On 5/28/06, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
John McCreery wrote:
> Perhaps it is time to reexamine our tacit assumption that a great > philosopher must be a good man. Perhaps it is as dubious as the > assumption that philosophy implies politics or vice-versa, which > Richard Rorty challenges using Heidegger as an example.
I'm not sure what's meant by 'philosophy implies politics,' but maybe it's the notion that one's 'philosophy' underlies one's politics, which in the non-technical sense of 'philosophy' (one's 'philosophy of life,' e.g.) seems not only true but very nearly tautological.
This is, as I understand it, the popular view against which Rorty is speaking. Instead, he offers the proposition that philosophy, in a narrower, technical, professional sense, may have little to do with political attitudes, a case nicely illustrated by the example of Frege provided below. In support of this proposition, Rorty himself asserts, as I have mentioned before, that John Dewey and Heidegger's views on the philosophy of language are very similar, while their politics, social democratic and Nazi respectively, are not.
In the narrower sense of philosophy, in which a philosopher not only has a 'philosophy of life,' but actively does philosophy, this is less clear. Gottlob Frege was the greatest philosophical logician since Aristotle. He was also a well-known anti-semite. But that Frege thought, as later did Kurt Gödel, that numbers were objects, would seem to have little bearing on his bigotry or vice-versa.
Precisely what Rorty was asserting more generally.
People worry about the relation between Heidegger's Nazi sympathies and the content, or even the usefulness of his philosophical writings. If he'd been a mathematical logician, surely this difficulty wouldn't have arisen; but since it has, I can only say that insofar as Heidegger purports to tell us something about the human condition, I cannot respect—I think that's the word I want—what he says.
I know that others disagree.
I would disagree, but not because I hold any particular brief for Heidegger. My concern is the more general one that we hear so much discussion these days in which assessments of character appear to trump judgments concerning both logic and tropes.* So we tend to decide a priori, having heard that X is a bad individual, that what he or she has to say isn't worth listening to. This character-assassination-first approach not only may prevent us from learning something useful, it also tends to erode the common ground on which all rational discussion takes place.**
*Here I allude to Aristotle's classic triad in The Rhetoric, a work to which Robert Paul renewed my attention very profitably several years ago.
**Here I am influenced by Zygmunt Bauman's argument that "critical theory," having set out to defend freedom against the threat of totalitarianism now needs to rebuild the forum in which people of different values and interests can not only assert their differences but, if only occasionally, actually resolve them.
-- John McCreery The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
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