What’s in it for me? Take an intellectual flight of fancy with philosophical heavyweights of the twenties.
In 1919, Germany was in ruins.
After the fall of the monarchy and the devastation brought by World War I, the country had to build a whole new social order.
German philosophy, too, was in need of reform after the catastrophe of the war.
So four philosophers set out to construct the world of the mind anew.
Things got pretty turbulent in the process: Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger argued about the nature of humanity, Walter Benjamin fell in love with a communist, and Ludwig Wittgenstein gave away all his money.
These blinks follow the footsteps of these four exceptional but very different philosophers as they turned the thinking of their time upside down.
Along the way, you’ll learn how their thoughts can help us answer life's big questions today.
In these blinks, you’ll find out what Walter Benjamin has in common with millennials; why Martin Heidegger loved skiing; and how Ludwig Wittgenstein came to the conclusion that philosophy is pointless.
The Davos dispute between Heidegger and Cassirer exemplified the polarized mood of the 1920s.
The 1920s were an age of extremes.
During the day, one technical innovation overtook the next: cinema, radio, and cars completely transformed urban life.
And at night, people let themselves go in wild excesses at basement pubs and jazz clubs.
But it wasn’t all fun and games.
In Germany, the economy groaned under reparation payments for World War I.
Poverty and misery reigned in the freshly formed Weimar Republic.
Politics, too, was turbulent: communists, fascists, social democrats, and conservatives all fought for power over the young republic – sometimes even in the streets.
Many Germans oscillated between a euphoric belief in progress and a desperate lack of prospects.
No one really knew what the future would bring.
And amid this uncertainty, two intellectual giants met for a legendary standoff.
Here’s the key message: The Davos dispute between Heidegger and Cassirer exemplified the polarized mood of the 1920s.
It was March 26, 1929, when every important name in contemporary philosophy gathered in the ballroom of the Belvédère Hotel in Davos, Switzerland, to watch the public debate of the decade.
Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer, the two opponents, couldn’t have been more opposite.
Cassirer was older and cosmopolitan, and he’d made a name for himself as a professor at the University of Hamburg.
His challenger, Martin Heidegger, was the enfant terrible of philosophy.
He was young, tanned, and sporty, and had only recently started teaching in Freiburg.
The night before the debate, he ruffled the feathers of his philosophical elders by wearing his ski gear to dinner.
The subject of their philosophical showdown?
Nothing less than the nature of humanity and the fundamental role of philosophy.
The humanist Cassirer asserted that man was a culture-forming being who asks questions and finds answers in morals and ethics.
Heidegger waved it off: ethics and truth were nothing more than man-made illusions to console us over the fact that there was no eternal life.
Cassirer was convinced that by creating artistic and cultural symbols, humans could lift themselves above their own mortality.
Heidegger shook his head at this: not culture, but fear and death were the basis of human experience.
Humans have to confront their metaphysical insignificance in order to become free.
Accordingly, the task of philosophy was to confront humans with the harsh truth of his existence.
Once again, Cassirer strongly disagreed.
He thought that the purpose of philosophy was to free us from our fears to uplift and liberate us.
The two simply couldn’t agree – their worldviews were too different and young Heidegger too stubborn.
But their opposing views fit perfectly into the ambivalent atmosphere of 1920s Germany.
Martin Heidegger wanted to shake people awake by giving them a metaphysical scare.
“I believe I have an inner calling to philosophy,” Martin Heidegger once claimed confidently.
And even though he came from a humble background, he quickly made a career for himself in the field – bringing with him a completely new way of thinking.
When he gave his first lecture at the age of 29, he challenged the students to muse over the words “There is something.
” Wasn’t it simply unbelievable that anything was at all; that people and the world existed?
The task of philosophy, Heidegger explained, was to unravel this monstrous truth.
The task of humanity, in turn, was to expose itself to the “storms of life.
” Only those who didn’t shy away from existential hardship could experience the mystery of the world through their own bodies.
