MARTIN HEIDEGGER: Between Good and Evil.

By Rudiger Safranski. Translated by Ewald Osers. Harvard Univ. Press. 474 pp. $35

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) poses a dilemma for the intellectual biographer. He was one of the more original and influential philosophers of the 20th century, and he was a supporter of the Third Reich. Situating his subject "between good and evil," Safranski, the author of Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy (1991), addresses the perilous links between Heidegger’s brilliant philosophy and his abominable politics.

Safranski’s focus is Heidegger’s quasi-mystical exploration of "Being," his attempt to find meaning in life through its intimate connections with death and nothingness. Heidegger believed that modern humanity had lost touch with its own essential nature because of the spiritual shallowness, materialism, and overall "inauthenticity" of contemporary life. Following the implications of his metaphysics, Heidegger embraced the National Socialist revolution as "a collective breakout from inauthenticity," a chance to attain authentic Being and create a "new intellectual and spiritual world for the German nation." In 1933, Heidegger accepted the National Socialist Party’s invitation to become rector of Freiburg University, a prominent position in Hitler’s cultural propaganda machine.

By the end of World War II, Nazism had become for Heidegger yet another nightmarish product of modernity: a conformist and manipulative regime. Inspired by his own disastrous experience, he went on to explore the insidious ways in which a modern technological society can lead people astray. Safranski cites the philosopher’s "seducibility by power" as a partial explanation of his disastrous political misstep. Heidegger was neither the first nor the last mandarin to conflate his own ideas with a monstrous ideology; a distressing number of 20th-century intellectuals have served as shills for Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism. Yet Heidegger’s life offers a particularly sobering lesson in the pitfalls of translating philosophical theory into practice.

—Lawson Rollins