I must make a confession here: Martin Heidegger was one of the first philosophers I really and truly loved. When I was around 19 years old, one of the summer jobs I worked was as a traffic counter. We were responsible for counting the number of cars that went through street lights, which needless to say was a profoundly boring task. I often passed the time by reading, and began delving into philosophy for the first time—there is something about sitting by the side of the road for 11 hours that enables speculation. Heidegger's dense and strange books were often infuriatingly opaque, but once I began to understand them I was thrilled. Here was someone who thought and wrote in a way that no one else seemed to, and who was emphatically unafraid of tackling the biggest and most novel philosophical questions. As a critical young man, I was also enraptured with his damning critique of modernity and especially technology. I was so absorbed by it that I identified as a Heideggerian well into my early PhD, writing an undergraduate thesis on “authenticity” and my L.L.M thesis on Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Anglo-American legal theory.
Unfortunately, this admiration was always tempered by a significant counterweight; the awkward matter of Heidegger's politics. My father was a human rights lawyer who made his living prosecuting ex-pat Nazis hiding in Canada, and I was brought up in a household in which the evils of the Hitler regime were transparently visible. When I was 12 years old, I started to volunteer for a number of human rights groups, and learned more about the horrors of Nazism from survivors and commentators. This shocked my young conscience. How could my philosophical hero, a man who embodied all the intellectual virtues I admired—critical mindedness, creativity, an emphasis on authenticity—relate himself to Nazism? This question only became more challenging as the depth of his association with Nazism and anti-Semitism became clearer to me.
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