>From John Gray's _Straw Dogs_ (Gray is no PoMo):
"In Heidegger's never-renounced engagement with Nazism, the quest for 'home' became a hatred of hybrid thinking and the worship of a deadly unity of will. There can be little doubt that Heidegger's flirtation with Nazism was in part an exercise in opportunism. In May 1933, with the help of Nazi officials, he was appointed Rector of the University of Freiburg. He used the post to give speeches in support of Hitler's policies, including one in November 1933 in which he pronounced, 'The Fuhrer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and its law.' At the same time he broke off relations with students and colleagues (such as his old friend and former teacher Edmund Husserl) who were Jewish. In acting this way, Heidegger was not much different from other German academics at the time.
"But Heidegger's involvement with Nazism went deper than cowardice and power worship. It expressed an impulse integral to his thinking. By contrast with Nietzsche, a nomad who wrote for travellers like himself and who was able to put so much in question because he belonged nowhere, Heidegger always desperately yearned to belong. or him, thinking was not an adventure whose charm comes from the fact that one cannot know where it leads. It was a long detour, at the end of which ;a the peace of no longer having to think. In his rectorial address at Freiburg, Heideger came close to saying as much, leading the observer Karl Lowith to comment that it was not quite clear whether one should now study the pre-Socratic philosophers or join the Brownshirts."
-John Gray, Straw Dogs p. 50-51, 2003 (from 1st US paperback edition of 2007_
-B.
Chris Doss wrote:
"Yes, but I think the context here is the Anglo-American world, in which, as Gadamer wrote someplace, the knowledge that Heidegger was a member of the NSDAP was taken as a Big Event in the late 80s-early 90s as if nobody had ever heard of it before."