In praise of Heidegger, the Nazi
The philosopher Martin Heidegger was a Nazi. He was a member of the party from 1 st May 1933, ten days after becoming Rector of Freiburg University and three months after the Nazis took power in Germany, to the end of World War II. This is problematic for the likes of me who have been profoundly influenced by Heidegger’s writings and find beautiful, even magical, insights in them. (For me, reading Division I of Being and Time , though slow and painstaking, was like turning a light on to the world as it really is.) Recently, with his so-called ‘ black notebooks’ apparently revealing deeper anti-Semitism than was previously thought, attacks on Heidegger and his philosophy for being Nazi have reached a crescendo. The Guardian for example published this article , entitled: ‘ Heidegger's 'black notebooks' reveal antisemitism at core of his philosophy ’. That piece and, it seems, the notebooks themselves, reveal nothing of the sort – though to begin with it is ...