Yet more on the wrongness of Heidegger

 I know philosopher friend and Heidegger lover student? (that doesn't sound fully explanatory either but works well enough as a one-word edit, and I told him I would edit, but see update below) Brett Welch has heard the basics of Martin Heidegger's antisemitism before, but the LA Review of Books has more on how his son and literary executor Herman has been at the lead of turd-polishing his literary estate. And, there's no way to put it any more politely than that.

Beyond the turd-polishing is general unprofessionalism, including massive amounts of sloppiness from poor manuscript handling by family members and sycophants.

The piece then raises the apparent ultimate issue:

The controversies that have haunted the publication of Heidegger’s work are significant, insofar as they concern not merely occasional and understandable editorial lapses but instead suggest a premeditated policy of substantive editorial cleansing: a strategy whose goal was to systematically and deliberately excise Heidegger’s pro-Nazi sentiments and convictions.

It's hard to say that's not the case.

Of course, the problem starts with Heidegger doing that himself to and for himself during the first years of Germany emerging not just from the physical rubble of World War II but the intellectual and socio-psychological rubble of the Third Reich.

To me, it seems clear that Heidegger, to riff on Nazi ideology, thought that "international Jewry," if not itself a virus, was a carrier of a virus — that of modern technology, along with related alleged ills.

That leads to this:

Whether Heidegger overcame these prejudices later in life is extremely doubtful. After the war, he bemoaned in the Black Notebooks a “conspiracy” purportedly initiated by “world journalism” (Weltjournalismus) to keep Germany in a condition of fealty vis-à-vis the Western Allies. When, in 1986, Hans-Georg Gadamer—Heidegger’s star student—was queried about his mentor’s postwar ideological leanings, he avowed that “Heidegger remained sufficiently a Nazi after the war that he was convinced that world opinion was totally dominated by Jews.”

I would only quibble with the use of "overcame," as I infer that it implies a conscious effort by Heidegger to address his own past antisemitism and I see no such effort.

Otherwise, the Heideggerian cult strikes me as one of the three biggest pseudo-intellectual cults of the Western world in the 20th century, along with Carl Jung and Ayn Rand. In the East, Mao and his Little Red Book, etc. was no slouch as a cult itself.

And thus, contra Richard Wolin and a brief interview by Yale Press, publisher of his new book from which this comes, I reject the idea that he's the most important philosopher of the 20th century. Even with him being overrated and his language philosophy NOT being "ordinary" language philosophy, Wittgenstein is more important. Kurt Gödel and his incompleteness theorems, especially combined with Tarski's undecidability theorem that Gödel anticipated, is definitely more important.  If you meant "most influential," I would halfway buy it — if you confine yourself to discussing philosophy inside the academy.

Update: As noted, I changed lover to "student." But, per Brett's own comment, maybe "Lover of Heidegger's strictly philosophical ideas" would be a better edit, but I'll leave the simple edit I made at that. As for whether one can separate Heidegger's other ideas from his purely philosophical ones, we'll probably disagree. I speak personally, having not read T.S. Eliot in more than a decade as my realization of the breadth of his antisemitism and its intertwining with so much of his poetry led to increasing disgust. As for the power of Heidegger's ideas in a world of increasing fractures and silos today? Brett knows Heidegger's overall philosophy better than I do. If it works for him, it works for him.

I will also note that, beyond this issue, most modern "Continental" philosophy, outside of existentialism, simply doesn't do much for me. Within the world of theology, Paul Tillich and his "ground of being," which has obvious parallels to Heidegger, never came close to enthusing me. I forgot that, a full decade ago, I wrote some highly snarky thoughts — yet highly serious ones — on "the Ground of Being." And, I stand by them. That said, as Tillich clearly did not follow Heidegger's path in politics, one can use such ideas as expressed by people other than Heidegger.