Can Bad People Do Good Things? (or, The Heidegger Paradox.)

[maxomai]

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.

Comments

[archmage.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. There are plenty of people, both talking heads and business owners, with whose politics I do not agree in any way. That does not diminish the accuracy of their spoken facts or my enjoyment of their products. Lovecraft is a perfect example: I'm a huge geek for his writing and imagination, but, let's be honest, the guy was not a good person.

Now, in a business sense, I might still choose to shun said service or product, merely for the idea of not allowing my money into their hands to support their policies (i.e. 'voting with your wallet'), but even then I question myself. Is the $12 I do or do not spend on a pizza really going to make a difference to John Schnatter's political choices? Doubtful, it would be a personal moral victory at best. (Yes, we can continue this argument to a mass scale and debate the economic pressure that could be brought to bear, but, damn, not in the mood for that this morning. :P)

[paradoxosalpha.livejournal.com]

"Not a good person"? In what sense? I mean, sure, he embraced a fairly odious racism, and he was as politically reactionary as the day is long. But he was an attentive correspondent and generous mentor to other writers, whose creative efforts never redounded to his own material benefit, while enriching readers for generations to come. It's just not that helpful to peg a person's essential "goodness" to a subset of their opinions -- or even to assume that anyone (as distinct from others) can be essentially good or essentially bad.

I mean, if you're St. Augustine, we're none of us "good persons." And if you're Aleister Crowley, Every man and every woman is a star.

Look at Dr. Seuess

[arkham4269.livejournal.com]

Beloved child animator, unapologetic propagandaist during WW II where he drew Japanese like mutant human-rat demons.

Plus how often do we like the music but hate the musician?

[paradoxosalpha.livejournal.com]

The real hazard for relatively intelligent people is the reverse ad hominem flip: to think, e.g., that since Heidegger was right about artificial intelligence, his opinions about Nazism deserve extra consideration.

"Even a stopped clock is right twice a day."

[scarletstar777.livejournal.com]

Asiatic people were depicted as monsters in WWII era cartoons and comics across the board. That doesn't stop me, and most of you, from liking Bugs Bunny or watching the new Avengers movie.

Lovecraft was racist, but that doesn't mean he was a bad person. Huck Finn uses the 'n' word as a first name, shall we crucify Twain? One will exhaust themselves running done that rabbit hole. Which reminds me, Lewis Carroll may have been a pedophile. Yet the Alice Books are still a favorite of mine.

In the end I think one has the right to like what they like, and say damn it all else to the rest.