This is popular philosophical biography at its finest—a group portrait of four of the twentieth century’s most profound Germanic philosophers. Eilenberger weaves back and forth between the four men, comparing and contrasting their lives, their struggles, their thoughts on metaphysics, and their place in the Weimar Republic, Austria, and the world of the 1920s at large.
Eilenberger begins with Ludwig von Wittgenstein, “The Tractatus is a therapeutic contribution to the question of what one can meaningfully talk about as a human being and what one cannot.” As Wittgenstein, himself, concludes his book, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” Wittgenstein was not the most easy man to deal with, either personally or philosophically. Initially, he also had a high idea of the Tractatus. In fact, after he finished writing the book, he thought that it had solved all of philosophy’s problems. Nonetheless, he realized that it would be hard to comprehend, even for great minds like Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. “This book will perhaps be understood only by those who have already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts.” He is even more explicit in the forward to the Tractatus, but also states the essential limits inherent in all philosophy. “I am therefore of the opinion that the problems have in essentials been finally solved. And if I am not mistaken in this, then the value of this work secondly consists in showing how little has been done when this problem has been solved.” Trying to explain more to his publisher, Wittgenstein continues that the “meaning of the book is an ethical one: the present one, and everything that I have not written. And that second part, [the part not written,] is the important one. The ethical is delimited by my book so to speak.”
Wittgenstein clarifies what he feels is the difference between science and philosophy, as well as the limits of both. “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.” Wittgenstein remains enigmatically esoteric to the last, “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions, then he sees the world rightly.” Eilenberger explains Wittgenstein’s thoughts at the time. “The conviction that language, out of its internal logic, bears within itself at every stage and every state of culture the forces needed to heal those very misunderstandings and misinterpretations that language itself constantly provokes and creates was already the foundation of Wittgenstein’s therapeutic program in the Tractatus.”
After returning to Cambridge in 1929 and debating with Frank Ramsey and Piero Sraffa daily, Wittgenstein would largely repudiated his whole masterwork. “I used to believe that there was the everyday language in which we all speak normally and a primary language that expresses what we really know, namely phenomena…. Now I would like to explain why I no longer maintain that view. I believe that in essence we only have one language and that is ordinary language. We do not need to find a new language or construct a set of symbols, rather everyday language is already the language, provided that we can liberate it from the obscurities that lie within it. Our language is already completely in order if only we are clear about what it symbolizes. Other languages than the ordinary ones are also valuable… for example artificial symbolism is useful in the depiction of the processes of deduction…. But as soon as one sets about considering real states of affairs, one sees that this symbolism is at a disadvantage compared to our real language. Of course it is quite wrong to talk about a subject-predicate form. In reality, there is not one, but very many.”
Much of Eilenberger’s book builds up to the famous 1929 debate at Davos between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. Eilenberger builds it as a clashing of two worlds. And philosophically speaking, it was the staid and dull Neo-Kantism of Cassirer being challenged and usurped by a full frontal phenomenological attack by Heidegger, which even paid no respect to his friendly predecessors like Edmund Husserl, Heidegger’s former mentor.
But first, Cassirer’s philosophy, “According to Cassirer, the human being is above all a sign-using and sign-making creature—an animal symbolicum…. We give ourselves and our world meaning, support, and orientation through the use of signs… symbolic forms in Cassirer’s terminology—those of myth, art, mathematics, or music. These symbols, be they linguistic, pictorial, acoustic, or gestural, are never self-explanatory; they need interpretation by other human beings. The process by which signs are placed into the world, interpreted, and augmented by others is the process of culture, and it the ability to use signs that enables human beings to ask metaphysical questions.” Cassirer writes, “If all culture is manifested in the creation of specific image-worlds, of specific symbolic forms, the aim of philosophy is not to go behind all these creations, but rather to understand and elucidate their basic formative principle.” Eilenberger expands, “Cassirer sees philosophy more as one innovative voice among many, and one with the function of connecting different disciplines…. One of philosophy’s essential tasks lay in identifying, beyond different disciplines, a common core that runs from one era to the next…. This culture is a continuous process of symbolically guided orientation.”
