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An unnamed rube over at the Chronicle of Higher Ed has a swinging polemic online against Heidegger. This is a pretty well beaten dead horse, but what the hell–easy targets are fun, and there are two of them here: the dead Teuton and his accuser. From the article:

How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany’s greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there’s a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance.

…

Next month Yale University Press will issue an English-language translation of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy, by Emmanuel Faye, an associate professor at the University of Paris at Nanterre. It’s the latest, most comprehensive archival assault on the ostensibly magisterial thinker who informed Freiburg students in his infamous 1933 rectoral address of Nazism’s “inner truth and greatness,” declaring that “the Führer, and he alone, is the present and future of German reality, and its law.”

…

“We must acknowledge,” Faye says in one fierce conclusion, “that an author who has espoused the foundations of Nazism cannot be considered a philosopher.” Finally, he reiterates his opposition to the Heidegger Industry: “If his writings continue to proliferate without our being able to stop this intrusion of Nazism into human education, how can we not expect them to lead to yet another translation into facts and acts, from which this time humanity might not be able to recover?”

With some trepidation, I’ll try now to state the obvious. Heidegger’s Nazism was appalling. His philosophy was obscure. But the two are not the same thing. His politics, at least for several years in the 1930s and ’40s,  were obviously and transparently repugnant. His philosophy succeeds or fails on its intellectual merits. These are distinct areas.

I’m willing to go to bat, now and then, for the latter. Heidegger’s philosophical contributions to phenomenology and to the roots of existentialism make his work important, if not always terribly clear. Yes, he defended his Nazism with reference to this work, but that doesn’t make him intellectually unsound. It makes him morally unsound, and that it a very different thing.

The thing to recall here is that he was, arguably, a decent philosopher. He was, distinctly and more importantly, a dreadful human being–serial philanderer as much as racist. One can, as it turns out, be all of the above. The philosophical consequence of getting metaphysics right and morals wrong is not shoddy metaphysics. It’s endorsement of the Holocaust.

In other words, Heidegger’s record questions the profession of philosophy as much as it makes clear his own decrepitude. One should recall this before climbing on one’s high horse to defend humanistic education.