Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was probably one of the most controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. His intense affiliation with Hitler's regime has largely been debated in a range of both academic and public debates. In fact, Heidegger was one of the first to be in line to assist in Hitler's urge for power and his dreams for a 'pure' Aryn society or as he himself told his students:

"The Führer himself and he alone is German reality and its law, today and for the future" (source)

After the war, Heidegger told a de-Nazification committee that his entrance into the party "was only a matter of form" and that, in any case, after only ten months in office he angrily resigned from the rectorate in protest over a "conspiracy" that the Nazi minister of education was organizing against him (source). Unfortunately, he was never known to be the most trustful of persons. His lifetime love, Hannah Arendt (Jewish herself), described him to be "notorious for lying about everything" (Arendt in Young-Bruehl). Despite all these controversies, his international reputation had already been earlier assured with the publication of 'Being and Time', a book that was characterised by the young Jurgen Habermas as “the most significant philosophical event since Hegel's Phänomenologie ...”(source).

Some time ago, I watched the below documentary and thought about the question if we should dismiss and delegitimise the person Heidegger and reduce the contributions that he made in the works of more contemporary thinkers or whether we should set our ethics and emotions aside and rely on the pure theoretical/ academic heritage that he left for us with. The mind versus the person. Naturally, these processes are interwoven and further problematise the question...