Time of the Magicians

Time of the Magicians Plot Summary

Introduction

In the tumultuous years following World War I, as Europe lay shattered and uncertain, four brilliant minds embarked on intellectual journeys that would forever change how we understand ourselves and our world. These philosophers—Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Walter Benjamin—navigated through the ruins of old certainties, seeking new foundations for human thought. Their quest wasn't merely academic; it was existential, reflecting the profound disorientation of a civilization that had lost its bearings. What makes their story so compelling is how their philosophical battles mirrored the larger cultural and political struggles of their time. As democracy faced challenges from extremist ideologies, these thinkers grappled with fundamental questions: What is the meaning of human existence? Can reason save us, or must we embrace more primal forces? How should we relate to language, history, and technology? Their answers would shape not just philosophy but the very self-understanding of modern humanity. This intellectual drama offers invaluable insights for anyone seeking to understand how ideas shape history, and how moments of crisis can produce revolutionary thinking that resonates for generations.

Chapter 1: Post-War Intellectual Crisis: The Collapse of Certainty (1919)

The aftermath of World War I left Europe not only physically devastated but intellectually shattered. As the guns fell silent in 1919, a profound crisis of meaning emerged among European thinkers. The war had exposed the fragility of Western civilization and undermined faith in progress, reason, and the Enlightenment values that had guided intellectual life for generations. The old certainties—that human history was moving steadily toward greater rationality and moral improvement—lay in ruins alongside the battlefields of France and Belgium. Into this atmosphere of disillusionment stepped four remarkable philosophers, each responding to the collapse of certainty in distinctive ways. Ludwig Wittgenstein returned from war as a prisoner, profoundly transformed by his experiences. Having completed his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus during the conflict, he now gave away his vast family fortune and sought to redefine the boundaries of meaningful language. Martin Heidegger, teaching at Freiburg University, abandoned his Catholic faith and began developing a philosophy centered on authentic human existence in the face of nothingness. Walter Benjamin, struggling to find his place in academia, explored how criticism could transform both the critic and the object criticized, seeking redemptive moments in a fallen world. Ernst Cassirer took perhaps the most traditional path, working to preserve rational discourse by developing a comprehensive theory of symbolic forms. As a neo-Kantian Jewish scholar, he represented the humanistic tradition that was increasingly under attack in post-war Germany. While the others questioned the foundations of Western thought, Cassirer sought to rebuild them on more secure ground, understanding human culture as a progressive development of symbolic systems that allowed greater freedom and self-determination. What united these diverse thinkers was their recognition that philosophy could not continue as before. The war had revealed the bankruptcy of conventional thinking, forcing a radical reconsideration of humanity's place in the world. Each philosopher, in his way, was attempting to answer the same urgent question: How could meaningful thought and action be possible in a world where traditional certainties had crumbled? Their divergent answers would shape not only the course of philosophy but the cultural and political landscape of interwar Europe.

Chapter 2: Language and Reality: Competing Frameworks Emerge (1919-1921)

By 1919, the question of language had become central to philosophical inquiry. The old certainties about how words connected to reality seemed increasingly dubious in the post-war intellectual landscape. Each of our four thinkers developed distinctive approaches to language that would shape their subsequent work and influence generations to come. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, completed during his time as a prisoner of war and published in 1921, attempted to draw a boundary between what could be meaningfully said and what could only be shown. His famous conclusion—"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"—established limits to philosophical discourse that challenged centuries of metaphysical speculation. For Wittgenstein, the limits of language were the limits of the world itself, and philosophy's task was to clarify these boundaries rather than transgress them with meaningless assertions about the ineffable. Heidegger was developing his own approach to language in his early Freiburg lectures. Rather than seeing language as merely representing reality, he began exploring how language constitutes our very experience of the world. In his 1919 lecture "The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview," Heidegger posed the seemingly simple question "Is there something?" to demonstrate how even our most basic inquiries reveal our embeddedness in a meaningful world. This marked the beginning of his lifelong investigation into Being (Sein) and human existence (Dasein). Benjamin approached language from yet another angle, developing a theory of language as fundamentally creative rather than merely descriptive. In his 1921 essay "The Task of the Translator," he argued that translation was not simply about conveying information but about revealing the "pure language" that underlies all particular languages. For Benjamin, this pure language was nothing less than the language of God, in which names perfectly correspond to the essence of things. Translation, like criticism, was a way of approaching this divine language. Cassirer, meanwhile, was formulating his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, which understood human culture as a network of symbolic systems—language, myth, religion, art, science—through which we give meaning to experience. Unlike the others, Cassirer did not seek a single "true" language beneath appearances but embraced the plurality of symbolic forms as the richness of human culture. His approach maintained faith in human reason while acknowledging its diverse manifestations. These competing frameworks for understanding language and reality reflected deeper disagreements about the human condition itself. Was language a picture of facts (Wittgenstein), a disclosure of Being (Heidegger), a glimpse of divine naming (Benjamin), or a diverse array of cultural symbols (Cassirer)? These questions were not merely academic but reflected fundamental choices about how to respond to modernity's crisis of meaning.