The key message here is: Martin Heidegger wanted to shake people awake by giving them a metaphysical scare.
Heidegger believed that only by facing extreme experiences could we find our way to authenticity.
This is what he called human existence that is most fully realized.
The prerequisite to authenticity is to become aware of our own mortality: We must accept that death is inevitable and final.
Only those who look fearlessly into this yawning abyss are free to live their lives to the fullest.
Heidegger remained true to his version of carpe diem all of his life.
He was a man of action, eloquent and charismatic, and he ascended the philosophical career ladder with hyperspeed.
He wrote his magnum opus Being and Time in just eleven months, which secured him coveted professorships in Marburg and later in Freiburg.
In Freiburg, he quickly became an academic superstar.
He was perpetually surrounded by student admirers who hung onto his every word.
Clearly, his metaphysical radicalism had hit a nerve of the time.
Young Germans in particular were eager to pursue authenticity.
Heidegger himself also indulged in some authentic living from time to time: he often took breaks from writing to chop wood, go skiing, or take long hikes through his beloved Black Forest.
But his favorite pastime was chasing after extramarital adventures.
For years, he maintained a secret love affair with his student Hannah Arendt, who later became a world-famous philosopher herself.
All in all, though, Heidegger was largely spared the identity-forming catastrophes he conjured in his lectures.
On the contrary, he’d fulfilled his life-long dream of achieving academic fame and reputation with ease.
The humanist Ernst Cassirer promoted a philosophy of diversity.
Heidegger’s most famous opponent, Ernst Cassirer, had also made a good career for himself in the German university system.
But he did so advocating for a measured, bourgeois lifestyle that Heidegger resented.
Following the example of his intellectual guiding stars Goethe and Kant, Cassirer was a man of composure.
Even when the power suddenly went out during one of his lectures at Berlin’s Humboldt University, he kept his cool.
That was in January 1919, when street fighting was part of everyday life in the young Weimar Republic.
During one of those fights, someone shot through an electrical line near the university.
Cassirer was unmoved: he simply finished his lecture in the dark.
Where did he get this composure?
Maybe it had to do with his unshakable faith in the good of human beings.
Here’s the key message: The humanist Ernst Cassirer promoted a philosophy of diversity.
For Cassirer, unlike for many philosophers before and after him, humanity wasn’t actually all that mysterious.
He believed that humans were revealed in the sum of their actions and works.
They differed from animals mainly in their ability to transform their experiences into symbols.
By creating and practicing art, science, and religion, humans understood and shaped the world.
Cassirer thought that all forms of understanding the world were of equal value.
Whether astrophysics or astrology were used to explain things – the main point was learning from one another.
The job of philosophy was to reconcile all the different forms of knowledge.
Cassirer lived his philosophy of human diversity and solidarity.
He was extremely educated, amiable, and unselfish.
He always read standing up during his daily streetcar rides, because he didn’t want to take a seat from anyone who really needed it.
He also loved working in the private Hamburg library of scholar Aby Warburg.
Warburg had sorted the books not in alphabetical or chronological order, but by thematic relationship.
For Cassirer, this structure mirrored his own thinking, according to which all cultural techniques were intimately related.
And so he wrote his magnum opus, the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, in the Warburg Library.
After completing his book in 1929, Cassirer was elected the first Jewish director of the University of Hamburg.
Even when he began facing increasing anti-Semitic hostility by National Socialists, he remained optimistic that humanism and education would triumph over human discord.
This confidence was astonishing, considering that just a few years earlier, World War I had reduced much of Europe to rubble.
Many of Cassirer's contemporaries – like Ludwig Wittgenstein – had lost all faith in humanity.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was an enigmatic loner who explored the limits of human thinking.
Wittgenstein experienced World War I first-hand.
When he finally returned from imprisonment in Italy to his Viennese family, he surprised them with a strange gesture: he signed over all of his belongings to his siblings.
