In the critical decade 1919-1929 of post-war economic collapse and the rise of Nazism in Germany, four pioneering figures of philosophical skepticism catalyze global thinking with their ideas. Wolfram Eilenberger presents the life and work of the “wizards” of German philosophy Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Cassirer, each of whom offered an innovative way of perceiving the world and human existence.

War

In 1929, the Wittgenstein crown, a student of Bertrand Russell, will defend his dissertation at Cambridge: a radical work of analytical thought called Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Ten years ago, the philosopher faced violence and death in the trenches. His experiences influenced the writing of the Treatise. There he demonstrates that philosophical questions are meaningless. The question of whether the world exists at all is a false question. That is why he writes: “Inevitably there is something that is not said in words. This shows is a secret item. The secret is not what the world is like, but what it is.” The multifaceted and restless Wittgenstein renounces his family inheritance (as the offspring of billionaires) by choosing the profession of a teacher in provincial Austrian schools. He mistreats his students, quits teaching and returns to Vienna. There he applies his philosophy to the architecture of the Kudmangase mansion: a “tamed” version of the Treatise.

Heidegger, recently appointed professor at the University of Marburg, notes that the effects of the First World War traumatized his audience. The intensity of the military experience of his former soldiers and current students is time to find an outlet in the model of dynamic philosophy. Then he comprehends the concept of a special “being-being”: a person truly exists in this world, when, after intense concentration on his “I”, he manages to “self-reveal”. For him, even his relationship with the gifted student Hannah Arendt is understood as an intrusion of the Self into his edona-Being, a kind of ego-isolation (“selfishness”).

Berliner Benjamin, translator of Baudelaire, bohemian flâneur of Paris, acquires the profile of a “cult” innovative critic-philosopher. Using Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah-Torah) as his methodology, he seeks the divine spirit through human language, studying the philosophy of the scholastics of the Middle Ages, where the connection between human speech and the language of God is explored. In Capri, he falls in love with the Russian communist theater director Asia Latsis and participates in the artistic circles of the Moscow avant-garde of the 1920s. He commits suicide with morphine in the Pyrenees, under pressure from the Nazi stranglehold.

Cassirer, a German-Jewish professor of philosophy at the University of Hamburg, formulates the philosophy of culture through interdisciplinary knowledge in his major work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. By a strange coincidence, he finds in an unusual way of classifying the Warburg library (the place where he works) an internal organization that perfectly reflects his research. There are no established sciences and limited ranking of book titles. Fundamental work in chemistry sits directly next to others in alchemy, and research in ancient visceral science sits next to astrology and modern algebra. However, such a harmonious coexistence of books in people’s lives does not exist. The neighbor yells at the cashier’s wife, Tonya, to get out of Germany because Jews belong in Palestine. Thus, the philosopher will formulate his theory of totemistic regression in mythical thinking and constitution, since the primitive logic of the totem creates overly simplistic distinctions between social groups.

verbal fight

In 1929, during the famous philosophical conference in Davos, a strange verbal contest breaks out between the two speakers Heidegger and Cassirer. Cassirer encourages the public to deal with their existential anxieties through culture and creativity. On the contrary, Heidegger views culture as a fragile aspect of nature and invites viewers to plunge into the liberating beginning of their existence: into nothingness and agony!

In 1933, Heidegger, now a member of the National Socialist Party and rector of the University of Freiburg, will defend the only “German reality” which is the Führer. Much later, the “ecumenist” Cassirer, a Yale University professor in exile, wrote the book The Myth of the State.