Author: Rüdiger Safranski
File Type: pdf
One of the centurys greatest philosophers, without whom there would be no Sartre, no Foucault, no Frankfurt School, Martin Heidegger was also a man of great failures and flaws, a Faustus who made a pact with the devil of his time, Adolf Hitler. The story of Heideggers life and philosophy, a quintessentially German story in which good and evil, brilliance and blindness are inextricably entwined and the passions and disasters of a whole century come into play, is told in this brilliant biography. Heidegger grew up in Catholic Germany where, for a chance at pursuing a life of learning, he pledged himself to the priesthood. Soon he turned apostate and sought a university position, which set him on the path to becoming the star of German philosophy in the 1920s. Rudiger Safranski chronicles Heideggers rise along with the thought he honed on the way, with its debt to Heraclitus, Plato, and Kant, and its tragic susceptibility to the conservatism that emerged out of the nightmare of Germanys loss in World War I. A chronicle of ideas and of personal commitments and betrayals, Safranskis biography combines clear accounts of the philosophy that won Heidegger eternal renown with the fascinating details of the loves and lapses that tripped up this powerful intellectual. The best intellectual biography of Heidegger ever written and a best-seller in Germany, Martin Heidegger Between Good and Evil does not shy away from full coverage of Heideggers shameful transformation into a propagandist for the National Socialist regime nor does it allow this aspect of his career to obscure his accomplishments. Written by a master of Heideggers philosophy, the book is one of the best introductions to the thought and to the life and times of the greatest German philosopher of the century. From BooklistHeidegger towers above this century as a thinker able to wrest insights from ancient texts (Plato, Heraclitus, and Parmenides) while simultaneously opening distinctively modern perspectives for contemporaries (Sartre, Tillich, and Arendt). With admirable erudition and sophistication, Safranski recounts the evolution of this giant from a cautious Catholic seminarian to a daring explorer of the depths of anxiety and alienation. A different kind of subtlety--more psychological than philosophical--comes into play in the analysis of why Heidegger veered from his quest for truth to serve Adolf Hitler. While refusing to exculpate him for supporting an evil movement, Safranski shows how philosophical reasoning belatedly helped Heidegger distance himself from Nazism, so opening the way to a fruitful postwar investigation of the human place in a technological world. As the well-told story of a life that combined, as few have, a heroic rage for truth with a tragic vulnerability to error, this biography will make a valuable addition to larger public libraries. Bryce ChristensenFrom Kirkus ReviewsThe author sheds light on the varieties of darkness that shade the life and thought of, arguably, Germanys most influential 20th-century philosopher. Safranski (Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, not reviewed) presents Heidegger in the context of what Osers, the books translator, so brilliantly calls codethat German specialty for extravagant wretchedness. More than most German philosophers, Heidegger, in quest of Being, pushes to the brink of incomprehensibility. The author comforts us with the knowledge that even so distinguished a friend of Heideggers as Karl Jaspers, missed what Heidegger meant bycodeBeing. But the darkness of incomprehension was itself a principle of Heideggers thought. Instead of the active, determining mind that Kant had posited, Heidegger found an intractable resistance to human reason--Being itself--of which we first become aware in amazement over the sheer fact that anything exists at all. We do not so much shape the world as find ourselves codebeing there, or in German, Dasein. Against this cognitive darkness, Safranski sets the moral obscurity of Heideggers Nazi involvement and tries to unravel the connections there between the philosophers thought and life. The picture that emerges is, appropriately, darkly unfocused. When Safranski observes at the end of his book that Heideggerscodebrusqueness and severity mellowed with age, readers will wonder whether theyve missed something Brusqueness is already too defined a quality for what Hannah Arendt called Heideggers ``lack of character, in the sense that he literally has none, certainly not a particularly bad one. Safranski suggests that the real Heidegger hovers between two self-portraits modern tower of philosophy and modest attendant in the museum of philosophys history, taking care that the works on display there are properly illuminated. Safranskis own take--both critical and appreciative--on Heidegger mirrors the complexity of his subject, and provides a welcome entre to a difficult thought world. -- 1998, Kirkus Associates, LP.