SLALOMING
HAVING CLIMBED TO THE SUMMIT, Heidegger was then “a little afraid of what was to come.” Twenty-seven hundred meters above sea level was higher than he had ever been before. The air was thin up there. Did he have the skill, and would the equipment he had brought from Freiburg be able to withstand the challenge? Here, now, he would have to prove himself. It was too late at any rate for self-doubt and hesitation. Hic Davos! Hic salta!
Things went surprisingly well. Even after the first few turns it was clear to Heidegger that he was in fact “far superior” to all the others—even those with more experience on these slopes. The Parsenn descent, some 800 meters into the valley below, as he wrote to Elfride, on March 21, 1929—from the middle of the Davos conference—was the highlight of his stay in the Swiss Alps so far. Cassirer couldn’t come on the hiking tour. His colleague, Heidegger reported, “fell ill after the first lecture, he came down with a cold.” The Kurator of Frankfurt University, Kurt Riezler, however, joined the climb. The same Riezler whom Ernst Cassirer had tried to headhunt from Hamburg less than twelve months previously with carte blanche to redesign the philosophy department in Frankfurt. The chair in question had been occupied after Cassirer’s resignation by Max Scheler, whose Position of Man in the Cosmos was published in 1928, less than a year after Cassirer’s Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy and before the third volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Scheler had died unexpectedly in May 1928.
SO WHILE CASSIRER SAT with his wife, Toni, swaddled in warm camel-hair blankets, on the balcony of his hotel room, hoping like Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain that he would soon be cured, Heidegger spent every free minute with his new Alpinist friend Riezler. It was a chance to make academic advances, and not just in passing: “I am with Riezler a lot, he told me he very much hoped that I would be receiving a call to Frankfurt—it was just a matter of time.” Everything else had for Heidegger been more or less disappointing—not least Davos itself: “It is dreadful: boundlessly kitsch architectures, absolutely random confusion of pensions and hotels. And then the invalids.”1
Reading The Magic Mountain in Marburg with Hannah Arendt, he had formed a rather more attractive image of the town. In terms of content, too, the course of the conference and its participants had hitherto left him cold. Admittedly, he considered his two lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—each of which he had delivered in a free slaloming style, “for over 1½ hours without notes”—to have been “a great success,” particularly since he had had the impression that “the young people feel that the roots of my work lie in a place that today’s city people no longer have—indeed no longer even understand.”
But he was also horrified to note “how torn, how insecure and deprived of instinct, the young people are. And they cannot find their way back to the simplicity of Dasein.”2 Cassirer, he added in a letter of March 23, “will try to get up today, so that the ‘working group’ will not take place until Monday or Tuesday.”
The disoriented “young people” who attended Heidegger’s and Cassirer’s lectures in Davos included a considerable number of the future greats of global postwar philosophy, such as Emmanuel Levinas, Norbert Elias, Joachim Ritter, and the no longer quite so young Rudolf Carnap. Like almost all of the rising generation of German and French philosophers, Carnap was particularly impressed by Heidegger: “University Conferences. Cassirer speaks well but somewhat pastorally. . . . Heidegger serious and sober, very attractive in a human way,” he recorded in his diary on March 18. Then, on March 30: “Went for a walk with H. His position: against idealism, particularly in national education. The new ‘question of existence.’ Need of redemption.”3
With Cassirer now on the way to recovery, Carnap did his rounds of the conference hotel. The discussion focused mostly on which academic posts would be vacated in the near future. Cassirer had been engaged in a long and intense exchange of research with Carnap’s Viennese mentor, Moritz Schlick: networking, bowing and scraping, forming and nurturing new contacts, collecting and recording impressions. Then as now, this business was at least as important for the career of an academic philosopher as thinking itself. Lucky are those who can maintain their balance on that waxed and polished parquet. That was how Heidegger saw it, too: “I am very pleased, even though there is not in essence very much for me to learn, to be a part of something of this kind—agility, dealing with people and having a certain outward confidence.”4
It may be that those days in the feudal Belvédère were the first that Heidegger had ever spent in a grand hotel. But for this milieu, extremely sensitive to etiquette, only those who had fully grasped and mastered its rules could afford to break with convention. This Heidegger also learned quickly: “Tired and satisfied, full of the sun and freedom of the mountains, still with the rhythms of those sweeping descents in our bodies, we always turned up in the evening in our skiing outfits among the elegance of the evening wear.”5
Toni Cassirer was appropriately irritated, all the more so because she enjoyed what was for her the distinctly dubious privilege of being right next to Heidegger in the seating arrangement imposed in the grand dining room. “The problem I encountered,” she remembered, “was how I would spend the next fourteen days as neighbor of this curious enemy if I acknowledged him as such.” Since her husband was ill in bed for practically the whole of the first week, that meant that twice a day she “sat with that strange character who had undertaken to drag Cohen’s legacy through the mud and, if possible, to destroy Ernst.”6
Toni Cassirer’s memories of Davos (written in 1948, when she was in exile in New York, and thus likely embellished) are the only ones we have that really speak of any kind of noticeable “enmity” or visible “destructiveness.” Other available testimonies, especially those of participants, are on the contrary united in their depiction of a cooperative, benign, and open atmosphere. And yet from the beginning, as all the participants knew, a shadow lay over the conference, and particularly over the upcoming debate between Cassirer and Heidegger.
