollment - departmental budgets are no trivial matter.)  Consider the book as a novel, not as a treatise or an assemblage of essays.  A Frenchman murders an Arab.  The French reader was aware that had Merseault been a somebody, a few thousand francs (or less?) to the victim's family and the whole matter could have been looked after - unless there were some political angle.
I encountered the book in two settings: first in a course on existentialism and then in a course in reading French.  The latter was the more useful, as the message for the philosophy student was of no interest - only the obvious flaws of the novel.  Change the setting such that a Russian kills an Estonian on a Baltic beach, or an Israeli kills a Palestinian on the West Bank or a Libyan diplomat murders a Turkish servant in Berlin - and the book (or in our day, a film based on the book) requires that we we know the life of that victim, how he came to be there that day, did he have brothers, was his father still living. what was his view of the French Empire (or Union or whatever face Paris was putting on their possessions.)
Were you to learn from an unpublished letter that some man born in Oran was obviously a racist, small-minded bigot, you might not purchase the letter (say you find it in a cardboard box in some shop.)  If a scholar found the letter and authenticated it as Camus writing to fellow writer X, we have publishing paydirt.
In the case of Camus' novel, it helps to read it in French and to discuss it with someone with some feel for character and its place in the moral evaluation or assessment of a novel.
In the case of Sartre's effort, it is essential to read La Nausée  in the original if you are to assess the book if only to be struck by the tasteless puns that litter the novel.  It is also essential to ask why it ends with an incident of sexual depravity in a library.  Why for all the attention to the root of a tree, there is nothing on the manner in which the root of the protagonist interacted with his partner in sex.  The root is seen in the library.
The entire effect is remarkably juvenile.  The only satisfaction for the reader is that Roquentin's time in a camp will be Sartre's (short) time in a camp.  That Sartre was a complete and utter scoundrel is something the reader simply must know.  Why?
Consider anonymity.  Personally, I wish to see anonymity established in natural science technical journals.  I wish to see the UN sponsor a research registry that is simply a science registry: you would not be published in a journal  even as EC1905uv-CHEM but as A3456gt (Feynman, for one, was well aware of what happens when a physicist ventures into biology - even physicists mock mathematicians and vice-versa - the word "mere" and "just" and "only" are essential to their gossip, banter and inuendo.)  Philosophers are worse: "She has only published one article - in philosophy of literature - and she has this thing about Simone Weil ..."
Tenure and promotion hang on publishing.  So, in the case of science, the registry would emit a rating.  Appeal it to an anonymous committee if you must (there would still be some abuses - students of X will still get more jobs, better jobs, than students of Y,etc - life is never fair nor expected to be so.)
Peer-reviewed may not suffice.  In literature, writers have demonstrated that they can submit their own best-seller years later to their own publisher under another title and with a pseudonym and only to have the publisher's reader reject it.

It is inconceivable that String Theory would have gotten so far in our day without the name of Gell-Mann.  Hidden variable theory got so far because some advocates were known by name as associates of Einstein.

Suppose you don't believe this.  Enter a bookstore and see a book, "I Did It" by Fred Smith.  Knowing that a legal loop-hole is allowing the royalties to go to a known murderer of another name, would you buy that book or woudl you instead by another thriller for the train trip to your conference?  Do you want to risk being seen reading THAT book when you have not yet received tenure or your first promotion?  (If you hope for tenure, pay attention even to the books -even the number of books, neither too many nor too few  on your office shelves.)
There are books that, ceteris paribus, we might borrow from a library but we would not purchase new unless remaindered.  If you are not that reader, I lost you a ways back, so I continue.

I recall reading some years ago that it was striking how little de Beauvoir had to say of interest of some of the remarkable people she met through her association with Sartre.  If you are a female reader, I risk now having lost you.  Let's switch to Iris Murdoch.

