Time of the Magicians Quotes

“Like large areas of analytic philosophy today, scholasticism, too, preferred to busy itself with the fetishization of fine distinctions on an apparently secure investigative foundation, rather than engaging in the adventure of providing a relevant contribution to the understanding of its own age, with its shifting foundational structures.”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“Being a philosopher is a way of leading one’s own life consciously, giving it pull, form, and direction through constant, probing questioning.”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“As Heidegger established quite clearly in 1922: “Philosophy is fundamentally atheistic.”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“In January 1930 he was to begin teaching a course at Cambridge. Shortly before he set off for the holidays he was asked by one of his colleagues there what title his course should be given on the lecture list.Wittgenstein thought for a while. Finally he replied: “‘Philosophy.’ What else?”2”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“Now a member of the National Socialist Party, he addressed the German student body in a newspaper article accompanying his appointment: “Let not theoretical principles and ‘ideas’ be the rules of your Being. The Führer himself and he alone is the German reality and its law today and in the future.”1”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“He spent the autumn of 1929 commuting back and forth between Berlin and Frankfurt. He met up with Adorno and his wife, Gretel Karplus, and Max Horkheimer and Lacis several times in a vacation home at the spa resort of Königstein. There Benjamin read to the group from the current sketches for the Arcades Project. Those weekends devoted to discussion in Königstein are now seen as the actual founding events of the so-called Frankfurt School, which would dominate German intellectual life for fifty years after the war.”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“Left-wing parties had performed very strongly in the Reichstag elections of May 1928, while the National Socialist Party had dropped to a 2.59 percent share of the vote. Something was under way here, as the communist camp—essentially living in a state of revolutionary eschatological expectation—clearly thought it discerned.”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“Everyone in the auditorium knows Heidegger’s reply to that: The inner structure of Dasein is radically finite, and its possibilities are determined from within by temporality. That is the core of Being and Time.”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“Anyone who philosophizes, of course, inevitably—and Heidegger would have been the first to admit this—“runs up against the limits of language.” However, it is in precisely this way that Dasein produces what is commonly called meaning: as the experience of a full, freely self-grounding, deciding life.”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“But what kinds of experiences are those? According to Heidegger, they are, once again, radical and existential experiences of groundlessness or even of the abyss. Near-death experiences in particular, or experiences of anxiety, or the tug of conscience.”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“The skepticism with which too many Germans regarded the Weimar Republic wasn’t primarily the result of its questionable efficacy. By August 1928, less than ten years after it had come into existence, it had gone through no fewer than ten chancellors, yes. But over the past two to three years it had undoubtedly made economic advances. The resentment of the great nations defeated in the First World War lay not in the realm of finance but in cultural memory: the republic itself, with its democratic form of government, was held in the dominant narrative to be foreign, imported from the histories of the victorious nations of the United States (Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights), France (French Revolution), and, with a great deal of historical benevolence, England (Magna Carta). Even Switzerland had its Pledge of Allegiance to the Confederation, but in terms of democratic creation myths, on the other hand, Germany pretty much drew a blank. From this point of view the Weimar Constitution was not a gift but an accident of the country’s own history, a kind of permanent collateral damage from the outcome of the war, along with the reparations imposed at Versailles, and not much easier to bear. For this reason a truly self-defined Germany would—on the basis of its own history—be many”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“THE TRANSITORY, THE FLEETING, THE CONTINGENT,” which Baudelaire had identified as the central properties of the modern age,”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“As if he wanted to give the Vienna Circle one last fatal blow, Wittgenstein announced on the occasion of another session: I can imagine what Heidegger means by being and anxiety. Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the amazement that something exists. Astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is no answer. All that we can say can a priori only be nonsense. Still we run up against the limits of language.8”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“The Monday meetings were in a sense a tug-of-war, in which the Schlick faction—supposedly in the name of his mentors, Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell—sought to drag their master over the demarcation line of the “verification criterion” (Schlick: “The meaning of an assertion lies in the method of its verification”), while a famously indefatigable Wittgenstein held his ground at the other end of the rope with Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, and Kierkegaard, waiting for the whole positivist troop to collapse.”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“If only to give all the forces and trends involved in this event a vision of their own limitations, and also of the connection among the different disciplines in the concert of the great whole. Without clues to define unity, especially in its more dynamic eras, the polyphony of disciplines threatened to descend into cacophony. And all participants suffer from that in the end.”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“On the very first pages of his book, Cassirer thus expressly turns against a characteristic assumption of Heidegger’s analysis of the fall in particular. It might be called the assumption of “an overestimation of the civilizing power of philosophy.”42 Anyone who seeks the supposed origins of an age, and particularly the modern age, in philosophy alone, will get to neither the peculiarities of the age nor its philosophy. In his analysis of the Renaissance, Cassirer sees philosophy more as one innovative voice among many, and one with the function of connecting different disciplines. It is precisely this understanding that guides his philosophy of symbolic forms throughout the rapid artistic, scientific, and technical innovations of the 1920s. That decade rightly saw itself as a time of unprecedented, world-changing innovations, above all of a technical kind. The automobile, now mass-produced, began to determine the shape of cities; radio became a global medium of communication in the public sphere, the telephone in the private; cinema became an art form; the first commercial airlines were launched; now not only steamships but soon also zeppelins and even airplanes crossed the oceans, with Charles Lindbergh paving the way. The twenties witnessed the birth of an age of global communication facilitated by and in turn facilitating leaps in technical innovation. It persists into our own time. No individual and no individual discipline could keep interpretative pace. Not even philosophy. Precisely in the German-speaking world it saw itself as being propelled forward”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“The presence and concern of other people were no help in that respect. Heidegger’s appeal to authenticity and hence to self-discovery is thus based on a pervasive asociality of Dasein. It is only as something fully uncoupled, unique, and thus isolated that we attain insight into our true possibilities.”