Why do we Judge Ideas based on their Author's Actions?

5/18/2009

I just began listening to a lecture series on Martin Heidegger, the German Philosopher with questionable ethics due to his involvement in Nazism.

Honestly, the first time I heard that he was involved with the Nazis, I got really cautious about listening to his ideas at all. I mean, why listen to the philosophy of someone who was part of one of the greatest evils of all time? What on earth could he possibly say that would have any sort of value for me?

But no sooner had that thought occurred to me, than another one entered my head: Why is it that I'm so quick to judge or label everything a person is (or was) based on one area of their lives?

I can't rationalize what Hitler and the Third Reich did. It was terrible. But that doesn't mean that individuals within the Nazi Party were completely devoid of good. (What about Shindler's List, for instance?) It would be like labeling me as an American and writing off everything about me because our Country's foreign policy is pretty messed up right now.

What's more convicting to me is that in a sense, that's exactly what the Nazis did when they began a genocide against Jews, Homosexuals, and Gypsies (among other victims of the holocaust). Hitler's gang couldn't see beyond ethnicity, religion, or sexuality. They reduced human beings to one defining characteristic and made an assumption that the person was completely worthless because of it.

So, even though I'm not the one carrying the gun- if I can't see beyond the fact that Heidegger had ties to the Nazis (or if I reduce anyone to a certain label), I think it puts me on shaky ground. I think it puts me just a few steps out of line with the Nazis.

That's why I've decided to listen to this lecture with an open mind, hoping for something good rather than assuming that I'm going to be listening to flawed logic and corruption.

seth link

5/18/2009 03:25:14

The tension you laid out I think is virtue ethics vs deontology. I can see value in both (and I walk the line between both) but I think by nature people are wired with virtue ethics in mind; it's not until you are able to use your higher brain that people are able to look outside circumstance and evaluate reality objectively.

I think that to a large degree a person's character shapes their philosophy and so thinking about the life and circumstances of a philosopher isn't an error. It's a measuring stick because being=doing.

Mr. Salk link

5/18/2009 12:30:10

I like the works of both Bobby Fischer and Woody Allen.
But we aren’t talking about art..

Jim Gulian

5/19/2009 05:33:22

The danger isn't in listening to a new or different point of view, it's in ignoring the fruit of the vine.

Jeff link

5/19/2009 13:20:09

Another consideration in all this is the role the world played in creating a perfect environment for growing Nazism in the first play. WWI reparations became this instrument of vengence; this lead to Germany's depression being among the most horrific in the world. And then, when it actually would have been helpful for the governments of the world to have a backbone, as the fledgling Nazi movement got off the ground, we knuckled under. In America, we quite willfully lived in denial of the realities that were going on.

Angel link

5/20/2009 07:09:10

My opinion is that there is value in understanding the ideas expressed by any person - even if those ideas are in themselves dangerous. If we ignore those things we find unsavory, unsafe, or incredible then we allow those things to flourish unchecked.

So, even if it is hard to separate the man from his political history, it still makes sense to me to pay attention to what he has to say. Maybe we learn something valuable because we want to integrate it into our world concept. Maybe it's valuable because we are able to identify it as somehow incongruent with the truth.

From a different perspective - People are not always the sum of their actions. I don't know anything about Martin Heidegger, but he could have had any number of reasons for "going along with" the Nazis. I would give him a chance, take his words with a grain of salt, and look forward to learning something about a vastly different perspective than my own.

... Now I have to go look up this lecture series.

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Don't Panic

Why do we Judge Ideas based on their Author's Actions?

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