In her major work, Murdoch sees fit to link Husserl to his followers - but only to those who abandoned his project.  Roman Ingarden is missing.  Only Husserl in one phase is presented.  But then she chooses, having first introduced a humourous comment about Zen, to tie Husserl to a Zen reading of his project (curiously, she may have been unaware of Heidegger's Japanese student.)
Husserl was a regular interlocutor with Cantor in Halle.  Husserl was then a Goettingen.  Later he took Rickert's position at Freiburg.  Unlike Russell, he lost a son to war and he would lose all to Heidegger and the Nazis and die before seeing their defeat.  All irrelevant.  Start again.  Husserl's concern was with mathematics and foundations.  This is completely missing in the thoughtful chapter by Murdoch.  The chapter - the book - is very much worth reading.  Read carelessly, we see that Hegel begets Marx.  But somehow Husserl fails to have the importance of Wittgenstein.  Not that he is neglected by the author as is Ayer, Ryle and Russell (to see Ryle in psychoanalysis, read Roy Schafer, "A New Language for Psychoanalysis" and compare his early work on "internalization" - a strange affair of which Murdoch was perhaps unaware.)

Why is Husserl not worth the attention of Frege?  How could a man with no morals, Heidegger, garner such continued attention?

Consider the failure of Heidegger to write one word of Edith Stein to his Hannah Stern.
Well, then don't.  Consider this: we are finally getting back to Schopenhauer in the Anglo-American world of philosophy. In the German text, the idea of "family resemblance" is right there on the page, literally.  Why had the attendees of Wittgenstein's afternoons not read their Schopenhauer?  Terror of the master?  One cutting word from LW about Schopenhauer would do it, one supposes.
Walter Bieml, years later in a Heidegger seminar on Heraclitus, on a day when the master had the grippe, is recorded as saying, roughly, "Perhaps today, in the absence of the Professor, I might venture to say that .."

