A HUT OF ONE’S OWN
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1922 real strains were making themselves felt in the Heidegger household. Even for a well-connected family in the rural setting of the Breisgau, food supplies were coming under threat. As it was for the great majority of Germans, their everyday life was starting to resemble a struggle for survival. Amid galloping inflation, time itself gained new significance. And with winter approaching, clever solutions needed to be found, especially with regard to firewood and basic foodstuffs. “Mother asks if they should send potatoes even before 1 Oct; I answered yes and sent the money at the same time. What should I do when the potatoes arrive,” Heidegger wrote on September 27 to Elfride, who was living with their two sons in the newly built cottage in Todtnauberg, while he worked furiously on his new manuscript down in Freiburg.1
What was he to do with the potatoes? Store them? If so, where? Eat them himself? Share them with the Husserls? Sell them? These were issues of survival, for which Elfride would remain responsible throughout their life. In part to free her husband from the demands of the everyday, she had devised a plan, after a winter hike in February 1922, to buy a plot of land on the lonely slopes of the southern Black Forest and build a wooden cabin there. In the spring, to finance the enterprise, she released part of her inheritance (about 60,000 marks). Elfride designed the cabin and organized and supervised its construction. Because time was a factor here, too. For some badly needed cash, the Heideggers rented their Freiburg apartment to an American couple for a few weeks, by which time they hoped that they would be able to move into the cabin. They made it, just.
On August 9, the family of four, one son held by the hand, the other one strapped to his father’s back, marched for the first time into their shelter, at an altitude of 1,200 meters. Today, “die Hütte” is an almost mythical site in the history of philosophy, the place where Heidegger spent nearly every spare minute from that year until the end of his life. There, on the remote heights of the Black Forest, he came into his own as a philosopher. It was all that mattered. At least if one saw and understood the world as he did.
JUST THE FIRST FEW WEEKS up there in August yielded spectacular results: “I must say that when I look at the manuscripts from the hut that I have with me, they are anything but unsuccessful,” Heidegger wrote to his wife on September 11, 1922, from Heidelberg, where he was staying with Karl Jaspers to exchange ideas. Jaspers, who was actually a physician and psychiatrist by trade, had landed himself a philosophical bestseller in 1919 with his Psychology of Worldviews, whose resounding public and academic success ensured him a professorship of philosophy in Heidelberg.
In his book Jaspers extracts philosophical and ideological aspects from individual psychological character studies. More important, though, his depiction of human existence is one whose true essence is revealed in extreme circumstances, such as near-death experiences, which are shown to have a liberating quality. It is a therapeutic, life-based approach to philosophy, which places particular value on borderline experiences and extremity for self-discovery—a book that could have been created especially for the generation of traumatized soldiers returning from a lost war.
Heidegger, too, felt that Jaspers’s great tome spoke to him directly. The two men met for the first time on a Sunday afternoon in 1920 over coffee at Husserl’s house. They corresponded regularly from 1921 and, equally frustrated by the plight of academic philosophy, soon shared a firm belief in the need to make common cause in the “battle against bleakness” (as Heidegger put it).
In September 1922, Heidegger accepted with alacrity a new invitation from Jaspers to develop what he perceived to be their shared ideas in dialogue and philosophize for “a few days at the appropriate times.” Heidegger spent almost a week with Jaspers, who, in view of the “present situation of both our lives” insisted on paying Heidegger’s travel expenses (1,000 marks). Jaspers was a full professor with a regular income and solid financial backing; Heidegger’s poorly paid position in Freiburg would expire in ten months. Heidegger urgently needed to build a reputation, lest the already precarious situation of his young family threaten to become completely untenable. Elfride was also concerned about this, and in spite of stress and exhaustion she had resumed her studies in economics earlier that year. Somebody in the house had to earn some money. And it didn’t look as if her philosophically inspired husband was going to be the one to do it.
The two philosophers found the days they spent together in Heidelberg hugely enriching, and they savored the joy that comes from true friendship. Over the coming decade Jaspers would be one of the very few interlocutors whom Heidegger not only trusted as a friend but also genuinely respected as a philosopher. Nonetheless, a vocational paradox overshadowed this meeting, too. Even as they conspired to join forces in an anti-academic resistance cell, Heidegger’s dearest hope was to be elevated, somewhere in the great expanses of the collapsing Republic, to a lifetime post as a state-sponsored intellectual. Husserl was one crucial advocate here, Jaspers a second.
“The eight days I spent with you remain constantly with me,” Heidegger wrote to his new friend in November. “The suddenness, the apparent uneventfulness of those days, the sureness of the ‘style’ with which one day grew into the next in a manner free of artifice, the unsentimental and austere step with which a friendship came toward us, the growing certainty of engaging in a common struggle, sure of itself on both ‘sides’—all of that remains uncannily in my mind, just as the world and life are uncanny for the philosopher.”2 That autumn, Heidegger had definitely found a language of his own to express precisely how the world must remain uncanny to a philosopher.
UNDER PRESSURE TO SUBMIT the findings of his latest research for a professorship that had arisen in Marburg, in the three weeks after his visit to Heidelberg, up in his new cabin Heidegger experienced a further philosophical breakthrough. Husserl’s wife quickly typed up a clean copy of the manuscript. At the beginning of October, Heidegger handed in his application paper, titled “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle—Indication of the Hermeneutic Situation,” to Marburg (and also Göttingen). The essay has about as much to do with Aristotle as Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator” has to do with Baudelaire. Instead, Heidegger was concerned, once again and with a curiously fresh intensity and clarity, with the question of what the actual task of philosophy might consist of. His answer springs from a few key sentences in the manuscript:
The object of philosophical research is human Dasein as interrogated with regard to its Being- character.3
Here the key term Dasein makes its first appearance in Heidegger’s writing. It is understood as a specific way in which humans have always felt meaningfully addressed and challenged by this world.
The world always meets with a particular way of being-addressed (Angesprochensein), of appeal (Anspruch).4
In this sense philosophizing is a questioning process of continuous self-enlightenment. The conceptual innovation of “Da-Sein,” however, expressly includes the idea that this task cannot be delegated: all must be themselves, in their own place, in their own time. There is no alibi in existence. At any rate not in philosophical existence. In Heidegger’s words:
Factual Dasein, whatever it is, is only ever the fully own, not the just-being of general humanity.5
Of course this process, thoroughly uncomfortable and not certain in its results, can also be dismissed or diverted by the Dasein in question. Human Dasein would not be human, it would not be free, if that choice were not open to it. To describe the more or less conscious overlooking of this possibility, Heidegger chooses—as Wittgenstein does in the Tractatus—the theologically tinged concept of the Fall (Verfallen). A regrettable drama, albeit an all-too-current one for Heidegger:
It is because of an inclination toward falling (Verfallensgeneigtheit) that the factical life, which is always in fact that of the individual, is not usually lived in that way.6
The majority’s susceptibility to “falling” is not, for Heidegger, due to a lack of intellectual ability. Rather it is the result of an inclination toward existential comfort. To put it plainly: Most people would rather spend their lives avoiding themselves than seriously seeking themselves. This deliberate self-avoidance is not necessarily either particularly painful or unpleasant. Indeed, it is without a doubt the safer path and, in a very dull sense, the one that guarantees happiness. It means never really becoming who we are or who we could be. It leads to a life of self-imposed and permanent impoverishment, one whose chief concern cannot therefore be with things that are important or on which a life might rest, in Heidegger’s sense. In the realm of the material these are consumer goods; in the social sphere, career goals; in relationships, friendships without actual conversation, marriages with a great deal of routine and little love; in religion, a learned faith without a true experience of God; in language it is apparent in the continuous, thoughtless repetition of clichés and received wisdom; finally, in research, it is a deliberation of questions the answers to which we already believe we know for certain.
