November 18, 2008: Philosophical Poison

Many of the philosophers who laid the foundations of modern and post-modern thought were profoundly bad men. This fact seems to surprise Nigel Rodgers and Mel Thompson, authors of Philosophers Behaving Badly. They write, "From philosophers...we expect, not unreasonably, nobler, wiser behavior, demonstrating some attempt to live up to their ideals." But, they note, "philosophers, while godlike in the intellectual sphere, can be the sorriest children in the world of power and money."

"Sorriest children" is too kind a label for the eight philosophers they profile in the book. "Demon-spawn" is more like it. A few tidbits:

Martin Heidegger, a father of Existentialism, was a Nazi. He concluded his lectures with "Heil Hitler!", and actively worked to make the university at Frieburg an institution subservient to the goals of Hitler and the Nazi Party. This included persecuting Jewish students and even the Jewish professor, Edmund Husserl, who had mentored him.

Jean-Paul Sarte was an apologist for Stalin, and so vigorous in his support of the Soviet madman that he criticized Krushchev for denouncing his predecessor! Even though Sarte knew about the gulags, he simply denied them the way some deny the Holocaust. To Sarte, heroic dissidents like Solzhenitsyn were mere criminals.

Michel Foucault, darling of postmodernism, was a drug-addled Peeping Tom. From his 8th floor apartment he used to train his binoculars on men undressing. He died of AIDS, but not before probably infecting many others because (1) he hid the fact that he had AIDS and (2) he refused to take precautions. Once while debating Noam Chomsky he maintained that he was willing to dispense with any principle of justice in order to achieve total victory for the proletariat. And if the proletariat needed to preserve power by violent oppression of the vanquished, so be it. Chomsky (no angel himself) "felt that he was debating with someone who did not even inhabit the same moral universe."

Bertrand Russell was the 20th century's foremost philosophical promoter of atheism, and though he had a reputation for non-violent pacifism he was actually such a war-mongering beast that he favored genocide. He considered defensible the extermination of North American Indians because they stood in the way of the spread of Western Civilization. In October of 1945 the famed author of Why I Am Not A Christian proposed that the US launch a massive pre-emptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, saying, "I should for my part prefer all the chaos and destruction of a war conducted by means of the atomic bomb to the universal domination of a government having the evil characteristics of the Nazis." Later, Rodgers and Thompson note, "he accepted that such a war might kill 500 million people and set civilization back centuries, yet thought this a price well worth paying." It seems to me that if this influential philosopher had possessed dictatorial power in the late 1940s, then the title of "Greatest Villain in the History of the World" would no longer be contested between Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Those pipsqueak knee-biters, with their millions of victims, would be nothing compared to Bertrand Russell and his hundreds of millions.

Time would fail me to relate all the cruelty, selfishness, mendacity, mean-spiritedness and grotesque immorality of the eight philosophers in Rodger's and Thompson's book. It is worth checking out of the library and reading for yourself. And it is worth thinking about a question the authors keep raising: "How could these men think so well but behave so badly?"

For the Christian, the answer lies pretty close at hand. The premise is wrong. These men were not great thinkers. Six of them (Foucalt, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Russell, Schopenhauer and Sartre) were atheists, and the other two (Rousseau and Wittgenstein) were not Christians. If you deny God and reject his incarnate Son, the worldview you construct will necessarily find itself twisted into a bad shape. Why expect good behavior to spring from that?

As I've written before, atheism can seek - but never find – a ground for moral behavior. A society that has philosophical materialists in it must hope that none of them thinks too hard. Because once atheists get to thinking and living by the results, watch out! They'll conclude (they always do) that the morality they learned in kindergarten is simply a creation of mankind, and, as such, can be reshaped like play-doh in their capable hands. They are free (Existentialists love to talk this way!) to construct their own realities and meaning. When they do that, why should any of us be shocked - shocked - that the behavior they find most reasonable is that which magnifies themselves, absolutizes their pleasure, and sacrifices all other people on the altar of self-serving desire?