Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil [Hardcover]

Rüdiger Safranski (Author), Ewald Osers (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 20, 1998

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. Rüdiger 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Heidegger 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 Christensen

From Kirkus Reviews

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 entre to a difficult thought world. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (April 20, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0067438709
• ISBN-13: 978-0067438701
• ASIN: 0674387090
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.7 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,503,695 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating intellectual biography, June 30, 1998

By 

Felix Gonzalez (Berkeley, Ca USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Hardcover)

Safranski's book makes an excellent case for the idea of an intellectual biography. It demonstrates that something material is left out when we consider a thinker's work entirely outside the life and context that produced it. For instance, Safranski's account allows one to discern the peculiarly performative aspect of this philosophy. Heidegger is revealed as a thinker who early on was quite conscious both of his great ambitions and of precisely what--in the feverish intellectual climate of the Weimar republic--was needed to fulfill them. Thus the overwhelming success of Being and Time upon its publication can be appreciated as not only a philosophic achievement, but also as a coup of intellectual self-promotion.

Another virtue of the work is the detached, and at times bemused distance Safranski adopts toward his subject. Given the gravity of the issues at stake, one might object that detachment is hardly called for; yet Safranski's relative coolness permits the damning facts to speak for themselves with that much more force. And none does so more loudly than the matter-of-fact, almost inevitable way in which Heidegger embraced National Socialism. Behind the grotesque intellectual irresponsibility of someone who must have known better we can make out--disturbingly--only a diffuse, tepid banality.

In order for this shock to hit home, Safranski must of course first convince us of Heidegger's genius, and he does not disappoint here. The chapter on Being and Time alone makes the book worth buying. Unlike other English-language expositions--especially some highly sympathetic ones--the work never produces the disagreable feeling that Heidegger's words are being "translated" for our consumption. Instead they are allowed to retain that degree of opacity which is probably so essential to their influence and evocativeness. Yet the quality of Safranski's overall exposition is such that, at those times when he chides his subject for hyperbole or obscurantism, one never feels that he i! s motivated by the impatience of Heidegger's usual no-nonsense, positivist critics.

The name Heidegger has apparently always generated strong feelings. Safranski's relatively detached approach ("balanced" is not quite the word I would use) has as one of its beneficial effects a subtle kind of displacement. It allows us to see that it is ultimately not Heidegger that is most at stake, but the nature of philosophy itself. Heidegger's thought freed from its historical and political entanglements may well be less objectionable, but also much less interesting in terms of the (ultimately philosophical) aporias they pose for his chosen discipline.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Between Biography,Journalism and Philosophy, June 22, 2001

By 

Michael Russell - See all my reviews

This review is from: Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Hardcover)

This book is an excellent introduction to the thought and life of Martin Heidegger. The author strikes a remarkably satisfying balance between biographical detail, historical events, and Heidegger's own philosophical writings. I found it to be a pleasure to read and I consumed it very quickly once I got started. Safranski used an economy of space to graft the details of Heidegger's beginnings, his early education and the choices he had to make. The author is wise enough to demostrate where real life events may have impacted on the subject's later views. Safranski has done research to add hitherto unknown (at least to this reviewer) facts that shed a slightly different light on Heidegger and on those he knew. I think the obvious, but not unimportant relationship is with Ardent. Safranski gives the details and relates how Ardent viewed, and later came to view, her association with the married Professor. (There is nothing all that scandolous about the story, except perhaps for its banality and "fallenness of everyday life"-likeness. Safranski is good enough to craft some quotes by Ardent into drole comments on Heidegger's legendary stiff upper lip. Heidegger comes across as a pardox in many chapters and Safranski is wise enough to not try to settle the confusions or demystify the man. It is a thorough and deliberate accounting of the philosopher's life which can catalyze readers to return to Heidegger's philosophy and take their own measure of it. Somehow by reading about a man's birth, life, death and some of the banal commonalities, or fallenness, of his life- like he has an interesting brother- it makes the bewilderment engendered by philosophy less discouraging.

24 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, solid work., December 25, 2000

By 

E. M. Dale (USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Paperback)

Safranski has given the interested public an excellent overview of Heidegger's life and intellectual development in this well-researched volume. As much a work of philosophy in its own right, the book's ability to explain often terribly difficult sections of Heidegger's thought makes it worth the effort it sometimes takes to read. Safranski does a princely job writing a biography of a philospher; in other words, Safranski deals with the thought as much as the man. With Heidegger, it is especially difficult to separate the two.

Heidegger's thought suffers from two extremes: those who wish to villify him for his cowardice and complicity in the face of National Socialism, especially his seeming whole-hearted endorsement of the application of the Führer-prinzip in the German universities, and those who want to pretend that Heidegger was (and is) misunderstood and mischaracterized. The truth, it seems, lies somewhere in between these two positions. I think that the title of Safranski's book, playing as it does off of Nietzche's Von Gut und Böse, accurately illustrates the author's take on Heidegger. Like most men of his time, he was between good and evil, a bit of both, and therefore morally ambiguous. This position does not satisfy Heidegger's diciples, nor does it mollify his persecuters. However, it is likely the position we will have to live with.

The application of Heidegger's work to philosphy and social sciences in the decades following the war shows that the "proof is in the pudding" when it comes to speaking of Heidegger's Philosophiepolitik. Many of the most anti-facist streams of thought to arise in the mid- and later-twentieth century, such as deconstruction and existentialism, were directly the result of thinkers dealing seriously with the implications of Heidegger's thought. No one today studying or teaching Heidegger's philosphy can afford to neglect this excellent book.