Heidegger was a protege of Husserl. Heidegger also “stresses the importance of the medium of language in human existence. He sees the actual foundation for humanity’s metaphysical essence as lying not in a distributed system of signs, however, but in a distinctly individual feeling—anxiety. More precisely, the anxiety that grips individuals when they become fully aware that their existence is essentially finite.” The human, gripped with that inescapable fact, then starts “working toward a goal that Heidegger calls authenticity.” According to Heidegger, “it is the role of philosophy to keep human beings open to the true abysses of their anxiety and thus, in an authentic sense, to liberate them.” Eilenberger explains further, “For human Dasein, in the end, there is only one fact that is truly unavoidable and at the same time always certain: the approach of death, which accompanies us as a possibility at all times…. The essential characteristic of Heideggerian “Dasein” is the fact that it is not and cannot ever be plural. “Dasein” is always only something individual, discrete, or, as he puts it, “in each case mine” (Jemeiniges).” Eilenberger stresses that Heidegger’s metaphysics was profoundly a “metaphysics of experience, the experience of Dasein, finite and aware of the fact…. What underlies our metaphysical questioning and hence metaphysics itself is not a foundation but an abyss…. Only the gaze of the abyss produces authenticity.”
Eilenberger writes of Walter Benjamin, “His worldview is profoundly symbolic: for him each person, each artwork, each object is a sign to be deciphered. And each sign exists in dynamic interrelation with every other sign. And the truth-oriented interpretation of such a sign is directed precisely at demonstrating and intellectually elaborating its integration within the great, constantly changing ensemble of signs: philosophy…. The most deviant statements, objects, and individuals, which were for that reason often ignored, contained the whole of society in microcosm…. Free human beings who thirst for knowledge must with every fiber of their being “open themselves up to remote extremes” and cannot “consider themselves successful” in their lives until they have examined, walked, or at least tried out all extremes of possibility.” Benjamin, unlike the other three philosophers, was never an academic. He was best known as a critic. But a very unique kind of critic, practicing what he saw as the only true kind of criticism. Eilenberger writes of Benjamin’s views, “The activity of criticism—if understood correctly—leaves neither the criticizing subject (the art critic) nor the criticized object (the work of art) unaffected. Both are transformed in the process—ideally toward truth…. The function of art criticism lies “not in judgment, but on the one hand [in] completion, consummation, systematization.” Second is the elevation of the art critic to the status of partial creator of the work of art. Third is the recognition that an artwork is fundamentally unstable, and changes and rejuvenates its nature and possible significance across history. Fourth, following from the thesis of the self-reference of all things, is the understanding that any criticism of a work of art can also be seen as the artwork’s criticism of itself. Critics and artists, correctly understood, thus exist on the same creative plane.” Benjamin expounds, “Thus, criticism is, as it were, an experiment on the artwork, one through which the latter’s own reflection is awakened, through which it is brought to consciousness and to knowledge of itself…. Insofar as criticism is knowledge of the work of art, it is as its self-knowledge; insofar as it judges the artwork, this occurs in the latter’s self-judgement.”
Benjamin also paid the bills through translation. Similarly to criticism, he felt, “To grasp the genuine relationship between an original and a translation requires an investigation analogous to the argumentation by which a critique of cognition would have to prove the impossibility of an image theory…. No translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original.” Benjamin spent many years painstakingly translating Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Benjamin posited, “Can we say that all lives, works, and deeds that matter were never anything but the undisturbed unfolding of the most banal, most fleeting, most sentimental, weakest hour in the life of the one to whom they pertain?”
For Benjamin, to get to metaphysical truth one needs to dig deep into language and meaning. “Whereas all individual elements of foreign language—words, sentences, associations—are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions. This law is one of the fundamental principles in the philosophy of language, but to understand it precisely we must draw a distinction, in the concept of “intention,” between what is meant and the way of meaning it.” Eilenberger explains, “For Benjamin this ideal language is that of the Old Testament God… what he called “pure language,” or indeed “true language,” was the language of God.”
