Can a bad person be a philosopher?

[Zetherin]

Originally Posted by kennethamy

Yes, I think that was what I was saying. Heidegger was an evil person, quite apart from his moral philosophy.

Isn't a part of what makes a person evil, their moral philosophy?

When I say Bob is evil, I am not just arbitrarily saying this. It is based on my perception of his morality and actions towards others; it is most likely reasoned based upon what standards, and philosophy, I think this person has and follows.

Is it always true that one's philosophy is seperable from one's character, the character that a moral judgment, like X is evil, would be based upon?

[kennethamy]

Originally Posted by Zetherin

Isn't a part of what makes a person evil, their moral philosophy?

When I say Bob is evil, I am not just arbitrarily saying this. It is based on my perception of his morality and actions towards others; it is most likely reasoned based upon what standards, and philosophy, I think this person has and follows.

Is it always true that one's philosophy is seperable from one's character, the character that a moral judgment, like X is evil, would be based upon?

I was using "moral philosophy" in a more theoretical sense. Of course, in the sense of a person's moral beliefs, you are right.

[Fido]

Why not consider whether one must do evil to be evil, or do good to be good... As it is, words are cheap, and thoughts are cheaper still; and no one beats Plato for malignacy, or Nietzsche for contagion... What ever Heidegger said or did does not hold a candle to those two, or I would have already heard of it...We might consider that only those who appear good can have much influence, and only those who appear greatly good can have a great influence so that only those who seem good can ever do much damage because they are not just wrong when wrong, but they take a lot of people with them.. Bad people have little influence and do little damage... Our prayer should be: Save us from good people...

---------- Post added 11-10-2009 at 05:54 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Zetherin

Isn't a part of what makes a person evil, their moral philosophy?

When I say Bob is evil, I am not just arbitrarily saying this. It is based on my perception of his morality and actions towards others; it is most likely reasoned based upon what standards, and philosophy, I think this person has and follows.

Is it always true that one's philosophy is seperable from one's character, the character that a moral judgment, like X is evil, would be based upon?

It is not moral philosophy that makes people evil, but immoral philosophy; and of course, this is a linking of opposites to make a point... There is no moral philosophy for the same reason that there is no wet water... All philosophy as we have come to know it, as opposed to physics, is moral philosophy...If all philosophy is moral then there can be no immoral philosophy, so it is not necessary to designate philosophy as being "moral"...... If it were immoral it would not be the love of knowledge, but the hatred of people, and there is another name for that...It is not out of knowledge, or the love of knowledge, or thought -that people do wrong; but out of the want of these emotions or actions...

[Fido]

Originally Posted by kennethamy

In his book, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, the author, Emmanuel Faye argues that Martin Heidegger was not a philosopher, and that his works should not be classified under "philosophy" because they were entirely based on National Socialism. Faye argues that Heidegger's work should be classified under "hate speech".

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/bo...?_r=1&ref=arts

I think this view is just wrong. Heidegger was certainly a bad man, and (IMO) he was a bad philosopher. But (again in my opinion) just as a bad man need not be a bad plumber, so a bad man need not be a bad philosopher. Being a bad philosopher is being bad at philosophizing, and being a bad person is being bad at being a person (in this view I am taking from Aristotle) Both are "jobs", but being bad at the one job has nothing to do with being bad at the other "job". "Bad philosopher" carries no ethical meaning, but "bad person" certainly does.

I should not repost on this; but I will say that I think the Germans have some method of seeing trees and missing forest... I am 3/4 German and the rest Irish so I don't ever have to apolagize about being drunk... I could have talked my self blue about the Justice of Government and it would not have put the smallest of dents in my grandmother's mind...There was only the law, the law, the law... And perhaps that is reflected is the French word for law and the German word for law being the same as right... What is right should be law, but some people see what is law as what is right; and it is not always so... I know Heidegger from his writing on Kant; and Kant tried to reconstruct a morality out of doomed metaphysics, and I think, failed... I think it possible since his intent was to write a book on Nietzsche that he was a fan...If this is so, then perhaps he bought into the larger picture, and the historical sense of Nietzsche which I take as being completely wrong...

Anyone have a list of his writings... Maybe I'll google...

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by Fido

What ever Heidegger said or did does not hold a candle to those two

Neither Plato nor Nietzsche was party to the Nuremberg Laws. Heidegger by denouncing and firing Jews from the University of Freiberg, on the other hand, was party to the Nuremberg Laws. Some of the Jews he denounced were sent to death camps.

