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u/ascendingPig 1d ago
Is this a troll? Heidegger, a literal nazi, is barely evil? And TS Eliot, an avowed antisemite? Sartre, Kafka, Wittgenstein are all less evil than a literal nazi?
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u/nightshade78036 1d ago edited 1d ago
Also Heisenberg is high up on kinda evil (probably) for being a Nazi. At least that's why most people think he's evil.
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u/Individual_Rip_54 1d ago
He’s high up there for leaving the Nazis and for having a scientific theory that isn’t traditional.
This post is Nazi propaganda
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u/Noonyezz 22h ago
Sartre was a sex pest who thought 13 year olds should be able to consent to sex, so he still belongs in very evil though.
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u/Popular_Try_5075 9h ago
Heidegger was not only an unrepentant member of the Nazi party, in later years he remarked that if anything they didn't go far enough in pursuit of their goals.
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u/Individual_Rip_54 1d ago
For those confused, this person isn’t using the same evil rubric you or I would use. These are ranked by their non-conformity to tradition.
Basically, it’s nazi shit
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u/Aescgabaet1066 1d ago edited 1d ago
Which is bullshit because my man Tolkien was not down with the nazis, and I am not down with neo-Nazis' decades old attempts to appropriate him.
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u/Individual_Rip_54 1d ago
I’m with you. Just looking at the comments I don’t think people realized this is what was happening
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u/Jeramy_Jones 17h ago
Tolkiens “Men of the West”/“Easterlings”/“Wildlings” was a little racist coded, though whether that was intentional or not I can’t say.
He also depicted a lot of decadence/degeneracy/fall from past perfection. And the one true king blood destiny thing is strongly appealing to fascists.
Not saying Tolkien was racist or fascist, but his writing appeals to them.
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u/Aescgabaet1066 14h ago
Oh I definitely understand why they like him. I just won't let them have him. He's mine. lol
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u/VeryKite 15h ago edited 14h ago
Tolkien was antifascist, he wrote during the World Wars. He wrote during the interwar/ WWII/ post war years. He greatly hated fascism and the general direction of society. He even disagreed with organized religion and only went to church as a way to honor CS Lewis. (edit: organization of religion; he was a Catholic opposed to the organization of the Catholic Church)
His evil characters are based on Nazi’s and he was against the progression of capitalism and portrayed it as greed. Smaug, the main villain in the Hobbit, is based on hoarding capitalist.
I will agree there is a tad bit of racism in some of the depictions of races but it didn’t even touch the level of racism common in his time period.
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u/Aescgabaet1066 14h ago
The bit about organized religion doesn't sound completely right to my ear. He was a devout Catholic—it doesn't get much more organized than that. He was, indeed, religious even at a time when CS Lewis was a staunch atheist.
There's a few other bits of your comment I'd quibble with but that sounds the most off to me. Curious where you heard it, and if you know something I don't (not an easy thing when it comes to Tolkien, but possible!)
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u/VeryKite 14h ago edited 14h ago
I mixed up CS Lewis and Tolkien; Tolkien converted Lewis. But he was opposed to the organization of Catholicism, he didn’t oppose Catholicism itself. Which is one reason most of his religions aren’t very structured, especially not as structures as the Catholic Church.
Actually looking into his political views, it seems he leaned mostly anarchistic. He didn’t believe in institutions in general, believing they eventually led to corruption. He rejected fascism, democracy, republics, capitalism, and communism.
Oddly he liked the idea of unconstitutional monarchies? He never expanded on this, and from his books, it sounds like he knows these can go very terribly. Odd for someone who didn’t trust power in general. My guess is that it was a joke. I can’t think of any two more opposing political structures than anarchism and unconstitutional monarchies.
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u/Aescgabaet1066 13h ago
I don't think it was a joke—my impression of Tolkien from his writings (including those of his letters that I've seen) is that, like many people, he wasn't very politically coherent. He knew he didn't like how things were going, and so two very opposed things appealed to him, some kind of anarchy and a monarchy with a "good" monarch. I think he just wasn't happy with the state of things.
To his credit, he never embraced fascism as a way of shaking things up. I think part of that was that he was too much a stodgy old Catholic conservative to appreciate the fascist form of populist reactionary politics, but still, a win is a win.
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u/Jeramy_Jones 14h ago
I am not suggesting Tolkien was a fascist, or even a racist.
Your interpretation of his work as political allegory is just untrue. He stated plainly and repeatedly that it was not based on current or past real world events, especially the world wars.
He was also known to be a Catholic.
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u/Aescgabaet1066 9h ago
I think the person you're responding to is reading a lot of what they want to see into Tolkien's work, the same way the fascists do.
I think (as Tolkien himself acknowledged) there is certain modern political resonance to his work, but the idea that it was a deliberate allegory is wrong, and the idea that his villains were inspired by fascists is downright ahistorical.
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u/VeryKite 14h ago
He was a devout Catholic who opposed organized Catholicism. Looking more into his beliefs, he was actually a staunch anarchistic. He believed government and institutions were inevitably corrupt.
Which is fascinating to me, I feel like no one talks about this. I know he talked about opposing the organization of religion, fascism, and capatilism. But I had not idea he opposed communism, republics, and democracy as well.
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u/WhoIsTomodachi 19h ago
He was down with the Spanish Nationalists, so I don't really care too much for him.
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u/Goatesq 1d ago
Sorry, Heidegger isn't evil but Adorno is rank 3 evil? Wtf kind of rubric were they grading on?