Not so Heidegger. He heard another appeal from his surroundings. It called for nothing less than a fundamental critique of all those concepts, categories, and structures that guided reflection on human Dasein over the previous twenty-five hundred years, from Aristotle onward, give or take. He finally wanted to take the gloves off in the “interrogation of Dasein with regard to its Being-character.” And thus in his “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle” he reaches the insight that the purpose of this opening interrogation must in the end be the complete destruction and wholesale replacement of those very conceptualities and categories.
In this, his first unquestionably independent piece of writing, Heidegger already styles himself as a kind of conceptual wrecking ball, blasting through the hopelessly distorted and obfuscatory interrogations of Dasein in pursuit of a perspective free of precisely that.
AT THE MOMENT when the centrifugal forces set in motion after the war by the Treaty of Versailles threatened to tear his country apart once and for all, Heidegger also opted for the existential tactic of a return to supposed fundamentals. He countered the seemingly inevitable fragmentation that was the spirit of his age with a concentration on the roots and origins of all Dasein. In terms of philosophy, this focus took the form of a startlingly clear-sighted revelation of its fundamental question. Conceptually, it is determined to renew the distorting and all-too-unquestioningly accepted vocabulary of tradition in contemporary terms, and bases it in the actual experience of Dasein. It is existential in the emphatic personalization of its project of self-illumination via the appeal to questioning contemplation, which every Dasein senses and hears within itself. Finally, in terms of its concrete application to real life, it is his solemn retreat to the cabin, buffeted by autumnal storms, up on the peaks of his native Black Forest.
Over the years that followed, Heidegger would time and again equate life in the cabin, especially with the storms that raged there, with the experience of thinking. In the supposed security of the wooden cabin, the uncanny and the primal powers of nature were more exposed, and could be felt all the more keenly. The essential uncanniness of philosophizing, of which Heidegger speaks solemnly in his November letter to Jaspers, reveals itself to Dasein, precisely there, in its full power and intensity, where its roots run deepest.
Philosophizing, as Heidegger saw it, did not seek to calm Dasein permanently, or to instill any tranquillity of the soul. On the contrary: it expressed itself in the steadfast will to resist the storm of radical questioning; to perceive, with courageous investigation, a bottomless abyss where, it had once been imagined, and hoped, a secure foundation lay. The path of this thought cannot be an easy one. It welcomes nothing more than moments of great tension and danger.
In the political sphere, this posture runs naturally into an emphatic affirmation of crisis and danger, situations that demand genuine contemplation and resolution, offering no alternatives.
As burdensome as the disaster years of 1922 and 1923 might have been in the real world, Heidegger welcomed them unconditionally as what we might call a configuration of the social climate. And as a moment of openness held out the prospect of a radical rethink. He already felt it in the winter of 1922–1923, just as he would do precisely ten years later, another time of extreme controversy and radicalism, which would see Heidegger in a quite different position.
BUT IN THE HERE AND NOW of the autumn of 1922, the immediate thing was to find himself a permanent academic post. Heidegger was well aware of the philosophically explosive power contained in his “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle.” “The work has struck home in Marburg,” he reported, with military-style understatement, to Jaspers in November, closing his letter: “I have been hard at work collecting wood and storing it for the winter.”7
Heidegger waited, lamenting, understandably enough, the “appalling state” in which this “endless rambling” of “half-constructed views, gushing praise and so on” put one. Finally, in March 1923, he had indirect word from Marburg. They didn’t want him. Not yet, at least, or probably not. Elfride, stretched to the limits of her abilities, had abandoned her studies once and for all in January 1923. Now the situation was serious. “We’re not about to starve,” Heidegger wrote encouragingly to her that March, but only a month later he set the bar at the barest minimum: “It’s enough if we and our children make it; otherwise I have more important things to do than strive for a great career or the like.”8 For that something else needed to happen, if necessary without an academic post. As he had written so rightly in September: “The factical life with a troubled livelihood is circuitous.”
Meanwhile inflation soared ever higher. Heidegger found a new source of income working as tutor to a Japanese aristocrat, Count Kuki. But his financial troubles were still great. Then, on June 18, the news arrived of his successful application for an “associate professorship with the status and rights of a full professor.” “At last the spell is broken,” Jaspers congratulated him from Heidelberg, advising him paternally that even though the pay was poor, he’d reached the limit of what he could ask for. In fact—and entirely in accordance with his nature—Heidegger had no intention “of being a seemingly elegant and cautious professor who takes his income ‘as it comes.’” Instead, in his letter of July 14, he openly informed a colleague at Marburg, a neo-Kantian and friend of Cassirer’s, Paul Natorp (who had resolutely supported Heidegger’s appointment), that he would henceforth “with the manner of my presence give (them) hell; a combat troop of sixteen is coming with me, among the inevitable fellow travellers some of them quite serious and hard-working.”
So Heidegger’s plan was to take Marburg by storm. Indeed, the whole thinking world.
AS WE KNOW, it was not easy to make Cassirer lose his composure. His labors were completely unaffected by the challenges of the financial crisis of 1922–1923. He finished the first volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and immediately set about preparing for the second part, which would be devoted to mythical thought. Myths and their associated rituals and taboos have from ancient times provided a form of orientation through the world and a guide for action; indeed, they constitute the origin of symbolic formation as such. “You really don’t need to worry about me: not only am I bearing my solitude well, as ever, I am seeking it out, since it is the best and absolutely tried and tested salve for my nerves, which have recently been subject to a certain amount of stress,” he wrote on July 5, 1922, from the study of his Hamburg villa, where he was buried under tomes about religious history and ethnology, to his wife, who was staying, along with the children, with relatives in Vienna.9 Yet the events of the previous month had left their impression on him. By then his children, particularly Anna, age fourteen, had already been subjected once or twice to “shouts from neighbors’ houses” on the way to school, but the recent occurrence had crossed another line. It was too much for even the imperturbable Ernst Cassirer:
Hamburg, 10 June 1922
Dear Sir,
Yesterday afternoon you used my absence from home to approach my wife and father-in-law, engage in a conversation with them and in the end shout some insults across the canal. Such behaviors toward a lady to whom you have not even been introduced and toward a 76-year-old man speak for themselves: it would be otiose to add anything about the nature of such actions. I have, as your neighbor, drawn clear and distinct boundaries between us—and I must most urgently ask you to make no further attempts to traverse those boundaries. Hitherto I have always successfully sought to avoid any dealings with people of your kind, and I must also urge other fathers from our neighborhood, in the interest of the upbringing of my children, to avoid any contact with your son.10
What had happened? The day before, a neighbor named Hachmann, from the other side of the tributary of the Alster, whose garden abutted the Cassirers’ property, had responded furiously to a request from Frau Professor Cassirer, doubtless with the greatest politeness, as to whether the Hachmanns’ seven-year-old son might not wish to play a little more quietly, or indeed somewhere other than in his own garden, since the shrill and irritating noises he was producing disturbed the summer reading of Frau Cassirer and her father, who was staying with the family in Hamburg. The retort, shouted as they sat in their sunlit garden, was vicious: “Do you think you don’t disturb us? The mere sight of you—you all belong in Palestine.”11
Looking back from her American exile, Toni Cassirer recalled that dispute between neighbors as a crucial turning point: “From that day I began to free myself from Germany.” The unabashed directness of Hachmann’s hatred was probably not the factor here, as much as Toni Cassirer’s keen sense that in those early critical years of the Weimar Republic an explosive mixture of anti-capitalism, anti-communism, and anti-Semitism was brewing, all the while finding more and more followers even in the circles of the cultured elite.
Ernst Cassirer believed, as his letter makes clear, that he could escape the acts of impertinence associated with this shift in public mood, even as it increasingly made itself felt in everyday life, with clearly delineated boundaries between public and private, buttressed by impeccable bourgeois etiquette, and by what he saw as a scholarly retreat into his own social circles and his own four walls. During that summer, nothing could have been further from his mind than the idea of bidding farewell to his German homeland, and particularly to Hamburg. After all, possibly for the first time he now felt acknowledged, fully and entirely accepted by his peers. This was not least because Cassirer had recently discovered his true thinking space. In his case it was not a lonely cabin on a hillside in the Black Forest, but the library of a private scholar of cultural science who had collected several tens of thousands of rare studies in intellectual and scientific history on his shelves, and organized them in a very idiosyncratic way. This was the library of Abraham (“Aby”) Moritz Warburg, the scion of one of the world’s most influential banking families, which Cassirer first entered in the winter of 1920 and which for the next ten years would be the site of inspiration for his work.
HE WAS IN SHOCK: “I can never return to this place, or I will lose myself forever in this labyrinth,” Cassirer murmured after Dr. Fritz Saxl, head librarian of the Warburg collection, led him past the shelves and stacks, elegantly if very eccentrically arranged.12 The richness of this literature as well as the precious rarity of the volumes acquired from all over the world was one thing. But for Cassirer what was miraculous was the idea of this library itself, and the intellectual objective behind its compilation and organization.
In fact, the volumes were not ordered alphabetically—Warburg organized them instead according to a taxonomy of his own devising, based on what he called “good neighborliness.” This measure was in turn based on a special research program into the true nature of human culture, its distinguishing features, and the dynamics that had determined its development over millennia.
The whole collection was accordingly divided into four sections, each of which corresponded to a fundamental philosophical concept.13 These were, and remain:
ORIENTATION
IMAGE
WORD
ACTION
Warburg, as director of the library, had initially used the rubric “Orientation” to reflect the fact that the world is for us far from self-explanatory. We come into the world largely helpless, without instincts, and also, crucially, without bearings. Our basic need to orient ourselves in thought and action, in our entire relationship with the world, gives rise to what we call culture. This was already the point of departure for Kantian philosophy. Not only was this view expressly shared by Cassirer, but it represents the true foundation of his major work, still in its early stages. Under the rubric of Orientation, Warburg’s library variously included works of superstition, magic, religion, and science—considered central cultural products of our fundamental human need for orientation.
However, the sections labeled “Image,” “Word,” and “Action” according to Warburg’s system implicitly answer the question of the structural forms through which this orientation is achieved: through what Cassirer, in his system, calls “symbols” and “symbolic systems.”
Under “Image,” Warburg included works about “ornaments, prints, or painting.” Under “Word,” spells, prayers, epics, and imaginative literature. Under “Action,” finally, books that investigated the human body itself as a medium of symbolic formation—treatises on festival and dance culture, on theater and erotica.
For that reason, on his first visit Cassirer had to overcome the uncanny and fantastical feeling that this library had been designed and organized precisely according to the strictures and emphases that had governed his own work since those fateful streetcar journeys of 1917: the arrangement of the Warburg Library corresponded exactly, in terms of both form and content, to his own philosophy of symbolic forms.
As if that weren’t enough, in one sense the library went a step further than the systematic architectural plan that was Cassirer’s work. Rather than proceed in a chronological fashion, according to the development of culture from its cultic beginnings in totem, rite, and myth through to the modern natural sciences in one continuous arc culminating in true knowledge of the world, what prevailed on the shelves of Warburg’s library was the internal organizational principle of “good neighborliness.” It saw works from a tremendous variety of disciplines and eras placed side by side in such a way as to suggest scarcely imaginable connections between them, potential similarities of approach, and lines of influence that seem inconceivable. Consequently, foundational works of chemistry rubbed shoulders with books on alchemy; studies in ancient haruspicy with books about astrology and modern algebra.
WARBURG’S COLLECTION IS FOUNDED on the idea of a continuous cultural non-simultaneity of the simultaneous, in which a great variety of approaches from a great variety of sources influence and also contradict one another. At the same time, his taxonomic system is based on the conviction that there is something like an unconscious cultural memory that lurks behind the various epochs and the objects of their scholars’ attention, with significant though subtle effect. Symbols and people—and this was Warburg’s central idea—constantly educate one another, and the symbols with which we think, speak, curse, and pray, with which we make predictions, inquire, and research—in short, find our orientation in this world—are generally much older and in a sense wiser than we, the creatures who use these symbols only in our own time and appropriate them in line with our own interests. So much could be revealed, if only the innumerable tacit connections and alignments among these symbols could be given a voice. It was only logical, then, that Warburg should have placed his library under the tutelage of the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne.
From his first day in that library, Cassirer’s way of thinking grew closer to the ordering of its vision of culture. In small steps at first, but then continuously and with ever greater intensity. On Warburg’s shelves there were no clearly demarcated individual disciplines, areas of study, or even clearly defined realms of culture. It was a space completely free from taboo, and its arrangement encouraged the visitor to embark on a glorious search for ideas as yet unexplored—whether from the future, the present, or the past.
Imagine it. A world in which Frau Cassirer and Herr Hachmann, having transcended borders, inherited categorizations and prejudices, could live side by side like the books in Warburg’s library. The library embodies a utopia of communality and connections among all things, and sometimes it takes only a small step or a leap across the waters of oblivion to perceive and acknowledge as much.
Cassirer was caught completely off guard in 1920 by the discovery of the Warburg Library of Cultural Studies. When he accepted his place in Hamburg and moved there from Berlin, he had no idea the library existed. The same could not be said, however, of the library. Dr. Saxl knew exactly whom he was dealing with when Cassirer first stepped into Warburg’s domain. Cassirer was expected—and subsequently he was deliberately lured. Saxl says of Cassirer’s first visit to Warburg:
I started in the second room, with the cabinet marked “Symbol,” since I assumed that Cassirer would find it easier to approach the problem there. He immediately gave a start and explained to me that this was the problem that had long preoccupied him, and one on which he was currently working. But he was only familiar with a small part of the literature that we own on the concept of the symbol, and he knew nothing of its visual configuration (the visualization of symbols in gesture and art). Cassirer immediately understood and asked me to spend over an hour showing him how one shelf was lined up next to another, one thought next to another. It was lovely to guide a man of such substance for once.14
After only a few months, the initial, humble reaction to this labyrinth, to which he had said he would never be able to return without losing himself, was replaced by an express desire to spend years there.15 And indeed he would go on to do just that. Cassirer had discovered the intellectual space of his dreams, and the library had found precisely the researcher for which it had originally been conceived. A perfect symbiotic relationship came into being, one that also included the management of the library. Cassirer’s requests for books expanded the holdings of the collection, while Dr. Saxl and his subordinates, whenever a new research question arose, approached Cassirer and encouraged him to write a response to it in the spirit of the library. The first result of this enormously fruitful collaboration, Cassirer’s essay “The Conceptual Form of Mythical Thought,” was published in July 1922.
IN THIS ESSAY, a milestone in his thought, Cassirer assessed the properties of concepts and the world as constructed in myth as opposed to the modern natural sciences. Meanwhile, in his investigations into Aristotle, Heidegger pursued the question of how much certain fundamental differences shape or distort the whole of our thought, as an archaeologist or indeed a demolitionist might; similarly, with his investigation, Cassirer also returned to a notional beginning of our cultural history, revealing the extent to which that unconventional primal layer of thought continued to influence our understanding of the world in the present.
