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With equal attention to both the life and work of his subject, Safranski places the visionary skeptic in the context of philosophical predecessors and contemporaries like Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and explores the sources of Schopenhauer's profound alienation from their "secularized religion of reason."
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Economist and Kirkus Reviews This “splendid biography” (Wall Street Journal) of Goethe presents his life and work as an essential touchstone for the modern age. A masterful intellectual portrait, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art is celebrated as the seminal twenty-first-century biography of the writer considered to be the Shakespeare of German literature. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), a remarkably prolific poet, playwright, novelist, and—as Rüdiger Safranksi emphasizes—a statesman and naturalist, first awakened not only a burgeoning German nation but the European continen...
According to current deabtes, ’individualization’ has frequently been proposed as the conceptual counterpart to ’globalization’. It has often seemed that nothing would be left once these processes have fully unfolded, other than individual human atoms dispersed on a globe without any political, economic or cultural structures. Regardless of whether this description is based on any good and valid observation, nobody drew the conclusion that suddenly emerges as evident after reading Rüdiger Safranski’s lucid and timely exploration of the issue: globalization, if it occurs, means a radical change in the human condition. It brings human being in direct confrontation with the world in ...
Assessing Nietzche's morality, religion, and art, this seminal biography is essential reading for anyone studying the philosophy of history's most enigmatic and fascinating thinker.
The renowned scholar Rüdiger Safranski's Romanticism: A German Affair both offers an accessible overview of Romanticism and, more critically, traces its lasting influence, for better and for ill, on German culture. Safranski begins with the eighteenthcentury Sturm und Drang movement, which would sow the seeds for Romanticism in Germany. While Romanticism was a broad artistic, literary, and intellectual movement, German thinkers were especially concerned with its strong philosophical-metaphysical and religious dimension. Safranski follows this spirit in its afterlife in the work of Heinrich Heine, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and through the later artistic upheavals of the twentieth century. He concludes by carefully considering Romanticism's possible influence in the rise of National Socialism and the student revolt of 1968. Romanticism: A German Affair is essential reading for anyone interested in the power of art, culture, and ideas in the life of a nation.
The story of Heidegger's life and philosophy, a quintessentially German story in which good and evil, brilliance and blindness are inextricably entwined and the passions and disasters of a whole century come into play, is told in this brilliant biography.
This is the first comprehensive biography of Schopenhauer written in English. Placing him in his historical and philosophical contexts, David E. Cartwright tells the story of Schopenhauer's life to convey the full range of his philosophy. He offers a fully documented portrait in which he explores Schopenhauer's fractured family life, his early formative influences, his critical loyalty to Kant, his personal interactions with Fichte and Goethe, his ambivalent relationship to Schelling, his contempt for Hegel, his struggle to make his philosophy known, and his reaction to his late-arriving fame.
He also explores Nietzsche's listening habits, his playing and style of composition, and his many contacts in the musical world, including his controversial and contentious relationship with Richard Wagner. For Nietzsche, music gave access to a realm of wisdom that transcended thought. Music was Nietzsche's great solace; in his last years, it was his refuge from madness."--Jacket.
Explains the development of Romantic arts and culture in Germany, with both individual artists and key themes covered in detail.