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Here, Rudiger Safranski sets his sights on the writer considered
the Shakespeare of German literature. Goethe (1749-1832) awakened a
burgeoning German nation and the European continent with his
electrifying novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Safranski scoured
Goethe's oeuvre, relying on primary sources as well as his
correspondence with contemporaries and their comments to one
another, to produce an illuminating portrait of the avatar of the
Romantic era. Set against the cultural and political turmoil of
Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
Goethe, who intersected with almost every great figure of his age,
is thrillingly re-created here. As Safranski shows, Goethe's
greatest creation, even in comparison to his masterpiece Faust, was
his own life.
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.
"
A seminal biography, essential reading for anyone studying the philosophy of history's most enigmatic and fascinating thinker
No other modern philosopher has proved as influential as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and none is as poorly understood. In the first new biography in decades, Rüdiger Safranski, one of the foremost living Nietzsche scholars, re-creates the anguished life of Nietzsche while simultaneously assessing the philosophical implications of his morality, religion, and art. Struggling to break away from the oppressive burdens of the past, Nietzsche invented a unique philosophy based on compulsive self-consciousness and constant self-revision. As groundbreaking as it will be long-lasting, this biography offers a brilliant, multifaceted portrait of a towering figure.
This richly detailed biography of a key figure in
nineteenth-century philosophy pays equal attention to the life and
to the work of Arthur Schopenhauer. Rudiger Safranski places this
visionary skeptic in the context of his philosophical predecessors
and contemporaries Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel-and explores the
sources of his profound alienation from their "secularized religion
of reason." He also provides a narrative of Schopenhauer's personal
and family life that reads like a Romantic novel: the struggle to
break free from a domineering father, the attempt to come to terms
with his mother's literary and social success (she was a well-known
writer and a member of Goethe's Weimar circle), the loneliness and
despair when his major philosophical work, The World as Will and
Representation, was ignored by the academy. Along the way Safranski
portrays the rich culture of Goethe's Weimar, Hegel's Berlin, and
other centers of German literary and intellectual life. When
Schopenhauer first proposed his philosophy of "weeping and gnashing
of teeth," during the heady "wild years" of Romantic idealism, it
found few followers. After the disillusionments and failures of
1848, his work was rediscovered by philosophers and literary
figures. Writers from Nietzsche to Samuel Beckett have responded to
Schopenhauer's refusal to seek salvation through history. The first
biography of Schopenhauer to appear in English in this century,
Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy succeeds in bringing
to life an intriguing figure in philosophy and the intellectual
battles of his time, whose consequences still shape our world.
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