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“For Heidegger, anxiety is the model for the experience of a comprehensive loss of meaning, which in the resulting emptiness and disconnectedness lays bare the true foundations of each Dasein. And lays it bare in such a way”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“Those who are absorbed entirely in their own world ask neither the question about the sense of Being nor the question about the Being of their own lives. It is only the concrete experience of a loss of meaning and therefore, in whatever form, a disturbed relationship with the world that raises the question for the concerned Dasein of the sense of Being and the sense of its own existence: What is it all for? Why am I here?”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“This project required that Heidegger either entirely avoid the ubiquitous but fundamentally false concepts used to describe the modern state of the world (subject, object, reality, individuality, value, life, matter, thing) in his own philosophy or replace them with new creations (Dasein, environment, being-in-the-world, each-one-ness [Jemeinigkeit], concern [Sorge], equipment [Zeug]). There can be no right speaking in the false, so Heidegger brought a new kind of speaking into the world.”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“origins” (Ur-Sprünge, literally “primal leaps”), as described in The Origin of German Tragic Drama: The term origin [Ursprung] is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis [Enstehung].10”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“So much that it seems consistent only for porosity37—seen as a kind of productive fragility that overcomes rigid dualisms—to be the key concept by which the nature of the city is revealed and interpreted in all its profundity. Porosity is the principle of the true life of Naples: At the base of the cliff itself, where it touches the shore, caves have been hewn. As in the paintings of hermits from the Trecento, a door appears here and there in the cliffs. If it is open, one looks into large cellars that are at once sleeping places and storerooms. Steps also lead to the sea, to fishermen’s taverns that have been installed in natural grottoes. Faint light and thin music rise up from there in the evening. As porous as those stones is the architecture. Buildings and action merge in courtyards, arcades, and staircases. The space is preserved to act as a stage for new and unforeseen configurations. What is avoided is the definitive, the fully formed. No situation appears as it is, intended forever, no form asserts its “thus and not otherwise.” . . . Because nothing is finished and concluded. Porosity results not only from the indolence of the southern craftsman but above all from the passion for improvisation. For that space and opportunity must be preserved at all costs. Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are divided into innumerable theaters, animated simultaneously. All share innumerable stages, brought to life simultaneously. Balcony, forecourt, window, gateway, staircase, roof are at once stage and theater box. Even the most miserable wretch is sovereign in his dim, twofold awareness of contributing, however deprived he may be, to one of the images of the Neapolitan street that will never return and, in his poverty, the leisure of enjoying the grand panorama. What is played out on the stairs is the highest school in theatrical direction. The stairs, never entirely revealed, but closed off in the dull northern house-”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“by Wittgenstein in the 1920s.”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“AS WE HAVE SEEN, the two questions “What can I know?” and “How should I live?” are for philosophers inseparable. This”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“exploitation. Benjamin was a few years older than Scholem, which gave him a certain advantage in terms of maturity and knowledge from the outset. This, too, is typical, for Benjamin preferred to maintain in his friendships a mutually acknowledged hierarchy of knowledge.”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“Or to put it another way: when that which the proposition asserts is also the case. According to the first two propositions of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: 1 The world is all that is the case. 1:1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things. THE BARBER AND WHAT IS WRONG with a proposition like “There are three dots in the world”? Russell may have asked in that hotel room, waving the sheet of paper in his hand. Well, as proposition 1:1 of the book establishes, “the world” (as a whole) is not itself a fact but only “the totality of facts.” One chief reason that Wittgenstein denied that propositions about the world could be meaningful lies in the following logic: If the world were itself a fact, it would—as only one fact among others—effectively include itself as a fact. It would be, as a world, on the one hand defined as a set of certain elements (here: the totality of facts) and at the same time an element of that set (hence: a fact). But a logical formalism that allows a set to contain itself as an element, leads—as none other than Russell himself had proved, Wittgenstein believed—to infernal logical complexities and, finally, to uncontrollable contradictions.”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“Russell states that this barber cuts the hair of all those, and only those, people in Chiswick who do not cut their own hair. Who, if anyone, cuts the barber’s hair? The question cannot be answered without contradiction. If the barber does not cut his own hair, he is by definition part of the set of people whose hair he cuts. But if he cuts his own hair, he contradicts the set definition, “cuts the hair of all of those, and only those, people in Chiswick who do not cut their own hair.” The suggestion that the barber is bald is a good joke, but it does not rid us of the set-theoretical contradictions that have arisen.”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“If we look more closely, Wittgenstein’s entire philosophical oeuvre, and especially his later work, is run through with metaphors and allegories of liberation, of exits and escapes. Not just his famous answer to the question “What is your aim in philosophy?” “To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle!”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“BUT HEIDEGGER’S IDEA OF THE LEAP—a core concept in the religious philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard—already suggests that this redemptive alternative is not a purely logical, argumentative, or even only rationally motivated choice. Instead it is more a decision, and thus demands something more and something different. Something that is in fact based primarily not on reasons, but on will and courage, and above all on concrete personal experience, comparable to that of religious transformation: a vocation.”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

“Held back for the first few years by a heart condition (self-diagnosis: “too much sport in my youth”), Heidegger had served as a meteorologist with the frontline weather service number 414 from August until November 1918.”
― Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy