I actually find him delightful and humorous to read. Reading Hegel is like having to drink cough syrup while having a migraine and insomnia in comparison, at least The Phenomenology of Spirit.

"Il faut cultiver notre jardin."

Voltaire

Both are correct, of course, but at different levels of conception and understanding.

One can easily look at history and see that much of it is chaotic, subject to human whims and illusions, and rife with repetition of the same tragedies and folly, recurring endlessly. But, at the same time, if one considers all of human culture over the fullness of time, you can ascertain that the arc of history (to paraphrase MLK) is long, and it bends toward justice.

Within anyone's given lifetime, it's impossible to perceive that arc... just as it's difficult to see the curvature of the world when sitting in an open field. But the world is spherical, nonetheless.

I’m just casually reading along. Not entirely looking to debate, but I think it’s possible to “accept” JKR’s bad behavior without endorsing it financially. And IMO that’s morally better than using “oh well, her hateful actions aren’t a crime” as an excuse to be ok with financially supporting a bigot. Just my 0.02.

>The answer to the art-artist conundrum is deeply personal. There is no way to produce a collective moral standard to arrive at a conclusive distinction between art and the artist.

This is a reasonable, but not practical, conclusion. This issue derives from the larger "ethical consumption" debate. The answer does not lie with art or artist, or an analyses of either, but majority consensus on ethical implications.

In other words, this debate only gains teeth when imposed on society, removing personal choice from a minority of the population.

For example, Russian sanctions are an example of society rejecting consumption. While boycotting most artists (and their art) is an example of society embracing consumption, by leaving the decision up to the individual.

Similarly, companies choosing to distance themselves from artists are an example of society banning consumption. This last example usually leaves a significant amount of consumers angry, which is why the art-artist and "cancelling" debates are so popular.

I have a cynical perspective on this issue: most people don't care, and those who do, shouldn't. It does not matter if you separate art from artist. What matters is if you should, or if you are allowed to, consume the art.

If you can't consume the art unless it is separated from the artist, for whatever reason, then you should not consume it.

TLDR: Should you separate art from artist? No.

Reading Schopenhauer isn’t negative or a downer to me, it just feels more grounded than Hegel. If it brought me down, I wouldn’t read it. There’s something deeply therapeutic about Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy that I don’t get from Hegel.

I hate how people just go with “Why would I want to read Schopenhauer when he’s a pessimist…yadayada”…it’s because the way he’s talked about not the way his philosophy actually is.

Oh, it’s for sure true that there are people from the 80s who didn’t like his humor. My parents had Cosby records when I was a kid, and I listened to them in the 90s. I found them to be corny with too much religious humor, so they weren’t my thing. Much like you and Harry Potter, I didn’t think Cosby was funny before everything came to light.

That being said, I was more likely to enjoy it before I knew he was a rapist than I am after. The main reason is that I just thought it was corny before - now I think it’s hypocritical at best, which is a much stronger ethical response than when I was a kid.

And time is the essence of everything.

> Individuals who saw Bill Cosby’s comedy in the 1980s are infinitely more likely to recognize his talent despite his actions because they did not experience his comedy with a predefined bias of him being a predator. Likewise, people who experienced his comedy after his actions became public are absolutely more likely to perceive the comedy in a different light.

I don't really find this to be true. I've met more than a few people who experienced Mr. Cosby's work prior to the allegations being leveled who then became convinced that said work lacked merit or talent.

It's possible that what is at work here is the idea that solidarity with the targets of injustice means having an active unwillingness to ascribe any positive attitudes to those perceived as unjust.

And, interestingly, perhaps vice versa as well. I told an acquaintance that I had no interest in reading any of the Harry Potter books, and was thanked for supporting people in the trans community. To be clear, I don't care for that brand of young adult fiction, and didn't even when I was in the target demographic. (I "noped" out on the Narnia books the moment I realized that all of the protagonists were children, even though I was in junior high school myself at the time.) But the perception was that I had a problem with J. K. Rowling's public stances, rather than her actual writing.

That’s a good response/question.

So you don’t want to criminalize JK’s ‘bad’ behavior. Then I stand by my point that there’s nothing wrong with supporting her art, even if she’s a ‘bad’ person. She does many good things with herself and her fortune, and I hope she continues to do good, despite also doing bad.

You are right, she has many choices, but let’s be pragmatic, here; she’s going to continue to be herself, she’s going to continue to be exactly what she is and not be anything else. That’s where cancelling comes into play; should her life be destroyed or not? Most people would say no, yet some would say yes. That is why the rule of law deems her actions acceptable; there’s not enough people against what she is doing, what she is doing is not seen as a crime.

You can ignore her and not support her, that’s your right. But are you any morally better than someone who does support her? According to my argument, no. The reason being that good and bad come together, and unless the bad is so bad that she needs to be dealt with, we’ve just kind of got to accept that bad with the good.