ONLY A MONTH BEFORE, on February 23, 1929, as part of an event for the Combat League for German Youth, the Viennese sociologist Othmar Spann had delivered a lecture on “The Cultural Crisis of the Present Day” at Munich University. In it he expressed regret at the fact that “the German people had to be reminded of their own Kantian philosophy by foreigners.” Among these “foreigners” he included philosophers of the rank of Hermann Cohen and Ernst Cassirer. In Spann’s words, “The explanation of Kantian philosophy by Cohen, Cassirer, and others is . . . very lacking,” since “the true Kant, who was in fact a metaphysician, was thus not presented to the German people.”7
“Professor Spann’s lecture,” the correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung reported on February 25, “was essentially a polemic . . . against democracy. . . . He spoke in fleeting but clear reference to the Prussian culture minister about the stifling of the intellectual freedom of German students, scholars and artists, and slogans about individualistic democracy and class struggle.”8
Spann’s appearance in Munich became a scandal for a number of reasons. First, the Combat League for German Youth was an organization founded by Alfred Rosenberg, the future Nazi ideologue, with the aim of representing and disseminating the political goals of the National Socialist Party. In Munich, as elsewhere, university guidelines prohibited the use of the institution’s space for political events. Before Spann stepped up to the podium, Adolf Hitler had entered the auditorium to a “noisy ovation” from his many “swastika-wearing followers,” and at the end of the lecture the two exchanged “a handshake and deep bows.”9
The occasion of Spann’s lecture represented a spectacular infringement of university regulations. But the substance of it fell explicitly within a line of thought, promulgated by nationalist-leaning Kant scholars such as Bruno Bauch, that held there were two traditions of Kant interpretation, one genuinely German and one Jewish, the latter characterized by Cohen and the neo-Kantian school at Marburg. In the wake of this talk, philosophical circles had been in uproar. Cassirer threatened privately to renounce his membership in the Kant Society if Bauch did not immediately resign his presidency, which he subsequently did. This was the backdrop for the toleration by Munich University of a völkisch-nationalistic, rabble-rousing attitude, applauded by Adolf Hitler, itself only four weeks before an international conference—guided by the Kantian question “What is a human being?”—at which Heidegger would present his own distinctly metaphysical reading of Kant’s major work. Whether it suited the protagonists or not, the Davos conference now held a distinctly political charge.
DURING HER HOURS WITH HEIDEGGER, Toni did everything she could to soften the brittle atmosphere:
Then it occurred to me to outwit the sly fox—because that was his reputation. I began a naive conversation with him, as if I didn’t know the slightest thing about his philosophical or his personal antipathies. I asked him about all kinds of mutual acquaintances, above all his knowledge of Cohen as a person, anticipating even with the tone of my question what was going to be an obvious answer. Without his asking, I told him what Ernst’s relationship with Cohen was like; I talked to him about the shameful treatment that this eminent scholar had experienced as a Jew; I told him that no member of the faculty had attended his funeral in Berlin. I told him, certain this time of his acquiescence, all kinds of important details about Ernst’s life, and had the satisfaction of seeing that hard crust dissolving like a soft roll in warm milk. When Ernst rose from his sickbed, it was difficult for Heidegger, who now knew so many personal things about him, to maintain his planned attitude of hostility. Admittedly, Ernst, with the kindness and respect that he showed him, did not make it easy for him to launch a frontal attack.10
Even in advance, Heidegger, too, was plagued by fears that the whole thing might become “a sensation,” in which “I was the center of attention more than I would personally have wished.” Particularly since Cassirer proved determined—probably to avoid a direct argument about Kant—to direct his lectures primarily at Heidegger’s Being and Time. While Heidegger, precisely out of fear of being too much the center of attention, decided to devote himself, given his fundamental ontological interests, entirely to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The tactical dance had thus begun long before the actual debate. And Heidegger seemed to have taken the lead: with Kant as his subject he would meet Cassirer on his own turf, where he had more, or indeed everything, to gain. Although it was by no means openly hostile, the meeting of the two at ten in the morning on March 26, 1929, was decidedly tense, as eyewitness Raymond Klibansky recalled. In front of the next generation of philosophers of both Germany and Switzerland, they were about to begin a debate that “in a sense concerned the future of German philosophy.”11
CASSIRER BEGAN, determined to sweep the subject of Neo-Kantianism—an explosive issue, once again—out of the way. “What does Heidegger in fact understand by Neo-Kantianism? . . . Neo-Kantianism is the whipping-boy of newer philosophy. I feel a lack of existing neo-Kantians.”12
Cassirer had scored a point. Particularly since Neo-Kantianism had in any case never been a “dogmatic doctrinal system, but rather a direction taken in posing questions.” And, he continued, “I must admit that I am surprised to have found a Neo-Kantian here in Heidegger, which I would not have expected.” A dexterous start. First: I’m not a Neo-Kantian! Second: If I am, Heidegger is too!
Now Heidegger, who begins by naming some names: “Cohen, Windelband, Rickert . . .” He was not out for reconciliation, that much was already clear. That said, Cohen was Cassirer’s thesis supervisor, and Rickert was Heidegger’s. So in fact the two were cut from the same cloth. But what cloth might that have been? Heidegger went on. Neo-Kantianism was at root more of an embarrassment than an autonomous direction of research. And around 1850 that embarrassment was the following: “What remains of philosophy if the totality of beings has been divided among the sciences? All that remains is knowledge of science, not of entity.” That hit home. And introduced the counterattack: philosophy as the pure maid of the sciences? Wasn’t that exactly what Cassirer was striving for with his “philosophy of symbolic forms”: knowing the systems of knowledge according to its internal structure? Epistemological theory rather than ontology? On it went, attack met with attack, now with Kant enlisted as token witness: “Kant sought not to provide a theory of the natural sciences, but to demonstrate the problems of metaphysics, and indeed of ontology.” In other words: Kant was not a Neo-Kantian, but a fundamental ontologist. Like me: Heidegger.
Cassirer was now clearly on the defensive. Distance himself from Cohen? Out of the question in the present circumstances. Better to attack Heidegger with Kant! His open flank was ethics. They were at least central for Kant, but a void for Heidegger. Cassirer: “If we consider Kant’s work overall, major problems arise. One problem is that of freedom. That has always been the actual main problem for me: How is freedom possible? Kant says the question cannot be grasped, we grasp only the ungraspability of freedom.”
The moral: Kant was a metaphysician, not at the service of ontology, however, but at the service of ethics! He was concerned with finite, active humans, not with Being. But precisely in Kantian ethics—and now Cassirer prepared to deliver a powerful blow—a breakthrough, an incursion, into metaphysics occurred: “The categorical imperative must be constituted in such a way that the law thus established applies not only to human beings but to all rational beings. Here there is suddenly this curious transition. . . . Morality as such leads beyond the world of phenomena. That is the decisive metaphysical aspect, that the breakthrough occurs at this point.”
A breakthrough from the sphere of the finite into the infinite, from immanence into transcendence. Here was something about which Heidegger had nothing whatsoever to say. And it implicated the problem with his whole design of Being and Time, his whole analysis of Dasein, his fundamental ontology. Or, as in a sequence of questions: “Heidegger has stressed that our cognitive power is finite. It is relative and it is bound. But then the question arises: How does such a finite being come by knowledge, reason, truth? . . . How does this finite being reach a definition of objects which are not as such bound to finitude?”