The Wittgensteins were among the richest families in Europe, and their money had opened all kinds of doors for their children, including Ludwig.
They’d encouraged his extraordinary intellectual talent and enabled him to attain a degree from Cambridge.
Why on earth would Wittgenstein reject this wealth?
But Wittgenstein’s radical decision didn’t come out of nowhere.
The war had severely traumatized him.
Once he’d experienced its horrors, academic philosophy began to seem pointless to him.
So in the trenches, he’d begun writing a treatise that would solve all the essential problems of philosophy once and for all.
After that, he wanted to start living the simple life.
Here’s the key message: Ludwig Wittgenstein was an enigmatic loner who explored the limits of human thinking.
Even though no one shared Wittgenstein’s conviction that his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus had solved philosophy, people were fascinated by it— partially because no one but Wittgenstein himself really understood it.
The Tractatus uses a complicated mathematical numbering system to number sentences and contains such enigmatic images that the academic elite still cut their teeth on it today.
Wittgenstein actually only wanted to show that you can’t solve the mystery of human existence by thinking.
The meaning of life reveals itself only in moments of mortal danger and cannot be decoded through any abstract theory.
So, it’s useless to ponder the meaning of life.
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” Wittgenstein concluded pragmatically.
He packed his bags to start a new life as a simple schoolteacher in a small Austrian village.
Needless to say, he was even less understood there.
The villagers kept their distance from the eccentric urbanite, who they considered difficult and resentful.
Wittgenstein was as lonely as ever.
He once lamented to his sister that it was as if he were separated from his fellow human beings by a pane of glass.
The pane of glass is actually a fitting image for Wittgenstein’s philosophy, too.
He believed that no matter how hard the human mind tries, it would never be able to overcome its own hidden limitations.
For Wittgenstein, a human was like a fly in a jar, unable to find her way out into the open.
And although he ardently wished that his Tractatus would open people’s eyes, he doubted humans were capable of true knowledge at all.
Bohemian Walter Benjamin was an astute observer of the zeitgeist.
Today, Walter Benjamin is fondly remembered by many as an academic rockstar.
But his life as a freelancer in the 1920s was anything but glamorous.
Unlike Wittgenstein, Benjamin lacked the money and connections to achieve much success during his lifetime.
He was chronically broke and constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Sounds a bit like the precarious lifestyle of a millennial creative?
Well, it was already a bitter reality for Walter Benjamin in the 1920s.
Benjamin came from a wealthy, bourgeois family in Berlin, but his father disapproved of his son’s philosophical ambitions and was stingy with his financial support.
So Benjamin worked as a freelance journalist to make ends meet.
The key message?
Bohemian Walter Benjamin was an astute observer of the zeitgeist.
Benjamin wasn’t particularly good with money either.
Whatever he earned as a journalist, he quickly spent again – on the nightlife in Berlin, in Parisian brothels, or on his extensive private library.
During the rest of the time, he ruminated on how humans could attain true knowledge.
He came up with an unusual approach: he believed that the path to truth was neither through thinking nor through action, but through observation.
Imagine you’re contemplating a work of art.
According to Benjamin, both you, the viewer, and the work of art change through this act of observation.
Your thoughts give it meaning.
But in turn, the artwork is charged with your associations, which further stimulate your imagination with each new viewing.
In this way, thoughts are in constant exchange with the observable world.
And only this exchange can lead us to deep knowledge.
Benjamin’s most profound exchange might have been with Latvian actress Asja Lacis.
The two met on the Italian island of Capri.
Benjamin had planned on having a work-cation there, but it quickly turned into a romantic getaway.
Lacis was also an ardent communist and stimulated Benjamin with her political enthusiasm.
Under the influence of his lover, Benjamin developed from a subtle observer of art into a subtle critic of capitalism.
He started devoting his attention to describing seemingly mundane everyday phenomena.
