How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany’s greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? (…)

For Faye, Heidegger’s 1930s Nazi activism came from the heart. Pains takingly providing sources, Faye exhibits Heidegger’s devotion to “spreading the eros of the people for their Führer,” and the “communal destiny of a people united by blood.” We learn of Heidegger’s desire to be closer to Hitler in Munich, and his eagerness to lead the Gleichschaltung, or “bringing into line,” of the German universities with Nazi ideology. According to several witnesses, Heidegger would show up at class in a brown shirt and salute students with a “Heil Hitler!”

{ The Chronicle of Higher Education | Continue reading }

I guess I think it sounds flatly preposterous to say that Heideggerian philosophy is fascist. It’s just that the Heideggerian immune system, so to speak, is particularly bad at fighting off something like fascism. That’s not what it’s built to do. Which is a very bad thing.

{ Out of the Crook Timber | Continue reading }

Stifter in fact always reminds me of Heidegger, of that ridiculous Nazi philistine in plus-fours. Just as Stifter has totally and in the most shameless manner kitschified great literature, so Heidegger, the Black Forest philosopher Heidegger, has kitschified philosophy. (…)

I cannot visualize Heidegger other than sitting on the bench outside his Black Forest house, alongside his wife, who all her life totally dominated him and who knitted all his socks and crocheted all his caps and baked all his bread and wove all his bedlinen and who even cobbled up his sandals for him. (…) Heidegger is the petit-bourgeois of German philosophy, the man who has placed on German philosophy his kitschy nightcaps, that kitschy black night-cap which Heidegger always wore, on all occasions. Heidegger is the carpet-slipper and night-cap philosopher of the Germans, nothing else.

{ Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters: A Comedy }

photo { Heidegger’s hut has become a place of pilgrimage | full story }

flashback, ideas | November 13th, 2009