The Higher Standard

I recall as a college sophomore looking at Nietzsche with my philosophy professor, who said something almost offhand to me I’d not ever considered before: “You can’t pick and choose. You can’t just take the parts of Nietzsche you like and dismiss the parts you don’t like, like his sexism.”

Up to that point in time, and frankly since, that’s precisely what I’d done with philosophers – creating a mix-and-match of the aspects I liked from various sources. Why couldn’t I just cherry pick, and only focus on the parts that were agreeable to me?

In the last couple of weeks, increasingly, women (and in the case of Kevin Spacey, men) are coming out and demanding justice for abuse, rape, and harassment. It feels like a turning point in America for women’s rights.

Remember when Hugh Grant and Rob Lowe had sex scandals in the 90s, and we never ever heard from them again?

That era of tolerance seems to have passed. The ‘apologize and lay low before your critically-praised comeback’ days seem over. Which is a good thing. Yet as a historian it brought up really, a very troubling consideration:

How many of the great artists of the past were rapists?

Since the 1800s the sex lives of our artists are relatively-ish well-known, from Edgar Allan Poe to Fyodor Dostoevsky. Or at least we think they are – who can really say? But go back further and the waters become brackish in the 1700s, muddy in the 1600s, and nigh-imperceptible prior. All clarity is lost.

Statistically, I’m pretty sure some of them were. But how do I know which ones? Was it Beethoven or Voltaire? Caravaggio or Cervantes? I’m presuming male.

The question which arises, is what next? What can we do about it? Do those older historical figures get a pass? It seems unlikely, and arguably unwise, to throw them all out – knowing, with  near-certainty, that some of them were sexual predators and, by modern (not to mention moral) standards, criminals.

We return then to the old chestnut of separating the art from the artist, or as my prof would have it, the philosopher’s better angels from his demons. Can we allow it? Once it’s known, established, a part of their character – can or should it be set aside in the consideration of their talent, contributions, or even genius?

Contemplating this I returned to Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ but even her Judith Shakespeare doesn’t address this topic: Some of the men we praise, whether the Whitmans or Warhols, did unspeakable things, and we sing their songs in ignorance.

In five hundred years will the monologues of Louis CK or Bill Cosby be separated from their actions? Will Woody Allen and Roman Polanski’s films be elevated, or reviled? As our globally self-aware civilization moves forward, will we simply adopt a higher standard, and those now on the cusp will be the last generation of artists and entertainers to have made it this far with these skeletons in their closets? I hope so. But those from the past remain deeply unsettling.

De Tocqueville. Erasmus. Raphael. Shakespeare. We may never know. Dante. Bach. Swift. Monet. Statistically it’s almost certain. Goethe. Mussorgsky. Tennyson. Plato. What do we do about it?

I don’t have an answer. Maybe we just need to live with the disquieting consideration in our minds. Forever. For all of them:

Sophocles. Chaucer. Mozart. Montaigne.

Moliere. Euripides. Verdi. Wordsworth.

Stravinsky. Twain. Descartes. Camus.

Rodin. Rabelais. Wagner. Aquinas.

Vermeer. Donne. Tchaikovsky. Emerson.

Wilde. Tolstoy. Virgil. Socrates. 

Nietzsche...