Rather than seeing mythical thought as purely random and irrational, Cassirer recognized that it was characterized by great rigor, expediency, and consistency. In the end its conceptualities establish a fixed and rigid place for everything and everyone in the universe. At the heart of this process are fundamental and absolute core divisions that follow a logic of the totem. It begins with dividing a social community—generally one’s own tribe—into two, and fixing that division with the attribution of rigid qualities, properties, and, above all, taboos. From this fundamental distinction, it becomes possible to form subgroups, so that for example “the men of one class who have a particular totemistic emblem . . . can marry only the wives of a very specific clan marked by a particular totem.” In this way a first order is created. That is, however, never enough:
In fact the difference between the individual clans according to their totems extends further and further out from the closer social circle in which it first applies, passing in the end to all circles of existence, the natural and the spiritual. Not only the members of the tribe but the whole universe with all that it contains is encompassed in groups by the totemistic way of thinking.16
This monumental task of translation—assigning a fixed place and value to everything in existence—is also accomplished in mythical thought through relationships of similarity. Thus it is the defining characteristic of mythical thinking that this similarity “is never grasped as a ‘mere’ relationship with its origin in our subjective thinking, for example, but points back to a real identity: things cannot appear similar without in their essence somehow being one and the same.”17
If we acknowledge that totemistic distinctions of value are highly value-laden, and thus encourage logics of absolute exclusion and inclusion (this is their first act of ordering), the political and moral controversy of this form of thought, as the foundation of our cultural evolution, also becomes apparent. We can see it in our everyday language even today. Take the word sinister, Latin for “left,” reflecting the low value given to the left hand relative to the right, a fundamental distinction that runs through the whole of Western culture. So the evaluative power of the mythical conceptual form is linguistically all around us. Indeed, whether we like it or not, it speaks to us from every word—and above all: from us.
FOR CASSIRER, shedding light on such origins through analysis meant enlightenment in the best Kantian sense of the word. That is, “leading human beings out of their self-imposed immaturity,” an immaturity that expresses itself primarily in our desire to avoid examining the true roots of the concepts that orient us in our thought and, hence, in our entire access to the world.
Heidegger, too, struggled against this same complacency or, as he termed it, unconcernedness, in his 1922 essay “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle.” Here, however, Heidegger spoke expressly of a necessary “destruction” of extant concepts, particularly in philosophy. By contrast, Cassirer’s analyses are not aimed at their wholesale destruction—where could that lead but to a new yet also inevitably mythical set of formulations? Rather, they were fostered by a growing awareness, in itself radically enlightening, of the possibilities and impossibilities inevitably imposed by every conceptual form, whether it be mythical, religious, or scientific.
Cassirer perceived two central dangers that every culture is exposed to at every point in its development. First, every culture is manifestly susceptible to relapse. Every developmental step it takes can be reversed. Second, it is at times of greatest crisis, tension, and confusion—as during the years 1922 and 1923—that the danger of an unburdening relapse into a rigid and judgmental pattern of interpretation is at its greatest.
IN THIS LIGHT, the dispute between Frau Cassirer and Herr Hachmann is a textbook example of a momentary relapse into mythical thinking. Hachmann was fully in thrall to mythic stages of thought when, from an ultimately totemistic distinction between “the Germans” and “the Jews,” he perceived Frau Cassirer’s very proximity to be an insult, a disturbance, even a contamination, while at the same time taking it for granted that all human beings have a fixed and given place in the world on the basis of their group or tribe—a There where they absolutely belong, and only there. For the Jews: Palestine.
And that was the spirit in which Frau Cassirer took it: “When Herr Hachmann shouted to me across the canal that we all belonged in Palestine, from his lips this was exactly the same as saying we belonged on the dung-heap. At the time, in the minds of those people Palestine was just a curse. For us it was the place to which Jews closely connected with tradition, or Russian and Polish refugees, turned to find a new fatherland.”18
The Cassirers emphatically did not feel any close connection with Jewish tradition or indeed with Orthodox Judaism—and they did not want to have that way of thinking imposed upon them by people more primitive than themselves. At the same time, and perhaps this was the actual point of Cassirer’s philosophy of culture, the criterion for philosophical primitivism lies not in the conceptual form to which one feels absolutely allied, but rather in the pursuit of a fixed idea that there should be something like a single unified, all-encompassing, exhaustive form.
But no single conceptual form is rich enough to exhaust the space of the real. On the other hand, each conceptual form—by its very nature—has a certain invasive quality. Each strives for total order and appropriation and thus a hostile takeover of all the others. It is in this impulse that Cassirer sees the potential calamity that could blight our cultural life:
A certain clear, emotional and intellectual difference does not stop at the point where it first came into being, but has a tendency to go on working from it, drawing greater and greater circles and in the end encompassing the whole of being and in some way “organizing” it.19
That applies to myth just as much as it does to modern science and its totalizing isms (biologism, physicalism, economism). It applies to religion and its psychotic fundamentalisms. It applies to works of art that strive toward aesthetic totality in the one-sided sense of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. For Cassirer, this insatiable urge to invade precisely those fundamental differences that are the most telling must be addressed by the difficult but invariably enlightening business of revealing the hidden connections and obvious designatory limitations in the description of each symbolic form. An endless, labyrinthine business—as endless and labyrinthine as the creation of culture itself.
In 1922 and 1923 Cassirer set about this project with gusto. He now had not only the support of his family, his Free Hanseatic City, and its university faculty, but also the library of his dreams. Financially, too, the light at the end of the tunnel was beginning to emerge. In April 1923 he reassured his wife, who was concerned about the future of the household, and indeed about feeding her children:
Today Bruno [Cassirer’s publisher] sent me the accounts for the first quarter of 1923. During those three months he sold 1,240 copies of my books, which has brought me in a royalty of over 1 million marks. So not only is my advance paid back, but I’ve also got over ½ million out of it.20
Home found. Mortgage paid. Book supply assured. And half a million marks! The same, alas, could not really be said of Benjamin.
THE YEAR 1922 SHOULD—once again—have been that of his breakthrough. At the instigation of the Heidelberg publisher Richard Weissbach, who also promised to publish Benjamin’s translation of Baudelaire, in the autumn of 1921 Benjamin planned, with high hopes and not a little ambition, to bring out a journal called Angelus Novus. Its writers were to be drawn from his closest circle of acquaintances, and its goals were set out in a note from the editor in chief, Dr. Walter Benjamin, to Gershom Scholem, one of his potential writers:
The plan, which is entirely my own, is to found a journal which does not have the slightest concern for the paying public, so that it can serve the intellectual public all the more resolutely.21
The first issue of the journal, named after a drawing by Paul Klee (bought by Benjamin in Munich in 1921), was in principle ready for the printers early in 1922. In spite of Benjamin’s tireless urging, however, Weissbach held it back. The economic risk to the publisher was too great. The publication of the Baudelaire translation (along with the preface “The Task of the Translator”) dragged painfully on throughout the whole year, and Weissbach still had no firm publication date planned. To make matters worse, mounting inflation was driving up the price of paper and forcing caution on the entire publishing industry. To an esoteric outsider, as Benjamin was—and was determined to remain—that development effectively ruled out the possibility of bringing out the journal. In 1922, when asked to list his book publications, he could give only one honest answer. Apart from his dissertation, which had enjoyed no attention whatsoever: none.
The gap between his self-image and reality was therefore as wide as it could possibly be. Much the same applied to his academic ambitions. The year 1922 saw him become a restless traveling salesman of postdoctoral dissertations. There was hardly a major German university at whose door he had not knocked in one way or another. He thought he had a chance in Heidelberg, though he couldn’t say precisely which subject and with whom. Philosophy, German studies, sociology . . . Jaspers, Emil Lederer, Alfred Weber? Benjamin sought closer contact with all of them.
In the late autumn his predicament grew more acute. The bond with his parents’ household now seemed to be definitively severed. Benjamin’s father insisted that his son should become a bank clerk, while Walter had declared himself open in principle to all forms of gainful employment as long as they didn’t get in the way of his postdoctoral dissertation. Without any clear postdoctoral prospects, however, that possibility hovered in the void. And without sufficient time and freedom to make that ambition plausible, the threat of life as a bank clerk or an inevitable—though equally impossible—approach to his parents for funding loomed. Benjamin was unable to show any income of his own for the whole of 1922.
