Time of the Magicians
Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger and the Great Decade of Philosophy
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
AN ECONOMIST, GUARDIAN AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR
A gripping narrative of the intertwined lives of the four philosophers whose ideas reshaped the twentieth century
The year is 1919. Walter Benjamin flees his overbearing father to scrape a living as a critic. Ludwig Wittgenstein, scion of one of Europe's wealthiest families, signs away his inheritance, seeking spiritual clarity. Martin Heidegger renounces his faith and aligns his fortunes with Husserl's phenomenological school. Ernst Cassirer sketches a new schema of human culture on a cramped Berlin tram. The stage is set for a great intellectual drama. Over the next decade the lives and thought of this quartet will converge and intertwine, as each gains world-historical significance, between them remaking philosophy.
Time of the Magicians brings to life this miraculous burst of intellectual creativity, unparalleled in philosophy's history, and with it an entire era, from post-war exuberance to economic crisis and the emergence of National Socialism. With great art, Wolfram Eilenberger traces the paths of these titanic figures through the tumult. He captures their personalities as well as their achievements, and illuminates with singular clarity the philosophies each embodied as well as espoused. It becomes an intellectual adventure story, a captivating journey through the greatest revolution in Western thought told through its four protagonists, each with their own penetrating gaze and answer to the question which has animated philosophy from the very beginning: What are we?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Four intellectuals hash out puzzling new worldviews after WWI in this spirited yet murky historical study. Philosophie Magazin editor Eilenberger (Finnen von Sinnen) follows the evolving thoughts of four German-speaking philosophers through the 1920s: Ludwig Wittgenstein, who dissected the meaning of language (or lack thereof); Walter Benjamin, a philosophy PhD and journalist who theorized about art, technology, and urban experience; Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time probed the impact of death and anxiety on the soul; and Heidegger's antagonist, Ernst Cassirer, who philosophized about symbols and metaphysics. The author weaves in colorful biographical sketches Wittgenstein gave away a fortune and became a schoolteacher; Benjamin dissipated himself in affairs, drugs, and misfired writing projects but primarily focuses on common themes in their writings, such as the tension between freedom and determinism, and the drive to escape convention and lead an authentic life. In Whiteside's serviceable translation, Eilenberger gamely tries to elucidate his subjects' famously knotty ideas, but the results "Man is the only creature that is open to the experience of nothingness at the ground of being," he writes, paraphrasing Heidegger often confirm just how difficult to parse those concepts were. Still, this comprehensive and well-informed treatment deserves credit for bringing four major philosophers down from the heights of abstraction.