That was the fundamental question of metaphysics. That was Kant’s real question. And Cassirer’s, too. But was it also Heidegger’s? Cassirer now went all in: “Does Heidegger want to give up all of this objectivity? Does he want to withdraw entirely to the finite being, or if not, where does he see the breakthrough into that sphere as taking place?”
Good questions. Body blows. Heidegger was now cornered. He needed to call upon Kant. Or at least upon himself. Ethics were not exactly his specialty, but needs must: “Cassirer, then, wants to show that finitude becomes transcendent in the ethical writings. There is something in the categorical imperative that goes beyond finite being. But precisely the concept of the imperative as such shows the inner reference to a finite being.”
True! A child could have understood it: God needs no imperatives, only finite rational beings do. And God doesn’t need ontology, so this is also essentially, Heidegger added, an “Index of finitude.” This, then, was not a breakthrough, quite the contrary. Now Heidegger came back powered by Kant: “This going out to a higher being is also only a going up to a finite being, one that is created (angel).”
Davos, 1929, and the two most important philosophers of the modern age are debating categorical imperatives for angels on a public stage? Yes indeed. But Heidegger’s actual point is: “This transcendence, too, still remains within creation and finitude.”
Therefore Kant’s transcendence is only an immanent one, which retreats to finitude, is limited by it, and is indeed only made possible by it! Heidegger is now heading upstream: if we wish to understand Kant, metaphysics, philosophizing, at all, the direction of the questioning must be radically reversed: the actual question is not how, from the transcendence of entity, and thus from its temporary disclosure to us as human beings, one reaches the finitude of Dasein as the actual origin of the whole. That leads, of course, directly to the question of the Being of Dasein. The real question is: “What is the inner structure of Dasein itself; is it finite or infinite?” Everyone in the auditorium knows Heidegger’s reply to that: The inner structure of Dasein is radically finite, and its possibilities are determined from within by temporality. That is the core of Being and Time.
No reply from Cassirer. So Heidegger continues: “Now to Cassirer’s question about universally valid eternal truths. If I say: Truth is relative to Dasein, that proposition . . . is a metaphysical one: truth can only be as truth and as truth has only one meaning, if Dasein exists. If Dasein does not exist, there is no truth, there is nothing at all. But it is only with the existence of something like Dasein that truth enters Dasein itself.” What is important for Heidegger: it is not, for example, that the truth of individual statements is relative to what a particular person may think; rather, the concept, the idea of truth itself, is essentially related to the finitude of Being, indeed it finds its true origin in its finitude. For God there is no question of truth, any more than there is for elephants or dogs. The question of truth arises only for Dasein. Metaphysics, developed from Dasein.
This was a tough one to counter. What about the supposed eternity of the known? Heidegger went on digging: “I ask the counter-question. . . . How do we know of this eternity? . . . Is this eternity not only what is possible on the grounds of an inner transcendence of time itself?” Inner transcendence of time itself? What did Heidegger mean by that? Simply put: Time, as something fluid, constantly refers beyond itself, and that is precisely what its essence is: “An inner transcendence lies within the essence of time; that time is not only what makes transcendence possible, but that time itself has a horizonal character; that in future, recollected behavior I always have at the same time a horizon of present, futurity, and been-ness in general; that a . . . definition of time is found here, within which something like the permanence of the substance is constituted for the very first time.”
Not all that complicated, in essence: for Heidegger, time is not something external or a containing vessel but a process that underlies all experience. Yet just because this process essentially denies with its essence the dynamic by which it is actually constituted—its constant state of flux—Dasein is led to think that there is something like permanent stability, indeed eternality. Eternal substances are therefore a metaphysical illusion, a deception from the spirit of Dasein. In truth, only the process itself is real. And that process is not a thing, it is not eternal, but “given.” And it “gives” in turn. Ultimately it “gives” everything that in its course becomes and passes. Being and time.
Bergson and Proust saw things similarly, incidentally. And Benjamin. And Husserl. And William James. And his brother, Henry. And Alfred North Whitehead. And Virginia Woolf. And James Joyce. And Salvador Dalí. And Charlie Chaplin . . . The idea defines the spirit of the 1920s. It is itself a child of the time. (What else could it be?) And for that very reason the important thing is to draw the correct metaphysical conclusions from it in a fully radical fashion. Heidegger is now in his element. Not another word about Kant. Heidegger is concerned with one thing only: “To stress the temporality of Dasein with regard to the possibility of the understanding of Being. And all problems are oriented with respect to this. In one direction, the analysis of death has the function of stressing the radical futurity of Dasein. . . . The analysis of anxiety . . . has the sole function of preparing for the question: On the grounds of which metaphysical sense of Dasein itself is it possible that the human being in general can be placed before something like Nothingness? . . . It is only possible for me to understand Being if I understand Nothingness or anxiety. . . . And only in the unity of the understanding of Being and Nothingness does the question of the origin arise of Why. Why can humanity ask about Why, and why must they ask?”
That is what metaphysics is concerned with. The experience of Being is bound up with the experience of the Nothing. It gives the groundless ground of all questioning. It shapes human beings into human beings, and brings them into actual existence for the first time! Human beings are the only creatures open to the experience of the Nothing at the ground of being. An eternally questioning origin, then. Infinite only in its ultimately unceasing questioning, but never in its cognitions.
Still no response from Cassirer. So on Heidegger went. And on. He now launched into a stormy counterattack: “Cassirer says: We do not grasp freedom, but only the ungraspability of freedom. . . . It does not follow from this, however, that to a certain extent the problem of the irrational pauses here. Rather, because freedom is not an object of theoretical apprehending but is instead an object of philosophizing, this can mean nothing other than the fact that freedom only is and only can be in the liberation. The only appropriate relation to freedom in humanity is the self-liberation of freedom in humanity.”
Freedom is a factual truth. And hence, by its essence, bound not to any given timeless law but to the groundless decision made in the moment, to make it work for ourselves. Is that still Kant? Kant reborn? Essentially German and metaphysical, the true Kantian Kant.
A student whose name has not been passed down to us took pity and brought Cassirer back into the ring. His questions were very simple. And aimed directly at the center.
Questions for Cassirer
What path do human beings have to infinitude? And can they participate in infinitude?
To what extent is the task of philosophy to be able to become free from anxiety? Or is its task not to surrender human beings, even radically, to anxiety?