You said it yourself that what she’s doing shouldn’t be considered a crime. That means you don’t want her to be forcibly stopped, you see the damage she does as so insignificant that she shouldn’t be held accountable for it in a court of law. And I agree with that statement. Yet we both also acknowledge that she is doing damage. I think there’s a very real but blurred line, where something is deemed so bad that we can’t allow the person doing it to continue. Clearly JK has not crossed that blurry line, and therefore is free to continue as she pleases.

Bad people, or people with bad ideas, always have am opportunity - they can stop being bad.

I'm not in any way obligated to pay to support someone's being terrible, and I reject the idea that for JK Rowling, the choice is "famous author who screams about trans people on social media" or "a life of crime".

There are so many options in between those two! She could be "famous author who doesn't scream about trans people" or she could be "anti trans author who is now broken and bitter and working at Subway" or she could be "famous author who took some time to reflect and apologized for the impact of her words"

All of these actions are under HER CONTROL.

I, as someone who exists in the universe with JK Rowling, have but a scant few options.

I can't force her to not be an asshole. I can't make it illegal to be an asshole (nor do I think that a law like that should be permissible).

So I can do a few things - I can ignore her. I can refuse to monetarily support her. I can encourage others to support my view.

With your thoughts on cancel culture it seems clear that you believe using the power of your speech or your money has an effect on people. So why is it ok for Rowling to use her words and money to actively try and hurt one group of people, but it is not ok for society to use their money and their words to convince her and other people that they are, in fact, acting badly?

With JK you are missing the point. Her bigoted and hatred views are in fact shaping policy and misconstructing the image around transgender people which in turn makes their lifes more miserable.

JK "views" affect the world in a negative way and are actively hurting a collective of people.

I totally agree with your take on it, but there’s also something to be said of perception. How people see and interact with the world is colored by their personal biases (either explicit or implicit). Individuals who saw Bill Cosby’s comedy in the 1980s are infinitely more likely to recognize his talent despite his actions because they did not experience his comedy with a predefined bias of him being a predator. Likewise, people who experienced his comedy after his actions became public are absolutely more likely to perceive the comedy in a different light.

People have no real control over how their brains choose to perceive the world in response to its previous experiences.

Do you know the artist or any possible victims of their behavior? If the answer is "No", separation achieved.

All I can say about that is, being bad and being a criminal are two different things. JK Rowling is a ‘bad’ person but she’s not a criminal, she’s not raping anyone. Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein were criminals, they were raping people. In their case, I’d still support their careers and their opportunities, but I’d 100% demand they face Justice for their crimes as swiftly and earnestly as possible, and realistically if they eventually are released from prison they’d need to be on a tight leash. Like, the rule of law is important. If Pablo Picasso was a murderer, despite my love and support of his art I’d absolutely want him arrested. I’m not saying we should excuse people from breaking the law, I’m saying that a bad person (not criminal, just bad) can do good things and that if doing good things keeps them from becoming a criminal or something worse than they are, then it’s important that they be allowed to succeed.

I’d summarize it like this; you can’t ‘cancel’ someone, but you can kill them. Cancelers (ideally) want people they deem worthy of being canceled to not have any opportunities whatsoever, meaning that that person will have to turn to a life of crime to survive. That’s essentially a death sentence, in modern society. So, I view it as equivalent to the death sentence.

Would I be OK with JK Rowling getting the death sentence? Absolutely not, even if I think she’s done some bad things. But criminals who have raped countless innocent people, like Cosby and Weinstein? Yeah, sure, kill them, they’re violent criminals, unfit for civilization.

You make a great point, though, that my idea could be stretched to an extreme, and used to protect criminals. I’d just like to reiterate that when I said ‘bad’ I did not mean ‘criminal’, and I do think it’s horrible that criminals are protected because of the things they achieve. The law is biased, and it shouldn’t be.

It’s funny because as much as I agree with Schopenhauer, I still side with Hegel. Simply due to the fact that being optimistic and positive just feels better than being a negative downer. I think the inherent problem with thinking pessimistic is that it just makes you into an unlikable person.

I feel this article is just misdefining or misunderstanding knowledge, and conflating it with certainty. It makes claims like:

>In contrast with general conceptions of knowledge, whether or not a belief is reasonable is not contingent on truth.

But what on earth about the general conception of knowledge says reasonableness is contingent on truth? It says that knowledge is contingent on truth, but the reasonableness of a belief is a seperate matter. I think what is going on is that the author is confusing the map and the territory wrt the "true" criteria of knowledge.

>If knowledge is justified true belief, then surely we can have justified belief regardless of whether we can state authoritatively that our belief is true

Ie. this seems to mistake the "true" criteria of JTB with "can state authoratively that it is true", but one is a statement about the thing itself, and one is a statement about our own mind. True means the claim is true, not anything about our beliefs or what we can state about the claim (that's what the "J" and "B" parts are for).

