Don Arthur presents a superb conspiracy theory to explain my recent discussion of Heidegger and Nazism. He suggests that it’s a subtle Bunyip trap. (I can’t make his permalink point to the right post at present)
Don’s got entirely the wrong conspiracy. My not-so-hidden agenda is to establish the admissibility of the political actions of philosophers as evidence against their systems of thought. As I admitted in the comments thread, I’m following the standard prosecutorial strategy of trying for an easy conviction early on, before going on to harder cases like Sartre and Hayek. Of course, this strategy is pretty transparent and Jason Soon, the leader of Hayek’s defence team, has already weighed in with an amicus curiae brief, objecting to the use of Nazi authorship evidence against Heideggerian thought.

As an aside, I wanted to illustrate a point made by Don that, ultimately, it doesn’t matter what the author intended by their words, it’s what we do with them. Arthur Hugh Clough’s marvellous indictment of Victorian hypocrisy, The Latest Decalogue includes the lines “Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive, Officiously to keep alive.” I’ve seen these lines quoted in the course of a serious defence of passive euthanasia. If you’re not aware of, or can disregard, the author’s original intent, they don’t do a bad job of summarising the views of passive euthanasia advocates.

But “ultimately” is crucial here. When we’re trying to figure out a complex argument or a complex work of art, it’s silly to suggest that the author’s intentions in creating the work are irrelevant. The distinction is somewhat akin to Popper’s distinction between the ‘context of discovery’ and the ‘context of justification’ in the formulation and testing of scientific hypotheses.