Martin Heidegger

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, is a highly controversial figure because of his Nazi connections during Hitler's dictatorship in Germany. It looks at how, although the extent of his collaboration with the Nazis is now clearly established by irrefutable evidence, Heidegger is still considered to be a titan among the 20th century philosophers and has influenced thinkers as diverse as Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Tillich, among others.

From the Paper:

"Johannes Fritsche points out another connection to Nazism in Heidegger's philosophy in his Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger's Being and Time. Fritsche believes that Heidegger's idiom and use of language in Being and Time were part of a shared tradition of right-wing thought that emerged in the 1920s in Germany the subtlety of Heidegger's language got lost in translation and led to its misunderstanding by the existentialist philosophers. He points out that Heidegger's theory about achieving authenticity means the opposite of exercising freedom and is an answer to a call to live life according to one's fate. For Heidegger, fate had a definite political content the fate of the patriotic German being identified with the Volksgemeinschaft, a term used by the Nazis to denote a community of the people bound by race and heritage."

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