The Anti-Communist Party (ACP) rep heiddeger as one of their premier thought-leaders alongside the likes of Dugin.

Yes, but he is still worth engaging with and reading if you're at all interested in philosophy beyond specific individuals.

What is considered Late Heidegger is more heavily Nazistic, in my opinion, but his Early and Middle period not as much. His Early work is especially interesting, his lectures in particular. And his Middle period, when he wrote Being and Time, is far more "proto-existentialist" and religiously influenced than anything else.

At the end of the day, his philosophy is not overtly political and it is not at all ethical so it's easier to engage with despite him being a Nazi. I'm not even a huge fan of Heidegger though and I'm not denying he was a Nazi, for the record. Heidegger even refused to apologize for being a Nazi to Jewish philosophers that would still visit him to learn from him after the War. But Schmidt was a Nazi too and it's still good to learn them. There are not too many intelligent Nazi/fascist writers anymore, and Heidegger was a genius for his part.

I do prefer Levinas to Heidegger, though. He is the Jewish, anti-Nazi answer to Heidegger. Levinas was Heidegger's former student and deliberately sought to undo Heideggerian philosophy. He is more founded in Talmud and tries to find a rupture with the history of Western philosophy up to that point and was temporarily held as POW during the War. But Levinas is also anti-Communist/USSR/Marxist, unfortunately. His philosophical understanding of "the political" isn't bad though and still informs my thinking.

Recommend both! Enlightened Centrist Philosophy moment.

Heidegger Heidegger was a boozy beggar,

He could drink you under the table...

The pinnacle of Western philosophy is 100% Marxism. Marxism represent a qualitative leap of Western philosophy. The problem is that since academia tries very hard to pretend Marx doesn't exist, they are forced to teach Western philosophy without teaching the pinnacle of Western philosophy, which is why you are forced either read about dudes who have been dead for centuries or a bunch of bunk bullshit by some dude talking nonsense. The rationale they give to teaching Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and so on is some bullshit about "being a better critical thinker" when the real reason why you should read them is because their works are the foundation in which Marx, who was also Western philosopher, would use for his works. You read Hegel so when you get to Marx, you can appreciate how Marx took Hegel's incomprehensible bullshit and turn it into something that even illiterate workers can understand and more importantly, apply towards a liberatory political project.

The analytic vs continental divide in academic philosophy is basically a divide between a branch of Western philosophy that pretends Marx doesn't exist vs a branch of Western philosophy that at least acknowledges Marx exists but isn't itself Marxism. And it should come as no surprise that in the completely reactionary environment that is the Anglosphere, it's the branch of Western philosophy that rejects Marxism that is completely dominant where you get to read philosophers who spend 200+ pages to prove that 1+1=2 or argue about qualia. It's only recently that students are starting to get taught influenced-by-Marx-but-not-actually-Marxist philosophy.

Originally I thought philosophy as a discipline was basically so far up its own ass as to be useless, then I took one or two philosophy classes and had some genuine interest, then I got politically engaged and read more philosophy outside of a classroom environment, and ultimately decided my original feeling was mostly correct.

Maybe, "philosophy is useless" is a philosophical statement though.

Y'all actually read this theory shit? I thought it was a joke

Even Marxist philosophy is saved by it being more science than philosophy.

There's also the lady who edits out nazi propaganda

What game is that?

Having drunkenly talked to German philosophers about this, some of them actually prefer reading him in English.

Heidegger does all kinds of fuckery with the German language, and imposes new technical meanings on words. If you're reading it in English and you come across a loan word from German in italics at least you know there's some fuckery going on, and you don't make the mistake of assuming he's using the word in the same way everyone else does.

I prefer to refer to his "philosophy" as nazi