The recent publication and translation of several of Heidegger's private
notebooks has caused old fights about the extent of his Nazism to erupt anew.
Presumably there was someone out there who was trying to dismiss the
philosopher's vile associations wholesale, as though he was a victim of
circumstance or his own academic ego.  I've heard these arguments, but in the
end they can't be taken seriously.  Even before the release of his "black
notebooks" we knew that his connections were more than an embarrassing stain:
that his allegiance was non-trivial, that much of Heidegger's philosophical
language, while not explicitly weighted with Nazi rhetoric, leans in a
direction that makes us uncomfortable.  And I suppose I could see how a new
student of Heidegger's work might be eager to brush it all aside and pursue
Heidegger's thought without reservation or concern.  All these books have done
is made this naïve and fringe attitude even easier to dismiss.

The true dispute, then, is between those who say that Heidegger is an important
enough thinker that we must take the bad with the good, making every effort to
understand the extent and ramifications of his odious perspective while
studying his philosophical work, and those who argue that his anti-semitism and
cooperation with (even enthusiasm for) Hitler's regime "disqualify" him
categorically from the philosophical canon.  One can certainly understand the
worry that a generation of impressionable thinkers might be subtly
indoctrinated into the most hideous social and political perspectives of the
modern age, if not all time.

This is certainly an important discussion for the academic world to have.  To
the outsider the latter option seems safer, but it's important to note that
Heidegger's work represents a paradigm shift in the progress of western
philosophy, deliberately working backwards all the way to the ancient Greeks to
challenge and redefine the field both as a study and as a practice.  Most
continental European philosophy in the last 100 years is grounded in his
thought, and it's impossible to pull off the tablecloth without knocking the
dishes to the floor.

Before analyzing this debate and explaining where I think the second camp has
gone wrong it's important to cover the ugly nature of the great divide in
contemporary philosophy.  While most philosophy departments act as though the
rift is mending or that they try to offer a diverse curriculum to protect their
students from a bias, the fact remains that most who consider themselves to be
students of philosophy have taken a side.  It's true that there aren't always
hard lines drawn, but it's also true that there usually are.  The divide I'm
talking about is between the English tradition of "analytic philosophy" and the
mostly French and German tradition of "continental philosophy".

While the spirit of the debate quite obviously has roots in the legendary
dichotomy between Plato's rationalism and Aristotle's empiricism, the thousands
of years of thought that followed them have mostly been an exercise in trying
to unify them.  When the hard rationalism of medieval scholasticism gave way to
Descartes's dualism, we started to see philosophers take a bicameral approach
to the issue.  German idealism, which orbits Kant almost exclusively, is
grounded in the belief that mathematical principles are the most appropriate
tools for understanding the nature of the world.  Until this point, English as
well as French and German philosophers were mostly in agreement.

Husserl's phenomenology, the school of thought to which Heidegger made such
great contributions and which has given rise to existentialism as well as
postmodernism, is where the true divide begins.  Analytic philosophy is rooted
in mathematical principles of logic, concerning itself with the symbolization
of language and the nature and methodology of representation and formalization.
Continental philosophy wants to find those explanations that are overlooked
through mathematical methods.  The bias typically manifests with continental
philosophers calling the other side dry, boring, and pedantic while analytic
philosophers accuse the other side of a lack of rigor and of being
impenetrable, even incomprehensible.

So it is when we see criticism of Heidegger fall into these idioms that the
critic's enthusiasm for jettisoning his work becomes problematic, even
alarming.  Quite often the argument takes the position that since Heidegger is
hard to read and doesn't conform with traditional Western ideas of rational
thought it's "not worth the risk" of exposure to something dark within it.
What's so jarring here, for me, is that in taking a hard position against his
anti-semitism (which one would probably never see taking his work on its own,
apart from the historical context of its author) Heidegger's critics are
leveraging the bias of western scientific thought.  They hold their nose at his
racism with the clothespin of imperialism.

Indeed, to expunge his work from academic curricula serves only to sweep under
the rug once more the true historical lessons of Nazi Germany.  While its
ideology must indeed be recognized as abhorrent, this recognition does not
occur by burning books (if you'll pardon the cute hyperbole).  Heidegger
represents perhaps the most frightful part of Nazi ideology--namely, that it is
possible for a brilliant man to adopt it.  That its hateful summary of the
Jewish people would lead a man who quite aptly warns of the dangers of the
technological attitude and publicly acknowledges that attitude's presence in
the design and application of concentration camps to privately connect it to
the grotesque racial stereotype of Jewish bookkeeping.  The extreme
positions--denial of Heidegger's anti-semitism as well as the denial of his
philosophical relevance--both flinch at the recognition of Nazism as something
that grew out of people.  Both positions reduce Nazis to comic book
supervillainy, instead of forcing the gruesome, wicked, uncomfortable truth of
a productive and hateful genius into academic discourse.

Heidegger is not a hero.  His writings are treasures, helping us understand the
growth, history, and future of western philosophy in new ways.  Perhaps now,
with the gradual publication of his awkwardly sinister private diaries, we can
further understand the dangerous truth that it didn't take a sociopath to make
a Nazi.