There are a number of misconceptions on display here:
Cecil’s column: I find this site very entertaining. But anyone who comes here for nuanced scholarly analysis is out of their minds. His facile, Readers’ Digest description of Heidegger’s philosophy is a case in point.
There are two Martin Heideggers. The first, the existentialist Heidegger, as described by Cecil, is a misconception not only 50 years out of date but based on sub-par philosophers like Sartre who had absolutely no understanding of him and attempted to lump him in with ethico-humanist philosophers like Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. Heidegger himself had no use for Parisian existentialism and repeated, again and again, that his was not yet another humanist Philosophy of Man. Derrida, in a collection of interviews called Points (which also deals with the Nazi thing) expresses bewilderment that anyone could have found a humanist philosophy in Heidegger. Anyway, this kind of obtuse interpretation is why no one reads Sartre anymore.
The second is the more recent Heidegger popularized by the Post-Structuralists, especially Jacques Derrida. In this version, Heidegger dissects humanist thinkers like Kant and Hegel to find inconsistancies and aporias in their thinking (what he called the “destruction of philosophy”)–a technique that Derrida would later borrow for Deconstruction. Despite what Sartre believed, Heidegger offers no philosophy or prescriptive view of “existence”. This Post-Structuralist interpretation of Heidegger is far closer to his actual intentions. For example, Heidegger always used to correct misunderstanding that the term “Dasein” refers to an actual “person” and that his philosophy was in any way a critique of emprical existence. He was content to leave that stuff to the priests and politicians–in his books anyway.
The analysis of Dasein in Being and Time and his essays on Holderlin and Nietzsche, in which he eschews a quasi-religious humanist rhetoric in favor of something that uncannily resembles what would later be called Structuralist and Post-Structuralist analysis, has been hugely influential on The Frankfurt School, Bataille, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Lacan, Paul de Man, Derrida and just about everyone else involved in Post-Structuralism and Cultural Studies.
Heidegger’s Naziism: I suppose your reaction to his having been a Nazi would be dependant on how much influence you believe “Martin Heidegger” had on the texts that bare his name. There is a school of thought that finds the notion of authorial intent suspect and so, according to this thinking, the life of the author would have minimal bearing on our response to his texts. Instead, the text is simply viewed as a collection of signs contextualized by the political and cultural mileu in which they were produced. Interestingly, Heidegger himself tended to use this kind of analysis. Another school, though not very popular these days, still has some converts. This school, popular in the 30s, uses a crude brand of Freudianism to psychoanalyze the text based on what’s known about the personal life of the author. I guess in Heidegger’s case you’d try and find a Nazi subtext to Being and Time. This is exactly the kind of analysis used in some of the books produced in the 90s, mentioned by the above poster, that attempted to link Heidegger’s philosophy with Naziism.
Lewis Carroll, Pasolini, Francois Villon: I don’t know about linking Heidegger’s Naziism to any of these guys. I think it does a disservice to them. Carroll is no longer viewd as a pedophile for a very simple reason: our view of pedophilia, as projected onto Victorian society, doesn’t take into account the fact that Victorians idealized children in a strange, asexual manner (the “Cult of the Child”) and produced thousands of the kinds of seemingly prurient images that Carroll produced. Carroll was completely asexual and died a virgin.
Villon killed a priest, by mistake, after the priest leered at Villon’s girlfriend and grabbed at his crotch. What would you have done? Pasolini, who did frequent male prostitues and was eventually killed by one, was a generally healthy gay male. I don’t think I’d link any of this behavior with Naziism or even deviancy.
Heidegger’s being the “most influential” philospher of the 20th century: Wittgenstein and Nietzsche were undoubtedly the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. While Heidegger has had a huge impact on French and American critical theory and philosophy, W and N have influenced art, architecture, history, poilitical science, psychology, the philosophy of science and numerous other fields in nearly every western country.