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The story, told with free-wheeling gusto, of four German thinkers – Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer and Ludwig Wittgenstein – before the dark decade of the 1930s
Wolfram Eilenberger’s new book offers us a group portrait of four brilliant young philosophers in the aftermath of the first world war. His awesome foursome is made up of Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer and – the only one who actually saw military action – Ludwig Wittgenstein. They make a pretty bizarre team: they were all conceptual innovators, but they innovated in different directions, and ended up with hardly anything in common apart from the fact that their mother tongue was German. If they had all ever met over Kaffee und Kuchen – which they certainly did not – they would probably 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 struck lucky, it would seem, and Eilenberger hails them as the “magicians” who made the 1920s into “philosophy’s great decade”.
Regardless of what may have happened in their lifetimes, Eilenberger’s magicians have since drifted far apart. Wittgenstein and Heidegger are now world-famous as patrons of two philosophical tribes – the sober linguistic analysts and the wild deconstructive existentialists – who are barely on speaking terms; Benjamin, the mystical Marxist, has a following but a cultish one; and as for poor old Cassirer, he seems to have no followers at all. Continue reading...