The depths to which someone in such circumstances could sink were revealed in crushing detail in October by his friend Erich Gutkind (the same Gutkind with whom the Benjamins had envisaged a bucolic communal existence on a farm in southern Germany):
Our situation is bad. At the Gutkinds’ it seems to be becoming disastrous. As his mother is still in the same condition, a few days ago Erich decided to become . . . a traveling margarine salesman. . . . But if that’s to work out, God’s going to have to do some selling too.22
Only a short time later Benjamin noted:
Gutkind’s . . . business is heading for catastrophe—earnings of 150 Marks in four days—that means, taking travel expenses into account, that he almost ended up making a loss. I have set off on a similar but easier course and had a go at buying and selling books, buying them in the north of the city and selling them in the west, for which some knowledge of old books is coming in useful. . . . It can be so enthralling looking for treasures in flea markets or little antique shops . . . and the work is in danger of faltering so that I have to keep at it.23
Throughout his life Benjamin saw “work” as meaning nothing other than the development of his own thoughts in writing. However precarious, or even hopeless, things might have seemed, he saw no room for compromise, no alternative. A postdoctoral thesis—ideally with a paid lectureship attached, which appeared for the first time to be a possibility—still seemed the only realistic way for him to rescue this way of life, and his willingness to make sacrifices and humiliate himself was accordingly great.
The obstacles in his case were considerable. There was, among German professors, something like an unspoken rule never to employ more than one Jew at a time as a postdoctoral candidate. It was also quite clear to those professors from Benjamin’s CV that he had conned his way out of military service, which certainly didn’t help. For many professors, it ruled him out from the start. You just don’t support someone like that.
DECEMBER 1922 saw Benjamin knocking on doors in Heidelberg once again, this time in a particularly regrettable situation. It was becoming increasingly difficult to find accommodation appropriate to his budget. For the whole of the Christmas season he rented a room in a primitive but warm flat
that has the great disadvantage of being beside the kitchen of a proletarian family that has a two-month-old child. . . . But I address the task with a stoicism unfamiliar to me—even though the child 1) also sleeps beside me at night; 2) was born at seven months and therefore raises a bitter war cry against life. Today, Sunday, when everyone was at home, it was entirely as if all hell had broken loose.24
Like the Cassirers, Benjamin struggled with the neighbors’ children. He could, however, neither keep his distance nor make a calm appeal to bourgeois etiquette. Which was not to say that Benjamin and his family, even in these most difficult times, were really about to fall into the financial abyss and lose their home. Significantly, Dora’s family was still giving them help and support. While Benjamin spent 1922 on the road as an editor in chief, serious critic, antiquarian book dealer, and would-be postdoctoral candidate, complaining all the while without a hint of irony about the “unfamiliar whirl of multifarious occupations,” Dora retired for whole months with Stefan to her aunt’s sanatorium at the foot of the Semmering in Austria—not far from the vacation home of Toni Cassirer’s parents.
No, there was further to fall. In September 1922, the month when Jaspers provided Heidegger with 1,000 marks to finance his trip to Heidelberg because such an expense threatened to sink the family budget, Benjamin, on his expeditions through the antique shops of Berlin, Göttingen, Frankfurt, and Heidelberg, wouldn’t have hesitated to spend the same amount on some rare book for his private collection.
Jaspers was in fact a significant reason why Benjamin was staying in Heidelberg again that December. “I don’t yet know how things stand at the university,” Benjamin told Scholem on December 6. “I will do everything I can to be introduced to Jaspers.” It is highly unlikely, if not quite inconceivable, that Benjamin knew anything about the “community of struggle” newly forged between Jaspers and Heidegger. And if he had, would it have discouraged him, or even bothered him?
Benjamin had made contact with Jaspers in 1921 (he had liked him “quite well”25), and after the setbacks of the previous few months, he saw the recently appointed philosophy professor as one of his last real hopes. Jaspers, whose wife was Jewish, represented a more unconventional and freer vision of philosophy, far from the scholastic strictures and the traditional straitjackets of what all young thinkers would have agreed was the common enemy: neo-Kantianism. And like Heidegger, desperately seeking a post in 1922, Benjamin had a new and extremely ambitious application in his suitcase that winter. An essay so powerful, so theoretically rich and methodically refined that, as he clearly sensed and also openly declared, it “marked the method of his future works.” It was his hundred-page critical analysis of Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities.
AS ALWAYS WHEN BENJAMIN TURNED his hand to philosophy, this essay was about simply everything, not least a piercing interpretation of his own living arrangements. Because the centrifugal forces of those years had taken his marriage to Dora to a breaking point. Certainly, at the time, Heidelberg University was one of the Continent’s intellectual beacons. It was where the brothers Max and Alfred Weber had laid the foundations of modern sociology. Where the lawyer and philosopher of law Gustav Radbruch achieved renown. Where the young György Lukács had written his theory of the novel. Friedrich Gundolf dominated German studies from Heidelberg. In the summer of 1921, Stefan George was still wandering lost in thought through the castle ruins that had once inspired Hölderlin and Hegel to reach their greatest heights. And among the philosophers, too, a newborn star was flickering to life in the form of Karl Jaspers.
But the actual reason, from 1921 onward, that Benjamin regularly spent weeks at a time creeping down the alleyways of Heidelberg’s old town was the sculptor Jula Cohn. When they first met among friends in Berlin, Benjamin had fallen heavily in love with her—unhappily, of course, and for a long time without a hint of reciprocation. But that wasn’t all. Jula Cohn had at the same time fallen for Benjamin’s school friend Erich Schön, with whom—and it’s almost too banal to be true or even just interesting—Benjamin’s wife, Dora, had been quite openly in a relationship since 1921. A tricky quadrangle whose classical model any child in Germany could actually have identified: Goethe’s deeply complex novel about relationships, Elective Affinities.
In the closing days of 1921, when Benjamin sat down at his desk in Berlin to have another run at his postdoctoral project, his own complex network of relationships became the crucial impulse to bundle his lifelong preoccupation with Goethe’s work and worldview—based on his conviction about the actual tasks and methods of literary criticism—into a treatise of just a hundred pages.
This extraordinarily dense text, celebrated today as one of Benjamin’s major works, titled “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” is dressed up as a classic, and therefore purely interpretative, essay.26 But in fact Benjamin’s engagement with Goethe’s novel, not unlike the novel itself, is the most comprehensive imaginable critique of—we might even call it a meditation on—the institution of bourgeois marriage and hence the supposed core of bourgeois society as a whole. In other words, it is an exercise in myth-busting, which reveals all the hidden forces and dynamics that actually hold a modern bourgeois society together, with all its constituent promises of freedom and self-involvement. For the Benjamin of “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” these are in the end mythical forces, patterns of thought and dynamics—and hence inevitably inauspicious, disabling, and constraining. Building on this, he answers the question of how the supposedly free and self-determining subject is to liberate himself from the subtly pernicious effects of these forces and ideas and thus lead a life in which a true and fulfilling marriage might be possible.
Benjamin’s essay amalgamates—of course without any knowledge of its contemporaries—the two central ideas and impulses of Cassirer’s book about mythical conceptual form and Heidegger’s “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle” into an autonomous theory of his own. The theory concerns the conditions necessary for a true marriage—or, more broadly understood, a true, free, and authentic form of life. Like Cassirer, Benjamin saw the need to reveal the cryptic and invariably present effects of mythical patterns of thought on our civilization through the liberating process of consciousness raising. And like Jaspers’s friend Heidegger, writing in the same year, Benjamin directed his attention at certain openings that become apparent in extremely heightened situations, and make possible the courageous leap into another and more essential form of existence. All three authors showed themselves (like Kant) to be firmly convinced: a person, a subject, an existence that is not clear about the true conditions of its orientation in the world cannot make a truly free decision. It is not truly mature. And only the mature, Benjamin would add, should marry each other—indeed only they can be married to each other in the true sense.
ALL THREE AUTHORS here recognize the obligation to philosophically submit the modern rational subject to a conceptual process of unlearning in order to render the linguistic forces at work in and through it visible and thus, if necessary, also treatable: to bring them into the light.
