Book Review: Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil

* Martin Heidegger. Between Good and Evil by Rudiger Safranski Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Translated by Ewald Osers.

In 1967, when I first heard the name Martin Heidegger, there was next to nothing to read in English about his life. Apart from a translation, published in 1965, of the brief, obligatory biographical blurb Heidegger had attached to his doctoral dissertation in 1914, there was only a brief text by Stefan Schimanski, a reporter for the Manchester Guardian who had visited Heidegger in June 1946 and again in October 1947, which was first printed in the States in the Partisan Review and eventually adapted for the Preface to the first translations of Heidegger into English in 1949, Existence and Being, edited by Heidegger's exiled, former assistant at Freiburg, Werner Brock. Heidegger, who at the time of Schimanski's visits was in his late fifties, was described by the journalist as "short and slight; his hair is thick and jet black with occasional white streaks. When he emerged from the small skiing hut, high in the mountains, to greet me, he was dressed in the costume of a Swabian peasant." The philosopher who had written Sein und Zeit, which I had just worked through in its first English translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, was an Alemannic peasant? "The world had to come to him, to Freiburg. There he lives, with Hellingrath's edition of Hölderlin's works." I was intrigued and, I will admit, fascinated by the portrait Schimanski painted.

Schimanski had reached Heidegger only after a one-hour drive from Freiburg into the depths of the Schwarzwald to Todtnauberg, where Heidegger preferred to live and work. In fact, as Schimanski

did not know, Heidegger had been at the cabin for an extended period of time because he had had a breakdown early in 1946 and was taken to Viktor von Gebsattel's clinic, where he stayed for three weeks. How the man, who as a young assistant professor in the years just following the first World War had been called the "hidden king" of philosophy in Germany and the "magician from Messkirch" (his home town), had ended up as an impecunious recluse is part of the story told by Rüdiger Safranski in his biographical study of Heidegger, Ein Meister aus Deutschland. Heidegger und seine Zeit, which was first published in 1994.

The cause of Heidegger's breakdown in February 1946 was a series of denazification hearings to which he had submitted in 1945. During Schimanski's first visit, Heidegger was awaiting the denazification committee's verdict, which he received at the end of the year. He was forbidden to teach for five years. The previous year, his home in Freiburg had been occupied by strangers and he had been threatened with the confiscation of his library.

Safranski tells the story of Heidegger's beginnings as a poor Catholic rustic who became enamored of books (but later set the stage for questioning the meaning of a text), who considered and rejected the priesthood (but later was thought of as a sort of Taoist priest), who studied mathematics and the natural sciences (but later denounced science as mired down in a metaphysics of static presence), who broke with Catholic dogma (but was later buried a Catholic), who became one of the first Nazi university rectors under National Socialism (but was later hounded by SS brownshirts in and out of the classroom), who was accused of antisemitism (but had the love affair of life with Hannah Arendt, who was Jewish), and who eventually disclaimed being a philosopher at all (but renewed philosophical excitement in Europe, Japan and, to a lesser extent, the United States in a way that left the influence of most other contemporary philosophical movements tepid by comparison). Heidegger stimulated thinking. He caused people, especially students, to take thinking seriously, to experience it as a calling, and to desire to pass along the impulse to think to others. He had rediscovered the passion of thinking known, for example, to Socrates and Nietzsche.

Safranski relies heavily on Heidegger's correspondence with Karl Jaspers and Elisabeth Blochmann, a friend from his early adulthood, and on biographical studies by Heinrich Ott and Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, one of Heidegger's strongest admirers in his later years. He is also familiar with the full range of Heidegger's published writings.

However, there are some peculiarities of interpretation in his reading of Being and Time and he pays little attention to Heidegger's later writings on language, which are so very different in tone and purpose from Heidegger's analysis of Dasein and his great phenomenological interpretations of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche.

Nonetheless, this is welcome addition to the still meagre biographical material on Heidegger in English.

