The author sheds light on the varieties of darkness that shade the
life and thought of, arguably, Germany's most influential
20th-century philosopher. Safranski (Schopenhauer and the Wild
Years of Philosophy, not reviewed) presents Heidegger in the
context of what Osers, the book's translator, so brilliantly calls
"that 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 Heidegger's as
Karl Jaspers, missed what Heidegger meant by "Being." But the
darkness of incomprehension was itself a principle of Heidegger's
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 "being there," or in German, Dasein.
Against this cognitive darkness, Safranski sets the moral obscurity
of Heidegger's Nazi involvement and tries to unravel the
connections there between the philosopher's thought and life. The
picture that emerges is, appropriately, darkly unfocused. When
Safranski observes at the end of his book that Heidegger's
"brusqueness and severity" mellowed with age, readers will wonder
whether they've missed something: Brusqueness is already too
defined a quality for what Hannah Arendt called Heidegger's "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 philosophy's
history, taking care that the works on display there are properly
illuminated. Safranski's own take - both critical and appreciative
- on Heidegger mirrors the complexity of his subject, and provides
a welcome entree to a difficult thought world. (Kirkus Reviews)
One of the century's 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
Heidegger's 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 Heidegger's 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 Germany's loss in World War I. A
chronicle of ideas and of personal commitments and betrayals,
Safranski's 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 Heidegger's 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 Heidegger's 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.
"
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