Heidegger to be cast out of philosophy

[Grames]

From the NY Times book section: An Ethical Question: Does a Nazi Deserve a Place Among Philosophers?

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: November 8, 2009

For decades the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been the subject of passionate debate. His critique of Western thought and technology has penetrated deeply into architecture, psychology and literary theory and inspired some of the most influential intellectual movements of the 20th century. Yet he was also a fervent Nazi.

Now a soon-to-be published book in English has revived the long-running debate about whether the man can be separated from his philosophy. Drawing on new evidence, the author, Emmanuel Faye, argues fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of Heidegger’s theories that they no longer deserve to be called philosophy. As a result Mr. Faye declares, Heidegger’s works and the many fields built on them need to be re-examined lest they spread sinister ideas as dangerous to modern thought as “the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples.”

Martin Heidegger

Dr. Peikoff has a description of Heidegger's thought in The Ominous Parallels ch. 10

In academic philosophy, amid a variety of routine movements unknown to the public, one development stands out as both self-consciously new and fairly popular (especially among college students): the Existentialism of Martin Heidegger, whose major work, Sein und Zeit, appeared in 1927. Existence, Heidegger declared to his enthusiastic young following, is unintelligible, reason is invalid, and man is a helpless "Dasein"; he is a creature engulfed by "das Nichts" (nothingness), in terror of the supreme fact of his life: death, <ompar_197> and doomed by nature to "angst," "care," estrangement, futility.

The novelty of this viewpoint lies, primarily, not in its content—Heidegger traces his root premises back to Kant—but in its blatancy and form (or rather formlessness). Contrary to the major line of nineteenth-century German philosophers, Heidegger does not attempt to offer an objective defense of his ideas; he rejects the traditional demand for logical argument, definition, integration, system-building. As a result, his works, brimming with disdain for the external world (and with unintelligible passages), have been praised by admirers as the intellectual counterpart of modern painting. Heidegger, it is sometimes said, exemplifies "non-representational thinking."

As to human action, according to Heidegger, it must be unreasoned, feeling-dictated, willful. On May 27, 1933, he practiced this idea on a grand scale: in a formal, voluntary proclamation, he declared to the country that the age of science and of academic freedom was over, and that hereafter it was the duty of intellectuals to think in the service of the Nazi state.

May 27, 1933 is when Heidegger acting in his capacity as Rector of the University of Freiburg fired all of the jewish professors.

Faye advocates Heidegger's books be banished to the Hitler shelf of the history section, not burned.