What did Heidegger mean by being-toward-death, and what do we make of his Nazi involvement?

For Heidegger, being-toward-death is not about dying sooner or dwelling on funerals: it is a way of living that faces the fact that your death is yours alone. He introduced the idea in Being and Time, his 1927 magnum opus and a key document of existentialism. Heidegger also joined the Nazi Party in 1933, and scholars still dispute how that fits with his philosophy.

Start with the idea. In his philosophy 'Dasein' names the mode of being particular to humans, who are aware of and must confront issues such as personhood and mortality. Being-toward-death is not an orientation that brings a person closer to clinical death, but a way of being. For Heidegger, death is one's ownmost and non-relational possibility: nobody can take it from you or die in your place, and you cannot understand your own death through the death of others. Everyday talk covers this up: 'one dies' is treated as a fact and comes to mean 'nobody dies'. Being and Time presents authenticity, in this setting, as a means to grasp and confront the finite possibilities of the individual.

Now the history. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party on 1 May 1933, ten days after being elected Rector of the University of Freiburg. He resigned the rectorship in April 1934 but remained a member until the end of the war. After 1945, denazification hearings led to his dismissal and a teaching ban.

Whether there is a relation between Heidegger's political affiliation and his philosophy is a matter of controversy. Critics such as Jürgen Habermas, Theodor Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas assert that it revealed flaws inherent in his philosophical conceptions. Supporters such as Hannah Arendt and Julian Young see it as an 'error', less crucial to his philosophy than the critics believe. Emmanuel Faye goes furthest, claiming that fascist and racist ideas are woven into the fabric of his thought, a claim other scholars dispute.