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I've come to accept that I can appreciate and embrace someone's work and condemn their politics and personality at the same time. For me, this isn't just an abstraction; it's a product of having to confront a paradox:
1) I think Naziism is evil and batshit crazy.
2) I think that we now have good, factual reasons to believe that Martin Heidegger is right.
It's easy for me to hate Nazis. Part of it is personal. Some of them mistook both my brother and I, each at different points in our lives, for Jews, probably because of a mix of Germanic and Eastern European features both of us picked up from our mother's side. This has led to some interesting and tense encounters. Part of it, also, is intellectual. The more I have come to study the Nazi ideology, the greater my dislike. It's not just that they're racists on steroids. Their groundless, stupid ideology slaughtered millions of people and literally destroyed Germany, which remained divided after WWII for generations. Anyone who sympathizes with that is a fool.
On the other hand, we have Hubert Dreyfus, a philosopher at Berkeley who looked at how computer scientists were conducting AI and realized that Heidegger had questioned, and demolished, their assumptions already. He predicted (in his book _What Computers Can't Do_ (1972)) that their approach would be a miserable and expensive failure. He was right, and the Association for Computing Machinery awarded him the Alan Turing Award for his efforts. This serves as compelling testimony to the power and value of Martin Heidegger's work.
Now, here's the thing: Heidegger was an unapologetic Nazi. He was, in the 1930s, an ENTHUSIASTIC Nazi. He was also an arrogant jerk in a lot of other ways. This makes it awkward to embrace his work, for a lot of people. But despite this, I *have* to embrace his work, because, again, the evidence is that he's right.
I think the problem in this paradox is here: we take an endorsement of a person's work as an endorsement of that person. I think that's a huge mistake. I think we have to be smarter than that, and acknowledge that (1) great work doesn't necessarily have to come from great people, (2) to judge a person's work by the person is to use an invalid criterion, (3) to be a great person is hard, to do great things is hard, and asking a person to both be a great person and do great things is to ask too much. Which, in turn, makes the movement against the work of other persons for their shitty personalities (e.g. H. P. Lovecraft, Crowley) ill founded.
Edit I suppose this is just another way of saying, "Ad Hominem is a fallacy and should be ignored." Unfortunately pointing out the fallacy fails to persuade even reasonable people.
1) I think Naziism is evil and batshit crazy.
2) I think that we now have good, factual reasons to believe that Martin Heidegger is right.
It's easy for me to hate Nazis. Part of it is personal. Some of them mistook both my brother and I, each at different points in our lives, for Jews, probably because of a mix of Germanic and Eastern European features both of us picked up from our mother's side. This has led to some interesting and tense encounters. Part of it, also, is intellectual. The more I have come to study the Nazi ideology, the greater my dislike. It's not just that they're racists on steroids. Their groundless, stupid ideology slaughtered millions of people and literally destroyed Germany, which remained divided after WWII for generations. Anyone who sympathizes with that is a fool.
On the other hand, we have Hubert Dreyfus, a philosopher at Berkeley who looked at how computer scientists were conducting AI and realized that Heidegger had questioned, and demolished, their assumptions already. He predicted (in his book _What Computers Can't Do_ (1972)) that their approach would be a miserable and expensive failure. He was right, and the Association for Computing Machinery awarded him the Alan Turing Award for his efforts. This serves as compelling testimony to the power and value of Martin Heidegger's work.
Now, here's the thing: Heidegger was an unapologetic Nazi. He was, in the 1930s, an ENTHUSIASTIC Nazi. He was also an arrogant jerk in a lot of other ways. This makes it awkward to embrace his work, for a lot of people. But despite this, I *have* to embrace his work, because, again, the evidence is that he's right.
I think the problem in this paradox is here: we take an endorsement of a person's work as an endorsement of that person. I think that's a huge mistake. I think we have to be smarter than that, and acknowledge that (1) great work doesn't necessarily have to come from great people, (2) to judge a person's work by the person is to use an invalid criterion, (3) to be a great person is hard, to do great things is hard, and asking a person to both be a great person and do great things is to ask too much. Which, in turn, makes the movement against the work of other persons for their shitty personalities (e.g. H. P. Lovecraft, Crowley) ill founded.
Edit I suppose this is just another way of saying, "Ad Hominem is a fallacy and should be ignored." Unfortunately pointing out the fallacy fails to persuade even reasonable people.
