The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: A Review of “Time of the Magicians” by Wolfram Eilenberger

“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.”

Wolfram Eilenberger. Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy. New York: Penguin, 2020.

In January of 2022, former Trump White House speech writer Darren J. Beattie was forced to resign from his position on the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. The forced resignation was only the most recent of attacks Beattie had suffered after he was appointed as a speech writer for President Donald Trump. In the laundry list of accusations against Beattie, one of the strangest was that he wrote his 2016 Duke political science dissertation on the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

While in the United States, philosophy is, at best, viewed as the concern of a few eccentric professors and coffee shop autodidacts, Heidegger has enjoyed some small presence in popular discourse. He is, on one level, one of the most important continental philosophers of the twentieth century (or, in the view of philosopher Immanuel Levinas, the greatest philosopher), effecting poetics, linguistics, existentialism, and a host of other branches of philosophy. There is also the “other Heidegger,” who was briefly the rector of Freiburg University in the 1930s and who made several statements supportive of German National Socialism. These statements, coupled with seemingly nationalistic passages in his writing, have inspired the “Heidegger Controversy” or the debate among scholars over the degree to which Heidegger’s thought is influenced by Nazism. In the “l’affair Beattie,” it is this second Heidegger that the left-wing press attempted to link to the Trump speech writer.

However, in his recent work, German philosopher Wolfram Eilenberger principally focuses on Heidegger the radical, Avant Garde philosopher as opposed to Heidegger the Nazi. Moreover, Eilenberger places Heidegger among a host of other philosophers who likewise helped to shift the direction of continental philosopher and who, like Heidegger, were very much caught up in the turbulent times of the early twentieth century.

Along with Heidegger, one of the largest presences in The Time of the Magicians is Ludwig Wittgenstein. The son of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish industrial family, Wittgenstein abandoned his inheritance for the study of philosophy and an attempt to live a simple, Christian life (Wittgenstein had converted to Christianity after reading the works of Leo Tolstoy). Wittgenstein studied philosophy at Cambridge University under the famous atheist British analytic philosopher, Bertrand Russell. While at Cambridge, Wittgenstein rubbed shoulders with such famous figures as John Maynard Keynes, one of the fathers of the democratic socialist state, as well as G.E. Moore, who, like Russell, was one of the most important analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. Wittgenstein stood out for his mercurial temperament but was beloved enough among his fellow Cambridge philosophers that he was made an honorary member of the secretive “Apostles” society. Unconventionally, Wittgenstein submitted his book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus for his dissertation, which he defended on June 18, 1929. Wittgenstein’s eccentric genius was on full display that day. After the examination, Wittgenstein approached Russell and Moore, the evaluators, and told them, “Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it.” The dissertation was approved.

Wittgenstein had, like many of his generation, previously served in the Great War—indeed Wittgenstein had served in the Austrian army as a corporal and had been taken prisoner by the Italians. Wittgenstein returned to an Austria not unlike contemporary America. Inflation was soaring, there was a tremendous sense of defeatism as the Habsburg Empire collapsed, and there was a sense of a new era on the horizon. Wittgenstein himself was burdened with a tremendous sense of defeatism and lack of purpose. Wittgenstein’ family also was marked by tragedy, as three of his brothers had committed suicide by 1918.

While others of the first of many “Lost Generations,” turned to politics, jazz, or drinking, Wittgenstein turned to philosophy for solace. Wittgenstein famously argued that the world of language and the facts that language presents must be left to science. However, the good or moral life is something ineffable, and it must be shown through real action as opposed to spoken about. This desire to live radically influenced Wittgenstein’s decision to forsake his family’s fortune and live the life of a simple country schoolteacher in rural Austria. For Wittgenstein, philosophy would ultimately lead to a life of true freedom and happiness and the ability to live properly with other humans.

Time of the Magicians also tells the story of Martin Heidegger, a cradle Catholic, who would later abandon his faith for various forms of Protestantism, agnosticism, atheism, and what could be called (with loud protest from Heidegger scholars, no doubt) some form of Romantic “neopaganism.” During the same year as Wittgenstein’s dissertation defense, Heidegger gave a series of prestigious lectures at Davos. Heidegger was riding on the success of Being and Time, which soon became recognized as one of the most important works in the history of Western philosophy.

Like Wittgenstein, Heidegger served in the first World War (albeit as a weatherman), and, like Wittgenstein, Heidegger responded to the malaise following World War I by turning to philosophy (and, by doing so, revolutionizing the discipline). As a student of Edmund Husserl, Heidegger was schooled in phenomenology, focusing on the human subject’s place in the world as well as attempting describe phenomena presented to the human consciousness. For Heidegger, there was something “given” to human consciousness, but what this something is, was, for Heidegger, a riddle. This question of Being preoccupied Heidegger for the rest of his study.

Along with the question of Being, Heidegger pursued the question of Dasein or human “being there” in the world. Like Wittgenstein, Heidegger was burned with the difficulties of his own existence. His wife was unfaithful to him, and, in fact, became pregnant by her lover Friedel Caesar—Heidegger himself would later raise the child with his wife Elfride. Like Wittgenstein, Heidegger was simultaneously praised by academics while feeling separated from the common man by an abyss. Heidegger further felt burdened by the task of escaping for the scientism and positivism of German philosopher and recultivating an encounter with being through philosophy, art, and poetry. Only through this encounter with Being (including one’s own), could a person live an authentic existence.

There are two other key figures in Time of the Magicians, the German-Jewish scholar and later émigré to America Ernst Cassirer as well as Walter Benjamin, one of the fathers of the Frankfurt School, who tragically ended his life on the run from the Nazis. In addition to his scholarship, Cassirer clashed with Heidegger at Davos over the authentic meaning of the German philosophical tradition. Cassirer represented the “liberal” (neo-)Kantian German philosophy as truly flowering in the Enlightenment, paving the way for freedom, human rights, and a sense of shared humanity. Heidegger, as he would develop throughout his work, viewed Dasein as being rooted in a place and among a people with a destiny and shared culture.

It is this clash that is one of the centers of Time of the Magicians. It is also this clash that is at the center of a conservative vision of a humanity as a united patchwork of tribes and cultures vs. the liberal globalist vision of the (consumer-worker) citizen of the world. It is necessary for conservatives to pursue a politics of authenticity that embraces the importance of cultural identity while shunning the extremism into which Heidegger temporary failed. For it is only in recognizing the importance of culture, place, and identity that a truly global community can be forged.

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