This Is What Happens When You Grow a Hitler 'stache

Ok, so, you're brilliant. You have a tremendous command of ancient Greek and Latin and, like Nietzsche, you assume a major university post at a young age. Your courses on Greece are so popular you have to hold them early in the morning just to get numbers down to a manageable level. Your students (Husserl, Levinas, Arendt) go on to be major philosophers in their own right, and you already cast a long shadow over the philosophy departments of continental Europe by the time you're forty. You argue that the analytic tradition of the ancient philosophers screwed up the entire course of western civilization, and that an appropriate stance is instead a messianic waiting before the becoming of Being. Fine.

Then, when the Nazis take over, you rejoice. You're appointed chancellor of Freiburg University and you give a speech praising the Reich as the fulfillment of the possibility of a rebirth of the West. You, my friend, grow a full-on Hitler moustache. Despite your later claim that you quickly tired of National Socialism, it haunts you for the rest of your life, and your erstwhile admirers are forced to reconcile your philosophy with your politics. A lot of people end up getting tenure writing about that issue, so it's not all bad.

Yet there are some of us who see the pivotal factor not in the implicit fascistic tendencies in your Sein und Zeit, but in that fateful choice of facial hair configuration. You can make a lot of arguments about a massive, nigh-impenetrable philosophical treatise, but there can be only conclusion about a dude who grows a Hitler 'stache.

P.S. "Schmutzig schnurrbart" is German for "dirty moustache."
P.P.S. My homie El has a new fun kiddo blog for her wee funny one, N.
P.P.P.S. Next time: my own special brand of cranky.