Everyone in the auditorium, even Cassirer, sensed it was now time to break cover. He didn’t hesitate to give all he had. What path did human beings have to infinitude? “Solely through the medium of form. This is the function of form, that while humans change the form of their Dasein, that is, while they must now transpose everything in them that is lived experience into some objective shape in which they are objectified in such a way, to be sure, that they do not thereby become radically free from the finitude of the point of departure (for this is still linked to their particular finitude). Rather, while it arises from finitude, it leads finitude out into something new. And that is immanent infinitude.”
This is the metaphysical core of his philosophy of symbolic forms: the embodiments of our own experiences in symbolic forms create an autonomous realm of their own, which transcends the boundaries of their own finitude and possibly even finitude itself. Like the realm of logic, for example, or mathematics . . . systems of symbolic form, created by humans as cultured beings, but in their laws and their validity presumably not limited to it. Ergo: “They [human beings] possess their infinitude solely in this form. ‘From the chalice of this spiritual realm, infinitude flows to them.’ The spiritual realm is not a metaphysical spiritual realm; the true spiritual realm is just the spiritual world created by human beings themselves. That they could create it is the seal of their infinitude.”
Once again, as ever in a time of emergency, the same combination: Kant—Goethe, Schiller, Goethe—Kant. Is that enough? It didn’t look particularly radical, at any rate. And in 1929 it looked even a bit stale. But it was certainly one thing: idealism embodied, “typically” German in character (insofar as that term means anything at all). It might also be true. Cassirer believed it was. He faced the music. Here he stood. He could not do otherwise.
Now to anxiety—and to philosophy: what was his position? Cassirer summoned his strength and stood a little straighter: “That is a very radical question, which can be answered only with a kind of confession. Philosophy must allow humans to become sufficiently free, to the extent that they can just become free. While it does that, I believe, it frees human beings—in a certain radical sense, to be sure—from anxiety as a mere disposition. I believe, even according to Heidegger’s disquisitions earlier today, that freedom can properly be found only along the path of progressive liberation, which indeed is also an infinite process for him. . . . I would like the sense, the goal, in fact the freeing, to be taken in this sense: ‘Anxiety throws the earthly from you.’ That is the position of idealism, to which I have always pledged myself.”
Pause for breath. Powerful emotion. Tense expectation. How would Heidegger react? Where did he see philosophy’s actual task as lying? Where was the actual liberation, the breakthrough? Nothing, that much was clear to everybody, could be considered certain and lasting in his view. Not even questioning itself. Rather, according to Heidegger, humans were, “in an ultimate sense, accidental . . . so accidental that the highest form of the existence of Dasein can only be traced back to very few and rare glimpses of Dasein’s duration between life and death, that humans exist only in very few glimpses of the summit of their own possibility, but otherwise move in the midst of their entity.”
Such moments are the ones that count, not least and in fact particularly in philosophizing. For that reason, Heidegger continues, “the question of the essence of human beings . . . makes sense and can be justified only insofar as it derives its motivations from philosophy’s central set of problems, which leads human beings back beyond themselves and into the totality of beings in order to make manifest to them there, with all their freedom, the Nothingness of their Dasein. This Nothingness is not cause for pessimism and melancholy. Instead, it is the occasion for understanding that authentic activity happens only where there is opposition and that philosophy has the task of throwing human beings back, so to speak, into the harshness of their fate from the shallow aspect of human beings who use only the work of the spirit.”
Theses like fists. Silence. How could all that be summarized? Which of the two directions should judgment take?
What the philosopher Cassirer wanted: Cast off your anxiety as creative cultural beings, liberate yourself from your original constraints and limitations.
What the philosopher Heidegger wanted: Cast off culture as a rotten aspect of your essence, and sink as the groundlessly thrown beings that you are, each in your own way, back into the truly liberating origin of your existence: the Nothing and anxiety!
Davos, the debate of the century, the monad of a decade. Stretched to bursting from within, on March 26, 1929, it gave birth to two radically different answers to the same eternal question: Where can we find the essence of philosophizing? Or indeed: What is a human being?
Even Cassirer, chronically well disposed, now saw no chance of agreement: “We have reached a position where little is to be accomplished through mere logical arguments.” What Heidegger had known from the outset. At root it is not about arguments but about the courage to leap. But nothing hinders the necessary courage more than tepid deliberation and yearning for consensus: “Mere mediation will never contribute anything productive.” Now he turned away from Cassirer, and delivered his conclusion to the students in the room: “The important thing is that you take one thing with you from our debate: Do not orient yourselves to the variety of positions of philosophizing human beings, and do not occupy yourself with Cassirer and Heidegger. Rather, you have reached the point where you have felt that we are once more on the way toward getting down to business with the central question of metaphysics.”
If they probably hadn’t fully understood everything, hopefully they had sensed it. It. The abyss. The first necessary step on the way into total authenticity! Was that the case?
Yes, they sensed it. They took the first precipitous step. Deep within. Most of them, at least. Heidegger left the hall certain of his victory.
IT WAS ELFRIDE who would find out first: “I have just had a two-hour debate with Cassirer, which went very well and apart from its content made a big impression on the students.”13 In time Heidegger’s judgment grew a little more sophisticated, as his report to Elisabeth Blochmann reveals: “Cassirer was extremely elegant and almost too obliging in the discussion. So I encountered too little resistance, which kept the problems from being given the necessary focus in their formulation. Essentially the questions were far too difficult for a public discussion. The only essential thing is that the form and guidance of the discussion could work through mere example.”14 Once again it becomes apparent: guidance was Heidegger’s new form of argument. That was a core insight of the days in Davos. At least for him.
It had not in fact come to a real battle, or even to real combat. The gloves had been kept on, the head guard, too. The correspondent of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, sounding a bit bored, reported with a hint of disappointment: “Rather than seeing two worlds collide, at best we enjoyed the spectacle of a very nice person and a very violent person, who was still trying terribly hard to be nice, delivering monologues. In spite of this all members of the audience seemed to be very gripped, and congratulated one another for having been there.”15
Still, the young guard of students seemed to find the dispute exciting enough to rerun it as a satirical sketch during the closing evening on the peak at Davos. Emmanuel Levinas, with white ashes on his head, took the role of Cassirer. To lend theatrical expression to the complete outdatedness of Cassirer’s idealistic sense of culture, he let ash trickle from his trouser pockets throughout the reenactment, while stammering: “Humboldt, culture, culture, Humboldt . . .” (If there are actions that deserve lifelong shame, in Levinas’s case this was surely one of them.) Only two months later, in June 1929, Heidegger published Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics16—an elaboration of the theses, delivered in book form. In 1932, Cassirer would return in written form to Heidegger’s Kant interpretation, but otherwise he handed down no further statement concerning the debate. Perhaps he simply didn’t consider the event important enough. Or else, years later, he had a painful sense that it was too important. At any rate, he remained silent about it for the rest of his life. After the debate he left Davos with a group of students for a day trip to the Nietzsche House in Sils-Maria. Heidegger didn’t join them. He preferred to continue hurtling down the snow-covered slopes.
