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In between message board debates about anime girls, racial inferiority, and whose country is the most degenerate, the basement-dwellers who loosely compose the alt-right find time almost every day to discuss a notoriously difficult German existentialist philosopher.

Martin Heidegger, author of Being and Time, followed in the intellectual tradition of Hegel, Marx, and the lesser-known nineteenth-century phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. Heideggers main interest was ontologythe study of beingbut he also spoke to the more material concerns of Germans in the early the twentieth century, such as technologys effects on society and whether Jews are actual people who have DaseinHeideggers termfor the condition of human existence.

You can see why he might appeal superficially to message board Nazis, but I dont mean to reduce Heideggers influence just to anti-Semitism. He was an unrepentant member of the Nazi Party, true, but thats not the only reason the alt-right likes him.

Hes a great object of fascination in the alt-rights academic wingoh yes, it exists, didnt you know? Although exist is a tricky word, some might tell you.

What Heidegger brings to the alt-right is a thick veneer of legitimacy grounded in the seemingly apolitical philosophy of existence itself. Through a rigorous study of ontology from the pre-Socratic Greeks to his own day, Heidegger arrived at a highly studied, very technical basis for what was essentiallyblood-and-soil nationalism.

For those with the nationalist, civilizationist, anti-leftist itch who are nonetheless looking for a critique of Enlightenment rationalism and liberalism along the lines of Marx, Heidegger is your man.

Thats why the American paleoconservative academic Paul Gottfried wrote the preface to a book on Heidegger by Alexander Dugin, a belligerent Russian mystic on the fringe of Kremlin nationalist circles.

Jason Rena Jorjani, a co-founder of altright.com, called Heidegger his point of departure in the introduction to Jorjanis 2016 book Prometheus and Atlas.

This is how Heidegger moves in the higher levels of the alt-right, but does he really have anything more than a kitsch presence among your every-day, basement-dwelling internet Nazis?

Richard Spencer, another prominent alt-right leader, has professed in interviews what VICE called a philosophical alliance to Heidegger.

Its hard to tell the extent of it, and Heidegger does have his detractors among some less scholarly elements. Heidegger was such an autist and even worse, a literal cuck, opined one user on 4chans politics board.

But its easy to see how Heidegger satisfies the needs of the alt-right. Referencing Heidegger sure makes them feel smart, for one. They can assure themselves that theyre deep thinkers grappling with the idea of Being, and not just bored twenty-somethings yelling at black people on the internet.

Heidegger might also fulfill a deeper need. In addition to his criticisms of technological society and his ideas about nation and historical destiny, he provides an alluring metaphysic bordering on mysticism. To a community of internet users for whom atheism is so ten years ago, Heidegger offers a new foundation for belief.

Heidegger can fill a spiritual void. To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal, he writes in one essay. It means to dwell. . . . The proper dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals search anew for the essence of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell.

Sadly for the alt-right, Heidegger isnt talking about learning to dwell in America as a white minority.

But if youre an internet fascistwho cant get into the Crusades-era Catholicism thats a popular aesthetic now on certain 4chan boards, theres always the Heideggerian tradition. You can sit in your moms basement among your piles of books, railing lines of Mike Cernovichs brain powder and contemplating the mysteries of Being and all the women whove rejected you.

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Alt-Right, Internet Fascists Heart Martin Heidegger - Heat Street