Time of the Magicians
by Wolfram Eilenberger
Penguin Press, 2020

Writing about the “journey toward knowledge” is a hefty undertaking. Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians maps one juncture in that journey, as conjured by four heavy-hitting philosophers—Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Walter Benjamin. Spanning only one decade in Weimarian Germany, short sections hop between the lives of each thinker to show the parallel roads of their thought development.

Eilenberger offers syntheses for whatever may be your heuristic for the 1920s—Dadaism, Surrealism, Proust, the Weimer Republic. As Wittgenstein saw language as a running up against a cage, the intellectual pursuits of all four thinkers not only ran up against, but spilled into the parallel spheres of art, science, or politics. Cassirer explained that philosophy doesn’t monopolize interpretation, it’s one of many modes to facilitate progress toward Truth.

Eilenberger is less interested in personal backgrounds or historical context. Which is to say, again, that his scope is focused. He references context only to explain a philosopher’s thinking. Ludwig Wittgenstein may have the most compelling story among Eilenberger’s subjects: a man who wrote the notes for the Tractatus while on the frontlines; a man who came from extraordinary wealth only to give away that wealth and become a schoolteacher. Not that these details haven’t been explored elsewhere (notably, in Ray Monk’s biography), but the reader may want more from them. Heidegger and Arendt’s relationship is outlined in a similar way. There’s roughly equal space devoted to the solipsism of Heidegger’s Dasein, and the existential plurality of Arendt’s Dasein.

“Back to the facts!” was Edmond Husserl’s famous rallying cry for phenomenology, a study of consciousness. The movement’s goal was to reassess the Cartesian scientific method by creating new modes of experiential inquiry such as intentionality. Basically, Eilenberger’s subjects believed Descartes got it wrong. Wittgenstein called him an interloper. To be clear, their beliefs have nothing in common with today’s anti-truths—they simply wanted to return to and strengthen the reciprocity between ontology, or defining the nature of our being, and the science of explaining our natural world.

In a war-torn country confronting its constitutional—and existential—identity, it made sense to hit the reset button. And that began with the simple astonishment that humans are here, existing. Heidegger appealed to this boyish comportment through the idea of givenness, or the point at which an object meets our ability to sense it. Before we even apply significance to that meeting point, we must first acknowledge the pure fluidity between our disposition and the thing. We can’t know the true nature of things, only how they are presented to us—their givenness.

On our relationship between Being and object, each of Eilenberger’s subjects turned to some form of linguistic dialysis. Walter Benjamin sought to bridge humans and God through language. Languages carry different etymologies, and therefore, different totalities that define the user’s comportment toward the world. Underneath it all, Benjamin thought, there may be a unified linguistical system, or an underlying ‘true’ language—not too dissimilar to the word of God. Like the brutishness and chaos of a Hobbesian state of nature, Cassirer imagined a world lacking this comportment, or language, as indefinable by any sense of meaning.

Eilenberger has a knack for smoothing out the most complex of concepts. He often first quotes the philosophical text itself, and then simplifies to an aphoristic punch. Heidegger writes, “(Dasein is) ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it. But in that case, this is a constitutive state of Dasein’s Being and this implies that Dasein, in its Being, has a relationship which itself is one of being. And this means further that there in some way in which Dasein understands itself in its Being, and that to some degree it does so explicitly.” To which Eilenberger boils down to, “…each Dasein understands itself more or less expressly in its Being, this also means that this very understanding of Being cannot be taken for granted but has to be examined and possibly made explicit.”

The 1929 Davos lectures are written as the book’s climax. Eilenberger narrates the debates between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger like a boxing match, but where one can watch two fighters smack each other around, it’s a little harder to discern the weight behind Heidegger’s critique of Cassirer’s Kantian metaphysics: “Good questions. Body blows. Heidegger was now cornered. He needed to call upon Kant.”

No subject of Eilenberger’s saw their life’s work through: Being and Time was only a preparatory step for Dasein; Benjamin’s Arcades Project was never finished; the Tractatus was Wittgenstein’s only published work is in his lifetime. And the tragedies to befall Cassirer, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and Heidegger after 1929 are hardly foreshadowed. An epilogue very briefly (three pages) outlines what happens next. But we know that Walter Benjamin’s suicide and Ernst Cassirer’s exile were caused by the rise of the National Socialist Party. And Heidegger’s life work was reassessed because of his allegiance to the Nazi Party. Eilenberger packages this all, however, into a brief coda. It’s here where the reader may want Eilenberger’s focus to be less extreme. If only to show how the tendrils of their intellectual endeavors evolved through later generations—from the existentialism of the 1950s to the critical theory of today—perhaps we should have been given just a little more time.

—Kyle Sellers is an editor currently living in Brooklyn.