Benjamin begins his essay with the four protagonists, highly cultured and intrinsically bourgeois, of Goethe’s novel:
At the height of their cultivation . . . they are subject to the forces that cultivation claims to have mastered, even if it may forever prove impotent to curb them.27
Benjamin is thus expressing the suspicion, shared by Cassirer, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, that the modern subject’s emphasis on consciousness, precisely where it imagines itself to be entirely free and sovereign, masks only processes of repression and obscurity that, if they are not worked through, can only lead to misery, if not to social destruction. But the prime example of a free choice made by the modern bourgeois subject on its own terms is precisely that of marriage. Here, as the title of Goethe’s novel suggests, the mature subject can escape the bonds of nature and confidently opt to find affinities with complete strangers.
THE TWO CENTRAL CONCEPTS that bracket each modern life, according to Benjamin, are “freedom” and “fate.” If true freedom is to exist, the forces of fate must ultimately pale in the face of human desire. If fate gains the upper hand, all freedom and choice are merely illusory, and the morally charged concept of “guilt” in particular becomes empty in its application. Fate knows no guilt, only atonement. Freedom knows no atonement, only responsibility.
For Benjamin, Goethe’s Elective Affinities portrays the necessary failure of the modern bourgeois way of life. In the end, bourgeois life has been unable to free itself entirely from the notion of destiny, which it presents as natural. Bourgeois individuals are accordingly incapable, despite their own supposed self-determination in the choices they make, of assuming full responsibility for the consequences of their actions.
This ambivalence, which shapes the whole of bourgeois existence and hence the whole of modern life, even and especially in the Weimar Republic, is particularly apparent in the concept of romantic love and its inevitable consequence, marriage. Because this love must, it is commonly held, always have something fateful about it, something vaguely predetermined and inexplicable (often the myth of how improbable the lovers’ first meeting was, in retrospect). On the other hand, that fateful event must be transferred, by the conscious choice of marriage, and hence the signing of the relationship into law, entirely into the realm of reason and self-determination. I do! But having both at the same time, once we grasp the situation in this way, is contradictory and existentially unattainable.
The necessary consequence of this dilemma is, in Benjamin’s words, a way of being that is distinguished by a “lingering, at once guilty and guiltless, in the precincts of fate.” And it inevitably leads, as Goethe shows us in exemplary fashion in Elective Affinities, to catastrophe. In this state of lingering, both inconclusive and tragically unresolved, the “powers that emerge from the disintegration of the marriage must necessarily win out. For they are precisely those of fate.”28 In Benjamin’s reading of Goethe, these are mythical powers in the sense of nature and natural forces (the environment, water, premonitions, astrology, curses . . . ) that exceed the human will and in this sense disempower human existence.
Benjamin sees the tendency to attribute the failure of one’s own marriage—while that failure is unfolding—ultimately to “higher powers” as a prime example of the very same existential laziness and lack of concern that Heidegger saw, in his “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle,” as the origin of the modern loss of self. In Cassirer’s terms it is the voluntary withdrawal into a form of thought—the mythical—in which truly self-determined action and hence responsibility become impossible.
Wrapped up once again in mythical thought, in which every event in nature augurs or reveals a plan predetermined by fate, or indeed fate itself, we lose ourselves as free beings. And in Benjamin’s view we lose ourselves all too willingly, because by doing so we escape one of the greatest of all impositions: truly having to accept responsibility for our own actions. It is an aversion that even Goethe, as he was only too aware, felt powerfully. Benjamin describes that state as follows:
The human being petrifies in the chaos of symbols and loses the freedom unknown to the ancients. In taking action he lands among signs and oracles. They were not lacking in Goethe’s life. . . . Indeed, in Poetry and Truth, he recounted how, while on a walk, torn between his calling to poetry and his calling to painting, he set up an oracle. Fear of responsibility is the most spiritual of all those kinds of fear to which Goethe’s nature subjected him. It is a foundation of the conservative position that he brought to the political, the social, and in his old age, probably the literary, too. It is the root of the missed opportunities in his erotic life.29
This is, then, one kind of disempowerment that Benjamin reveals through Goethe, using the example of the marital crisis: a relapse into descriptions of and perspectives upon the world that yield to the lazy urge to self-disempowerment. It exemplifies the fall into the mythical form of thought, which for Benjamin (and indeed for Cassirer) includes all forms of deterministic and interpretative superstition, particularly that of astrology.
But the shortcoming addressed—and here Benjamin, unhappy in both love and marriage, is also addressing himself—refers to the state of a cravenly neglected and essentially irrevocable chance at a fresh experience of love and the chance of a new life.
ISN’T IT ALL A LITTLE BIT TOO PAT, and above all too gloomy? Isn’t the absolute I do uttered voluntarily by spouses the textbook example of a mature promise, a durable self-tethering, a willingness to assume lifelong responsibility not only for their own life but also for the life of their chosen partner?
One Benjaminian answer to that is: If marriage is really a choice, then that choice is not the one on which the institution is supposedly based, namely true love. Because, according to Benjamin, we cannot choose love, insofar as “choice” here means something like a selection deliberately made from established alternatives (like the choice between two pairs of shoes, for example). The complete erasure of fate from the course of love seems inevitably to mean the extinction of love. Such relationships even have a contemporary name: rational marriage. This may exist, indeed it may even today be the most widespread form of the institution. But by definition it does not fulfill the ideal of a true marriage. Even from this point of view, then, an ultimately liberating escape from mythical thought is obstructed by the same bourgeois-romantic ideal of marriage. In these matters we cannot be entirely rational and self-determined. Anyone who really wants to be struck by Cupid’s arrow cannot have fired it himself.
But above all, in Benjamin’s view, when we say I do and enter a bourgeois marriage as someone who is capable of love, we inevitably find ourselves plagued by thoughts of guilt and sacrifice. For what is the meaning of I do, if not the promise to deny ourselves, in the future and for the rest of our lives, that singular event that opened up our lives, the true foundation of the promise we have just given? And are we then supposed to act as if that is where the actual, rational happiness of life is to be found? As if it were really possible for us to reconcile ourselves with this self-chosen state of permanent self-denial? This is precisely what Goethe did not believe. His flesh-and-blood experience as an erotic natural being was fundamentally different. As Benjamin maintained:
In the tremendous ultimate experience of the mythic powers—in the knowledge that reconciliation with them cannot be obtained except through the constancy of sacrifice—Goethe revolted against them.30
Goethe’s novel is thus, for Benjamin, the most artfully composed testimony imaginable for rebellion against two equal forces: the myth of Eros (in which we are passionate natural beings) and the allure of mastering these forces by means of reason, law, and voluntary moral education (in which we are linguistic rational beings capable of cultivation). In Goethe’s day this was the classic opposition between “Sturm und Drang” and “Enlightenment.” What the example of marriage clearly shows is that reconciliation between these forces is ultimately impossible, and that there cannot be something like a truly successful, truly self-determined life under the premises of the bourgeois plan of life. The bourgeois promise of freedom is inevitably deceptive, distorting, and hampered by fate. Its freedom is also purely notional:
For what the author shrouds in silence a hundred times can be seen quite simply enough from the course of things as a whole: that, according to ethical laws, passion loses all its rights and happiness when it seeks a pact with the bourgeois, affluent, secure life.31
There is no true marriage on bourgeois terms, no right life in the false. Bourgeois marriage, by virtue of its stability, leads to a state of irresolution, a “lingering, at once guilty and guiltless, in the precincts of fate.” Furthermore, for both Goethe and Benjamin that stability can only be illusory, as any form of stagnation can only be a concealed form of falling, and in the end it unleashes the mythical forces with all their destructive power and leads the bond, chosen by lovers, to its destruction.
IN 1922 ALL THIS WAS, for anyone capable of reading it, now far more than merely a dazzling analysis and decoding of the philosophical content of Goethe’s novel. The open-minded reader could see that Benjamin was using the institution of marriage—as the supposed foundation, indeed the kernel of all bourgeois society—as a cipher for the state of bourgeois democracy, meaning the Weimar Republic; his prophetic and philosophical verdict on the predictable fate of precisely this republic had been committed to paper. This republic, if it continued doggedly in its present form, constantly stalling and refusing reparation payments, a typically Weimar form of “lingering, at once guilty and guiltless, in the precincts of fate,” would inevitably fall back under the spell of mythical forms of thought—and in the end be destroyed by them.
