Martin Heidegger’s influence has been enormous. Richard Rorty once justifiably claimed that it would be impossible to write the intellectual history of the 20th century without acknowledging Heidegger’s titanic impact. But these tributes to Heidegger’s prodigious achievements are question-begging in one crucial respect: they neglect to consider what we are actually reading when we read Heidegger.
A closer examination of the publication history of Heidegger’s texts reveals that, for decades, his philosophical legacy has been willfully and systematically manipulated by a coterie of well-disposed intimates and disciples. Toward the end of his life, Heidegger entrusted editorial responsibility for the supervision and publication of his manuscripts not to experienced scholars but instead to acolytes and relatives who, as a rule, possessed limited professional competence—persons whose overriding concern was the preservation of the “Master’s” reputation rather than respect for inherited editorial norms.
Among this close-knit group of loyalists, immediate family members have played—and continue to play—a disproportionate role. Thus, following Heidegger’s death in 1976, the philosopher’s son, Hermann, assumed primary responsibility for the oversight and publication of his father’s manuscripts, including the mammoth, 102-volume Gesamtausgabe, or Collected Works edition, under the imprint of the Frankfurt publisher Vittorio Klostermann…
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-heidegger-hoax/
Heidegger in ruins? Grappling with an anti-semitic philosopher and his troubling rebirth today
The story of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and his posthumous reception almost reads like the plot of an airport spy thriller.
Heidegger rose to global fame with Being and Time (1927). This work, which shaped philosophical existentialism, claimed Western culture had lost touch with what he portentously called the “meaning of Being”. We have become too preoccupied with material things and the ephemera of fast-moving modern societies, forgetting the larger significance of our lives.
In Heidegger’s view, this was due to Western philosophy’s overly-rational approach to existence. In subsequent works, he would develop his position into a deep scepticism of modern technology. Technology, he claimed, embodies a way of seeing reality that robs everything of intrinsic value. Instead, we treat everything (including human beings) as raw materials to control, buy and sell.
Heidegger joined Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party on 1 May, 1933. In the following months, he gave a series of fiery public speeches in favour of the Nazi regime. In lectures and seminars, Heidegger linked his thought, and his aim of “overcoming” all of previous Western philosophy, with the Nazis’ attempts to reshape Germany and the European order.
After the war, Heidegger was subject to a teaching ban under denazification. His philosophical activism during Hitler’s reign, he told the Allies, had been an insignificant “blunder”. But he never apologised for his role in legitimising the Nazi seizure of power.
Heidegger was long imagined to have remained silent about the Holocaust, in ways we now know to be untrue. In the four decades after Nazism’s “zero hour” in 1945, his works appeared in many languages. Yet, they did so with the most openly political passages redacted. Almost all of Heidegger’s Nazi-era works were withheld from publication until the 1980s in Germany and elsewhere…
After the truth-shower 