2. Why did the Nazis reject Heidegger's articulation of their philosophy?
3. Is there A philosophy behind Nazism, or, more likely, are there as many forms of Nazism as there are Nazis?
4. Just how the fuck does being-toward-death correspond to the "Nazi death cult" (whatever that is -- I could have sworn they had a cult of strength, not death). Other than both containing the word "death"?
5. The idea that Heidegger's thought can be divorced from his politics, is obviously wrong, since nothing anybody does can be divorced from anything else that they do. However, Nazis, being people, are, like everybody else, extremely complicated, self-contradictory beings, and, accordingly, just like in the case of everybody else, nothing that they do can actually be reduced to something else that they do. If a Nazi builds the Autobahn in order to, among other things, allow faster troop deployment, that does not make the Autobahn reducible to the builder's desire to deploy troops more rapidly.
6. To state the obvious, this whole "Heidegger was a Nazi, therefore his thought can hold no value" trope is totally Manichean and, dare I say it, undialectical.
5 and 6 refer to rhetorical moves that are obviously vapid and contain glaring logical fallicies, and nobody would use them in any field other than the humanities, where they can be employed because intellectual laziness and stupidity in the humanities have no immediate real-world consequences, unlike, say, in engineering. If Heidegger were a physicist and his physics worked, only a complete moron would go around proclaiming it false, even if, say, some insight in his physics were in fact derived from Nazism. (In fact, we get a lot of our knowledge of hypothermia from the Nazis' experiments.)
----- Original Message ---- From: Asad Haider <noswine at gmail.com> I would agree with most of what you say here, but let's reinscribe it a little, as they say.
Heidegger was a right-wing extremist who articulated the philosophy of a movement that successfully seized political power, nearly on a global level. Even after the defeat of fascism, Heidegger managed to use a philosophy that was articulated within esoteric language to infiltrate mainstream intellectual life in every corner of the world.