It certainly is not the last and likely not the best intellectual biography of perhaps the most important philosopher of the twentieth century. Such a study is not possible in any case at the present time. For one thing, not all of Heidegger's manuscripts have been published, although there are already 54 volumes in the Collected Edition, which may nearly double by the time the project is completed. Then there are the textual problems of this first complete edition, which is not a critical edition but rather presents items ranging from texts to which Heidegger gave his own stamp of approval to pieces that are heavily editoralized transcriptions of rough-draft manuscripts which have been supplemented by and corrected by comparison with student transcripts (often nearly verbatim) of notes from his lecture courses.

Some of the copies of books Heidegger published during his lifetime were annotated by him. These marginalia have been added to the printed text of some volumes of the Collected Edition. However, it is not known when the annotations were made. Only the edition of the book in which Heidegger made his notes has been cited. All of this will have to be meticulously sorted through in the coming decades and only then will we have clear access to Heidegger's thought as his texts translate it.

The translation of Safranski's book is puzzling in a few places. To begin with, Safranski wrote a book called "A Master from Germany: Heidegger and His Times." The American publisher has transformed this into Martin Heidegger Between Good and Evil, evidently in order to attract a wider audience interested chiefly in the connection between Heidegger's political entanglements in 1933-34 and the religious undercurrent some perceived in his thought. (The original title is given as the title of the authors "Preface" (p. ix).) This interest is part of what is by now a long tradition of attempting to disparage Heidegger and disqualify his thought on the basis of his actions as an administrator and his later reticence about the accusations made against him. The tradition began with his contemporaries at the end of World War II, continued with Max Horkheimer and Theodor

Adorno in the 1950s, and was renewed in the 1980s by Victor Farías and others.

Safranski's assessment of Heidegger's politics is balanced. He points out the excesses of some of Heidegger's critics and, on the basis of the evidence now available, corrects rumors and insinuations about Heidegger's behavior. He brings into perspective especially the often one-sided accounts by and about Jaspers and Hannah Arendt, both of whom are portrayed as having been endeared to Heidegger to the end, while at the same time not having missed the opportunity in their private correspondence to speak openly about their hurt and personal feelings of shame about Heidegger's personal weaknesses.

But to return to the translation, unaccountably, the translator is not consistent in rendering one very important term in Heidegger's lexicon, Seiende, which becomes both 'that-which-is' and 'essent' (e.g., pp. 284; 367, 380). This is far removed from Heidegger's meaning, however, for whom Seiende does not have the sense of a thing, of something fixed and frozen. The word refers to what occurs, of whatever sort, in its dynamic, ongoing manifestation. Oddly, too, Heidegger's first collection of essays, Holzwege (1950), is given as 'Wrong Paths' in the list of bibliographic abbreviations (s. xvi) and as "False Trails" (p. 413) in the chapter on Heidegger and the Frankfurt School. So also for Heidegger's article "Die Zeit des Weltbildes," which turns up as "The Age of Ideology" (p. 293) in the discussion of the aftermath of Heidegger's rectorship and, later, as 'The Age of the World Picture" (p. 398), where the German title is given without the definite article.

The latter instances are hints of some sort of editorial tampering, but the very important matter of how to translate Heidegger's basic terms is a more important matter, as we saw with Seiende. There are other examples. Sein, which is translated as 'being', is sometimes capitalized, sometimes not. As in the past, to the generalist reader, this must be mystifying and the hints remain of something otherworldly in Heidegger's thought. The translation of Sein is important, too, because everything depends on understanding the sense of the ontological difference between any sort of be-ing (Seiende)-which, as indicated above, is always to be understood in its temporality-and the be[-ing] (Sein) that makes temporality and any such be-ing possible.

