Dec 10, 2020 07:10 PM
https://www.newstatesman.com/time-magici...ger-review
EXCERPT: It is small wonder that Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians, first published in German two years ago and now translated into English, has been received with such enthusiasm. It is an intellectual lifebuoy thrown from the past to the present. One might call the book an event, were it not that Eilenberger wants us not only to learn from modern philosophy but, as importantly, to be cautious about some of the grander claims of those philosophers who prided themselves on staring into the abyss.
Time of the Magicians takes us back to the interim between 1919 and 1929, a decade that began with the peace and ended with its disastrous consequences, the stock market crash, and Europe’s final swing towards fascism. In these ten years, four European men – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer and Walter Benjamin – thought intently, obsessively and sometimes dangerously about how to answer the oldest questions of philosophy. What is a human being? How should I live? And, possibly most importantly, how, in such conditions, can I even ask these questions?
A socially tortured, war-torn, ascetic rich boy (Wittgenstein), a narcissist who got his suits cut especially so he could approximate his own rugged mountain-man dream (Heidegger), a randy middle class klutz, equally hopeless at love and life (Benjamin), and an older man, his hair already bright white, also Jewish, deeply committed to the past, already fearful of the future (Cassirer). None of these brilliant men fitted comfortably within the philosophical schools and institutions of the moment. None of them really wanted to, despite their (many) vanities. All four wanted to shake things up, but not simply for the sake of show. Each believed that only a fearless rethinking of certainties, a piercing of convention and superficialities, and a puncturing of lies and falsehoods, could push philosophy, and humanity, into a position from which to see the world as it really is.
The magic that these notoriously difficult thinkers pulled off is deceptively simple. Each, in their own way, stripped back philosophy in order to make the world sparkle again. They argued that there are no absolute grounds for being, knowing or living that can be reasoned into the light with the old tools of philosophy: the real magic, they claimed, is there in front of us.
For Wittgenstein, born in Vienna in 1889, it lay in the pristine logic of what language shows, and not in what we assume it to be telling us. Cassirer, born in 1874 in what was then Silesia, similarly rediscovered the mysteries of human life in the rich historical interplay of symbols and speech. Heidegger, born in south-west Germany in 1889, was a darker kind of wizard, and urged that we leap into the nothingness that stares us in the face. We must, he argued, grasp the project of being in the world (Dasein – “being there”), alone and unsupported by old metaphysical certainties, anxiously but authentically. Benjamin, born in Berlin in 1892, was less persuaded by authenticity. He was enchanted by the redeeming wonders of the everyday, those moments that could seize life back for us, if only fleetingly, in a glance; a shop window, a word.
All knew of one another, even though (with the exception of Cassirer and Heidegger, for a short time) none were friends... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT: It is small wonder that Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians, first published in German two years ago and now translated into English, has been received with such enthusiasm. It is an intellectual lifebuoy thrown from the past to the present. One might call the book an event, were it not that Eilenberger wants us not only to learn from modern philosophy but, as importantly, to be cautious about some of the grander claims of those philosophers who prided themselves on staring into the abyss.
Time of the Magicians takes us back to the interim between 1919 and 1929, a decade that began with the peace and ended with its disastrous consequences, the stock market crash, and Europe’s final swing towards fascism. In these ten years, four European men – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer and Walter Benjamin – thought intently, obsessively and sometimes dangerously about how to answer the oldest questions of philosophy. What is a human being? How should I live? And, possibly most importantly, how, in such conditions, can I even ask these questions?
A socially tortured, war-torn, ascetic rich boy (Wittgenstein), a narcissist who got his suits cut especially so he could approximate his own rugged mountain-man dream (Heidegger), a randy middle class klutz, equally hopeless at love and life (Benjamin), and an older man, his hair already bright white, also Jewish, deeply committed to the past, already fearful of the future (Cassirer). None of these brilliant men fitted comfortably within the philosophical schools and institutions of the moment. None of them really wanted to, despite their (many) vanities. All four wanted to shake things up, but not simply for the sake of show. Each believed that only a fearless rethinking of certainties, a piercing of convention and superficialities, and a puncturing of lies and falsehoods, could push philosophy, and humanity, into a position from which to see the world as it really is.
The magic that these notoriously difficult thinkers pulled off is deceptively simple. Each, in their own way, stripped back philosophy in order to make the world sparkle again. They argued that there are no absolute grounds for being, knowing or living that can be reasoned into the light with the old tools of philosophy: the real magic, they claimed, is there in front of us.
For Wittgenstein, born in Vienna in 1889, it lay in the pristine logic of what language shows, and not in what we assume it to be telling us. Cassirer, born in 1874 in what was then Silesia, similarly rediscovered the mysteries of human life in the rich historical interplay of symbols and speech. Heidegger, born in south-west Germany in 1889, was a darker kind of wizard, and urged that we leap into the nothingness that stares us in the face. We must, he argued, grasp the project of being in the world (Dasein – “being there”), alone and unsupported by old metaphysical certainties, anxiously but authentically. Benjamin, born in Berlin in 1892, was less persuaded by authenticity. He was enchanted by the redeeming wonders of the everyday, those moments that could seize life back for us, if only fleetingly, in a glance; a shop window, a word.
All knew of one another, even though (with the exception of Cassirer and Heidegger, for a short time) none were friends... (MORE - details)