Paint it how you want...

Paint it how you want, future generations (if they exist) will know that the most significant philosophical thinker of the 20th century was an unrepentant National Socialist.

How much does this hurt the soyboy nu-male bugmen?

>Paint it how you want, future generations (if they exist) will know that the most significant philosophical thinker of the 20th century was an unrepentant National Socialist.
Going to school with Hitler doesn't make you an "unrepentant National Socialist"

I think it is cool, ads diversity

>How much does this hurt the soyboy nu-male bugmen?
Is the philosophy and its potential applications as important to you as the prospect of inflicting anger/frustration/etc upon your enemies?

i've heard his writing is needlessly obtuse and cryptic. what does he actually believe/expound? what's so great about his philosophy? should i bother?

I thought he was kicked out of the party for not being Nazi enough though?

It's not that bad honestly. Heidegger is most remembered for fully committing contemporary philosophy to something that had been "in the air" for at least two generations, and that his teacher Husserl was close to formulating himself if he hadn't already formulated, but in any case Heidegger is the first clear, explicit, and most importantly self-conscious formulation of the thesis: ontology is completely hermeneutic. Put another way: there can be no theory of truth/meaning that hinges on reference; likewise, there is no privileged vantage point for determining the correct or ideal reference.

Ontology comes from the Greek word "ὄν," meaning "being," or "is-ness," that which makes something what it "is," that which makes it a "thing" (as opposed to some other thing), also called essence or substance.

Hermeneutic broadly means "interpretive," i.e., it describes an approach to discovering the meaning of some "thing" (a text, an utterance, a thought, the correct usage of a word, the reference* which some use of a word indicates*) wherein its meaning is assumed to be somehow hidden from view, at first. To discover the meaning of a thing (usually in hermeneutics, a text or part of a text, and the authorial "intention" behind it), is to interpret it properly - which in hermeneutics usually means to know the context of its origination, which is almost always the culture and the mindset of the person who authored it.

So, a fully hermeneutic approach to ontology means that no meaning of any word, no shade of its meaning, exists outside the human mind. All meaning, even down to the subtleties of what a simple physical object "is," and how "it" fits into the cultural world that gives it that quality of existence, the range of possibilities for "its" utilisation and participation in that world, all of this is hermeneutic in origin and in experience. We interpret a lifeworld of given "entities" based on how our culture, the people who came before us, established and developed, semi-unwittingly and in collaboration with one another, the existence of those entities. All of this is bound together in a stream of historicity, because it is taken from the past (past usages, past understandings of "Being," of the "isness" of the world and its various components), and projected into the future. The future and its possibilities can only be interpreted on the basis of an understanding of the past and its repertoire of existing (i.e., already disclosed) entities. We ourselves are "thrown" into that world, a world of meanings already established before our entry into it, and we must come to grips with that world and learn to take a stand in relation to it and its parts.

But we can never do so by exiting altogether out of the stream and searching for transcendent touchstones of truth. Hence the rejection of referential theories of truth, or privileged vantage points - the latter being the modus operandi of the Kantian and post-Kantian tradition of transcendental philosophy, and sometimes called the "view from nowhere," or the "step backward," i.e., a step backward out of "life" and into pre-empirical realm of somehow more objective, more perfectly rational understanding and self-understanding. That is why Heidegger starts with the EXISTENTIAL analytic of Dasein: he begins with the being of everyday entities, everyday existence, empirically experienced reality, and does not seek that Kantian or Hegelian step backward into some pre-empirical intuition of the conditions of the empirical. The empirical array of entities which we experience IS life. There is no step backward, no step outside of it. Any analysis of thought and meaning, of what (as Nietzsche said) we "take-to-be" or "hold-as-true" in the most everyday sense, must begin with the very taking-to-be-ness of basic experience itself.

Heidegger's great contribution, and the way in which he felt himself to be going beyond Husserl, was to scorn the possibility of this longing for a transcendental perspective. The critical, scientific contribution of his approach to ontology, one that he found implicit or explicit in Nietzsche already, was that even the forms of meaning we employ to talk about "transcendental steps backward" are already built on the backs of more elementary, more simple, more everyday meanings. We long for a transcendental standpoint precisely because the subtleties of our everyday approach to Being makes us crave such a standpoint. To try to BEGIN with such a standpoint is to fail to notice that you can never begin with it.

So, the purpose of a scientific approach to truth therefore cannot be to find the "correct" usages of words, if by "correct" something extra-human or pre-empirical is meant. Correctness, truthfulness, is irreducibly hermeneutic, because truth (again, as Nietzsche said) is simply a function of taking-to-be. Taking-to-be, assigning "isness" to "things," is something more primordial than philosophy. It's just talking, it's thinking. That's the level of thinking that Heidegger wanted us to think about, and to move beyond mere "philosophy," in the sense of philosophers who systematically and unwittingly bear out the consequences of interpretations of Being that they don't think are interpretations, that they think precede or underlie the possibility of all interpretation. That's dangerous.

Why Heidegger is controversial: Despite the enormous utility of hermeneutic ontology for a philosophy of science, naturalists often see Heidegger and the Frenchmen who think like Heidegger as unconcerned with "what's really real, out there." It can sound a lot like Heidegger is denying the possibility of a "really real" physical world, some kind of anti-scientific solipsism, but that's not true at all. Anyone who has read Heidegger can see that Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and most of contemporary theory in the philosophy and sociology of science are Heideggerians or quasi-Heideggerians. William James' pragmatism is dead-on, too, and preceded Heidegger. Husserl was fond of it. You can also reintroduce epistemological naturalism, back into a hermeneutic view of ontology, in interesting ways.

The other reason he's controversial is because his reduction of meaning-constitution to this fully immanent, fully hermeneutic vision still left him with the meaning-constituting being, which he called Dasein, or "the being for which Being is an issue" - i.e., us, the interpreter of Being, the one(s) doing all the interpretation and re-interpretation. Whether he likes it or not, whether he wanted to avoid any transcendentalising or not, his model of Dasein is transcendental, and he imposes all sorts of traits on it, in his existential analytic. Adorno wrote an essay called "The Jargon of Authenticity" about this. Heidegger spurred what was already a rising trend of existentialism, especially in France, and there are all sorts of Marxist critiques of existentialism as a flight from the social and economic realities of modernity.

No, he and a lot of similarly inclined reactionary and conservative thinkers quit. Or were sceptical of the party from the outset. Heidegger was enthusiastic in 1933, because he thought he could harness the spiritual revolution and re-founding of the German people and its destiny, and use it to combat what he perceived the crisis of modernity, which was the end-result of the crisis of Western metaphysics that his philosophy was critiquing. Basically, modern science, industrialisation, the technicisation of the human being, the closing-up of possibilities for other ways of being in the world and their replacement by an pseudo-scientific techno-nightmare. (See: Ernst's Junger's The Worker, his brother F.G. Junger on technology, Spengler on "Technics," Gehlen on "Man and Technology," Husserl's "Crisis of the European Sciences," Adorno and Horkheimer on the "Dialectic of Enlightenment," etc. It was a common theme in German philosophy, and still is.)

Heidegger quit a few years later when he came to feel that the Nazi state was just another outcropping of that modernity he was trying to combat. Rather than being the clearing-away of the techno-fetishism, and the re-opening of the possibility of being human, it was the apotheosis of techno-fetishism. And it was extremely cynical and pragmatic in the worst ways, "Machtpolitik," no idealism, in the ways it functioned.

Make no mistake though, on a personal level Heidegger was almost certainly a sociopath as well.