A philosopher tells his reader, not his technical colleague, but his intelligent reader, that you cannot enter a public building from an open square without also "entering a cathedral".  Follow me: the author is an unbelieving Jew whose grandparents had all converted but whose parents practiced no religion.  Variant: the author is named Mackenzie.  Variant: the author has converted from Methodist to Roman Catholic.  Variant: the author no longer attends a mosque.  Or: the author is an avowed atheist who never has a religion.  Or: the author is an atheist who had been raised a High Church Anglican.
It may help to know that the the early Christians thought of themselves as Jews without temples.  It may not. What about the insight: I remember entering a reknowned basilica after a day of cycling through summer farmlands and the near over-whelming frisson when gazing up in the dim and the chill of the nave.  In that moment I might even have undergone a conversion.  I do believe that it happens that the first large ceiling that I ever saw above me was indeed a church ceiling, but the first "Great Building" that I ever saw was seem from great distance across the prairie by the plume of black smoke rising from its unseen pinnacle, the great Bessborough, the Saskatoon railroad hotel (although now no railroad entered it below).  Had I first seen the great Banff Springs Hotel (my father saw it in the Bow Valley before he ever laid eyes on the Bess', but he already knew the MacDonald from his boyhood in Edmonton.  Unlike my first trip to the Bow Valley, he was there in knickers and later in a suit.  He vacationed in vacation dress.  His mother was English, his father a businessman - and an American at that.
The first building known by some of my mother's ancestors was a wigwam.  A wigwam is not a teepee.
What insight of my own might be elided if I follow the vision of the writer, every great public building, a cathedral, incomprehensible without the cathedral, the bishops's seat, where declarations were made such as that which would take Edith Stein to Auschwitz in reprisal.
When a piece of writing is not presenting an argument, say one found on a sheet of paper in a shop - consider this novel line of argument, author unknown, could anything be less appropriate than ad hominem?  It may depend on the premises I am asked to accept as true, the assumptions that appear to be required, but also the terms, the rhetoric, in which the matter is posed.
Take the case today of theists presenting the scientific case for the religious brain and the evolution of religion as the integument of culture and social structure and societal relations if not language itself.
Take the case of a writer child psychologist, appealing for consideration of mind, consciousness, self-awareness, character, courage in assessing the normal versus abnormal development of children.  And then we learn that he was an abuser at his charity institution.
Someone tells you that Adolf H*tler loved animals.  That he was neurologically afflicted.  This may hold no interest for you at all.
But someone proposes that our study of language acquisition in the bonobo be conducted by an autistic animal trainer who does not touch fur and is almost mono-syllabic, has no pets, and no "liking" for animals.  Now we may have an asset.  Now we can mask the animal detecting that we too, as trainers, have feeling, like the little fellow, find him amusing, endearing, are glad to see him this morning.
Think what a discovery if we learned from a letter than Stanley Milgram wept each night over the plight of those in his experiments, that M*ng*l* whipped himself each night with a belt and prayed for forgiveness, that Harry Harlow had buried each little monkey in its own grave, visited them each year, pausing for a moment before each.
I confess, I am unaffected by the report that Derrida was in the habit of praying.  I am too much aware of the man with whom he enjoyed conversing.  I cannot imagine what could endear Derrida to me, make me reconsider the value of what is written in that slim PUF volume in its endearing cover, gold yellow, rough pages, carried about now for years from one city to another.
In a similar vein I am unable to take Habermas seriously having never been able to take seriously a single lecturer who embraced him.
I remember my vexation when a philosopher of note addressed an international conference on history and logic of science to say of hermeneutics that interpretation is a game that anyone can play.
First: not a game.  Second, no, not anyone.  Third, this is not "mere" interpretation.  Even without a knock-down argument, a given reading of human life may be inadequate or unsatisfactory or otherwise incomplete on many grounds, if only a hunch.
But when the hunch we choose to follow is a hunch expressed in writing by an author we come to know as utterly disingenuous, a prevaricator, a liar, a traitor, a poseur or simply a person devoid of conscience we can politely say, "Sorry, she/he (or their book) simply doesn't interest me, failed to hold my interest..."  If there is an interlocutor who responds with "But I think that what X is trying to say is that ..." now we reach the author's intention, imputing a good motive, an effort to be understood, we are asked to be just, fair.  And with Samuel Beckett, I am always more than fair, and will ignore verse after verse until some one short verse catches hold of me.  I would have to learn something truly hateful about Lawrence Durrell before I would cease to suggest his poetry - long after I have seased to recommend his first Quartet.
A man with a nasty reputation but given to good causes, reported to his readers his shock at learning that Frege was an anti-Semite.  If I believe that a word from Frege was enough for Russell to have been deterred from visiting him to discuss propositional functions with him in Goettingen, at the university built as an alternative to building a prison, the home of Gauss, Hilbert - a doubt or suspicion is planted.  Some writers must be above reproach just as a Pope must be above reproach, an Irish Catholic Bishop above reproach, a Rector of Heidelberg University above reproach.  Any such reporach could be considered ad hominen, but in these special cases is excused.
And what of the Gifford Lectures?  Or a Pulitzer Prize?  Or the Nobel which may have been denied to Hoyle and Gamow?  Must the Vietnamese wait a century to learn about the fate of Ho's wife?
Eliade wanted us to understand his actions in Romania as mere youthful indiscretions.  Frankly I cannot read a writer today on the "sacred" in the "modern" age without hearing boots on paving stones.
I cannot read an attack on "technology" without seeing the marvelous inventions of Arthur Ganson.
Nothing in man's essence destined him to fly, but once airborne, who failed to denouce the "heros" who would drop bombs from aircraft?  The courageous pilots!
An old friend, a neighbor, lies on his deathbed in a hospice - at Seymour Johnson he taught barnstormers to find a homing beacon before they were sent off to Europe.  I reproached him for his habitual remarks about Jews.  He lived a short walk from what had been the Jewish golf course.  But he wrote no book, never stood for public office.  He always apologized, I always forgave.  His faults were not those of a Norm Coleman or a Michelle Bachmann, politicians here in our towns, our state,  who could never have my vote.  Leave politics, and I would accept them as neighbors, try to be just, try to forgive their faults, try to speak plainly but not too harshly. Even buy their autobiography - but only as a neighbor.
PS
In her remarks on "sees" in the same section, Murdoch appears unaware that the root for a "kind" in Russian is the same as the root for "to see" as in the Greek, video, VID, in Russian.  It is a shame that Russian must not have been one of her languages and perhaps not even taught at her college in her day. Yet it is closer to English than is, say Hungarian to its cousin, Finnish.  English, French and German - barely two languages from the diachronic standpoint, barely two from a synchronic standpoint if you instead consider English, French and Dutch.  Imagine if the Danes had never been in England, not Jutes and Angles but only Frisians and Dutch before the Normans ... and you may grasp how silly that we count those as "foreign" languages. Contrary to this view, Ricoeur on "recognition" in English, French and German.