Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Intellectual Biography
Review: 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.