Does Martin Heidegger's Nazism Mean We Should Exclude Him From Philosophy?

This is a question I pose to the couple of people who seem to be repeat visitors, and to anyone who happens by via Google: Does Heidegger's enthusiasm Nazism mean he shouldn't be considered a philosopher? This is the position taken by a recent article by Carlin Romano in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and in a book by Emmanuel Faye on Heidegger's Nazism. From the article:

"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?"

To me, this seems like an dangerous position to take. I have no patience with those, including Heidegger himself, who would attempt to explain away or dismiss his Nazism of the 1930s. It is simply inexcusable, and to ignore it is to act as though it has already been excused. What's more, to ignore it is to fail to fully engage some of his most important philosophical works, including Being and Time and his Introduction to Metaphysics. One can be influenced by Heidegger without being influenced by his Nazism, but one can't read Heidegger without reading his Nazism. To do so would be the like reading only the pages of Heart of Darkness that have beautiful descriptions of nature, because all that stuff about the psychology of evil is too depressing. You couldn't then say, "I've read Heart of Darkness," because you haven't.

That said, when Faye writes, "If his writings continue to proliferate... 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?", he is being either obtuse or absurd, or both. I'm quite sure Faye's aware that Heidegger's writings played little or no role in the actual rise of Nazism. Heidegger was, if anything, following on the heels of that rise in a blatantly self-serving manor. It's despicable, and shows Heidegger to be a horrible human being, but it doesn't make him responsible for Nazism. Yet when Faye states that we can expect, if his writings are allowed to be read, "yet another translation into facts and acts," the words "yet another translation" seems to imply that the first instance was also a translation of Heidegger's writings into facts and acts.

There's also something disturbing about his suggestion that we should hide Heidegger away, because he wrote about Nazism in the 1930s, as though we're not strong enough to read those passages and not immediately, or at least over time, gravitate towards National Socialism. But it is not the job philosophers, or librarians, or even publishers, to hide away ideas that we don't like, even if those ideas celebrate obvious evils. Those are the ideas in most need of engagement, and refutation. Hiding them away is more of an invitation for someone to develop them again than reading and openly criticizing them ever will be.

The history of philosophy is replete with justifications and endorsements of evil: Plato advocated infanticide in the Republic, Hume was openly racist (see here for a good discussion), and Schopenhauer wrote the mindbogglingly misogynist essay "On Women" (and he pushed his landlady down the stairs!), yet few would advocate that we should stop reading Plato, Hume, or Schopenhauer because they thought infanticide was a good idea, were racists, or were misogynists, and only slightly more would advocate that they are bad philosophers for these reasons. These things shouldn't be ignored, and should certainly figure into an evaluation of their work, but they shouldn't be the only factors considered. Yet because of his celebration of Nazism, Romano and Faye believe not simply that Heidegger should be considered a bad philosopher, but that he shouldn't be considered a philosopher at all.

I can't close out this post without noting one thing. If you're going to label someone a bad philosopher, you should probably have at least a rudimentary understanding of their core ideas and concepts. Ramono apparently doesn't believe this, as in his article, while discussing the various ways in which Heidegger's philosophy has been praised, he writes:

Another cites his helpful boost to phenomenology by directing our focus to that well-known entity, Dasein, or "Human Being." (For a reified phenomenon, "Human Being," like the Yeti, has managed to elude all on-camera confirmation.)

Anyone who's ever read Being and Time, or even the Cliff Notes, will know that "Dasein" does not mean "Human Being." "Dasein" literally means "being there." It's true that "Dasein" refers to the exclusively human mode of being, but referring to human being as Dasein, and describing it as such, is what people are praising in Heidegger's thought, because they see it as opening up new philosophical avenues in the study of being in general and human being in particular. You might think it's not a very productive way of talking about the being of human beings, but simply dismissing it as a fancy way of saying "human being" is no way to address even a bad philosophy.