>again without need to add “truth” to our definition

No - truth is a vital part of the definition, but it simply isn't what the author thinks here. You need truth to make the claim refer to something out in the world, rather than mainly in our heads. And that truth criteria matters. No matter how confidently we assert a claim, the world in which the claim is actually true differs from one where it is false.

Considering something to be knowledge doesn't require certainty, only the same regular degree of confidence belief requires. The truth criteria only distinguishes between what someone thinks is knowledge, and what actually is, in the same way that there's a distinction between something someone thinks is round, and what shape it actually is. Ie. if we find that something we justifiably believe turned out to be false, we say "I thought I knew it", not "I used to know it, but now I don't" - our claim of knowledge was simply mistaken, just like any other claim could be. That doesn't mean we need to transfer that "true in fact" criteria somehow onto our beliefs about that, and indeed to do so would be to destroy the whole point of that criteria.

I’m glad I read this. Doing so led me to discover what pessimism really is. Thanks for posting

How about this though - when bad people do bad things while being protected by their good acts.

Bill Cosby's bad acts were PROTECTED from justice by his good work. He didn't have to choose at all. In fact, the more good he did, and the more we enjoyed his good work, the worse he was allowed to behave.

Harvey Weinstein made a lot of great movies. Movies that would otherwise never be made. His philanthropic efforts undoubtedly helped a lot of people. The only cost was the rape of a few women.

If we hadn't stopped him or brought him to justice, he could have made literally hundreds of good movies, and probably given millions more to charity.

Should he continue to do the good work, even if the cost is a few more rapes? Is the opportunity cost worth it?

Part of the problem is, a BAD person can create GREAT art. Also, a bad person can be an amazing lawyer, or doctor, or worker. And we support all of those bad people by hiring them and letting them do work.

At the end of the day, work is GOOD. Art is GOOD. We need BAD people doing GOOD things, like art, and law, and medicine, etc., because the other option is simply bad people doing bad things, like crime.

Everyone needs to make money to survive. And when you stop people from making money, oh god, they will find a way to make money and survive, and it won’t be as nice as the good work they can do.

Call it an Opportunity Cost.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/opportunitycost.asp

Now, do you want bad people doing good work, or do you want bad people to do bad things? Because you have to choose one, literally HAVE TO. Again, think about opportunity cost. Bad people have many options; do you want them to opt for the good option, or the bad option?

I’ll give you a real world example; JK Rowling. JK has said bad things. JK has also helped countless people through philanthropy and inspired countless people through writing. Should JK double down on being a ‘bad’ person and stop helping anyone and instead focus all of her fortune on greed and hatred, or should JK continue to help others despite having said or done bad things? The option forgone is the opportunity cost, and I know I’d rather see ‘doubling down on bad’ as the opportunity cost as opposed to ‘helping others’.

Abstract: Both Hegel and Schopenhauer departed from Kant’s ideas about the relationship between our sense and the mind which organises them and the mental categories necessary to learn the truth about the world. But the two thinkers arrived at very different conclusions, writes Joshua Foa Dienstag. For Hegel, the unfolding of truth could be revealed in history – human culture was a process of becoming something better, which reached its culmination in the period of the Enlightened Europe. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, thought the exact opposite: truth was not to be found in history but only outside of it. He saw reality as detached from our notions of space and time because our human understanding, reliant, as Kant argues, on mental categories, always contained something illusory. Thus, Hegel’s optimistic idea that humanity was following a predictable pattern of growth towards an ultimate stage of development clashed with Schopenhauer’s pessimism about our capacity to fundamentally change. He recognised an immutable essence that ran through all of history, despite its periods of growth and deterioration. Schopenhauer’s solution was resigning from Hegel’s deceiving optimism bound to lead us to disappointment and to “lose ourselves” in activities that allow us to contemplate the eternal, such as art.

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An aesthetic evaluation of art is not the same as a moral evaluation of the artist. The author's case for not separating the artist from the art is entirely unconvincing. Your example of Bill Cosby is excellent. Unless you fixate upon the writer and performer as the immoral creature that he is, his performances range from hilarious in his stand-up to convincing in his dramatic roles. This does not make him a good person, any more than a bad artistic performance by anyone else makes them a bad person. His moral imperfections do not make his performances bad. There are many examples of persons whose vile behavior was only discovered after their death. They were evil, but this does not diminish their performance or their creations. If you want to refrain from purchasing their artistic contributions, I would not disagree with you. If Mr. Cosby's planned stand-up tour happens, I will not be attending, but that does not mean the performances he gives will be poor nor that his humor will be inadequate. I would never condemn anyone who said they cannot make the separation practically, but I do not see that the separation is logically impossible.

Well, I agree with you. Sometimes, we may distance ourselves from certain art as morally repugnant or bad. But, at times, the art is really good, and its appreciation is never in question. However, our engagement with it may be partly, as I claim in the essay. However, your point is interesting. And I need to think more about it.

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