№ 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.”

 

Young thinkers were forced to answer anew two related questions: “What can I know?” and “How should I live?” The difficulty of answering was compounded by World War I, but also by a decade of economic instability and the Spanish flu, which infected a third of the world’s population between 1918 and 1920.

“Time of the Magicians,” set exactly a century ago, is about thinking through these global crises, which alone makes it a timely and worthwhile read. Eilenberger’s “magicians” are household names in Germany and much of Europe — which may partially account for the book’s success abroad — but they are relatively unknown in the United States. Eilenberger makes a good case for their familiarity even when the magic that they practiced veered toward the dark arts.

In 1919, as Eilenberger recounts, Martin Heidegger delivered his first lecture at the University of Freiburg to “a scattered crowd of mostly defeated men … who now had to pretend that they saw themselves as having a future.” This crowd of returning soldiers was downtrodden and vulnerable, which is to say highly susceptible to influence. These men had no future — no money, no job, no pride, no hope — but, according to Heidegger, they maintained the most basic, but also most vital, philosophical choice. He implored his soldiers-turned-students to exercise it: to “learn thinking anew” and, in so doing, to “leap” into “another world.”

 

The Things We Don't Choose