Heidegger’s deliberate peasant persona and obscurity were central to his philosophical mystique

Evidence

Increasingly, Heidegger imported the peasant image into his town job too. He started wearing a specially tailored version of traditional Black Forest dress: a brown farmer’s jacket, with broad lapels and a high collar, set off by knee-length breeches. His students called it his ‘existential’ or ‘one’s ownmost’ look, the latter a reference to one of his favourite phrases. They found him funny, but he did not share the joke because his sense of humour was somewhere between peculiar and non-existent. It didn’t matter: his clothes, his rustic Swabian accent and his seriousness only heightened his mystique. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 189

Categorization

• FICTION: Heidegger as a self-staged character — the costumes, the accent, the gravity — reads like a fictional figure of the professor as stage performer, a resonant image for depicting real teachers turned into legend.
• CANDY: Students nicknamed the ultra-serious Heidegger in his peasant costume the ‘existential look,’ and he apparently had no sense of humour about it.
• XREF: connects to: Heidegger’s peasant self-image masked an unusually dominant personality — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 180; Heidegger appeared to lack character rather than possess bad character — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 307; Heidegger equated philosophical thinking with the physical labours of farmers and herdsmen. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 313

Broader Connections

• Heidegger’s peasant self-image masked an unusually dominant personality #expands (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 180
• Heidegger equated philosophical thinking with the physical labours of farmers and herdsmen. #expands (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 313
• Heidegger appeared to lack character rather than possess bad character #complicates (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 307