WAS THIS PROCESS really inevitable? Was there really no way to escape the forces ranged against one another, no chance of a universally liberating extirpation of guilt, a leap into freedom, into a happy “marriage”? According to Benjamin, such a possibility certainly did exist. It is at least hinted at in Goethe’s novel, or more precisely in the novella “The Curious Tale of the Childhood Sweethearts,” which lies at the novel’s center and is completely uncoupled from the actual plot. The marriage of those “children” is, in Benjamin’s reading, the only truly successful one in the novel, because it is based not on a choice in the conventional sense, but instead on a decision in the existential sense. A decision made in the midst of a perilous, life-threatening situation.
The female sweetheart, in extreme hardship due to the oppressive power of bourgeois convention, resolves to make a leap from a moving boat into a supposedly lethal river, only to be rescued by her future bridegroom, who is likewise resolved to end his life. Benjamin offers—on occasion quite directly and deliberately addressing Jaspers, as the intended reader of what was, after all, an application essay—the whole repertoire of existentially urgent rhetoric as necessary for true self-discovery:
In the novella a brilliant light holds sway. From the outset everything, sharply contoured, is at a peak. It is the day of decision shining into the dusk-filled Hades of the novel. . . . Because these human beings [the sweethearts] do not risk everything for the sake of a falsely conceived freedom, no sacrifice falls among them; rather, the decision befalls within them. . . . It is the chimerical striving for freedom that draws down fate upon the characters in the novel. The lovers in the novella are beyond both freedom and fate, and their courageous decision suffices to tear to bits a fate that would gather to a head over them and to see through a freedom that would pull them down to the nothingness of choice.32
HOWEVER, IN THE CONSCIOUSNESS of Benjamin’s approach to the existential leap into true freedom lies an essential difference between him and Heidegger. Heidegger’s leap resolutely renounces any form of a Beyond or transcendence, and hence renounces all religion. Dasein can acquire liberation only from the structures of false (i.e., bourgeois) existence, from the false (Aristotelian-Cartesian) foundations of the modern subject, from within itself. As Heidegger established quite clearly in 1922: “Philosophy is fundamentally atheistic.” The self-enlightenment of one’s own facticity must be accomplished in full knowledge of one’s own finitude (Heidegger speaks of the “having-imminently” [Bevorstehendhaben] of death). Benjamin, on the other hand, explicitly interprets the leap of the young sweethearts—perfectly harmonizing with that of the existentialist philosopher-king, Søren Kierkegaard—as a leap into belief in God, belief in the possibility of salvation from the ultimately false alternatives that condition and devastate all non-transcendent existence.
Goethe said this expressly in the novella, since the moment of shared readiness for death through God’s will gives new life to the lovers, following which old rights lose their claim. Here he shows the life of the two lovers saved in precisely the sense in which marriage preserves it for the pious ones. In this pair he depicted the power of true love, which he prohibited himself from using in religious form.33
Yes, for Benjamin, every decision worthy of the name refers to the transcendent sphere of the Beyond, because “choice is natural and can even belong to the elements; decision is transcendent.”34 There is in decisions always more at stake than we want and are capable of. And in 1922, this transferred quite neatly to Benjamin’s political theology. He sees the Weimar Republic as trapped inside the same unholy maelstrom as that in which Goethe describes his couples. Choices are incapable of salvaging this mess. Rather than return to the polls, always with less hope than last time, we need to summon the courage for a quasi-religious leap into a different system, to make a decision in favor of a radically new form of coexistence, one predicated on the experience of a Messianic salvation.
At a personal level, things with Jula Cohn hadn’t worked out. She just hadn’t made that leap. And that year Benjamin lacked both the strength and the funds necessary to make a brave escape from the bourgeois structures of the academic career. Neither could he have described the form of government that the Weimar Republic should have adopted to save itself. Nor, for that matter, could Heidegger. In this context Cassirer’s desire to cling to his perfectly conventional, if perhaps also slightly passionless, marriage to Toni Cassirer also acquired a distinctly political edge as a rejection of confused adventures, revolutions, or civil wars, particularly in a time of crisis. They would only make everything much, much worse.
And Wittgenstein? Well, as we have seen, following in the footsteps of Kierkegaard and Tolstoy, he had taken the leap into a new life of his own. Now he had to live with the consequences of that decision.
“LET US PRAY.” The teacher reverently sets his watch down on the lectern, his stick on the other side. He folds his hands, closes his eyes, and in a deep voice recites the usual morning verses to the forty pupils in his classroom:
Holy Spirit, come and shine
Your light of mercy on us,
So that we may make our progress,
our duty always to learn.
To retain what we have learned
And always strive to do good.35
It was a sacred ritual for him. This week, as every week, Wittgenstein would tell stories “in which the battle for religious convictions placed the faithful in situations of extreme danger.”36 His eyes, normally hidden behind his hands as they dug furrows in his brow, begin to shine with enthusiasm. Each of his pupils understood that this teacher was different from all the others in the school. The day before, he had struck one pupil on the head with his exercise book until it fell apart and the pages fluttered loosely to the floor of the classroom. The boy’s misdeed had been to answer Wittgenstein’s question “Where was Jesus born?” by saying, “In Jerusalem.”37
Every day Wittgenstein battled to hold on to what he had recognized philosophically and then chosen religiously, while still striving to do good, but without losing his self-control or the possibility of a meaningful life. As he had written in January 1921, from his first teaching post in the little mountain village of Trattenbach, to his friend Paul Engelmann:
I ought to have turned my life to the good and become a star in the sky. But I have remained stuck on earth and now I am gradually fading away. My life has actually become meaningless, so it only consists of superficial episodes. The people around me don’t notice and wouldn’t understand either; but I know I lack something fundamental.38
By now, in November 1922, he had already switched posts twice, and he hoped—or pretended to hope—that he would find conditions at least tolerable in the school in the village of Puchberg.
His doubts about the meaning and above all the value of his life were increasingly taking their toll on his colleagues and even his friends. “To my great shame I must admit that the number of people I can talk to is becoming smaller and smaller,” he had admitted to Engelmann that August. During this phase, the criterion of connection was determined by his devotion to the Catholic faith: Wittgenstein feared that he would no longer be able to make himself intelligible to those who lacked it—above all Bertrand Russell, the author of the future international bestseller Why I Am Not a Christian.39 As a result, their friendship entered a serious crisis. That terrible encroaching suspicion about everything human, which Wittgenstein described to his friend and patron at the start of his time in Trattenbach, applied increasingly to his closest circle of friends: “It’s true that people on average aren’t worth much anywhere; but here they are far more useless and irresponsible than elsewhere. . . . Trattenbach is a particularly inferior place in Austria and the Austrians have—since the war—fallen abysmally low.”40 In his first two years of teaching, Wittgenstein was trapped in a downward spiral of misanthropy in which self-hatred and hatred of others increasingly came to reinforce each other.
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1922, when he was transferred to the neighboring village of Hassbach, Wittgenstein stuck it out there for just a few weeks, since the locals seemed to him to be “not human beings at all, just repellent maggots.” It was not until he was moved to Puchberg in Lower Austria in November 1922 that things took a slight turn for the better. Not that the people there struck him as more agreeable than anywhere else. In Puchberg, too, he saw himself surrounded by creatures that were at best “three-quarters human, but one-quarter animal.” But that month Wittgenstein, then still a trainee teacher, took his final qualifying exam. From now on he had greater freedom in designing his courses. His status among his colleagues was also more secure than before. Yet this period of relative relaxation may have had something to do with developments in the life that he had abandoned. While their friendship might have become increasingly fraught, Russell, after his return from China in August 1921, had, as promised, stepped up his efforts to find a publisher for Wittgenstein’s book, and had in the end succeeded. On or around November 15, 1922, the first copy of Wittgenstein’s treatise, printed in German and English, arrived in Puchberg, under the now definitive title Tractatus logico-philosophicus.
