Much has been written in recent years about his life and its relation to his philosophy. In contrast with most modern philosophers, whose curricula vitae are almost entirely academic, Heidegger’s life entered into the public record and therefore calls for both narrative and reflection.

As is commonly known, he joined the Nazi party and served for almost a year as rector of the University of Freiburg (1933-34), expressing public support for the leadership and policies of Hitler and implementing them in the university. This mixture, although typical of modernity, is highly unstable. He conflated his philosophy with religion and politics and saw himself not only as a philosopher but also as a prophet and leader, precisely in his character as a philosopher-he felt it a philosopher’s duty to act as a participant in history. (There is a difference between the two.) Furthermore, he elaborated his thinking at a time of great turmoil in Germany (in the 1920s and early 1930s), and failed to distinguish the political from the philosophical issue of Being. He was formulating his approach to the question of Being at the time when he overtly abandoned his Catholic faith (in 1919, at the age of thirty), and he failed to distinguish between the religious and the philosophical issue of Being. The force with which this issue gripped him made it hard for Heidegger to distinguish it from other issues. I felt as though for a moment I had gazed at the foundations of the world. It was not a matter of a system, but of existence. In almost painful brightness the things of the world lay revealed. As one student later described a Heidegger lecture: It was as if a gigantic lightning bolt cut through a sky clothed in darkness. His formulation of it, in his teaching and writing, made an immense impact on many of the most important twentieth-century European thinkers as well as on the general public. Heidegger had an extremely powerful grasp of this issue. In his early work, as expressed in Being and Time, he concentrates on man as the place ( Dasein ) where the question of Being is raised, and in his later work he focuses more directly on Being itself.

Everything he wrote, even his commentaries on other writers, got pulled explicitly into that one overriding question. Martin Heidegger was taken by a single issue in his philosophical thinking, the question of Being. Harvard University Press, 474 pages, $24.50

Martin heidegger rüdiger safranski