№ 682. Knockin' On Heavens Door

№ 681. The Magicians of Thinking

When I was 20 a professor of philosophical logic informed me that “philosophy teaches you how to think.” Of course, I thought that was ridiculous; taking her class was proof enough that I already knew how to think. But she was right. Philosophy, the kind that actually matters, teaches us how to think about the world in genuinely novel ways, to see it with fresh eyes, especially at moments when it is tempting to either look away or assume that everything has already been seen clearly.

 

Listen Notes

 

“Time of the Magicians,” Wolfram Eilenberger’s group biography, smoothly translated by Shaun Whiteside, focuses on a decade of crisis in Europe — the interwar period between 1919 and 1929 — and argues compellingly that a small cadre of thinkers responded to their turbulent times by reinventing philosophy, an intellectual task that effectively conjured a new world. Philosophy is born not of leisure (as Thomas Hobbes once suggested) but of struggle — a spontaneous generation in the midst of personal, political, economic and natural disaster. When it arises, according to Eilenberger, it does so suddenly, originally — as if by magic.

Eilenberger explains that philosophers in 1920 faced a common task: to “draw up a plan for one’s own life and generation, which moves beyond the determining ‘structure’ of ‘fate and character’ … to break away from the old frameworks (family, religion, nation, capitalism) … finding a model of existence that made it possible to process the intensity of the experience of war, transferring it to the realm of thought and everyday existence.”