Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil

EUR 17,25

a good cover... - as far as a work in the genre of biographies, this book doesn t stand out. but since it is a biography of heidegger, it stands out nevertheless. safranski depicts heidegger narrow and straight without any recourse to psychologism or moral condemnation/justification. this is an intellectual biography and a fairly successful one at that. safranski does a good job of describing heidegger s education and he gives a good, general account of most aspects of heidegger s philosophy. the chapter on heidegger and arendt is particularly illuminating--just because the subject is so juicy to begin with. and again: safranski does not put heidegger on trial. it s a good thing. similarly, he depicts the question of nazism that looms over heidegger with a balanced account. intresting note: i didn t know that heidegger was conscripted briefly by the german civilian army towards the end of the second world war, did you?

An excellent, accessible overview of Heidegger an his work - 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.

Excellent Intellectual Biography - 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.

Fascinating intellectual biography - 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. F. Gonzalez