An Incomplete Philosophy

...In 1933 it led Heidegger into the Nazi Party...

...Except for a brief account of Heidegger's last days, it concludes with a rather snippy chapter detailing the attacks on him by the philosopher Theodor Adorno...

...Its being has changed...

...There are more than a few echoes between the two of them...

...The history of philosophy has recorded many foolish beliefs expounded by otherwise very smart individuals, but none more ridiculous—or more baleful —than this one of Heidegger...

...That is why critics who gibe at the apparent nonsensicalness of individual sentences miss the point...

...Safranski tells us that Heidegger came out of a conservative Catholic background in the period before World War I, when the Church was being philosophically challenged on every side...

...Heidegger came into his own during the 1920s, achieving fame after the publication of Being and Time in 1927...

...The experience of reading him can be unusually intense—his memento mori, that each of us must die his own death as the particular being that he is, confronting nothingness unaided and unconsoled by anything in this world, is both chilling and unassailable...

...Max Weber, Ernst Bloch, Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmarm, Karl Mannheim, even the dadaists, all make sustained appearances...

...As an awkward, provincial Jesuit novice confronted with a high-speed, cosmopolitan civilization, he tried to appropriate the weapons of timeless logic on behalf of "a tradition that could maintain itself only defensively against a modernist movement for which God had lost his meaning...

...A lapsed Catholic who has read the book criticized these pages, remarking to me that the reason one leaves the Church almost never has to do with philosophy and almost always has to do with sex—except he used a less polite word...

...In his essay "On the Essence of Truth," Heidegger puts it this way: "'Truth' is not a feature of correct propositions which are asserted of an "object' by a human 'subject' and then 'are valid' somewhere, in what sphere we know not...

...One disciple said of phenomenology that it "requires the work of centuries for its completion...

...New York "Times Book Review" Anyone thinking about reading this book should be forewarned...

...It can also point to the fact that celebrated Heideggerians like Paul de Man were admirers of Hitler...

...None of this is excusable, and I think it is fair to say that whatever value a reader finds in Heidegger's philosophy, he must also always bear in mind that it is incomplete: By itself it does not provide a defense against acquiescence in the most heinous crimes human beings are capable of...

...One of the major Heideggerians in France after the War, Jean Beaufret, the man who prompted the "Letter on Humanism" that is among Heidegger's most important postwar essays, became associated in the 1970s with the Holocaust deniers...

...George Steiner talks of the "hypnotic," "spellbinding" quality of Heidegger's writing, of the impossibility of paraphrasing it or entirely comprehending it, and compares it to poetry or, perhaps more tellingly, to music...

...Heidegger's nervous breakdown in 1946 gets half a page, his relationship to his wife—a virulent anti-Semite and ardent Nazi—little more than that...

...The author of Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, he is obviously at ease with Continental thinking, and he is able to immerse Heidegger wholly in the intellectual currents of his time, explaining influences, drawing occasionally surprising connections...

...Still, it is the handling of the ideas that makes this work so valuable...

...When Husserl died in 1938,he left a collection of 40,000 unpublished pages...

...Safranski is outstanding on two counts: his contextualization of Heidegger's thought and his explication of it...

...Heidegger wrenches language out of its normal usage to awaken people to Being, producing what Safranski calls "bizarre terminological convolutions...

...Heidegger's sex life, including his affair with Hannah Arendt, is limited to a few fleeting and unoriginal comments...

...Heidegger had never been a racist...

...Still, it is a sign of Safranski's achievement that whenever one faults him, it is always because one wants him to give us more...

...Karl Jaspers admitted that he couldn't grasp passages in Heidegger, and once wrote: "No one will in fact be able to assert that he has actually understood what that Being, that mystery, is of which Heidegger speaks...

...The concept of God even began to creep into his thoughts...

...Heidegger's "we honor theology by keeping silent about it" does not seem so very far, after all, from Wittgenstein's "what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence...

...The emphasis here has to be on the word "relatively," because Heidegger is so notoriously obscure that some who are unsympathetic to his project suspect fraud, or at least willful obfuscation...

...Heidegger went beyond Husserl as he developed his own ideas, but what he took from phenomenology was the discipline to open himself directly to the multiplicity of things, without preconceptions or philosophical encrustations...

...The prosecution can point to the antidemocratic tendencies in Heidegger's thought (at best, democracy was an irrelevancy to him), to his persistent denigration of reason and to his early emphasis on action per se, with little or no attention to ethics...

...There is no disputing that an unhealthy odor emanates from Heidegger's neighborhood...

...And although she had no direct bearing on his ideas, we should not entirely ignore Heidegger's fanatical wife, a dreadful woman by all accounts...

...Safranski explains: "The same tree that at one time I regard with pleasure because it gives me shade, and another time from the viewpoint of the economic advantage of cutting it down, is not the same tree in these perceptions...

...He learned a lesson from what he had done," Safranski writes, "and his thinking subsequently focused on the problem of the seducibility of the spirit by the will to power...

...He argues that Heidegger's Nazism was a betrayal of his own thinking, "a philosophical somersault into primitivity...

...The Nazis did not dwell in the world of ideas and they were not about to take lessons in authenticity from Heidegger...

...After the War, he was ready to lie ignominiously in a futile effort to protect his position...

...Context is everything...