IN LATE MARCH 1929, when Martin Heidegger delivered a second Kant lecture in the Grand Hôtel Belvédère, and Ernst Cassirer, still weak from what appears to have been a bad case of flu, rose once more from his sickbed, Benjamin was hunting for a capable Hebrew teacher. “I will write to Dr. Magnes daily, as soon as the lessons—daily ones—have begun,” he promised in a letter of March 23 to Gerhard Scholem, who had now been waiting impatiently in Jerusalem for news on the subject for some time. That spring wasn’t trouble-free, but problems were distinctly thinner on the ground than usual. Because in the grand scheme of Benjamin’s fiasco-strewn career, the previous twelve months were the most successful of his adult life: the book on tragedy and One-Way Street actually materialized late in 1928, winning an intense and even largely positive critical reception. He was praised to the skies in Literarische Welt and the Frankfurter Zeitung, his home ground. But he also found admirers in the Vossische Zeitung and as far away as Austria and Switzerland. No less a figure than Hermann Hesse contacted Rowohlt unprompted to express spontaneous enthusiasm for One-Way Street. A Berlin bookshop near Potsdamer Brücke decorated its entire window with Benjamin’s collected writings—along with a bust of his head made by Jula Cohn. Even though sales of each book barely exceeded a thousand copies, within a year of publication Benjamin had gained widespread recognition as an author of considerable originality.
HE WAS ALSO ENJOYING considerable stability in his role as critic. Both the Literarische Welt, run by Willy Haas, and the arts section of the Frankfurter Zeitung kept him firmly on their roster. Indeed, if we look a little closer, Benjamin was now a fixture, if not a major influencer, of an arts-page clique that happily took the liberty of reviewing one another’s books in the relevant media. Kracauer reviewed Benjamin, Benjamin reviewed Bloch, Bloch reviewed Benjamin . . . Adorno, too, still going by the moniker of “Wiesengrund,” was a rather established member of the circle.
For the first time in his life, Benjamin, now also a contributor to the radio schedule of Hessischer Rundfunk, had a professional network and a measure of financial stability. He no longer seemed desperate, but could confidently turn down work every now and then; he didn’t have to beg for review copies time and again, they were delivered free to his door. These days he even felt established enough to give starving friends like Alfred Cohn (Jula Cohn’s brother) a helping hand to get them into the editorial offices—but warning them all along about the indisputable harshness of that way of life: “Even earning only three hundred marks a month with literature is impossible before you’ve endured several years of waiting, and even then it’s never a guaranteed minimum.”17
Benjamin knew what he was talking about. But at last, everything seemed to be going his way. Rowohlt wanted to collect the best of his reviews and publish them as a single volume. And there was the essay about Elective Affinities. Kracauer would soon become Berlin correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Adorno and Bloch also spent more and more time in the capital, where Benjamin had been welcomed into the exclusive circle around Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel.
Brecht’s dialectical theater finally enjoyed its breakthrough with the premiere of The Threepenny Opera at the Berlin Ensemble in the autumn of 1928. Enormous hopes in Germany rested on the shoulders of this brilliant thirty-one-year-old dramatist, not least social-revolutionary ones. Left-wing parties had performed very strongly in the Reichstag elections of May 1928, while the National Socialist Party had dropped to a 2.59 percent share of the vote. Something was under way here, as the communist camp—essentially living in a state of revolutionary eschatological expectation—clearly thought it discerned.
During those months Benjamin increasingly felt that he was part of the movement. Something was stirring in him; his creative demon was guiding him increasingly toward the idea of class struggle. His work on the Paris arcades, originally conceived as a small study, had acquired a life of its own, and dominated the whole of his literary output: “Work on the Paris Arcades has assumed an increasingly enigmatic, urgent face, and is wailing through my nights like a small beast, if I haven’t watered it from the remotest springs during the day. God knows what it will do if I let it off the leash one day,” he established as early as May 1928.18 A year later nothing had changed. Extensive research on the Arcades Project in the Berlin State Library took up almost all of his time. All other articles and commissioned pieces of writing were subordinated to it, and at best fell under the category of quasi-original side projects.
This remained true in March 1929, when Benjamin was working on two major essays for Literarische Welt. One was devoted to Proust’s oeuvre, and titled “On the Image of Proust,”19 and the other to the development of contemporary French Surrealism since 1919, and titled “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.”20 Every line of both indicates the consistency with which Benjamin’s thought (and that of the authors he engages with) took as its point of departure the constantly accelerating experiences of the metropolis that a denizen of the countryside simply cannot know or comprehend.
That spring, both essays blossomed into classic Benjaminiana. That is, once again Benjamin interpreted the authors he chose by the light of his own current insights into life, and hence his own research interests.
And what question motivated those interests in 1929? The question of the nature of time and, in that context, a possible breakthrough from finitude into eternity. The question of bourgeois decadence and its fate at a time of crucial events and decisions. The question of freedom and, in parallel with that, the possibilities of true (self-)knowledge in the real conditions of contemporary urban existence.
PRECISELY THE RANGE OF SUBJECTS discussed in Davos, then, but imbued with the texture, and through the medium, of French literature, which—according to Benjamin—granted a German critic particular insights precisely because of his cultural semi-detachment from it. Because where Proust and above all Surrealism were concerned, “the German observer is . . . not at the source. That is his good fortune. He is standing in the valley. He can gauge the energies of the movement. For him, long familiar with the crisis in the intelligentsia or, more precisely, the humanistic question of freedom, as a German who knows the frantic will that has awoken within it to emerge from the stage of eternal discussions and reach a decision at any price. And as someone who has had personal experience of his extremely exposed position between anarchist rebellion and revolutionary discipline, he would have no excuse if even at the most superficial examination he saw it as an ‘artistic,’ ‘poetic’ movement.”