Chapter 3: Cultural Battlegrounds: Visions of Human Existence (1922-1923)

The years 1922-1923 witnessed not only Germany's devastating hyperinflation but also an intensification of intellectual conflicts over the nature of human existence. As the Weimar Republic teetered on the brink of collapse, with the German mark becoming virtually worthless and political extremism gaining ground, philosophical debates took on urgent political dimensions. These were not abstract discussions but attempts to diagnose and respond to a civilization in crisis. Heidegger, now teaching in Marburg, was developing his concept of "authentic existence" in opposition to the "fallen" everyday world. His lectures electrified students with their radical vision of human freedom achieved through confronting one's own mortality and groundlessness. For Heidegger, modern society represented a flight from authentic being into the comfortable anonymity of "das Man" (the "they" or "one")—a realm of idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity where genuine questions about existence were avoided. His philosophy offered a stark choice between conformity and a courageous embrace of one's finite freedom. Cassirer took a dramatically different approach. Working in Hamburg and deeply influenced by the Warburg Library's collection of cultural artifacts, he developed a philosophy that emphasized the continuity and plurality of cultural forms. Rather than seeing modern society as fallen or inauthentic, Cassirer traced the evolution of symbolic forms from myth to science, arguing that human freedom increases through this development. His 1923 essay "The Form of the Concept in Mythical Thinking" showed how even primitive myth contained its own rational structure, suggesting that human culture progresses not by radical breaks but through gradual transformation. Benjamin, meanwhile, was struggling to establish himself academically while developing a profound critique of bourgeois culture. His 1923 essay "Goethe's Elective Affinities" analyzed the institution of marriage as a cipher for the contradictions of bourgeois society itself. For Benjamin, true freedom required a "leap of salvation" beyond the false alternatives of bourgeois life—a quasi-religious decision rather than a rational choice. His rejection of his habilitation thesis by Frankfurt University that same year confirmed his outsider status in the academic world. Wittgenstein had taken his own leap, abandoning philosophy to become a village schoolteacher in rural Austria. Yet even as he taught elementary mathematics to children, he remained tormented by isolation and depression. The publication of his Tractatus in 1922 brought little satisfaction, as most readers misunderstood its ethical purpose. For Wittgenstein, the book's aim was not to advance logical analysis but to show the limits of what could be said, thereby freeing readers to confront the truly important questions of life. These competing visions of human existence—Heidegger's authenticity, Cassirer's cultural continuity, Benjamin's messianic leap, and Wittgenstein's ethical silence—represented fundamentally different responses to the crisis of modernity. Their philosophical disagreements reflected deeper political and cultural divides that would soon tear Europe apart.

Chapter 4: Personal Struggles as Philosophical Crucibles (1923-1925)

