it's heidegger was a nazi! time again. and let me say: heidegger was a nazi. the times piece quotes carlin romano (whom i know a bit) from the chronicle of higher education, who calls Heidegger a “Black Forest babbler” and fraud who was “overrated in his prime” and “bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now.”

ok let me have a quick go. i actually think heidegger is a profound and important thinker, though i would also say there is an element of hoohah: a mystical obcurantism.well that's true of all german systematic philosophers, and heidegger was the best the twentieth century had to offer in that vein. even if he kind of encouraged a cult of himself, he's not responsible for the shocking submissiveness and credulity of his followers, whom i've had to live with in philosophy departments now and then.

now let me say that we live inside two centuries of totalitarianism and many philosophers are tainted. hegel is an inyourface state worshiper: he flatly asserts that the state is god. or consider schelling. marx is, i believe, an utterly totalitarian thinker who had a far more direct influence on actual totalitarian regimes and their genocides than did heidegger, who was too obscure to really wield any direct influence on practical politics. there are reasons that hitler loved nietzsche; a fascist reading of nietzsche is not entirely disconnected from what he actually said. well, you might also grab folks like hobbes or rousseau.

and we are, right now, still in the middle of the cult of the state as represented by all these people: essentially no one does not advocate total state power: it taints everyone from rawls to habermas to zizek etc. and in a way this is just the reflection of the reality of our amazing progress. so i more or less hate the political philosophies of all these people. it's a harder question on heidegger than most, because even more than most he does not say: here's my totalitarian system; there is no clear advocacy of any particular politics in heidegger, though it's not wrong to keep feeling a fascist undertow. 

but our intellectual life is unimaginable without hegel, marx, nietzsche. nor would we want to imagine that even if we could. many of the ideas are compelling, and you can't think completely outside them. now you had better keep your critical faculties about you at all times. if you start accepting stuff because marx said it or because hardt and negri said marx said it etc you are not only going to end up accepting totalitarian premises; you are actually enacting the submission that makes totalitarianism possible. most intellectuals do exactly that.

but i think that marx and nietzsche and hedegger, e.g., also can be wielded in a liberatory vein: the ideas are extremely rich, complicated, equivocal. someone like foucault  shows the kind of thing i mean. he's inconceivable without marx and nietzsche and hegel and heidegger. but he also exposes our totalitarian situation profoundly.

heidegger is not going to imperceptibly make you a nazi through some kind of secret mesmeric power in the text. read. read hard. read carefully. stay free in relation to the text. take what you can use and leave the rest. read...as an anarchist, or a radical advocate of direct democracy. read and never knuckle under to what you read. the question really isn't about the dictatorial power of the author; it's about the free resistance of the reader.