Heidegger, reading the history of thought, and politics today
Heidegger's thought is as discredited by Nazism, as Marxism is by the Gulag, Christianity by the Inquisition, or Judaism by Israel's war against the Palestinians.
Meaning: not quite.
This is one more reason to reject a logic of representation. Truth is not an image of a thing, prefabricated, that only needs a mirror we can look at. For the same reason, it is not the reflection of demigods that we could vote aye or nay in a parliament that would decide what is true, doubtless according to what is right and so should be. (A right that may not be the same as justice). The love of wisdom has the patience of the one who desires to understand. It seeks to understand what is beautiful (or ugly), not just buy it, and adore it.
Philosophy is not a trial of persons (most of the authors in its canon are dead), nor a set of advertisements for purchasing at a supermarket for not yet discredited celebrities.
The world of the (any) present time can only be redeemed by finding new meanings in fragments of old edifices that have served conspicuously in the architecture of barbarism normalized as civilization. This normalization always appears as civilization's enforcement of some good that is good enough for affirmation (consent) and enforcement against the fears externalized as a barbarism that has been rejected or overcome. The scholar of the history of ideas studies old works to find in them sources of beauty and hope that were overlooked until now. This is not the same as dusting them off and offering them for sale with some gloss serving as advertisement. Works of art and thought share with persons the capacity to present an image of God. Each of them does so imperfectly. This is why these works have a future that becomes a history. There is in them a promise. But none of them is perfect, because perfection is the artifact that lacks nothing, and this is not the icon, which reveals the divine, but the idol, which substitutes itself for it. The icon is always a partial view affair, in which the divine is revealed as glimpsed yet obscured. This gives the work its temporality as part of history, and the timeliness that it can only have when untimely, and so surprising. Like persons, works of art and thought all have a "lack" through which the virtue is possible no less than the finality of mere sin, offering nothing.
The world that treats all beings as idols is cynical; it is disappointed that nothing and no one is a God. If, as in the modern world, everyone is suspected of being, not a sinner but a hater or traitor, then while just judgment may get rendered to persons for their transgressions, the political itself, which desires a happier world, is impossible. But then negating this situation should render politics everywhere.
The left always, perhaps since Machiavelli, wants more situations to be political and nor moral, while the right wants politics to be kept rare and moral judgment to sustain the police everywhere and always. This is a matter not of fact but decision.