The Continuation of Philosophy by Other Means?

In a study dedicated to Karl Kraus’s art of polemics, Stefan Straub lists six necessary features for a discourse to qualify as polemical, namely: personalization (Personalisierung), aggressiveness (Aggressivität), argumentation (Argumentation), credibility (Glaubwürdigkeit), activation of value feelings (Aktivierung von Wertgefühlen), and direction toward a concrete and practical goal (konkrete Zielsetzung). The question I want to raise in this sketch, which was inspired by Sharon Weisser’s idea about a possible typology of ancient philosophical polemics, is whether these characterizations, or at t least the most relevant among them, also specifically apply to philosophical polemics or whether philosophical polemics represent a special case of polemics—due, perhaps, to the very nature of philosophy. The question essentially arises because argumentation, which certainly belongs to the essence of polemics if it is to be distinguished from sheer personal attacks, plays a particular, constitutive role in philosophy: under this assumption, are philosophical polemics, strictly speaking, possible? Must not a philosophical argument be by definition neither aggressive nor personal nor practical (in the relevant sense) nor emotionally loaded? In other words, are philosophical polemics philosophy continued by other means? The alternative would be to assume, in agreement with an intuition we might wish to preserve, that ‘philosophical polemics’ is a well-formed, nonoxymoronic expression. In what follows I present some considerations to this effect. I shall first look at the relationship between polemics and critique (Part 1); I shall pinpoint various ways in which personal references of a certain kind play a role in philosophical polemics—what I call ‘depersonalized personalization’ (Part 2); I shall then say something about how polemics can be philosophically reevaluated (Part 3); and add an observation about polemics and hermeneutics (Part 4). In dealing with these different points, I shall refer to various ancient philosophical polemics, but I shall not engage in a detailed analysis of any of them, in order to keep these preliminary remarks at a general level. On the other hand, I shall mention some modern polemics and modern views on polemics. One reason for this is that ‘polemics’, if not a modern phenomenon, is at least a modern word: for whereas polemikos in Greek means “related to war” or more generally “hostile,” it very seldom, if ever, specifically applies to literary or philosophical polemics (the same is true of polemos). The second related but more important reason is that whereas the notion and practice of blame (psogos) in ancient rhetoric has attracted scholarly attention, conceptual reflection about ancient polemics as such remains relatively rare.