Customer Reviews

Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil

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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.

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.

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.

Heidegger's writings are turgid and difficult, and a layperson who approaches them in order to gain an idea of how the author influenced twentieth century thought is likely to be frustrated by their impenetrability. Safranski's biography is a valuable resource, providing an accessible and actually rather detailed account of the evolution of Heidegger's ideas. He also does an excellent job at elucidating the tricky topic of the relationship between his philosophy and his Nazi sympathies before and during World War II. He treats the philosopher fairly and with a detachedness that fits the subject very well.

This is an excellent and dispassionate biography of Heidegger's career. This is mainly an intellectual biography with a minimum of personal detail presented. Safranski does a superb job of explicating Heidegger's thought and provides concise, insightful summaries of Heidegger's intellectual milieu. Heidegger emerges as a man of remarkable talent and ambition. His goal was nothing less than a reformulation of philosophy on radically new bases. He set out to destroy the metaphysics of Kant, Descartes, Aristotle and saw himself as the equal of Plato. He succeeded to a great extent though at the cost of greatly narrowing the scope of philosophic inquiry and as Safranski demonstrates, he did not produce positive results in the sense of the metaphysics of his chosen targets. Safranski deals very well with Heidegger's notorious period of enthusiasm for Nazism. He demonstrates that Heidegger's often fervent support for Hitler grew directly from Heidegger's philosophical preoccupations of the late 20s and early 30s. Safranski shows as well that Heidegger dropped Nazism because the Nazis were insufficiently revolutionary for Heidegger. Heidegger made no more forays into public life but spent the remainder of his career as a philosophical oracle. This biography is more than a good introduction to Heidegger's thought, it is a real contribution to the intellectual history of the 20th century.

Rüdiger Safranskis biography on Heidegger combines a profound understanding of Heidegger's philosophy with a wealth of anecdotes and perceptive analysis of Heidegger the man and his relationships. In particular, Heidegger's affiliation with National Socialism is well covered.

Overall, the book is very impressive and well worth time and effort. As I am quite familiar with the young Heidegger via Theodor Kisiel's "The Genesis of heidegger's Being & Time" and the work of Scandinavian philosophers on the subject, my only regret is that Safranski didn't write more about the "thinking" of the late Heidegger.

There are a lot of reasons why I was interested in picking this book up: my mentor at Georgetown, Wilfrid Desan, stressed how important it was to know the life of a philosopher, even the likes of Quine, because philosophy is ever and always about one's life. In the case of Heidegger, the mysteries of this man, the profound impact of his work on the course of 20th century thinking, the controversies of his politics all left me wondering how to get a grip on this man.
This book is not for beginners. I've spent my undergraduate and graduate years studying Heidegger. Like a moth to the flame, and it consumed me in every regard. His books have totally spun me inside out, shook me to my soul, sent me off into Asian thought. If ever there was a Dasein thrown, yers trewly is it. How to begin to come to terms with this writer?
Safranski does an absolutely brilliant job at delineating the strands of thinking leading up to the advent of phenomenology. But, as I say, this isn't for the novice or the casual reader. This is disciplined, committed writing in service of Thinking itself. There are no two ways about it, Heidegger erupted into the Twentieth Century. There seemed to be a sense among his teachers that this was an extraordinary thinker. As he gains the acceptance and posts of influence in German university life, he gains his confidence and from the point of BEING AND TIME onward, nothing, absolutely nothing will ever be the same.
This book documents the transitions remarkably and with great clarity.
Of course, one of the things that troubled me the most in my undergraduate days was the prospect of Heidegger's anti-Semitism and his political allegance to the Nazis in the early days of their rise to power, all the while entering into a passionate romance with Hannah Arendt. The book does not hide or apologize for Heidegger. But it seems clear that it is not real clear just how anti-Semitic he was. He quite directly states to Arendt that he finds his Jewish students annoying, and he somewhat buys into the supremecy of the German state espoused by the 1920's and early 30's Nazis. And he very definitely benefits from their appointments. Yet, he witholds. His wife does not. She is clearly and vehemently disgusted by Jewish people. I'm sure that her husband's affair with Arendt only added fuel to that fire. Yet Heidegger does not seem to buy the whole program. On the other hand, he does little or nothing to help Arendt get out of Germany, and nothing at all to save Edith Stein, his colleague from their days with Husserl, who had become a Catholic nun, was murdered at Auchwitz and has since been canonized. Nor is he willing to give a full and clear account of himself in the trials after the war. I am as puzzled now as I have always been. Was this incredible thinker also so filled with narrow mindedness that he could watch a people get exterminated because some of his students were annoying him?
And as his thought began to walk more Buddhist paths, how did he resolve this great beginning of thinkng with the conflicts in his life? Those questions are not answered. Still in all, this book is a remarkable achievement. I could go on about so many other aspects, but I'll leave it at this: this is a book about a man's beginning, about being thrown fully consciously into the ground of thinking, and it uncovers what he found in the clearing with great insight.