Davos, Switzerland: March 26, 1929. The debate at last begins: Heidegger opens,”What remains of philosophy if the totality of beings has been divided between the sciences? All that remains is knowledge of science, not of entity…. Kant sought not to provide a theory of the natural sciences, but to demonstrate the problems of metaphysics, and indeed of ontology.” Cassirer rebuts, “If we consider Kant’s work overall, major problems arise. One problem is that of freedom. That has always been the actual main problem for me: How is freedom possible? Kant says the question cannot be grasped, we grasp only the ungraspability of freedom…. The categorical imperative must be constituted in such a way that the law thus established applies not only to human beings but to all rational beings…. Morality as such leads beyond the world of phenomena. That is the decisive metaphysical aspect, that the breakthrough occurs at this point…. Heidegger has stressed that our cognitive power is finite. It is relative and it is bound. But then the questions arises: How does such a finite being come by knowledge, reason, truth?… How does this finite being reach a definition of objects which are not as such bound to finitude?… Does Heidegger want to give up all of this objectivity? Does he want to withdraw entirely to this finite being. Or if not, where does he see the breakthrough into that sphere as taking place?” Heidegger responds, “Cassirer, then, wants to show that finitude becomes transcendent in the ethical writings. There is something in the categorical imperative that goes beyond finite being. But precisely the concept of the imperative as such shows the inner reference to a finite being…. This transcendence, too, still remains within creation and finitude…. Now to Cassirer’s question about universally valid external truths. If I say: Truth is relative to Dasein, that proposition… is a metaphysical one: truth can only be as truth and as truth has only one meaning, if Dasein exists. If Dasein does not exist, there is no truth, there is nothing at all. But it is only with the existence of something like Dasein that truth enters Dasein itself…. An inner transcendence lies within the essence of time; that time is not only what makes transcendence possible, but that time itself has a horizontal character; that in future, recollected behavior I always have at the same time a horizon of present, futurity, and been-ness in general; that a… definition of time is found here, within which something like permanence of the substance is constituted for the very first time.” Cassirer again, “Philosophy must allow humans to become sufficiently free, to the extent that they can just become free. While it does that, I believe, it frees human beings—in a certain radical sense, to be sure—from anxiety as a mere disposition…. Freedom can properly be found only along the path of progressive liberation, which indeed is also an infinite process for him… I would like the sense, the goal, in fact the freeing, to be taken in this sense: ‘Anxiety throws the earthly from you.’ That is the position of idealism, to which I have always pledged myself.” Heidegger concludes, “Humans exist only in very few glimpses of the summit of their own possibility, but otherwise move in the midst of their entity…. The question of the essence of human beings… makes sense and can be justified only insofar as it derives its motivation from philosophy’s central set of problems, which leads human beings back beyond themselves and into the totality of beings in order to make manifest to them there, with all their freedom, the Nothingness of their Dasein. This Nothingness is not cause for pessimism and melancholy. Instead, it is the occasion for understanding that authentic activity happens only where there is opposition and that philosophy has the task of throwing human beings back, so to speak, into the harshness of their fate from the shallow aspect of human beings who use only the work of the spirit.”
Where did all these four great philosophers actually agree? Not in much, but in profound things. Eilenberger states, “A philosopher who had nothing to say about the role of language in knowledge and life in fact had actually nothing whatsoever to say. This was true for Cassirer, and if there was a conviction that Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Benjamin all embraced unreservedly and unconditionally at this stage (and every other stage) of their thought, it was this: The human form of life is one of speech. In this sense language is not one symbolic form among many, but the most important, and elemental, of all. It is the foundation of our understanding of the self and the world.” Benjamin, speaking of humanity through the ages, states, “At the height of their cultivation… [men] are subject to the forces that cultivation claims to have mastered, even if it may forever prove impotent to curb them.” Eilenberger expands, “Benjamin is thus expressing the suspicion, shared by Cassirer, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, that the modern subject’s emphasis on consciousness, precisely where it imagines itself to be entirely free and sovereign, masks only processes of repression and obscurity that, if they are not worked through, can only lead to misery, if not social destruction.” It all sounds a bit Freudian, which, of course, it is. Eilenberger reveals, “None of these thinkers ever wrote about ethics in the conventional sense, or even tried to do so.” Wittgenstein, at a meeting of the Moral Sciences Club of the Heretics in November 1929, perhaps sums it up best, “My tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever wanted to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind, which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.” All four of these men thought about the world a little askew from most. They were all geniuses in every sense of the word. But they were also all troubled (aside perhaps Cassirer). An anecdote that Hermine Wittgenstein told of her brother, Ludwig, perhaps, might sum them all up in some regard, “I told him during a long conversation that when I imagined him with his philosophically trained mind as a primary school teacher it felt to me as if someone were trying to use a precision instrument to open crates. Ludwig replied with an analogy that silenced me. He said, “You remind me of someone who is looking through a closed window and cannot explain to himself the strange movements of a passerby; he doesn’t know what sort of storm is raging outside and that this person is perhaps only with great effort keeping himself on his feet.””
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