“Time of the Magicians”

by Wolfram Eilenberger (review)

The story of four German thinkers – Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Ernst
Cassirer and Ludwig Wittgenstein – before the dark decade of the 1930s

Jonathan Rée

Kant and His Comrades at the Table by Emil Doerstling Photograph: Science History
Images / Alamy S/Alamy Stock Photo

Wolfram Eilenberger’s new book offers us a group portrait of four brilliant

young philosophers in the aftermath of the first world war: Martin
Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was
the only one to actually see military action.

They could have made a pretty bizarre team: they were all conceptual
innovators, but they innovated in different directions, and they ended up with
nothing in common, except that their mother tongue was German. If they had
ever met over Kaffee und Kuchen – which they certainly did not – they might
have disagreed about everything. According to Eilenberger, however, they
were united by the “spirit of the age”, which led them to “break away from the
old frameworks (family, religion, nation, capitalism)”, and construct a new
model of existence commensurate with “the experience of war”. They may
have been just lucky, so Eilenberger hails them as the “magicians” who made
the 1920s into “philosophy’s great decade”.

No matter what may have happened in their lifetimes, Eilenberger’s

magicians drifted far apart. Wittgenstein and Heidegger are now the world-
famous patrons of two philosophical tribes – the sober linguistic analysts and
the wild deconstructive existentialists –; Benjamin, the mystical Marxist, has a
following one; and poor old Cassirer may not have attracted any followers at
all.
The neglect is undeserved. Cassirer was a bold and original thinker, but he
must have been too urban for his own good, as Eilenberger shows. His work
was rooted in Immanuel Kant. He strongly believed that the world is shaped by
the forms of human thought and sensibility. He asked other philosophers to get
out a bit more and explore the world “in all directions”. He encouraged them to
pay attention to art, images and myths, as well as abstract arguments. In 1919
Cassirer settled into a comfortable life as professor of philosophy at the
University of Hamburg. He soon won recognition as a prominent defender of
German democracy.

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

In August 1928, the Weimar republic celebrated its ninth anniversary. Cassirer
marked the occasion with a public lecture in the Hamburg Rathaus. His theme
was twofold: 1) the constitution of the new German republic could take its place
in the liberal descent from Magna Carta and the American and French
revolutions, 2) it was also the offspring of the German intellectual tradition of
Leibniz, Kant and Goethe. The speech must have been delivered with grace
and aplomb, because Cassirer was greeted with effusive applause.

The following February, however, the University of Munich hosted a rally for the
nationalist Kampfbund of German youth. Swastikas were everywhere. There
was an ovation when Hitler and his entourage entered the hall. The Viennese
philosopher Othmar Spann delivered a speech on the “cultural crisis of the
present”. He argued that German philosophy was being traduced by a group of
“foreigners”, notably Cassirer. To outward appearances Cassirer was of course
genuinely German - not only by birth but also by education, culture and
vocation-. But appearances can be deceptive, and Spann must have
considered it his duty to reveal that Cassirer was not a German, but a Jew.

Cassirer was unperturbed: he could not believe that a civilised country could
believe the lies of populist clowns. A month later, in March 1929, he went to the
Swiss ski resort of Davos for a two-week seminar on Kant. He would lead the
seminar in collaboration with the leader of a new generation of philosophy
professors, Martin Heidegger. Cassirer and Heidegger must have got on
really well because they rounded off proceedings with a debate. Cassirer took
the opportunity to praise Kant as a philosopher of infinity. Heidegger, on the
other hand, presented Kant as simple witness to an “abyss” beneath the
burnished throne of reason. The confrontation may have been a little stiff, but
it must have been cordial: a genuine meeting of minds with a serious
difference of opinion.

Within four years, Cassirer would find refuge in England, while Heidegger
became a paid-up Nazi. But Eilenberger prefers to stick to the golden 20s when
Cassirer and Heidegger, together with Benjamin and Wittgenstein may have
danced to the same philosophical tune.

Martin Heidegger, 1961. Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images

It can’t have been a likely story. But Eilenberger tells it with free-wheeling
gusto. He begins by claiming that his four philosophers all ask themselves the
same “fundamental question”: “what does language do to us?” In apparent
agreement with Wittgenstein, they may have set off in search of “the one
language underlying all human speech” – “a unifying, primal language that lies
behind all languages and all meaning”.

Eilenberger appeals to “the spirit of the 1920s”, which involved confusion at the
elusiveness of time, anxiety about the de-humanising effects of science, and
amazement at “the birth of an age of global communication”. He must have
been aware, however, that all decades in the last 500 years could be described
in the same way. Unfortunately, he is reduced to the biographical chatter of his
four magicians.

Eilenberger must be considered a benign presence in Germany. He has founded

a popular philosophical magazine and published generalist books. He has also
promoted “philosophy for all” on social media, radio and TV. But philosophical
popularisation is a double-edged trade: it may engage us to read the great
books, but at the same time, it can lead to simple gratitude for the
popularization of philosophy.

Philosophy depends on creative labour, rather than on relaxed magicianship.

But when it actually happens, it is found in well written words, which can open
our minds to new worlds.