Hildegarde

So between comments and e-mail I got a lot of feedback on that last one that amounted to, “well, MY kind of writer is nice.  It’s that other kind that isn’t.”

As a matter of fact, thatisn’t true.  Among “storytellers,”for instance, there have been some notable pricks, including both Maugham and Hawthorne, neither of whom was in the least bit interested in changing the world.  Some writers who were passionately interested in changing the world–Orwell, for instance, and Ralph Waldo Emerson–were actually, by all accounts, unusually decent human beings.

One of the reasons we like naratives is precisely he fact that they fix he moral chaos of the world.  In narratives, heroes may have flaws, but justice is always done, and an evil skank is never a saint in her professional life.

If you want to know just how strongly we cling to our wish for a world that is morally cohesive, consider the response to a book of mine, now very far in the past, that was published under the title Dear Old Dead.

Not my title.  Don’t get me started on the early titles.  Really.

Anyway, the central character in Dear Old Dead is a physician by the name of Michail Pride, who chucked over a Park Avenue practice to open a clinic in Harlem with the help of a group of Augustinian nuns.  He is a truly remarkable man.  He works ceaselessly and at gteat hardship to himself to bring free medical care, and first class care, to people who would otherwise be reduced to emergency rooms and really bad doctors.

There’s just one thing–he’s not only a gay man, but a gay man with a complete obsession with sex in glory holes.  And he’s got AIDS, which of course he would have–but he’s still going to glory holes, which means he’s still infecting other people.

So what is Michael Pride–a saint or a piece of moral crap?  I’d say that what Michael Pride is is more realistically drawn than most fictional characters.  In the real world, it just isn’t true that anybody is ever a “good person” in every way, and my guess is that somebody who is spectacularly good in some ways will be spectacularly bad in others.

But Micheel Pride would have been even more realistically drawn if I’d given up the glory holes and simply made him petty and meanspirited in everyday life.  Because that’s more realistic, too, than what we normally get from fiction.  In fact, it’s the most realistic of all. 

It’s a good question, though, in terms of real life–what part of the human being should we count as definitive in our jedgments of him?  When, if ever, are we justified in rejecting a writer’s work because of what he is or has been in life?

Fiction may be the easy case here.  Fiction creates a world of its own, and lots of writers seem to crate that world on autopilot, so it relly doesn’t matter if Hawthorne was a racist, misogynist jerk, Hester Prynne is feminist enough for practically anybody, and a strong enough call for the rights of individual conscience aainst the pressures of conformity.

Science might not be too dificult a case, either.  Two plus two equal four no matter who discovers it.  Even if it had been Hitler who had first presented the world with the heliocentric solar system, the merits of the case for that system would not be weakened.  Science is supposed to be about the data, and the data are the same for everybody.  Liberals and conservatives do not get different answers to the question of the validity of the germ theory of disease.

Even so, ad hominem is the first of the logical fallacies for a reason.  Human beings are loath to give it up.  What do you mean it doesn’t matter if he’s scum of the earth?  If he’s scum of the earth, nothing he says can possibly be tue!

Francis Bacon was a nasty little man, a world-class opportunitst who took favors from people and then cheerfully threw them to the wolves as soon as the political winds changed.  He also laid the foundations for the scientific method, and the world has een immeasurab;y better because of the movement he started. 

But.

Consider another kind of writer–the writer on philosophy.  Philosophy is ethics and politics as well as metaphysics.  In fact, almost nobody does metaphysics any more.  And seemingly obscure branches of philosophy can have enormous impact on history.  Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge, what it means to say we “know” something, whether we can “know” anything at all.  It’s not just academic, whether we understand the world as being really out there or just a construction of our own minds.  It really matters what the rules of evidence are, and not just in courtrooms.

I’ve always been of the opinion that Hegel was the worst thing that ever happened to Western Civilization.  It was Hegel who apotheosized history in such a way that made both Naziism and Communism not only possible, but inevitable.  If you want to know why so many secular people think that those two movements were religious, not “atheistic,” go read Hegel.  It’s fairly clear.

But the philosopher that has had the most impact on Western philosophy in this century, the one whose insights have generated the most comment, and engagement, in the field and out, is Martin Heidigger.

He’s the counterexample to the old saw that academics will allow a Commu8nist anything but conservatives absolutely nothing.

Of course, Heidigger wasn’t a conservative.  He was a Nazi.  Literally  He was a member of the Nazi party.  He joined after the persecution of the Jews started, so he was not blind to what was going on.  His former student and longtime lover, Hannah Arendt, had to flee to New York to escape being placedin a concentration camp.  Heidigger sailed serrenly through the war, overseeing the expulsion of Jews from his university, hanging on to his position to the very end–and never, not once, apologizing for it afterward, or even really explaining himself.

And yet, after the war, his reputation was rehabilitated, his career was excused–he was only doing what he had to do to keep his job, people said, as if craven ambition is supposed to be a mitigating factor–and he became the foundation of a whole set of philosophical, literary and historicall movements, from that old saw moral relatiism to structuralism, deconstruction, and constructivism.

I really don’t expect my universe to be morally coherent.  I know that many atheists are more generous and upright than many Christians and that many religious people are more intelligent than people who do not believe. I knwo that there are lots of intelligent and compassionate Republicans and lots of stupid and selfish Democrats.  I know the world is not a narrative, no matter how much we would like to make it one.

But there is a part of my head that says philosophy–and that offshoot of philosophy which is intellectual religion (think Thomas Aquinas here)–is trying to tell us how to live, and looking at how well the philosophers themselves were able to live is a good place to start to judge their usefulness to the rest of the human race.

But then part of me remembers Saint Paul.  The spitit is willing, but the flesh is weak.  We often understand what would be the right thing to do and lack the whatever it is to carry it out.

Okay, I have to admit it.  In spiteof the silly nonsense about women, I often rather like St. Paul.