Foreign Affairs: Haters Gonna Hate - Does It Matter That Heidegger Was A Nazi?

By Christian Madsbjerg and Gregory Fried

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger has always been a deeply problematic character. Scholars have long known that Heidegger was an active and unapologetic Nazi. But for the most part, they managed to separate the man from his work. Until now, that is: after examining several of Heidegger’s private notebooks, released just last year, Gregory Fried (“What Heidegger Was Hiding,” November/December 2014) argues that such a separation is no longer possible.


Fried is one of a growing number of academics who claim that Heidegger’s anti-Semitism infected his core philosophical ideas and who have delivered, in essence, an intellectual death sentence. “The notebooks will almost certainly spell the end of Heidegger as an intellectual cult figure, and that is a welcome development,” Fried writes. But he has things backward: philosophers achieve immortality not by escaping the eye of critics but by being subjected to critics, who chisel away at the uninteresting and inconsistent to reveal a bedrock of truth.


“However abhorrent Heidegger’s politics, his ideas are more relevant than ever. They tackle today’s most important philosophical question: How can humans find meaning in modern lives?”

Read the full article on Foreign Affairs here.