> You can argue that there is no relation between Heidegger's politics and
> his philosophy, but there is, as he himself insisted. The anti-rational
> project was coterminus with fascism. Destruction of ontology = book burning;
> Being-towards-death = Nazi death cult; authenticity = German romanticisim;
> 'The They' = the working class; their 'endless chatter' = democracy.
>
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.
Sounds to me like he is well worth studying, just like his colleagues Schmitt and Strauss, and far more than his sputtering and incompetent precursor Nietzsche. The fact that there is such widespread liberal naivete that imagines that their work can be separated from their politics seems like an even greater reason to study them seriously.
In any political struggle it does not seem wise to complain that one cannot understand the enemy.
^^^^^^^ CB; I agree it is important to study th enemy, but if he has infiltrated so much of intellectual life, it doesn't seem like he isn't understood. Certainly, James is not complaining that he doesn't understand him.
Also, unfortunately, as far as infiltrating intellectual life, Nietzsche seems to have done as much of that as Heidegger, so....
Finally, the idea of your post seems to be that bourgeois intellectual life in general isn't right wing or wasn't right wing before Heidegger. On the contrary, part of the reason Heidegger is so popular is that he is "infiltrating" bourgeois intellectual life, which since Marx and Engels we know is philosophically idealism; and bourgeois idealism is reactionary, naturally. Heidegger isn't infiltrating. He's culminating and making explicit, making manifest what is already widespread in bourgeois intellectual life.
Engels distinction between philosophical idealism and materialism has important political implications. ( See _Ludwig Feuerbach_ and _Socialism:Utopian and Scientific_; and Lenin's _Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, where he call's idealism reactionary)