Wittgenstein was delighted. The fact that he received not a single shilling, or indeed penny, for the book from his publisher Kegan Paul mattered not in the slightest. Neither did the fact that he was still waiting for someone to understand it. It had been published in England, was as free of errors as possible, and the translation wasn’t bad. The work now existed in this world, it was universally accessible, a publicly available fact: it was the case. And it was not inconceivable that someone would comprehend the actual therapeutic aim of his treatise, motivated as it was entirely by ethical concerns.
THE OBJECTIVE OF THE WORK was simply “to see the world correctly” and, with this clarified way of seeing, which relied on drawing a sharp boundary between what can be said meaningfully and what cannot, to lead a more clarified life. It was also this objective approach that had led Wittgenstein to accept G. E. Moore’s suggested title of Tractatus logico-philosophicus. It was a reference to Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus, and hence a book written in the seventeenth century with the explicit aim of liberating its readers from false assumptions based on errors of thought and concept about the nature of the human spirit—above all, errors involving the use of divine revelation as a supposed foundation for ethical and political action. For Spinoza, philosophizing meant first and foremost exposing existing confusions as such, and exposing false assumptions through a clarifying logical analysis that enabled readers at last to “see correctly” the world of which they are a part. Spinoza’s program, too, was initially a destructive or decivilizing one—in the sense of liberating us by linguistic means from false assumptions that are themselves linguistically determined, which permanently distort our vision of the world.
As far as Wittgenstein was concerned, however, by 1922 these false assumptions were not solely, and not even primarily, religious convictions. Rather, they were the fundamental assumptions of the supposedly enlightened scientific vision of the world. This vision revealed itself (although its acolytes were not aware of it, and had no wish to be) to be trapped in extremely primitive and, according to Wittgenstein, demonstrably groundless convictions, which in the end fell short of even clarified religious faith. The scientifically enlightened modern age, with its foundational belief in the unconstrained power of natural laws, from which it imagined everything that was, is, and could be causally explained and even predicted, was based on a conceptual self-deception. It lay in an inability to distinguish between the concepts of “logical necessity” and “the necessity of natural laws.”
Confronted with the same problems that preoccupied Heidegger, Cassirer, and Benjamin, Wittgenstein might be said to have been concerned more than anything with clarifying the relationship between “guilt” and “fate,” “freedom” and “necessity,” “faith” and “knowledge,” “being there” and “being like this” as the central concepts of any truly mature life. And these ideas were set out as clearly as possible in the very book that Wittgenstein was now able to hold in his hands:
6:36311 That the sun will rise to-morrow, is an hypothesis; and that means that we do not know whether it will rise.
6:37 A necessity for one thing to happen because another has happened does not exist. There is only logical necessity.
6:371 At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.
6:372 So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate.
And they both are right and wrong. But the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear conclusion, whereas in the modern system it should appear as though everything were explained.
The truth was, however, that nothing was explained, least of all the question of why the world exists, with its laws that we believe we are able to explain. And no explanation of it would ever be possible, because any explanation would have to fall back on something outside this world and thus inevitably make us say things that were nonsense. A truly religious individual of the kind Wittgenstein imagined, and considered himself to be, was someone able to take that crucial clarifying step, advancing ahead of all those who put their faith in science.
That was not to say that no locus of meaning might be found beyond the boundaries of the sayable, only that what can be sensed beyond those boundaries was unsuited to justifications or explanations concerning this world—if those justifications were of a factual or an ethical nature.
6:41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so.
THEN AGAIN, these were all propositions that, according to Wittgenstein’s own criteria, were completely meaningless. But that was precisely the brilliant trick that formed his program of conceptual decivilization. How can a confusion created by language be clarified except through the means of language itself?
In the end, therefore, all that remained was to push away the clarifying ladder of propositions that had just been laboriously climbed.
But what next, at such a height, in the absence of a ladder? What chance do we have of returning to solid ground? There is in fact only one option: the decision to make the leap! The leap into faith! The leap into a truly ethical existence, the leap into freedom! Granted, this leap is distinguished by the fact that it is performed in the full awareness of its fundamental instability and groundlessness. A leap into nothingness, then, if its opposite “something” means a solid ground or a fact within the world. Only a genuinely groundless leap grants a true footing in faith, because only such a leap is from the outset free of any justifiable expectation of a potential reward, of justice, spiritual salvation, immortality, or anything else usually promised by religion. This is also set out, word for word, in the Tractatus:
6:422 The first thought in setting up an ethical law of the form “thou shalt . . .” is: And what if I do not do it. But it is clear that ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the ordinary sense. This question as to the consequences of an action must therefore be irrelevant. At least these consequences will not be events. For there must be something right in that formulation of the question. There must be some sort of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but this must lie in the action itself.
The value of the decision to lead a free life, if there is one, is justified by the experience of living that life itself (and can therefore not be grasped externally as its consequence). And it must be understood as a leap into this concrete life and no other, not even a later or indeed an eternal one:
6:4312 The temporal immortality of the soul of man, that is to say, its eternal survival also after death, is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption in the first place will not do for us what we always tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive for ever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.
The very decision to make the leap into faith or, more broadly, into a truly ethical existence, presented by Heidegger, Benjamin, and Wittgenstein to their readers in 1922 with the full force of their rhetorical and conceptual acuity, seeks no other guarantee and no other basis than the living of life itself. Those who now seriously ask why we should opt for such a life—is it, for example, easier, more pleasant, more comfortable, more carefree?—reveal only their misunderstanding of the purpose of that leap. Indeed, it shows that they have in the end understood nothing at all. Not about themselves, nor about the world. That, at least, was how Wittgenstein saw it—and he wasn’t alone.
Wittgenstein’s clarification of motive and expectation sheds light on the difference between “choice” and “decision” that was also crucial to Benjamin’s, Heidegger’s, and even Cassirer’s writings from this time. A choice seeks justification in predictable consequences, while a decision does not. In this sense a choice is always conditional, a decision unconditional—and hence in fact free. A choice remains entangled in myth, while a decision—ideally—breaks away from the supposedly existence-guiding, rational logic of cause and effect, fate and necessity, guilt and reconciliation. This liberation in itself bestows sacredness of a kind. That was the philosophical and educational liberation theory (or liberation theology?) set out by Wittgenstein in the 1920s.
But there was one thing that Wittgenstein could not deny, fully aware as he was of having undertaken the leap into a new life as a primary school teacher: the possible meaning of that existence did not appear to him in his daily living of that life. At any rate it did not fulfill him, but left him for days and weeks at a time with that numb feeling of emptiness from which he had in fact hoped to escape, redeeming himself by making his decision. He found himself not only seriously troubled in Puchberg; he had had enough of this “it.” His letters from this period testify with monotonous regularity to his awareness of the impossibility of escaping the dark forces of his own character and nature. Time and again he was drawn inexorably inward, back to the deeper, unilluminated strata of himself.
He did make sincere attempts to connect with others; indeed, he was at this time spending his lunches with his colleagues at the pub, and in Rudolf Koder he even found a person who shared his tastes in music and with whom he was soon playing duets for piano and clarinet by Brahms and Mozart every afternoon. But in the end he and everyone around him clearly sensed that that invisible and, for precisely that reason, impenetrable pane of glass—which he had once described to his sister Hermine—still stood between him and the rest of the world. Throughout the winter and spring of 1923, Wittgenstein was above all: painfully lonely.
The publication of his book did nothing to relieve his plight. On the contrary: it must only have reinforced and intensified his sense of constant, fateful isolation. As he sat in his sparsely furnished room, what else could the sight of that volume, day in and day out, convey to him but the simple truth that there were limits, clearly and firmly drawn, on his ability to liberate himself from his own troubles by philosophizing. What is the point of seeing this world “correctly” if there is no one anywhere to share it with?