From: "henry sholar" <H_SHOLAR-AT-marta.uncg.edu>
Date:          Mon, 4 May 1998 12:37:52 EST
Subject:       Rorty on Safranski on Heidegger


For those who missed yesterday's New York Times
Review of Books:

May 3, 1998   Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company 

 A Master From Germany 
 One of the greatest Western philosophers was also a Nazi. 

[Safranski, Rudiger, _Martin Heidegger:  Between Good and Evil_, 
translated by Ewald Osers, 474 pp., Cambridge, Mass: Harvard 
University Press, $35.]


 By RICHARD RORTY

 Many people who learn that Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) 
lied over and over again about his Nazism, and that he did 
his best to ignore the murder of the European Jews, conclude 
that his writings can be neglected. For those who care about 
philosophy, however, things are not that simple. 

 Heidegger was a resentful, ungenerous, disloyal and deceitful 
man. But he somehow managed to write books that are as 
powerful and as original as Spinoza's or Hegel's. Hans-Georg 
Gadamer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, 
Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jurgen Habermas all cut 
their teeth on those books. You cannot read most of the 
important philosophers of recent times without taking 
Heidegger's thought into account. 

 Rudiger Safranski's evenhanded study, ''Martin Heidegger: 
Between Good and Evil'' (in a capable translation by Ewald Osers), 
is equally successful at illustrating its subject's pettiness and at 
displaying the vast power of his imagination. It is the first 
comprehensive biography of the man, and supersedes both 
Victor Farias's ''Heidegger and Nazism'' and Hugo Ott's 
''Martin Heidegger: A Political Life.'' It reports many facts 
that these books did not, and it offers a detailed account of 
Heidegger's intellectual development -- relating his twists 
and turns, with great skill and remarkable concision, to 
German intellectual and political life in the first half of this century. 

 Safranski, the author of ''Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of 
Philosophy,'' never steps back and pronounces judgment on 
Heidegger, but something can be inferred from the German title 
of his book: ''Ein Meister aus Deutschland'' (''A Master From 
Germany''). Heidegger was, undeniably, a master, and was very 
German indeed. But Safranski's spine-chilling allusion is to 
Paul Celan's best-known poem, ''Death Fugue.'' In Michael 
Hamburger's translation, its last lines are: 

 death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue 
 he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true 
 a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete 
 he sets his pack on us he grants us a grave in the air 
 he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a 
master from Germany 

 your golden hair Margarete 
 your ashen hair Shulamith. 

 No one familiar with Heidegger's work can read Celan's poem 
without recalling Heidegger's famous dictum: ''Language is the 
house of Being. In its home man dwells.'' Nobody who makes 
this association can reread the poem without having the images 
of Hitler and Heidegger -- two men who played with serpents and 
daydreamed -- blend into each other. Heidegger's books will be 
read for centuries to come, but the smell of smoke from the 
crematories -- the ''grave in the air'' -- will linger on their pages. 

 Heidegger is the antithesis of the sort of philosopher (John Stuart Mill, 
William James, Isaiah Berlin) who assumes that nothing ultimately 
matters except human happiness. For him, human suffering is 
irrelevant: philosophy is far above such banalities. He saw the history 
of the West not in terms of increasing freedom or of decreasing misery, 
but as a poem. ''Being's poem,'' he once wrote, ''just begun, is man.'' 

 For Heidegger, history is a sequence of ''words of Being'' -- the words 
of the great philosophers who gave successive historical epochs their 
self-image, and thereby built successive ''houses of Being.'' The history 
of the West, which Heidegger also called the history of Being, is a 
narrative of the changes in human beings' image of themselves, 
their sense of what ultimately matters. The philosopher's task, he said, 
is to ''preserve the force of the most elementary words'' -- to prevent 
the words of the great, houses-of-Being-building thinkers of the past 
from being banalized. 

 Heidegger wobbled back and forth between a self-effacing conception 
of the philosopher as the interpreter of an already written poem and 
an egomaniacal belief in the world-historical importance of his own work. 
In the latter mood, he hoped that he himself would complete the stanza 
of Being's poem that Plato had begun -- that he would utter a word that 
would come, as Arendt said both Plato's and Heidegger's did, ''from the 
primordial.'' When Hitler came along, the prophetic mood took over. 

 As Safranski tells us, Heidegger, who was born in Messkirch, in southern 
Germany, the son of a sexton, started out as a reactionary Roman Catholic, 
but after World War I he broke with the church. He then found a way to 
package Nietzsche and Tolstoy, Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky into an 
academically respectable philosophical system. He reshaped what had been 
thought of as merely literary matter into a doctrine of the nature of human 
life. His ''Being and Time'' changed the course of European philosophy by 
breaking down barriers between genres, barriers no one else had been able 
to surmount. 

 That book, with its Nietzschean call to authenticity, resolution and 
decisiveness, was an instant success. This success encouraged the 
egomania that let Heidegger imagine that he and Hitler could work 
together to transform Germany. Heidegger was oblivious of the torment 
of his Jewish friends and colleagues, but after a year of hectic propagandizing 
and organizing, he did notice that the Nazi higher-ups were not paying 
much attention to him. This sufficed to show him that he had 
overestimated National Socialism. 

 So he retreated to his mountain cabin and, as Safranski nicely says, 
traded decisiveness for imperturbability. After World War II, 
he explained, imaginatively albeit monomaniacally, that Americanization, 
modern technology, the trivialization of life and the utter 
forgetfulness of Being (four names, he thought, for the same 
phenomenon) were irreversible. His last works are lyrics 
of resignation -- often very beautiful lyrics, though soiled by 
the events that led Heidegger to write them. 

 Safranski, appropriately, devotes three-quarters of his book to 
Heidegger's writings and only one-quarter to the events of his life. 
He entwines the two in a narrative that will engross those already 
familiar with Heidegger, but will be intelligible to those who are not. 
If you should decide that you ought, despite everything, to read 
Heidegger's books, this biography will give you a good running start. 
============================================ Richard Rorty has recently published two books, ''Achieving Our 
Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America'' and a 
collection of philosophical articles titled ''Truth and Progress.'' 



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