In this passage Benjamin is accusing primarily himself. This had been his view of both the Surrealists and the Dadaists in the early 1920s. In the shadow of the book on tragedy, he understood them as the degenerative artistic phenomena of a lost and decadent age. His age. But now his eyes were opened. In fact, Surrealism was a social revolutionary movement. The “writings of the circle no longer concern literature, but something else: manifestation, slogan, document, bluff, forgery.” Surrealism was not “about theories” but about “experiences.” And about everyday experiences that revealed that the reification and alienation of the capitalist city subject had advanced so far that the boundary between sense and nonsense, reality and dream, intoxication and sobriety, waking and sleeping, art and advertising, could no longer be clearly drawn.
In other words: The actually liberating, actually revolutionary realism of the 1920s could at first be only Surrealism! According to Benjamin, what Surrealism was searching for could be found when it succeeded, through the forms of the most immediate expression of this now all-too-everyday state of intoxication, in opening doors to what he called a “profane illumination.”21 Hashish and other drugs with which he himself had experimented since 1928, a feature of the Surrealist imagination since its ancestor Rimbaud, could provide the “preliminary training” for that illumination. But the genuinely liberating intoxication, the actual path toward the prerevolutionary event of “profane illumination,” lay in nothing other than yielding to the experiences, which had themselves become a drug of the insanely accelerated life of the city. Benjamin, now himself writing in manifesto mode: “Gaining the powers of intoxication for the revolution—that is what Surrealism revolves around in all books and undertakings. . . . They bring the powerful forces of ‘mood’ which are . . . concealed in things to an explosion. How do we imagine the configuration of a life that had at a crucial moment allowed itself to be defined by the latest popular song?”22
BUT BENJAMIN REFRAINED from using the exclamation mark actually required by the manifesto form. Just as, in “On the Image of Proust,” he did not wish to go so far as to claim that Proust had ultimately endorsed the global communist revolution. But of course, as far as he was concerned, Proust’s work was about nothing but, in the mode of perpetual recall, keeping watch for moments of “profane illumination”:
What was it that Proust sought so frenetically? What was at the bottom of those infinite efforts? Can we say that all lives, works, and deeds that matter were never anything but the undisturbed unfolding of the most banal, most fleeting, most sentimental, weakest hour in the life of the one to whom they pertain? . . . In Proust, too, we are guests who enter through a door underneath a suspended sign that sways in the breeze, a door behind which eternity and rapture await us. . . . But Proust’s eternity is by no means a platonic or a utopian one: it is rapturous. . . . The eternity which Proust opens to view is intertwined time, not boundless time. His true interest is in the passage of time in its most real—that is, intertwined—form, and this passage nowhere holds sway more openly than in remembrance within and aging without.23
And of course the whole Proustian universe, precisely because it remains permanently on the threshold between the deepest layers of meaning and perfect presence, appears as a world in which it is no longer always possible to distinguish clearly between dream and reality, fact and fiction, conscious and unconscious, given and wrought, complete distortion and the most unvarnished authenticity: even the moments of the truest emotion, and hence the most liberating instants, are still suspect and may be only the results reaching for meaning hidden in the depths of creation, the imposition of connections between signs external and internal. Day and night, waking and dreaming, being and seeming . . . the boundary is irremediably blurred.
WE MIGHT IMAGINE these extracts from Benjamin’s metaphysical and revolutionary phase of work of March 1929 as direct verbal contributions to the Davos debate. In fact, they could have been inserted directly into the transcript of the Davos debate using the same collage technique that, it was becoming increasingly clear in the spring of 1929, formed the basic architectural principle of Benjamin’s Arcades Project. The result would have been: Where Heidegger places his Dasein-redeeming confidence in primal anxiety, Benjamin places it in the rapture of different kinds of artificial paradise; the wild roar of rush-hour traffic replaces the experience of the storm high in the Black Forest; aimless flâneuring replaces the ski slope down to the abyss; absorption in outward things replaces the retreat into the interior; apparently random distraction occupies the space of contemplative concentration; the deracinated, disenfranchised masses of the international proletariat replace those people rooted in their homeland . . . Both Benjamin and Heidegger longed for revolutionary change, in everything that they were and had. Just to get out, out of the one-way street of the modern age! Back to the junction where they had taken the wrong turn. And the two agreed on the sources and traditions that were absolutely to be avoided in that endeavor: bourgeois culture, so-called liberal-democratic constitutional orders, worn-out moral principles, German idealism as a cult of the mind, academic philosophizing, Kant, Goethe, Humboldt . . .
In 1929, when Heidegger, the philosopher of origins, cast a diagnostic eye back, he saw the beginning of philosophizing itself as a sacred “place” of an awakening that remained possible. That place lies deep within Dasein, timelessly guaranteed by the essence of temporality itself. Benjamin’s now materialistic concept of history lacked that option. His task was to point out the fatal origin, demonstrate the moment when falsehood made its appearance in history itself, and make it as available to concrete experience as possible.
In 1929, Benjamin once again believed that he could pinpoint when, where, and how the breakthrough into the unreal and universally falsifying spirit of his age occurred. In Paris, in fact, the capital of the nineteenth century. Not in the form of an individual or a book, but in a new form of construction, built from iron and steel: the Paris arcades, the cabinets of curiosity, bathed in a perpetual artificial twilight, of coming consumer capitalism. In their window displays the whole disparate world of commodities, forms, and symbols was placed side by side for the onlooker’s gaze, and in the end offered for purchase. Neither entirely an internal space nor a part of the streetscape, the arcades were deliberately arranged as liminal places that leveled out every fundamental difference. Half cave, half house; half passageway and half room.
In the finite individuals who strolled aimlessly through them, with their always brimming, constantly redecorated vitrines, these arcades created the appearance of infinite availability, which would soon extend to the rest of the world—and anesthetize it. If the window to future salvation was left ajar, it meant penetrating this configuration of arcades. And thus with the question: What concrete material conditions made them possible in the first place?
Most of the Paris arcades came into being in the decade and a half after 1822. The first condition for their emergence is the boom in the textile trade. Magasins de nouveautés, the first establishments to keep large stocks of merchandise on the premises, make their appearance. They are the forerunners of department stores. This was the period of which Balzac wrote: “The great poem of display chants its stanzas of color from the Church of the Madeleine to the Porte Saint Denis.” The arcades are a center of commerce in luxury items. In fitting them out, art enters the service of the merchant. Contemporaries never tire of admiring them, and for a long time they remain a drawing point for foreigners. An Illustrated Guide to Paris says: “These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the passage is a city, a world in miniature.” The arcades are the scene of the first gas lighting.
