Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Paperback)

~ RĂĽdiger Safranski (Author), Ewald Osers (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

...a remarkably detailed full-scale biography. Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil is a labor of philosophic devotion, entering so deeply and appreciatively into the thought and sensibility of Heidegger that his faults are found forgivable or are forgiven, and the real world is often well lost. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (November 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674387104
• ISBN-13: 978-0674387102
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #273,751 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 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.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Michael Russell (Toronto, Canada) - 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.

22 of 27 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 (REAL NAME)

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.