The Philosopher was A Nazi

Born in Messkirch, in the Black Forest region. the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1884-1976) studied philosophy under the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, a Jewish scholar at the University of Freiburg. In 1933 when Heidegger became the rector of Freiburg University, he delivered an inaugural speech in which he praised Hitler. Heidegger remained a committed Nazi to the very end of the Third Reich. According to record he humiliated his former teacher Husserl and banned him to use the university library. As a philosopher, Heidegger identified the central problem of philosophy in existence, why do things exist, rather than nothing? His term for human life was Dasein, being there. He saw human life as a process leading to death. The basic mode of being in the world, Heidegger believed, was sorge, concern with participation and involvement with survival. He reified nothingness making it into a concrete thing. Although he had a wife and was the father of two children, Heidegge became involved in an extra-marital affair with a Jewish student who was half of his age. The student, Hannah Arendt, rose to eminence as a political scientist author of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) , The Human Condition (1958) , as well as of othe volumes. Arendt traveled to Jerusalem and attended the Eichmann trial. She found Eichmann, a major perpetrator of the Holocaust, to be a thoughtless, common man, a rather ordinary bureaucrat, who represented 'the banality of evil'