Heideggeriana:
Joanna asks about Rilke.
Rilke was degenerate (to Nazis) because he was avant-garde and cosmopolitan. Heidegger on the other hand loved anant-garde art and poetry, notably Rilke, Trakl and later Paul (Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland) Celan. And Holderlin of course -- not really avant-garde by the 20s but anyway.
Jim:
Heidegger and Arendt had an affair when she was his student. Eventually he broke it off for whatever reason and sent her off to study under Jaspers. Arendt left Germany for France in 1933, and they were out of contact until she came back to Germany in I think it was 1949 to work on restoration of property expropriated by the Nazis to Jews. They reestablished contact at that time and saw each other a number of times thereafter. Arendt had a tendency to blame everything bad about Heidegger's personality on the influence of his wife Elfride (I think Elfride gets treated a little too shabbily in the literature sometimes -- she had a lot of faults, like being a real anti-Semite, but she was also active in the German women's rights movement IIRC). The first draft of her last letter to Heidegger, written shortly before she died, was signed, "To Martin, to whom I was faithful and unfaithful, but always in love." Personally I think the influence of Heidegger on Arendt's work was immense -- I wrote my dissertation on it in fact.
Jerry:
The relationship betweeb Heidegger's personal worldview, his politics, and his philosophy are debatable and not so simple as you make them out to be. Personally I think the core experience linking them is his religious crisis at the time he was being groomed as the Next Catholic Thinker by the Church, which never happened. Be that as it may, this is like saying that Foucault's philosophy is based on his own sado-masochism (which is certainly arguable), so therefore it's worthless. For that matter we can throw out all the non-democratic philosophers -- or wait that would be everyone before the 1700s.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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