The period from 1923 to 1925 revealed how deeply personal circumstances shaped these philosophers' universal inquiries. Far from being detached intellectual exercises, their philosophical positions emerged from and responded to their lived experiences, demonstrating the inseparability of thought and life that all four, in different ways, affirmed in their work. Wittgenstein, isolated in the Austrian village of Puchberg, struggled with profound loneliness and depression. His experiment in rural schoolteaching, initially undertaken with idealistic fervor, was proving difficult and frustrating. When the young Cambridge mathematician Frank Ramsey visited to discuss the Tractatus, Wittgenstein confessed he could "never write another book" and was regarded by colleagues as "a little mad." His correspondence with John Maynard Keynes revealed his ambivalence about returning to Cambridge—he longed for meaningful connection but feared disappointment and "disgust." These personal struggles reflected the very limits of language and communication that his philosophy had identified. Heidegger's life took a dramatic turn when he began an affair with his 18-year-old Jewish student Hannah Arendt in 1924. Their passionate relationship challenged Heidegger's own philosophy of authentic existence. "The fact of the Other's presence breaking into our life is more than our disposition can cope with," he wrote to Arendt. This encounter with love forced Heidegger to confront the tension between his philosophy of solitary authenticity and the transformative power of human connection. Meanwhile, his lectures were attracting increasing attention, with students like Hans-Georg Gadamer and Karl Löwith recognizing that something revolutionary was happening in his classroom. Cassirer experienced a different kind of personal encounter when he visited Aby Warburg at the Bellevue Sanatorium in 1924. Warburg, the founder of the library that had become central to Cassirer's work, was recovering from severe mental illness. Their meeting—a conversation between two brilliant minds about Renaissance symbolism, conducted while Warburg periodically suffered delusions—demonstrated the thin line between rational inquiry and psychological fragmentation that concerned all these thinkers. For Cassirer, this encounter reinforced his commitment to reason as a fragile but essential human achievement. Benjamin continued to struggle financially and professionally, moving between Berlin, Vienna, and Frankfurt while pursuing elusive academic positions. His marriage to Dora was dissolving, and he was developing relationships with women like Jula Cohn that mirrored the complex romantic entanglements he analyzed in Goethe's work. For Benjamin, these personal complications were not distractions from philosophy but its very substance—the lived experience of contradiction and ambiguity that he sought to illuminate through his critical method. What united these diverse experiences was the conviction that philosophy could not be separated from life itself. Whether through Wittgenstein's ascetic teaching, Heidegger's passionate affair, Cassirer's engagement with mental illness, or Benjamin's precarious existence, each philosopher embodied the questions they explored. Their personal struggles became universal inquiries into the meaning of human existence in a world where traditional certainties had collapsed.

Chapter 5: The Davos Showdown: Philosophy's Defining Confrontation (1929)

The decade's philosophical tensions culminated in March 1929 at the Davos University Conference in Switzerland. Here, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger engaged in a public debate that many witnesses recognized as a watershed moment in European thought. The formal topic—"What is Man?"—belied the fundamental clash of worldviews at stake. Cassirer, now 54 and at the height of his career, represented the humanistic tradition of neo-Kantianism with its faith in cultural progress and rational discourse. Heidegger, 39 and recently appointed to Husserl's chair at Freiburg, embodied a radical new approach that questioned the very foundations of Western philosophy. The contrast extended beyond ideas to personal style. Cassirer appeared in formal attire, speaking with measured elegance about human freedom achieved through cultural forms. Heidegger, dressed in a ski suit with his hair severely combed back, refused his assigned seat among the professors and mingled with students. When not debating, he spent his time skiing down the Alpine slopes with younger attendees, while Cassirer convalesced in his hotel room. The generational divide was palpable—most students strongly favored Heidegger's revolutionary approach. At the heart of their disagreement lay competing visions of human freedom. For Cassirer, freedom emerged gradually through the development of symbolic forms—language, myth, religion, art, science—that allowed humans to shape their world with increasing self-determination. For Heidegger, this cultural optimism masked a fundamental evasion of authentic existence. True freedom required confronting the anxiety of one's finite existence rather than seeking refuge in cultural achievements. When Cassirer extended his hand at the debate's conclusion, suggesting their differences might be reconciled, Heidegger's response was tellingly ambiguous. The Davos debate represented more than an academic disagreement. As Toni Cassirer observed, Heidegger's "tendency toward anti-Semitism was not unfamiliar to us." The philosophical clash anticipated the political conflicts that would soon engulf Europe. Cassirer's pluralistic humanism and Heidegger's radical authenticity offered competing responses to modernity's crisis—one embracing cultural continuity and diversity, the other seeking a revolutionary new beginning through confrontation with nothingness. The consequences would soon become painfully clear. Within four years, Cassirer would flee Nazi Germany while Heidegger became rector of Freiburg University under the Nazi regime, delivering his infamous rectoral address that attempted to align his philosophy with the "national awakening." Benjamin would escape to Paris before ultimately taking his life while fleeing the Nazis in 1940. Wittgenstein, returning to Cambridge, would develop his later philosophy in relative isolation from these political storms. The Davos debate thus stands as both philosophical watershed and historical harbinger—a moment when the intellectual fault lines of European culture revealed the deeper crisis that would soon erupt in violence and genocide.

