[OPE-L] 'demonstrates ad hominem'

["michael a. lebowitz" <mlebowit@xxxxxx>]

Anyone have a good answer to this question from PEN-L? Did 'ad
hominen' mean something different then? Is there a question of translation?
        cheers,
          m

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> I like it best presented in fuller quote. But, I have a question, What does
> Marx mean by "demonstrates ad hominem"?
>
> quote:
>
> "Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and
> also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the
> oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the
> spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
>
> To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand
> their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing
> state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs
> illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism
> of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion.
>
> Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man
> shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the
> chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions
> man to make him think and act and shape his reality like a man who has been
> disillusioned and has come to reason, so that he will revolve round himself
> and therefore round his true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun which
> revolves round man as long as he does not revolve round himself.
>
> The task of history, therefore, once the world beyond the truth has
> disappeared, is to establish the truth of this world. The immediate task of
> philosophy, which is at the service of history, once the holy form of human
> self-estrangement has been unmasked, is to unmask self-estrangement in its
> unholy forms. Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the
> earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the
> criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.....
>
> The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons,
> material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also
> becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is
> capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and
> it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is
> to grasp the root of the matter. But for man the root is man himself. The
> evident proof of the radicalism of German theory, and hence of its
> practical energy, is that it proceeds from a resolute positive abolition of
> religion. The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the
> highest being for man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow
> all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved forsaken, despicable
> being....."
>
> It's also quite relevant given that it feveals the deep humanism in Marx's
> thought at this point, a humanism which is something folks like the author
> Ravi quotes often reject -- man as center of the universe and all that.

Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6

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