The problem isn't a judgment per se, it is judging based on evidence ripped completely out of time and place. Context is missing here and without that context you really can't say at all whether this was either a jerk making demands or someone exhibiting the patience of a saint. Even with a biography as a guide you still can't make a call like that.
The private affairs between two people are best left alone unless you get an active invitation from both participants to state what you think, and even then you're going to have to work really hard to figure out what an objective viewpoint would be. Judging is easy, deciding when explicitly not to judge is a lot harder.
I think we are talking past each other. If I knew Einstein, if he were alive today, then certainly what you say is true. Additionally, if I were trying to impeach him or his works, such as the attacks that Thomas Jefferson gets when we talk about slavery, then you would also have a point.
But I'm not trying to slander the man, I'm trying to understand him.
When I was a kid I used to be interested in General Patton of WWII. After a long spell of hero worship, I came to know more and more about the man. Finally I had an epiphany: he was really an asshole. Men who were under his command would have shot him. Many times. The people he reported to could barely manage him. He was an arrogant, self-centered, SOB.
But that didn't make Patton bad. That made Patton interesting. Yes, he was a son of a bitch, but damnit, he was our son of a bitch. :)
Understanding other human beings is the primary goal of biography. Of course one can never live entirely in another's shoes, but humans were then much as they are now, and we can gain much from trying to understand them more fully. A hundred years within the same culture and language is not so vast a chasm.
It would be a mistake to use this one letter to judge this one man through the lens of our times, which is what I think you're objecting to. Certainly that's not good history. But viewed within the context of the other things we know about him, it is much more revealing, and an interesting counterpoint to the hero/villain-narrative we reflexively grant famous people.
You can try to make it ridiculous but I actually was not aiming at anything 'deep' or philosophical, merely indicating that there is a problem with the method used to gain the required level of understanding.
I think you can actually understand others, but you're going to have to interact (like we do right here) with those people that you wish to understand.
Trying to understand people that have been dead for quite a while from (very terse) writings made in a stressful situation almost a century old is a very difficult undertaking. The lack of access to the subject, the distortion of social mores over time and more things like that make this from a practical point of view very hard.
At best this will give you fractional insights into aspects of their character it will never allow you to say 'x is a jerk' or anything to that effect. There would have to be significant qualification of that statement.
No, we can never really know any historical figure or event. The most we can do is try to learn what we can and hope that it has an emotional impact on us. If you really want a historical person to have the most influence possible in your life, you should strive to learn both the good and bad things about them -- not in terms of dates and facts, but in terms of how they thought about things.
Reading about historical figures should be an emotional experience. You should try to empathize and feel the things they felt. This is, of necessity going to cause you some discomfort as well.
Not only is it possible to say "X is a jerk", but it is necessary. Otherwise people from the past are just little cardboard cutouts in a sea of data. Fan of Plato? Then you should not only know his works, you should have a personal feeling of how you view the way he thinks about things. Yes, this is imaginary, but it's also necessary. History is not just a list of famous guys doing things on certain dates. It's something you, personally, should use your imagination to dive into and enjoy.
History is fun. People are complex. We use our imagination and comprehension and passion to drive us towards better understanding of historical figures and their actions. This is the good part.
I'll bow out. Seems like you are making some other kind of point about really knowing what's in the heart of others and judging those we may never culturally understand. That really has nothing to do with anything. I say grab onto somebody in history you admire and dive deep into their personal and emotional life. Make your own judgments, ask yourself how you would have acted in similar circumstances. Learn and respect both the good and the bad. Have passion.
interacting with people in person doesn't remove the context problem
the context in which you interact with someone changes how you know that person
the same person (everyone, you included) will seem like a different person based on whether they are interacting with a collegue, a supervisor, an underling, an employee at McDonalds, a waiter at a fancy restaurant, an old friend, a stranger, a child, a parent etc. etc.
alot of the people you view favorably, you probably do so because the context of your relationship is mutual respect, those people probably have relationships that aren't in those context, and the people in them probably have quite different views of those people.
if "knowing" a person is actually possible, it might be easier to do so from the prospective of 100 years of distance and a biography than from the extreme closeup of personal interaction
>The problem isn't a judgment per se, it is judging based on evidence ripped completely out of time and place. Context is missing here and without that context you really can't say at all whether this was either a jerk making demands or someone exhibiting the patience of a saint.
You make it sound like some mysterious quantum dynamics problem.
There is _already_ plenty of context for making a judgement call in this case. It's not like they lived in another galaxy, in a society with extremely different cultural norms.
We know the norms of the era they lived, we have other people as examples from that time, and we even know (or have known) people that were alive back then. It's not like we're missing some mysterious information that changes all this into something else.
We're not talking about Andromeda. This is planet earth, a western society, a highly educated man, less than a century ago.
Heck, those of us who know History, we can make judgement calls even for millennia before.
The private affairs between two people are best left alone unless you get an active invitation from both participants to state what you think, and even then you're going to have to work really hard to figure out what an objective viewpoint would be. Judging is easy, deciding when explicitly not to judge is a lot harder.
And I wasn't judging you either ;)