Chapter 6: Beyond Academia: Ideas Reshaping Weimar Society

The philosophical debates of 1919-1929 extended far beyond university lecture halls to shape the broader cultural and political landscape of Weimar Germany. These thinkers were responding not only to abstract problems but to the concrete crises of their society—hyperinflation, political violence, cultural fragmentation, and technological transformation. Their ideas circulated through journals, newspapers, and intellectual circles, influencing how Germans understood their tumultuous present and imagined possible futures. Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms offered a defense of liberal democracy at a time when many intellectuals were abandoning it. As president of the University of Hamburg in 1929-1930, he became one of the few Jewish academics to hold such a position, embodying the pluralistic values he advocated. His 1928 essay on the philosophy of the Enlightenment explicitly connected philosophical rationality to political freedom, arguing that cultural progress required both. For Cassirer, the Weimar Republic represented an imperfect but valuable attempt to institutionalize human freedom through constitutional governance and cultural openness. Heidegger's thought, by contrast, resonated with anti-democratic currents in German society. His critique of modern technology and "inauthentic" mass existence appealed to conservatives who rejected liberal modernity. Though not explicitly political during this period, Heidegger's philosophy contained elements that would later align with National Socialism—the emphasis on decisive action over rational deliberation, the glorification of rootedness in native soil, and the call for a radical new beginning beyond liberal democracy. His students carried these ideas into various cultural and political spheres, extending their influence beyond philosophy. Benjamin occupied a different position, developing a Marxist critique of capitalism while maintaining his interest in Jewish mysticism. His essays on urban experience captured the disorienting effects of modern technology and consumer culture. In works like "One-Way Street" (1928), Benjamin analyzed how advertising, film, and architecture were transforming human consciousness. Neither liberal like Cassirer nor conservative like Heidegger, Benjamin sought revolutionary transformation through a unique blend of Marxism and messianism that influenced leftist cultural criticism. Wittgenstein remained distant from explicit political engagement, yet his philosophical approach—stripping away conceptual confusions to reveal the limits of language—reflected broader cultural trends toward clarity and functionality seen in Bauhaus architecture and New Objectivity art. His ascetic lifestyle and rejection of academic philosophy embodied a critique of bourgeois values that resonated with various counter-cultural movements, even as his actual work remained little understood outside specialized circles. As the decade ended and economic crisis returned with the 1929 Wall Street Crash, these philosophical positions would be tested against harsh political realities. The intellectual frameworks developed during this remarkable decade would shape how Europeans interpreted the catastrophes that followed—the rise of fascism, World War II, and the Holocaust. They continue to influence how we understand the relationship between thought and action, reason and myth, tradition and revolution in our own uncertain times.

Summary

The intellectual drama of these four philosophers reveals how the crisis of modernity manifested as a profound struggle over the meaning of human existence. At its core, this was a battle between competing visions: Cassirer's defense of progressive rationality and cultural symbolism against Heidegger's insistence on confronting human finitude and authenticity; Benjamin's revolutionary messianism against Wittgenstein's therapeutic return to ordinary language. These philosophical positions weren't merely abstract theories but responses to modernity's fundamental tensions—between reason and myth, technology and tradition, universal values and particular identities—that erupted catastrophically in totalitarianism and world war. Their story offers crucial insights for our own era of democratic fragility, technological disruption, and cultural polarization. First, it reminds us that ideas matter profoundly in shaping historical outcomes; philosophical debates can prefigure political developments, as Heidegger's triumph over Cassirer at Davos foreshadowed liberalism's collapse in Germany. Second, it warns against the seduction of radical simplifications that promise to resolve complex problems through revolutionary breaks with the past. Finally, it suggests that navigating our own crisis requires neither blind faith in technological progress nor nostalgic retreat into mythic authenticity, but rather critical engagement with both the liberating and destructive aspects of modernity. The challenge remains finding ways to preserve human freedom and dignity within the disenchanted world these thinkers struggled to comprehend.

About Author

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Wolfram Eilenberger

Wolfram Eilenberger, born 1972, is an internationally bestselling, award-winning writer and philosopher. In 2018, he published Time of the Magicians (Zeit der Zauberer) in Germany. The book instantly became a bestseller there, as well as in countries such as Italy, and Spain. It has been translated into thirty languages. In November 2018 it won the prestigious Bayerischer Buchpreis, in 2019 the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France. It was also shortlisted for several other awards, both nationally and internationally. The book also received wide critical acclaim in the US and UK. Eilenberger has been a prolific contributor of essays and articles to many publications, among them Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, and El País. He has taught at the University of Toronto, Indiana University Bloomington, the ETH Zürich and Berlin University of the Arts.Eilenberger is one of the program directors of the phil.cologne, Germany's biggest philosophy festival, and moderator of the TV program Sternstunde Philosophie (Swiss Television). He also holds a DFB football trainer’s licence and appears regularly as a soccer expert on German TV and radio.He is married to the linguist and former Finnish national basketball player Pia Päiviö, and he lives with his family in Berlin.

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