Similarly, Heidegger's use of Existenz (in Being and Time), which later (in the "Letter on 'Humanism ... ") turns up as Eksistenz, is easily clarified when one sees that Heidegger has in mind with the

term a particular kind of life-for example, a political life, an artistic life, a life in science. There is no danger of confusing this sense of a concrete life with the term Leben, which means the experience of living, always understood as historical, i.e., bound to a particular era or time. (One of Heidegger's best exposition of how he understands these terms is in his "Anmerkungen zu Karl Jaspers 'Psychologie der Weltanschauung" [1911 12], in Wegmarken [pp. I3-181])

Safranski correctly emphasizes that, while Heidegger's major question is about the sense of Sein, the fundamental topic of his thinking was always time (pp. 44, 87, 164).

Time, which as Heidegger said in 1924, is "in us," is the access human beings provide that lets them make a world with and for us. Time is the source and meaning of our always being in a world (in-der-Welt-sein), which is coextensive with our existence. It is the "means" whereby the earth opens up to us and the things of the earth are held open, to see us and be seen by us.

When human beings suffer in the ways that have interested psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, Heidegger thought there is evidence of "disturbances in 'existing', in the most literal sense - a failure to 'sustain' the open relationship to the world" (pp. 405-406). Safranski's account of Heidegger's contribution to psychology and his relationship with Medard Boss is brief and moving. We see the notorious exile, in response to Boss's fan letter of 1947, requesting food and, soon after, the younger psychiatrist befriending the great thinker. Their partnership during the next thirty years, as we know, set the stage for a transformation of the practice of psychotherapy that, after a brief entrance in the 1960s and early 1970s, is only now about to take center stage in the revolution in clinical psychology that is underway.

In his seminars with Boss, which were given in Zurich between 1959 and 1969, Heidegger set the groundwork for existential analysis and once and for all refuted the mechanistic hypothesis of medical psychology, institutional psychiatry and, in particular, psychoanalytic theory.

Heidegger's account of his own psychological disturbance, mentioned above, is revealing. Safranski (p. 352), citing Heinrich Ott, quotes Heidegger's comments about his experience of psychotherapy with von Gebsattel:

And what did he do? He took me on a hike up through the forest in the snow. That was all. But he showed me human warmth and friendship. Three weeks later I came back a healthy man again.

What a revelation there is in those words: "But he showed me human warmth and friendship"! And what a contrast with the chilly atmosphere of psychoanalytic neutrality or impatient "milieu therapy".

In 1958, Heidegger repaid von Gebsattel's efforts with an essay, "Grundsätze des Denkens [Fundamental Principles of Thinking]," which was printed in honor of the psychiatrist's 75th birthday in the Jahrbuch für Psychologie und Psychotherapie.

I mention these details because, as already noted, it was during the period just following Heidegger's experience with von Gebsattel that Schimanski met Heidegger and painted the picture of him readers had of him until the 1970s, when a few details of Heidegger's life began to be known to English speaking readers. We now know, in part, the meaning of the "spirit of overwhelming solitude" that encompassed the Heidegger which Schimanski portrayed.

We learn from Safranski that, at the end of his life, Heidegger "was a venerable old gentlemen, and his former brusqueness and severity had mellowed with the years" (p. 428). Yet he was still restless. No wonder! He had confided to Boss that thinking overcame him every morning at nearly the same time - about 10:00 a.m. - and that he had no choice but to surrender to it. This had been his burden and his joy from early on.

This book is the first attempt at an impartial account of Heidegger's life and thought, and how they are related to each other. It is not staked with an ideological ante. The presentation of Heidegger's thought in it is sometimes superficial, and, as already noted, there are important omissions. Thus, we hear about Heidegger's esteem for Hölderlin but nothing about his studies of Rilke's poetry and the poet's effect on him. Nor do we hear anything about Heidegger's contact with Asian thought, including his influence on Japanese philosophy and his work on a translation of the Tao te Ching during the 1940s.

The full story of Heidegger's life awaits the telling. In the meantime, we have in Safranski's book an engrossing story of someone whose ardent hope, interestingly enough, was to be a man without a biography (pp. 1-2).

Miles Groth.