Book review - High minds, low politics: The lives of four revolutionary thinkers

By Dilip -

In spring 1929, a group of distinguished scholars convened at the Grand Hôtel Belvédère in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, a place that had already acquired literary fame through Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, for a grand philosophy congress. At the meeting, two of the most influential thinkers of the time, Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer, engaged in a philosophical disputation that became legendary. Cassirer, the mild-mannered professor from Hamburg who embodied a cultivated, cosmopolitan, liberal bourgeoisie, represented the philosophical establishment. The significantly younger newcomer, Martin Heidegger, dark haired and tanned from his days on the pistes, was determined to rock this establishment. It was a conflict of opposing personalities and philosophies. 

TIME OF THE MAGICIANS: The invention of modern thought, 1919–29. 

By Wolfram Eilenberger; Reviewed by David Motadel

Whereas Cassirer, a world-leading authority on Kant, then at the zenith of his career, stood for the enlightenment ideals of human reason, tolerance and civilizational progress, Heidegger, who two years earlier had published his celebrated existentialist magnum opus Being and Time, represented national parochialism, romantic mysticism and an anti-liberal vision of modernity. Their debate on the nature of the human condition in the hotel’s grand hall, attended by a large audience that included Rudolf Carnap, Emmanuel Levinas and Norbert Elias, highlighted these two diametrically opposing worldviews. It was a mirror of the interwar zeitgeist.

The encounter at Davos forms the framework of Wolfram Eilenberger’s magnificent Time of the Magicians, which traces the paths of four towering German-speaking thinkers who revolutionized philosophy, over the decade between the Great War and the Great Depression: Cassirer, Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin. Eilenberger sees the 1920s as the last great moment of German philosophy. His four protagonists each profoundly shaped one of the major schools of thought that came to dominate our philosophical world: hermeneutics, existentialism, analytical philosophy and critical theory. It was the radical transformations of the First World War, which shook old political, cultural and moral certainties about humanity’s progress, and the fundamental upheavals that followed, that brought about the major intellectual revolutions of those years….

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/time-of-the-magicians-wolfram-eilenberger-book-review/

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