>You can wrath and contempt for Heidegger or Schmitt as
>a Nazi without thinking that this personal, political,
>and moral failing makes their thought worthless. The
>assertion that X was a a Nazi, therefore his ideas are
crap, is an ad hominem....
Heidegger is being held up as an Important Thinker. Is it being
denied that someone's status as Important Thinker implies
for that thinker a fair measure of intellectual self-respect?
Is it being asserted that someone whose "thought" makes him an
active partisan of the most anti-intellectual thugs in modern
history has claims to any intellectual self-respect whatsoever?
The "ad hominem" objection would be valid against denigration
on *those* grounds of the compositions of Orff or Pfitzner, or
even the interpretations of that opportunist scum Von Karajan.
But Heidegger, soi-disant Important Thinker?
>
>...And I venture to say that most philosophers
>have had bad political allegiances, starting with
>Plato...
Odd, since Plato had no political allegiances whatsoever (unless the reference is to the reforming faction in Syracuse led by Dion, but in that case any "allegiances" went in the opposite direction) and most philosophers seem to have been faithful Platonists in that respect
>....in my view the connection between Nazism and Heidegger's
>thought is at an abstract enough level -- basically
>anti-modernism, Germanocentrism, and nature-worship --
>as to exculpate the thought if not the man of the
>worst of Nazism....
Abstract? these are precisely the sort of anti-intellectual, viscerally emotional, fancies that the Nazis passed off as National-Socialist-Thought. And they are organically of a piece with Heidegger's assault on the whole philosophical tradition from Socrates on, based on his fantasy of "preSocratic" thought as concerned with Being qua Being.
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things...It consents and does not consent to be called Zeus."
Herakleitos of Ephesos