Yet when he saw Beckenbauer on TV, perhaps he muttered to himself: ‘You see, I was right’.One of the century's greatest philosophers, without whom there would be no Sartre, no Foucault, no Frankfurt School, Martin Heidegger was also a man of great failures and flaws, a Faustus who made a pact with the devil of his time, Adolf Hitler. Some philosophers never looked into his books again after they became ware of this. Heidegger, though he was something of a technophobe, even watched the caps of the German team on TV! For Heidegger, Beckenbauer was such a passer, a libero who was above the technical constraints of the game. Applied to football, this means that, where the game is dominated by a routine but meaningless pushing of the ball back and forth, it must be given a brilliant twist by a decisive pass.

Heidegger’s idea was that, by shifting a lever, everything could be set right again. Why do you link the libero with the existentialism of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in your book?Įxistentialism is a response to the challenge of how we can free ourselves from the constraints of technology in which we’re hopelessly trapped – like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. ” You describe the next step in the development of football as the invention of the sweeper or ‘libero’ in the form of Franz Beckenbauer. He called Beckenbauer an 'inspired player” and praised his “invulnerability” in duels on the field.“ He was full of admiration for this player’s delicate ball control - and actually tried to demonstrate some of Beckenbauer’s finesses to his astonished interlocutor.

He did not succeed however, because Heidegger still under the impact of an international soccer match, preferred to talk about Franz Beckenbauer. The then director of the Freiburg theater met Heidegger on a train one day and tried to conduct a conversation with him on literature and the stage. During the legendary match between Hamburg and Barcelona, he knocked a teacup over in his excitement. He would go to a neighbour’s house to watch European Cup matches on television. “Heidegger by then was a venerable old gentleman, and his former brusqueness and severity had mellowed with the years. Rüdiger Safranski’s Martin Heidegger - Between Good and Evil (1998):

HEIDEGGER AND BECKENBAUER THE EXISTENTIALIST LIBERO

Martin heidegger rüdiger safranski