(actually his actions preceded the Nuremberg laws -- that was the vehemence of his antisemitism)

Neither Plato nor Nietzsche imposed racial policies on a student body and eliminated any administrative recourse by proclaiming himself quasi fuehrer of the university and placing his appointment under the administration of the Nazi Party.
Heidegger did.

Neither Plato nor Nietzsche was a wormy supplicant to a dictator. Guess who was?

Here is a good reference. What comparable "evil" was accomplished with the direct complicity of Plato or Nietzsche?

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/relstud...df/88-nazi.PDF

Originally Posted by Fido

or I would have already heard of it...

are you that "in the know"?

[Fido]

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/relstud...df/88-nazi.PDF

are you that "in the know"?

More like, in the read... I have read a lot of histories of philosophy in one form or another as well as reading philosophy directly... I have almost a whole set of Will and Arial Durrant, and in every volume he covers the progress of philsophy as a matter of course, and that would be with the progress and contributions of both Jews and Muslims... In addition I also have Durrants History of Philosophy too, and others...I never heard of this before, but I have also heard little of Heidegger, and my interest in him only extends to his explanation of Kant, which I think is great... But; the one article I have read on the subject suggests their was a concerted cover up...And last but not least, there is no reason to believe that a person who can teach philosophy is a philosopher... His crime, if it is not prejudice is certainty in his judgements, and this is shown in his willingness to join the form... The problem with forms is universal, that they are not the same seen from the inside as the outside... That age was all ideology... Not only he, but almost all people looked at new forms or simply -a form- as a solution to what ever ailed humanity...If you had time, even to day you could find in short order a hundred or even a thousand suggestions on these forums that if we only organize we could affect change regardless of the direction of change or the political realities at work... That word, organization, means form...So rather than tear down a form, people organize a new form to reform an old form, -at least in theory, but at every step the form adds to their impediments...History shows that unless old forms self destruct, that the people no matter how well organized, cannot bring change...It is just too easy to simplify the factors at work during that day... One might consider that Hitlers seemed on his face to be more in tune with the common currents of thought than against... He had a quasi evolutionary theory that fit with some accepted historical and philosophical views...He had enough picked up knowledge on enough subjects to impress the average man, but it may have all been bluff combined with a good memory... He could hold forth on many subject until he bored the spots off the dog..Having power, he did for the German economy what the former chancellor had intended to do before he was replaced, and was on the verge of doing when he had seen the economy turn the corner...And with the help of the banker Schatz, I think was his name, with his Mefo bonds, he was able to build up the war economy without alarming bankers abroad about the health of their economy, and the extent of their deficites... Hitler was one of history's great destroyers, and the evidence was there early enough, but he kept it hidden, and his program, in many senses seemed moral- better that the individual should suffer than the many...As the religious evidence shows, Heidegger was given to belief, and that is poison to philosophy, which thrives in scepticism.....

[Aedes]

Fido, you're not the only one here who reads a lot. We read different things, and histories of philosophy (of which I own and have read a fair number myself) are not going to cover this issue very adeptly. Heidegger wasn't the only major modern thinker who was a raving antisemite, Frege was another notorious one (more a contemporary with Nietzsche and Wagner).

Hitler kept his program hidden at first. By 1945, when Germany was a smoldering apocalyptic wasteland and the world found out that Hitler had sent 12 million noncombatants up through chimneys, Heidegger still had another 31 years to live. He never ever renounced Hitler or his Nazi affiliation. Heidegger, whose philosophical interests were politics and ethics and above all 'progress', never saw it in himself to condemn the Nazis or shed his reverence for Hitler -- long after that "form" was dead and that age was over.

[Fido]

Originally Posted by Aedes

Fido, you're not the only one here who reads a lot. We read different things, and histories of philosophy (of which I own and have read a fair number myself) are not going to cover this issue very adeptly. Heidegger wasn't the only major modern thinker who was a raving antisemite, Frege was another notorious one (more a contemporary with Nietzsche and Wagner).

