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Steven Poole, Author, The Spectator Australia writes,Wolfram Eilenberger credits Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Benjamin and Cassirer with inventing modern thought. But a shared language was all they ever had in common.
Martin Heiddeger.
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How do you write a group biography of people who never actually formed a group? Such is the challenge Wolfram Eilenberger sets himself in a book about the philosophers Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin and — the surprisingly unstarry fourth subject — Ernst Cassirer, an urbane and now nearly forgotten neo-Kantian who might have deserved the made-up title of ‘symbologist’, thus far reserved for the heroes of Dan Brown’s novels.
What these men have in common is that they spoke German and were philosophically active during the 1920s, but that is about it. Heidegger and Cassirer met and traded rhetorical blows at a celebrated philosophy conference in Davos; Benjamin was envious of Heidegger’s success and Wittgenstein at least had heard of him. But they were all ploughing very different furrows — unless you ascend to the highest levels of abstraction and say, along with Eilenberger, that they were all interested in human beings’ relationship with language. Well, sure. Aren’t we all?
The book starts at the end of its chronological period: in 1929, Wittgenstein receives his PhD at Cambridge, while Heidegger and Cassirer arrive at Davos, and Benjamin is ‘troubled by concerns of quite a different order’ — his girlfriend has just kicked him out...
In the end the reader is prompted to wonder whether it was indeed these four men, and only they, who ‘invented modern thought’. Plenty of other candidates of the era come to mind, philosophical and otherwise — why not Niels Bohr and the other quantum physicists? (As it happens, Cassirer wrote a well-received book on Einsteinian relativity, as well as a later treatise on the idea of indeterminacy in quantum mechanics.) As for Heidegger, his membership of the Nazi party is still in the future as the book closes, and so Eilenberger absolves himself from having to address the thorny question of what that episode means (if anything) for an assessment of his philosophy.
Recommended Reading
Source: Spectator.co.uk 
Time of the Magicians:
The Invention of Modern Thought, 1919-1929