Writing about philosophers is a rather difficult task in most cases. The author has to be able to separate the philosophy from the man without making too many conjectures as to how the man shaped the philosophy or how the philosophy shaped the man. It's rather understandable the different opinions on him. He was a rabid National Socialist, hough he saw the errors of this ideology with time, he alienated many of his close friends for petty reasons, and showed blatant infidelity towards his wife.

His writing had a tendency to be obtuse, but this book is anytihng but. His philosophy is well covered, and there are some instances of a tongue -in-cheek amusement at his play on words. Like every philosopher, the philosophy changed with him, and there were times he was writing almost incoherently. It seemed he was in love with his own words as opposed to being at certain points, or perhaps couldn't come up with a logical structure to explain what he felt. Regardless, his influence is without question, and with time he always recomposed himself to the core of his teaching, to be-in-the-world, and to be open to one's own Dasein.

An excellent biography that is a good introduction to his core teachings.

Any philosophy student who was had to wade painstakingly through the dry, abstract prose of 'Being and Time' will greatly appreciate Safranski's overall lucid explication of Heidegger's thought. Exhaustively researched and well-documented, with copious excerpts from lectures, correspondence and personal accounts, Safranski chronicles Heideggar's break with Catholicism, rise to academic stardom and relationship with contemporary philosophical scholars including Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, Edmund Husserl, and Hannah Arendt.

When I initially studied Heidegger in college it was with great suprise and disappointment that I learned about his involvement in the Third Reich. Safranski's deft handling and elucidation of this controversial issue will be of interest to anyone who has pondered the reasons behind Heidegger's intellectual capitulation. According to Safranski:

'We are faced with a Heidegger who is woven into his own dream of a history of being, and his movements on the political state are those of a philosophical dreamer. In a late letter he would concede to Jaspers that he had dreamed "politically" and therefore had been mistaken. But that he was politically mistaken because he had dreamed "philosophically" -- that he would never admit, because as a philosopher who wished to discover the essence of historical time he was bound to defend -- even to himself -- his philosophical interpretative competence for what was happening in political history.' [p. 234]

The British historian Paul Johnson once said "The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas," and the chief lesson humanity can learn from the twentieth century is to beware of intellectuals. Heideggar's involvement in National Socialism illustrates the danger of a mind enslaved by intellectual hubris, and should remind today's scholars to conduct themselves with care and humility.

Incidentally, the book touches upon the Nazi attempt to enlist Nietzschean philosophy as a resource for propaganda. Given Nietzsche's popular depication as an anti-semite, it was a suprise to learn that Nietzsche actually came under heavy criticism by Nazi philosophers, one of whom, Arthur Drews, went so far as to describe him as an "enemy of everything German", an out an out individualist whose philosophy was completely antithetical to the National Socialist principle that the common good comes before personal advantage.

Drews' lament that "most people today who make statements about Nietzsche are only picking the 'raisins' out of the cake of his 'philosophy' and, given his aphoristic way of writing, have no clear idea at all about the context of his thoughts" echoes Walter Kaufman in 'Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, AntiChrist'. Of course, it was only by this very method that the Nazis were able to enlist Nietzsche as a resource in their propaganda.

Perhaps Safranski will have more to say on this matter in 'Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography' (which I am currently reading). Meanwhile, I heartily recommend 'Between Good and Evil' to anybody interested in Heidegger.

This book's richness is quite impossible to adequately convey. Safranski not only conjures up the circumstances surrounding Heidegger and his work, but also touches on the zeitgeist surrounding that which surrounded Heidegger. One of the most exciting things I've read in recent years is the portion of the book explicating the 'life philosophy' movement of the late-19th c./early 20th c. and how this played out among the professional and academic class. Fascinating book, and I find myself still able to continue to mine nuggets through the many re-readings of it I have done this past year. By the way, I initially purchased a soft cover copy at Borders and, when I discovered I had accidentally left it behind in a coffee shop somewhere, I had to re-purchase the book again (this time via Amazon, and a hard-back copy now, since it has become a 'lifetime book' for me - one to which I return, over and over again.) Beautifully written and well-translated, this book is Safranski's major achievement, his genuine tour de force. Yes, I profited from his Nietzsche book as well, but that book does not convey the care and - one is tempted to use the word 'love' - that he put into this Heidegger biography. An unqualified masterpiece!