Heidegger (again) and history

I'm amused that my last two posts have mentioned Martin Heidegger.

I read somewhere that part of the reason why Heidegger's philosophy didn't spread as quickly in the United States as it did in Europe was because a lot of Americans were uncomfortable with studying the philosophy of a card-carrying Nazi. Could Heidegger's philosophy be separated from his Nazism?, a lot of people wondered.

In our department, the majority would shout a resounding "Yes!" to that question. I think we have more scholars of Heidegger than we do of any other philosopher, and very few of them talk about Heidegger's political inclinations.

I took my one and only Heidegger class as an undergraduate ten years ago, and back then, I agreed with many others in the department that given the brilliance of his insights, Heidegger's Nazi involvement could be relegated to a footnote in his biography. However, as time has passed, I've changed my mind about that.

One of his best students, Emmanuel Levinas, didn't think that Heidegger the philosopher could be separated from Heidegger the Nazi, and he spent his entire philosophical career trying to rectify the ideas that he felt Heidegger had gotten so hopelessly wrong.

Last July, at an Arendt conference in Sydney, I watched a video of Kate Fodor's stage-play Hannah and Martin. The play is fictional, but watching it made me rethink a lot of Arendt's writings as explicit struggles not just to come to terms with the historical fact of Nazism, but to come to terms with Heidegger's Nazism.

Which leads me to my point. The author is not, should not be dead, in philosophy. Every philosopher writes out of a unique historical context, and the validity and strength of his/her arguments spring from that unique historical context.

Not that we shouldn't study Heidegger. I do think he is the most influential and ground-breaking 20th century philosopher. But genius doesn't make a person infallible. Nor even necessarily moral.