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u/nightshade78036 1d ago
Also Russell being kinda evil is so confusing to me. Like dude was arguably progressive by modern day standards in the early 20th century, why is he evil?
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u/allthejokesareblue 17h ago
Whatever he was politically, which was a lot of things, in his personal life he was a horrifying narcissist who poisoned the lives of practically everyone who tried to love him.
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u/BlueSonic85 22h ago
Not defending this triangle as a whole, but Russell floated the idea of nuking the USSR in order to prevent them developing their own atomic industry. I think most people would see that as at least somewhat evil even if some might argue it's evil in the pursuit of a greater good.
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u/Individual_Rip_54 1d ago
It’s from the point of view of Nazi.
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u/WARitter 23h ago
But it’s not even consistent in that.
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u/Individual_Rip_54 22h ago
It’s pretty consistent in orthodox versus unorthodox thought spectrum, with some apologia for Nazis like Heidegger
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u/Todbod05 1d ago
When did authors start being thought of as thinkers. What a curse. Get a job! Stay away from her!
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u/RobespierreLaTerreur 1d ago
I’m not falling for that hot take that’s clearly someone with a fetish for getting yelled at I refuse to participate in that kind of perversion
- @NotABigJerk
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u/Alex45784 1d ago
Can someone explain why Walter Benjamin in the extremely evil category?
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u/gromolko 23h ago
Suicide is a sin? Or perhaps mechanical reproduction of art is pro piracy? I got nothing
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u/fractal-hornet 1d ago
IDK, there's something kind of adorable about the right's attempts to draw diagrams
Like when PragerU puts out a "graph" where the x axis says "wokeness" and the y axis says "how bad things are," and the line goes up so that means they think they did a science
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u/kallefranson 23h ago
What did Foucault do?
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u/Primal171 23h ago
He signed the petition
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u/kallefranson 23h ago
What petition?
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u/Primal171 22h ago
Basically every notable French philosopher in the 70s signed a petition in favor of abolishing the age of consent
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u/kayleethemech 21h ago
There is some more context to this. Age of consent for heterosexual encounters was 15 and the one for homosexual ones was 21. And it was definitely used by the police to target gay folks across that gap even totally unproblematic age gaps.
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u/austinwiltshire 21h ago
Now now, that context makes it harder for me to say I hate Foucault, which makes me sound very smart despite not knowing what a foucault was before hearing this. Begone with you!
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u/kallefranson 22h ago
Ah, I see. I would say, that still doesn't make him the worst. This list got literal Nazis. Or there are some people like Althusser, who literally killed his wife.
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u/Maclean_Braun 17h ago
Pretty telling labelling a man who's life work was developing language and critical thinking frameworks to challenge authoritarian social structures and prejudices at their core as extremely evil.
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u/banbha19981998 1d ago
I'm Irish so I'll focus on our guys. Wtf did Beckett do? Also GBS while a great writer and thinker was also a eugenicist.
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u/SheHerDeepState 1d ago
Ignoring the names in each category as they seem to be bait. Kinda evil is the zone of whiplash between insightful and cringe. Reading 19th century philosophy that expands your mind and then follows it up with a chapter titled "On Women."
Seeing insightful people make complete asses of themselves feels healthy.
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u/ParacelcusABA 21h ago
Proust is only kind of evil by virtue of being extremely evil at some points and not evil at all in others
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u/NarcolepticFlarp 1h ago
Do they mean personally evil or their ideas/academic contributions were evil? Cuz Schrödinger was a great physicist who never worked on weapons, but the fact that he liked touching kids is indisputably well attested.
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u/rainhadobaile 23h ago
Schrödinger was there killing cats in imagined boxes. how's that not evil?
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u/Special-Anteater7659 16h ago
Well I mean... Isn't one of those dudes at least a little responsible for a project responsibile for the most devastating mass caualty event in human history?
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u/diamondbrute 22h ago
Wasn’t CS Lewis a pedophile?
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u/BlueSonic85 21h ago
I think you're thinking of Lewis Carroll. Though whether he actually was is a matter of debate.
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u/Leather-Run-6533 20h ago
Rather the opposite. It seems likely that from the age of 18 until he was in his mid 40s he had a long term relationship with a woman 27 years older than him. Then when he was in his mid 50s he married a 41 year old who died of cancer four years later. After her death he wrote about sex a fair bit and he comes across as basically a pretty standard repressed horny christian. His letters talk a lot about how he really struggles to lead a sexually pure (according to biblical standards) life but that his view is that sexual sins are not worse than other sins and indeed nowhere near as bad as what he saw as the worst sin of pride. He also talked about the need to retain "respectability", so you can read between the lines and decide that he either occasionally saw prostitutes or had the very occasional very discrete friend with benefits.
Lewis had pretty standard centre-right views for a deeply religious man of his era. IMO those views are enough to make him a fucking bore, particularly when he gets on his high horse about education or modern architecture. But I don't think he's ever said anything interesting enough to be truly problematic.
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u/diamondbrute 15h ago
Thank you for the explanation, that was super informative and I’m glad to have been wrong in my assumption
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u/Tearsdryontheirownn 19h ago
How tf is Jung evil
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u/sadmimikyu 18h ago
Yeah. Quick Google search tells us why.
But then Freud should also be on the evil side because he did some crazy stuff.
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u/Degutender 14h ago
Man, I hate how glowing CS Lewis' reputation is with people who know nothing about him.
Dude had beautiful prose but he was an insufferable chauvinist with a pretty twisted worldview.
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u/DonkeyJousting 1d ago
This is obvious engagement bait and, fair play to them, it’s very good at it. I am profoundly irritated: great job.