Benjamin possessed a unique gift for capturing the essence of an era by describing individual objects and phenomena.
The best example of this comes from his unfinished work Passages, in which he diagnoses Paris’s lavish new shopping arcades as an expression of the materialistic spirit of modernity.
Unfortunately, Benjamin never managed to establish himself in the academic world of his time with this revolutionary approach.
His writing style was too idiosyncratic and closer to being art itself than to sober theory.
And so Benjamin vagabonded throughout Europe as a professional bohemian, without permanent residence or financial security.
All four philosophers believed that humans are beings of language.
As different as they were, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Cassirer, and Benjamin could agree on one thing: language is the most fascinating human trait of all.
To them, it was much more than a means to communicate – it was an instrument with which humans shape and form the world.
And they all set out to examine it more closely.
For Ernst Cassirer, language was one of the important symbolic forms through which humans gain access to the world and themselves.
He believed that the essence of a human being is formed through language.
It's when a small child utters her first words that her spirit and personality are formed.
Cassirer himself mastered Sanskrit and Chinese, on top of German, English, and French.
The key message here is: All four philosophers believed that humans are beings of language.
For Benjamin, language was his daily bread.
He loved French literature, and whenever he found himself in a financial emergency, he’d save himself by translating Baudelaire poems into German.
For him, poetry represented the true spirit of language, because it tried to put the hidden essence of things into words.
He believed that all philosophers should aspire to use language like poetry.
Heidegger, too, was searching for new forms of expressions.
He believed that if his philosophy was to inspire humans to have new existential experiences, then he needed new words for them.
His lectures were teeming with mystical jargon he’d coined, like presence-at-hand and worldhood.
All of his neologisms had the same purpose: to allow humans a completely new experience of existence.
Pessimistic Wittgenstein, of course, remained skeptical about the possibilities of philosophical language.
He saw in it an embarrassing error: Only the world of facts could be described with language.
But that was the task of the natural sciences, not of philosophy.
If one wanted to speak about metaphysics and the meaning of life, one had to go beyond the limits of what can be said.
Philosophy’s job, then, was to expose the fallacy of language.
The relationship between philosophy and science occupied all four thinkers.
In Germany, people had long believed in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which saw human reason as a cure for all personal and social ills.
But the horrors of the war had called this view into question.
People started doubting the idea that the human mind was capable of always making the best, rational decisions.
So what, then, was the point of philosophy?
Heidegger, Benjamin, and Wittgenstein harbored a deep mistrust of modern science.
It wasn’t just the war that shook the world view of young German philosophers.
Recent theories from the natural sciences also began to cast old philosophical problems in a new light.
For some, the advance of Einstein’s theory of relativity from 1905, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Darwin’s theory of evolution raised the question of whether philosophy had become obsolete altogether.
Self-confident Heidegger wasn’t intimidated by such musings.
He even lamented the purely theoretical approach to the world that characterized modernity.
For him, science imprisons humans in superficial self-avoidance and blocks their access to unadulterated Dasein, the word he uses for human existence.
The key message is: Heidegger, Benjamin, and Wittgenstein harbored a deep mistrust of modern science.
Poetry-fan Benjamin, too, had massive reservations about natural science.
He saw it as an attempt to take shortcuts in order to force knowledge.
For him, true knowledge lay in revelation, not research.
Only those who patiently listened to and contemplated the world around them would hear it reveal its secrets.
According to Benjamin, the progress myth of natural science had silenced the voice of the world and alienated humans from their environment.
His vivid, descriptive sketches of everyday things can therefore be seen as a private protest against the disenchantment of the world.
For Benjamin, nothing would have been worse than becoming guilty of dry argumentation and linear logic.
Skeptical Wittgenstein was impossible to please on all fronts and he made no exception for natural science.
Even though he himself had declared philosophy to be superfluous, he didn’t place much faith in science, either.
