As you may have noticed, there’s been a flurry of discussion over the past couple of weeks about the 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger and his involvement with the Nazis before and during WWII. While Heidegger’s Nazi connections are no secret, an occasional book pops up now and then to fan the flames of an old debate: Can you separate the man from his philosophy? The latest is French philosopher Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, which first came out in France in 2005 and will be published next week in the US. According to the New York Times, 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.” Among the impassioned responses that Faye’s book has provoked, Damon Linker’s piece at TNR is among the most balanced I’ve seen, admitting that “Heidegger was a pretty despicable human being” but that Faye’s argument is still absurd. “Heidegger,” notes Linker, “also possessed the most powerful philosophical mind of the twentieth century. If he had written nothing besides Being and Time (1927), he would deserve to be recognized as Europe’s greatest philosopher since the death of G.W.F. Hegel in 1831.” [Read more →]