> Anyway, that's not what got H going the wrong way, it's his utter naivite in
> thinking that the Nazis had anything to do with these romantic ideals apart
> from cynically manipulating them. In any case, the Heideggerian ideals are
> quite different from either the SS's aestheticism or any sort of Socratic
> skepticism, and is in fact foreign to and hostile to both these ideals.
Hardly. Heidegger is worth reading the same way that Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" is worth seeing -- in order to understand 1930s Fascism, which was part of the constellation which birthed Stalinism, the New Deal and ultimately the Cold War. But Heidegger was *not* some philosophical innocent who wandered down the wrong path (a Holzweg, no doubt); that was Nietzsche's historic fate. Adorno says it best:
"Separation is demythologization, mythos the deceptive unity of what is undifferentiated. Because however the inadequacy of the Ur-principles in explaining the world denoted therein caused its analytical exegesis [Auseinanderlegung], and thereby caught the magical extra-territoriality of being, as one vagabond between essence and facts, in the web of concepts, Heidegger must for the sake of the privilege of being condemn the critical labor of the concept as a history of decay, as if philosophy could occupy a historical standpoint beyond history, while it nevertheless on the other hand is supposed to obey a history, which is itself ontologized as existence. Heidegger is anti-intellectual out of systemic compulsion, anti-philosophical out of philosophy, just as contemporary religious revivals are inspired not by the truth of their teachings but by the philosophy, that it would be good to have religion. The history of thought is, however far back it is traced, the dialectic of enlightenment. That is why Heidegger does not halt, resolutely enough, at one of its stages, as he might perhaps have been tempted to in his youth, but plunges with a Wellesian time-machine into the abyss of archaicism, in which everything is to be everything and can mean everything. He reaches out towards mythos: his own, though, remains one of the twentieth century, the appearance [Schein] which history unmasked it as, and which becomes striking in the complete incompatibility of mythos with the rationalized form of reality, in which every consciousness is delimited." (Theodor Adorno, "Negative Dialectics", pg 124)
-- Dennis