When the logical empiricists, a club of Viennese philosophers who’d declared war on metaphysical speculation, courted him as their intellectual leader, he declined politely.
Instead, he turned to architecture, designing a residential palace for his wealthy sister.
The Wittgenstein house in Vienna’s Kundmanngasse is an unadorned, cube-shaped building, with tiny windows and iron walls that protect the residents from prying eyes.
To this day, this strange house is the perfect symbol of the unsolvable riddle of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.
And what about Cassirer?
He was always the optimist.
In contrast to his doubting colleagues, he saw natural science as a chance to overcome human limits and expand our possibilities of self-creation.
After all, science had already made the impossible possible on several occasions – like when humans trumped gravity by inventing planes.
But most citizens of the crisis-ridden Weimar Republic had concerns other than musing about science.
For the first time since 1918, Germany was to embrace real democracy.
This was hotly disputed among the population.
But what did the great minds of philosophy have to say about Germany’s political future?
Philosophical opinions on German politics differed greatly.
In 1928, the young Weimar Republic was in deep trouble.
One chancellor after the other had quit the job.
Hunger and unemployment plagued the citizens.
In addition, many Germans were resentful of democracy, considering it to be an “un-German” import of their enemies from the war.
In the midst of this tense atmosphere, Ernst Cassirer delivered a speech celebrating the anniversary of the Weimar Constitution.
As an antidote to the German disenchantment with democracy, he evoked the philosophical legacy of his hero Immanuel Kant.
He skillfully explained why Kant himself – arguably the most German of all German philosophers – would have supported a democratic republic.
As a Jewish man in a time of mounting anti-Semitism, it was brave of Cassirer to come out as a constitutional patriot.
Just five years later, the Nazi takeover forced him into emigration.
The key message here is: Philosophical opinions on German politics differed greatly.
Heidegger’s political convictions were very different from Cassirer’s.
He believed that a solidaric democratic community would only interfere with an individual’s quest for meaning and our experience of authenticity.
So Heidegger swore by radical isolation.
He liked to compare the fully realized human being to his hut in the Black Forest.
Situated at 1,200 meters above sea level, the hut stood lonely and exposed to the raging elements, but it was unshakeable.
Heidegger was sure that the unbridled grandeur of existence would only reveal itself in the face of danger and adversity.
Was this just the harmless fantasy of a Black Forest romantic?
Or was it a philosophical plea for another world war?
We might never know for sure.
But we know that Heidegger later joined the Nazi Party and under Hitler, became director of Freiburg University.
At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Benjamin flirted with joining the Communist Party.
But he was too accustomed to his role as an outside observer to take an active part in the political arena.
Like Cassirer, Benjamin was Jewish, and soon left Germany for exile in France.
When German troops invaded France, he fled again.
In 1940, out of fear of being extradited by the Nazis, he took his own life.
While his contemporaries grappled with German politics, Wittgenstein preferred to devote himself to the mathematical concept of infinity.
He never had much faith in people anyway, so he stayed away from day-to-day politics.
But when Hitler annexed Austria, he too packed his bags and went back to Cambridge to teach at the university.
As brilliant as they were, Heidegger, Cassirer, Wittgenstein, and Benjamin couldn’t change the course of history.
Nevertheless, they recalibrated the compass of philosophy after the Enlightenment – a compass that still guides us today.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks: The four big philosophical geniuses of the 1920s are closer to us than we think.
The bourgeois professor Ernst Cassirer, the poetical observer Walter Benjamin, the enigmatic loner Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the charismatic provocateur Martin Heidegger set out to answer the great questions of philosophy anew.
Along the way, they fought intellectual battles that still move us a hundred years later.
Cassirer sought salvation in culture and humanism.
Heidegger wanted to scare humans into experiencing the meaning of life.
Wittgenstein dissolved philosophy into a language problem.
And Benjamin believed in revelation through deep contemplation.
With their lofty philosophical work, these brilliant minds shaped the way we think about the world today.
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