The second condition for the emergence of the arcades is the beginning of iron construction. The Empire saw in this technology a contribution to the revival of architecture in the classical Greek sense.24
This is from the first chapter of The Arcades Project, and it says a great deal about the collage technique that carries the work that Benjamin leaves it up to a seemingly random quotation from a seemingly random publication (in this case, a guidebook) to set out the crucial philosophical markers right at the beginning. Because even if the author of the article in the Paris guide that Benjamin cites did not see it, and in all likelihood did not deliberately intend it, it reflects the whole history of metaphysics. It is expounded in what we might call magazine-speak, and is granted a weird afterlife as if by a ghostly hand: just like the shadow plays in Plato’s cave, the displays of commodities in the deep mirrored passageways of the arcades receive “their light from above,” in the form of artificial fire (gaslight). As in Leibniz’s Monadology, even the windowless arcades appear as “a world in miniature.” And as Kant (and of course Marx) would have it, all that maintains these passages through whole buildings—which are themselves only superficially buildings—is the “speculative” will of their owners, “united” for this apparent purpose, if not for anything else.
A textual monad inside a textual monad, mounted with the sole intention of making visible for a brief bright moment the unfathomable ways in which time itself entwines things together. Benjamin’s vision of reality. Remembrance as knowledge.
IN THE SPRING OF 1929, Benjamin reached the height of his powers as a thinker and a journalist. Which is not to say, of course, that he was not at this time involved in various tangles intertwined several times over, of almost metaphysical profundity. The first to have a clear vision of the calamity that was about to take its course, and how it would, was probably Gershom Scholem, on receiving the following letter from his friend in Berlin in early August 1928: “My trip to Palestine, as well as the strictest observance of the study plan prescribed by Your Hierosolymitan Excellency, has been decided upon. . . . Now to the details. First of all, the date of my arrival. This may be postponed to mid-December. That depends . . . on whether I can finish the Arcades Project before I leave Europe. Secondly when I will see my Russian friend in Berlin in the autumn. Both are still undecided.”25
Of course the Arcades Project wasn’t completed in autumn 1928. At that point it was only just getting going. In addition, it would not be until March 1929 that Benjamin made the slightest progress with his Hebrew. The date for his passage to Palestine hadn’t been fixed, either. This may have been due chiefly to the fact that Asja Lacis had turned up in Berlin in September 1928. She had been sent officially, or rather “posted” there, to the film department of the Soviet trade delegation. And with the express mandate, as a member of the “Proletarian Theatre Group . . . of establishing contact with the League of Proletarian Writers.”26 Reich, too, was back in Germany, although for now he was professionally tied up in Munich.
When Benjamin learned that Asja was coming, he was already aware of another piece of welcome news. Despite lacking a second reference from Cassirer (or any other high-ranking literary figure), Dr. Magnes of the Hebrew University had authorized funding for Benjamin’s one-year full-time language course, along with travel to and accommodation in Jerusalem. The funds, being dependent on his study quota, were to be paid out in monthly installments. Scholem himself had argued for that course of action. For not only did he know Benjamin all too well, he had also acted as his guarantor from the beginning. But to both Benjamin’s and Scholem’s great surprise, in October 1928—when Asja had been in the city for just three weeks—events took a new turn:
18 October 1928
Dear Gerhard,
I can confirm with many thanks receipt of the dispatch of the check for 3,042 Marks (70/100) sent by Dr. Magnes. Please pass on my warmest thanks. He will hear from me directly later on. Everything else in a few days. Warm regards,
Yours, Walter27
Without consulting Scholem or even putting him in the picture, Magnes had paid the whole grant—a year’s earnings for Benjamin—in one lump sum by check.
Only two weeks later Benjamin rented a spacious apartment for Lacis and himself on Düsseldorfer Strasse. Their cohabitation did not last for more than two months, but in spite of their frequent fights, which occurred on regular three-day cycles, they got on well enough, together enjoying a pleasantly extravagant lifestyle. Lacis kept the apartment and Benjamin moved back to Delbrückstrasse, to his wife, who had just become unemployed once again, his son, and his mother, who was in bed recovering from a stroke. At least now they had some money.
It was Lacis who encouraged Benjamin’s contact with Brecht at this time. And it was Benjamin who gave Lacis new insights into Berlin’s intellectual life, and hence its nightlife, too. It was Lacis who brought Benjamin closer to the life and work of a professional revolutionary operating in the field of culture. And it was Benjamin who made Lacis familiar with his own cultural circles, which included Erwin Piscator and Siegfried Kracauer, Victor Klemperer and Leo Strauss, Brecht and Adorno. They met, spoke, debated, and planned new projects. Together, and shortly again with Dr. Reich, they moved through the nightlife of the city that was the real capital of the 1920s—Berlin.
EVERY EVENING WAS FILLED with things to take in and admire. Josephine Baker, for example, was producing epiphanies of a very special kind. “After midnight to Vollmoeller’s on Pariser Platz to see Baker. He had a strange party once again, no one knowing what the other person was. . . . Women in all stages of nakedness, whose names you couldn’t make out and couldn’t tell whether they were ‘girlfriends,’ prostitutes, or ladies. . . . The gramophone was playing a steady stream of old songs, Baker sat on the sofa and, rather than dancing, ate one bockwurst after another (‘hot dogs’), Princess Lichnowsky, Max Reinhardt, [Max] Harden were expected but didn’t appear. It went on like that until three, when I took my leave.”28 At the end of October 1928, Erwin Piscator hosted a party at his place: “Pretty, light apartment, furnished by Gropius, ‘sober’ but attractive, and the people look good in it. Quite a big party, forty to fifty people, men and women joined by more and more until after midnight; apparently the event was being held in honor of the Russian-Jewish director Granowsky. . . . Met Brecht.”29 Are these lines from Benjamin? No. But they easily could be. These were extracts from the diary of the busy socialite Harry Graf Kessler. He was always in the midst of things.
Jazz was playing everywhere, now sung in German by the Comedian Harmonists. At the time Benjamin, Wiesengrund, and their gang couldn’t agree on what to make of this musical hybrid between “jungle and skyscraper” (Kessler).30 But they did agree on the subject of Russian cinema: without a doubt it was the measure of all things.