Hitler kept his program hidden at first. By 1945, when Germany was a smoldering apocalyptic wasteland and the world found out that Hitler had sent 12 million noncombatants up through chimneys, Heidegger still had another 31 years to live. He never ever renounced Hitler or his Nazi affiliation. Heidegger, whose philosophical interests were politics and ethics and above all 'progress', never saw it in himself to condemn the Nazis or shed his reverence for Hitler -- long after that "form" was dead and that age was over.

As one Jewish person said: It is hard to forgive someone who does not ask for forgiviness, or say are sorry...The Germans feel hurt, and the Jews and perhaps six million others had every reason to feel enraged...It may not be philosophy, but there is a lesson in the simple words that what goes around comes around..Injustice craps injustice... The German people were made to bear a terrible price for the actions of their Kaisar when they had no more control over him than the Iraqis or this day had over Saddam... And that is a wrong, to attack a whole country because you do not like what an individual or a handful of individuals have done... The people of Germany sought peace with honor and the people of the world gave them a kick in the teeth... Does it matter that they kicked the Vietnames and the Arabs in the teeth at the same time???The victors helped themselves and hurt humanity, and their gain was not justice for either side...
Here is the danger... We must admit that it takes little enough to make a lunatic like Hitler... What is difficult is to arrange the sort of mass antagonisms and insecurities to where masses of people will grasp at the straw a madman says is their life line...Reason is the enemy of tyranny, and for that reason tyrants never give anyone enough time to think...Beware of a man of action... The biggest fools in the world want it done right now...

[Aedes]

The pyramid atop which Hitler stood was an enormous social force that required more than just a military dictatorship. It self-legitimized because of its appeals to philosophy (I use this term loosely here, but this includes religious ideas, racial / social Darwinian ideas, and academic philosophy). Heidegger desperately wanted to be one of the intellectual patrons of Naziism. Turns out that he wasn't taken in -- they liked genocidal zealots like Alfred Rosenberg better. So Heidegger during the early Nazi regime was a very small cog in the intellectual train of Naziism, but he got to play a little part in Germany's purgation.

But yes, his greater offense in my mind is that after the war he did nothing to diminish the idea that his philosophy was high-falootin' Naziism, loud about ubermenschen but quiet about the Zyklon B. He became a tacit apologist for Naziism in this way.

He's not the only one -- Werner von Braun comes to mind. But von Braun was a technician, a scientist. He let 20,000 Jews die while working as slaves on his V2 rockets, but that didn't matter, it was up to others to make the moral decisions.

Heidegger, on the other hand, was a self-selected moral decisionmaker.

[Fido]

Originally Posted by Aedes

The pyramid atop which Hitler stood was an enormous social force that required more than just a military dictatorship. It self-legitimized because of its appeals to philosophy (I use this term loosely here, but this includes religious ideas, racial / social Darwinian ideas, and academic philosophy). Heidegger desperately wanted to be one of the intellectual patrons of Naziism. Turns out that he wasn't taken in -- they liked genocidal zealots like Alfred Rosenberg better. So Heidegger during the early Nazi regime was a very small cog in the intellectual train of Naziism, but he got to play a little part in Germany's purgation.

But yes, his greater offense in my mind is that after the war he did nothing to diminish the idea that his philosophy was high-falootin' Naziism, loud about ubermenschen but quiet about the Zyklon B. He became a tacit apologist for Naziism in this way.

He's not the only one -- Werner von Braun comes to mind. But von Braun was a technician, a scientist. He let 20,000 Jews die while working as slaves on his V2 rockets, but that didn't matter, it was up to others to make the moral decisions.

Heidegger, on the other hand, was a self-selected moral decisionmaker.

To this last line; not true...He was a moral absolutist, and I can see that in very cursory reading of the article about him as a nazi...To reject humanism is to embrace determanism... The Catholic atmospher in Germany before Nazism was stiffling...If Heidegger was anti humanistic, he was also idealistic, and it was slavishness to the ideal as perfection that has characterized modern tyrannies, just a the genius of the tyrant characterized tyrannies past...

What is the danger here??? Is it that we will say that his value was no greater than his use??? What he said right is not less right today, and what he said wrong was always wrong... I hope you do not think less of me, but if history presented you to me as great, then I would want to see for myself, and I would doubt that you were more than myself, more able and intelligent...I will read and get some value from just about any philosopher of any stripe, but there are only a hand full I would want as friends...Considering most of them as one, I would bet I could cut a better human being out of a human being with a rusty knife... So, maybe I have to add Heidegger to that list... That just means he is par for the course....