...rather, truth is disclosure of beings through which an openness essentially unfolds...

...Instead, the teacher must not analyze or define so much as evoke and awaken, bringing things into the light and then letting them be...

...By 1934 Heidegger was in retreat, withdrawing from any public role and sinking ever deeper into the philosophy of a solitary...

...That, they said, explained why he had so many Jewish followers...

...Husserl devised a method for examining consciousness by closely analyzing the different ways a phenomenon comes to be perceived...

...He was, Safranski says, "a perpetual beginner in regard to his work," and becomes in this account a comic (or perhaps tragic) figure...

...One follows him for a while, only to lose him in the fog, then catch sight of him again...

...But it is a safe bet that those who are uncomfortable with linking philosophy and poetry or music, who are more inclined to associate philosophy with logic or mathematics, will, for better or worse, not be susceptible to Heidegger's spell...

...Hitler had created a revolution, but Heidegger would shape it...

...It might be said that one engages with Heidegger the way one engages with a work of art, though the rewards are metaphysical, not esthetic...

...When Edmund Husserl arrives on the scene in 1916 as Heidegger's most influential mentor, Safranski takes the reader on a quick tour of phenomenology that is likely to offend phenomenologists but will enlighten just about everyone else...

...Or, better yet, Safranski could have discussed Heidegger's ideas in relation to those of Wittgenstein...

...Safranski is more scrupulous than most in trying to assess the extent of Heidegger's culpability...

...I think this is right...

...A key question that burns brightly today is: How much did his philosophy encourage his embrace of Nazism...

...Safranski speaks for the defense...

...He deplores the man's megalomania and his lack of self-awareness...

...Nonetheless, Heidegger never did repudiate what he—and perhaps only he —understood to be the "inner truth" of National Socialism...

...These are extremely complicated issues, however, and one wishes that Safranski had done more with them...

...An extraordinary degree of concentration is required, but statements that would otherwise look like gobbledygook if taken on their own convey meaning when embedded in the fabric of Heidegger's prose...

...That is not the only reason why the final sections of the book are disappointing...

...Typically, Safranski locates this betrayal in the intellectual sphere, particularly in Heidegger's reading, or misreading, of Plato, which encouraged him to turn from a concern with the individual to a concern with the nation, from metaphysics to politics...

...This is an intellectual treatment of an intellectual, and topics that would receive lengthy examination elsewhere are dealt with only in passing...

...One wonders what the author, with his training in Continental ideas, thinks about the greatest modern philosopher in the English-speaking world...

...If Jaspers couldn't fully understand him, what hope is there for us mere mortals...

...Indeed, it sometimes seems that with the exception of Heidegger's involvement with the Nazi Party, Safranski is reluctant to provide any quotidian facts at all, rushing through them so that he can get back to the things that really matter, the ideas...

...relying on these otherwise useful tools of the human mind can lead away from life's immediacy, away from Being, and into sterile theorizing...

...Admittedly, there is a kind of mysticism about all this incommunicability, and mysticism can lead practically anywhere...

...The problem, surely, is rooted in Heidegger's view that the task of philosophy is to address the reality of Being, the fact that something exists rather than nothing...

...Husserl was discontented with the delicatessen of philosophical choices arrayed before the inquiring student—positivism, Marxism, neo-Kantianism, intuitionism, et al.—and he sought to overturn all of these attempts at system-building with his battle cry of "to the things themselves...

...But to catalogue each of the different and ever-shifting aspects of being is a task beyond the Herculean...

...Butto AngloAmerican readers these pages will seem a missed opportunity, the occasion when Heidegger's influence could have been traced down to the present through such figures as Foucault and Derrida...

...Safranski's discussion of the ideas of those years is expert and relatively clear, touching all the familiar themes: authenticity, anxiety, the anticipation of death, "the They...

...Heidegger's break with Catholicism is attributed to his encounter with the historicism of Hegel and Wilhelm Dilthey...

...Soon they were complaining about his unreliability, calling him a "dangerous schizophrenic" and, worst of all, describing his philosophy as "talmudist-rabbinic...

...Rüdiger Safranski's engrossing study is not a comprehensive biography of the man who is probably the most important philosopher of the 20th century...

...At the same time, in discussing Heidegger's much criticized postwar silence about his involvement with the Third Reich, Safranski legitimately asks: "Was Heidegger to accept shared responsibility for the monstrous crimes of Nazism in which he had genuinely played no part— not even in terms of ideological prerequisites...

...Yet trying to make sense of him can be frustrating...

...Reason and logic are secondary to this fundamental, awesome fact...

...Intoxicated by the gigantomania" of Plato, the biographer says, Heidegger came to think of himself as a modern philosopher-king, whose duty it was to lead a benighted people into the light...

...Safranski is, of course, writing primarily for a German readership, and it may be that in Germany Adorno's name carries considerable weight...

...The approach can give the narrative an airy quality...

...As the Holocaust reached its height and the Allies were closing in, he could still declare to his students that "the Germans and they alone can save the West for its history...

...Safranski observes that even after Heidegger gave up his faith, he may have retained from these struggles of his youth the idea of two worlds—one steady, rooted and serious, the other superficial, faddish and hedonistic—and that this dichotomy may have been the seed for his distinction between authentic and inauthentic being...