In an earlier post I asked, Who is the most loathsome philosopher in history? I suggested that Rousseau and Heidegger be considered top candidates.
Some more data relevant to Rousseau: He made his common-law wife leave all five of their infants at foundling hospitals, on the grounds that they’d be better off there and that he couldn’t afford to raise them.
Had he tried, Rousseau may very well have been incompetent as a father. Yet also relevant are these statistics for one foundling hospital in Paris: “Between 1771 and 1773 the Hotel-Dieu recorded mortality rates between 62 percent and 75 percent. French church registries of the same period show that in the private sector the death rate among infants was only 18 percent.”
(Source: “Children in European and American History.”)
Related: Rousseau on the education of children, in the Philosophers, Explained series.
Rousseau is definitely more loathsome than Heidegger. Heidegger lied a lot (according to Hannah Arendt) but he never personally killed anyone (let alone his own children). There is an additional reason. Yes, Heidegger was a Nazi, but he joined the movement. He didn’t start it. Rousseau, on the other hand, was the philosopher of choice for the radicals who turned the French Revolution into a bloodbath. In addition, Rousseau’s work was a strong influence on Kant.
A goodly number of Rousseau’s contemporaries agree with Mr. Marks — although they tended to lump Voltaire and Rousseau into the same wicket. Dr. Johnson, when asked their merits, replied, ‘Why, Sir, it is difficult to divide the portion of iniquity between them!” Rousseau started the “noble savage” nonsense, which implies that primitive peoples live more closely to [human] nature than do we. Diderot endorsed this primitivism in several essays, often claiming that the native diet, which could be picked off a tree, as in the breadfruit tree, surpassed corrupt civilized fare. Dr. Johnson again : He took the slice from a good loaf, held it up and said, “Nay, Sir, this is better than the breadfruit tree!”
I’d put Heidegger at the top and a lot of the Enlightenment philosophers were racist were they not?
The idea that Heidegger is more loathsome than Rousseau is absurd. Heidegger was a Nazi, but so was all of Germany at the time, though Hitler did turn out to be a monster it was impossible to predict at the time despite what others would have you believe. The entire country loved Hitler, he had just brought Germany out of a major recession that the entire world was suffering from after WW1, no other country was able to do this. If you do some research you will see that pre-WW2 Hitler was greatly respected by all world leaders, including Americans, for this accomplishment. As for his racism, most refer to his black notebooks, where journalists have gone in and handpicked particular quotes out of thousands of pages. These examples show that Heidegger was an antisemite, but if you look further, you will see that he acknowledged his views as unreasonable, and new that they were simply an ingrained belief. Anyone with some sense will also realize that Heidegger’s views were not extreme for the time, you could go to America at the time and find that most people had the same feelings about the Jews. When Heidegger first joined the Nazi party he was appointed director of the Freiburg college in Germany, which was a position he held for less than a year because he refused to put up propaganda posters which promoted antisemitism. He also had a Jewish lover who was a notable scholar herself and who he had a relationship with for years and declared his true love at one point. The fact most overlooked by people is that Heidegger was majorly disappointed in the Nazi party, he had hoped for a revival of traditionalism with Hitler but instead found simply another modernist shift. The scholars who wish to dismiss his work today by using his past as ammunition are simply the ignorant who wish to stick to the simplistic philosophy of the time which focused on syntax rather than true metaphysics.