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?

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?

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/books/09philosophy.html?_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.

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

or I would have already heard of it...

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Aedes;102921 wrote:

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.

Reading just a little about him I can't see how he functioned at all as a "Philosopher" because he was so Catholic and prejudiced... I have a Book around here about Pius the 12, and it is called Hitler's Pope...If I understand the guy, he reined in the church pretty tight, so there was no sense of freedom of thought, or speech... It was not such an extreme thing for peasants to be anti semetic... If I read their history correctly, such people were once littlle more than property, and after the Jews in one fashion or another had financed the nobles in the wars against each other to the point of bankruptcy, then they owned the land, and the peasants went with the land..If I may... .I have a friend of Polish decent, and he is no fan of Jews... After the Communists fell back the Jews came to the village where his people haled from and said: We own this land...The people there said Bullshet you do... We have had this land forever... Both may have been right... The peasants had what they call bottom rights in China, and the Jews Probably held a mortgage signed by some former noble living on his equity...

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

Lie... Plato sucked up to Dionysius, and Nietzsche sucked up to Caesar Borgia, and Napoleon; and it make no difference that they were dead because he would have sucked up to any petty tyrant under the sun...He was not much of a man; but he was a born lickspittle...

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

Both did violence to the truth to the entertainment of ideology...

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/relstud/faculty/sheehan/pdf/88-nazi.PDF

are you that "in the know"?

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.

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.

I meant in the sense of being a moral judge and a judge of morals. He was a philosophical ethicist. Thus, if anyone should be reflective on questions of good and bad, it should be he who took it up as an academic life-endeavor.

I can't disagree with your second paragraph. You know my family history, and yet I still own (and listen to) the complete Ring des Nibelungen and Tristan und Isolde (a total of 20 CDs). There's a difference between a Heidegger and a Mengele. Mengele produced his science through torturing people with his own hands, and most scientists would agree that no generalizable clinical science can come from coerced subjects.

No one should confuse morals and ethics with good and bad...

if the question is whether one must be moral to be a moralist, I think the answer is no, but it is usually the case... And people can be moral without understanding morality...In a limited sense, Heidegger was moral without being a moralist, because if he had understood national morality, and Catholic morality he would have expanded it to the international level, and set about building world justice...

The personal philosophy of good and bad is morality. The general philosophy of good and bad is ethics.

But the question is about how to regard someone who is a philosopher of morals who fails to condemn the most outwardly destructive and self-destructive regime in the history of the world.

A number of people have said that no art is possible after Auschwitz (Auschwitz of course being both place and emblem). It's an enormous punctuation mark on history. It's not a period, but it's simultaneously question mark, exclamation point, and ellipsis. You think about humanity, about progress, and then Auschwitz and Hiroshima and Kolyma and Verdun enter your mind -- and you take note that all our great steps forward have a reciprocal step backwards.

And then Heidegger comes into the picture: 1) philosopher of progress, 2) philosopher of ethics, 3) WWII happened during the height of his career, 4) German, 5) Nazi celebrist, 6) survived three decades after WWII.

He was not sheltered from it at all. He was best equipped of any Nazi to account for and understand it. But he did not. Why not? Because like many other prominent Nazis who survived decades after the war, like Eichmann, like Mengele, like Stangl, there was no contrition, no apology. Only self-justification. "It was an era", or a "context". Stangl ran Treblinka -- he never expressed remorse for gassing 800,000 people. He never sought to understand it (read Into That Darkness).

So Heidegger, it seems, couldn't let go of it. He couldn't separate his philosophy from it, or at least separate his self. If he can't do that, being intellectually equipped to do so, then why should we grant him that favor?

Foucault may not be considered a good person either. He lived an odd personal live that would have probably repulsed many people, but someone's work should not be confused with their personal lives. You see this in many different fields--especially the arts which philosophy should be lumped in with. One of the best actors of recent times, Robert Downey Jr, fights drug addiction, and many of the greatest musicians over the last 50 year have battle with drugs (e.g. John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, Janis Joplin). Of course, it is not just limited to people in the public eye. There are lawyers, doctors, priests, pastors, teachers, police officers, and members of every line of work that battle their inner demons. Does this make them bad? No, it just makes them weak to certain passions and drives.

I believe that Schopenhauer actually suggested that philosophers were motivated by irritability. And Nietzsche was powered, if you ask him, by the power drive. Hegel talked of the necessity of tarrying with the Negative, and even defined man as negativity, a hole in the present. (Loosely, via Kojeve..)

What I am getting at is that there is a dark side of the Force. Philosophy has strong associations with evil as well as good.