Martyn in Europe

Excellent Martyn thanks

I think you're missing a key component of Heidegger's engagement with the Nazis. Heidegger was an opportunistic individual who saw in the rise of German national socialism an opportunity for his philosophical perspectives to gain a degree of concrete political reality. In other words, he used the Nazis.

You didn't provide any philosophical reasons for Heidegger's Nazism in your post.

Please put these lazy reductio ad Hitlerums aside and, if you haven't already, check out John D Caputo's excellent Demythologising Heidegger for a careful, supremely ethical, and nuanced dismantling of Heidegger's thought.

Cheers!

What point are you trying to make? Millions of German citizens were Nazis.

Daniel Dennett has criticized phenomenology on the basis that its explicitly first-person approach is incompatible with the scientific third-person approach, going so far as to coin the term "autophenomenology" to emphasize this aspect and to contrast it with his own alternative, which he calls heterophenomenology. Dennett's criticism reflects a more general attitude among analytic philosophers of mind. Phenomenologists, however, are often quick to point out that the relationship between phenomenological and natural scientific methods has been a major theme in phenomenology since at least Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences, though Dennett makes no real attempt to engage with the work of phenomenologists on this issue. Many proponents of phenomenology argue that natural science can make sense only as a human activity, i.e., an activity which presupposes the fundamental structures of the 'first-person perspective.' While not hostile to the natural sciences per se, many thinkers in the Heideggerian tradition would regard criticisms such as Dennett's metaphysical rather than purely scientific claims, and thus susceptible to the usual criticisms directed at metaphysical theories of all kinds.Defenses of the phenomenological approach against science-inspired reductive naturalism have been made by Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor among others.

As part of an ongoing debate with Hubert Dreyfus, John Searle has argued that much of the work done by phenomenologists on the philosophy of mind suffers from what he terms the 'Phenomenological Illusion'. Searle defines the Phenomenological Illusion as the mistake of assuming that what is not phenomenologically present is not real, and that what is phenomenologically present is an adequate description of how things really are. According to Searle, this leads some phenomenologists to make mistaken claims about subjects such as meaning, social reality, functions, and causal self referentiality. Searle himself makes explicit that, defined as the examination of consciousness, he has no problem with phenomenology itself.

Yes, he endorsed Nazi ideology, both because some elements corresponded with his conception of the authentic, and because he was an academic opportunist, as wonder points out.

The Volkish elements you detect are closely linked to his notions about the uniquene suitability of the German language for philosophical thought.

However, I don't see anything anti-humanist in his phenomenology. The stance that existence precedes essence - or that the human participant is the measure of all things - is surely fundamental to a humanist perspective and programme, which doen't mean that such programmes are monolithic, or that a humanist has to agree with all of them. On the contrary, freedom implies choices, including his choice to be what I think of as a repulsive creep, albeit philosophically sound.