Benjamin put Lacis in touch with Kracauer. That, too, went down well with the higher-ups in the Communist Party. She would soon speak about Russian cinema in Frankfurt. But in Berlin first, about contemporary Soviet drama:
I suggested repeating the lecture in a big hall for the unemployed. A huge hall, it was full. The unemployed listened attentively. But I was disturbed in the middle of the lecture. Opposite the podium, by the entrance, there was shouting: “Away with the red Moscow agitator!” The duty officers threw themselves on the intruders—SA men. A fight developed—knuckle-dusters clashed. All of a sudden Red Front boys ran over to me. They called: comrade, don’t be afraid—but you must get out of here at once! Becher grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away from the stage. He led me—upstairs, downstairs, across a courtyard, down an alleyway and then another courtyard. We ended on a street corner and went into a pub. We sat down at a table and Becher ordered sausages and beer. He said it often happened. Wherever there are communist events, the SA was there at once. But Red Front smacks them in the face.31
Not exactly Benjamin’s world. And certainly not his style. But “overall,” Lacis immediately added in her memoirs, “Benjamin was now more concentrated, more strongly connected with practice, with the earth. . . . During this time he met Brecht more often. Benjamin almost always accompanied me to the public events of the League of Proletarian Writers in workers’ halls.”
Love worked genuine miracles and changed things around. At least for a few moments or certain phases. Barely worth mentioning: that’s not how you learn Hebrew. And that was what the money, most of which had evaporated by mid-May, had actually been intended for.
On May 22, 1929, Benjamin proudly announced to Scholem that he was drawing his “first Hebrew cursive characters.” He was really taking lessons, and also found the courage—more than six months had passed since he had received the check—to thank Dr. Magnes in person for the first time. Meanwhile his classes lasted a whole two weeks. The daily teacher he had taken so much trouble to find had to leave the country. His mother was seriously ill. What objections could Benjamin make to that? He was aware enough of that problem from his own experience.
Once again he found himself thrown back to Delbrückstrasse. On June 6, 1929, he wrote to Scholem, who was becoming seriously furious: “Unfortunately I have no answer to give to your accusations; they are absolutely justified, and with regard to this matter I am aware of a pathological feeling of hesitancy from time to time. My arrival in the autumn depends only on my financial situation. On nothing else.”32
The grant was gone. So the financial situation was back to precarious normality. There was only one area that spring in which Benjamin managed to overcome his “pathological hesitancy.” Asja had been “ordered” back to Moscow for the autumn. She would be able to go on living in Berlin only if she got married. It is unclear whether Benjamin actually consulted Asja on this matter or even put her in the picture, but in late spring 1929 he filed for divorce from Dora. The reason: anti-matrimonial conduct.
By August he had moved out of Delbrückstrasse, this time with everything he owned. He put his library in storage and moved in temporarily with his close friend and fellow translator Franz Hessel. It was now the middle of autumn. If everything had gone according to the promise he had given, he would have been able to spend at least eight months in Jerusalem. Time for another letter to Scholem: “I don’t remember if I wrote to tell you that a friend, Frau Lazis [!], has been in Germany for about a year. She was about to go back to Moscow, when the day before yesterday, or so it seems, she suffered an acute attack of encephalitis, and yesterday, since her condition still allowed it, I put her on the train to Frankfurt, where Goldstein, who knows her and who has treated her in the past, expects her. I will also . . . soon travel over. . . . Recently I’ve been working unusually hard, just not in Hebrew.”33
The neurologist Kurt Goldstein was, incidentally, one of Ernst Cassirer’s closest friends. But that was no longer particularly interesting. Benjamin had other worries now. And he still had projects. He spent the autumn of 1929 commuting back and forth between Berlin and Frankfurt. He met up with Adorno and his wife, Gretel Karplus, and Max Horkheimer and Lacis several times in a vacation home at the spa resort of Königstein. There Benjamin read to the group from the current sketches for the Arcades Project. Those weekends devoted to discussion in Königstein are now seen as the actual founding events of the so-called Frankfurt School, which would dominate German intellectual life for fifty years after the war.
WITH HIS SHORT FLANNEL TROUSERS, heavy peasant shoes, and hiker’s rucksack, the young-looking man immediately stood out from the crowd of conference participants who had just traveled in. Presumably a student who had gone on the trail of Robin Hood in Nottingham and didn’t know that this hotel was reserved for speakers. “I’m afraid there is a gathering of philosophers going on in here,” John Mabbott, a professor from Oxford, said, attempting to sum up the situation in a single sentence. To which the stranger replied: “I too.”34
Until the last second, Wittgenstein had hesitated about whether he should travel to that annual meeting of the Aristotelian Society—the most important association of British professional philosophers. But he would not deliver the talk on the subject he had announced (“Some Notes on Logical Form”). Admittedly, he had written an academic essay especially for it, the first in his life, but the questions relating to it remained more unclear than ever, in spite of nightlong conversations with Frank Ramsey. It was better to think freely about the “Concept of Infinity in Mathematics” and see what the moment revealed to him. Otherwise, the author of the Tractatus, even at this conference, precisely at this conference, had no hopes that the other participants would even begin to understand him. “I fear that whatever one says to them will either fall flat or arouse irrelevant troubles in their minds.”35
That was what he had written a few weeks previously, in his old familiar tone, to Bertrand Russell, with whom he was now friends again, and who was officially his doctoral supervisor. And he had asked him to attend the conference. In vain, as it turned out.
IN FACT, Wittgenstein’s lecture on July 14, 1929, would remain his sole appearance at an academic conference, just as the talk he wrote for it would be his only “academic publication.” Like Heidegger, he had a low opinion of such gatherings and conference papers. He wanted nothing to do with manifestoes, self-styled movements, or even schools, not in thought or politics. In Vienna, a Festschrift in honor of Moritz Schlick was being drawn up under the guidance of Friedrich Waismann with the title The Scientific Worldview: The Vienna Circle. If at all possible, Wittgenstein was to contribute something. Waismann made the request carefully. Not a good idea: “Precisely because Schlick is not an ordinary person, he deserves to be spared from having himself and the school whose representative he is being made a mockery of through good intentions and boasting. When I say ‘boasting,’ I mean any kind of complacent self-reflection. ‘Rejection of metaphysics!’ As if that was anything new. The Vienna school must show, not say what it does. . . . The work must praise the master.”36
Show, don’t tell. Wittgenstein had based his own masterpiece on that principle in 1919. Admittedly the significance of the distinction still struck him as indisputable. Many of the other pillars of his Tractatus had become deeply questionable to him in the six months or so since his return to Cambridge, however. Clearly not all “problems had essentially been solved once and for all.” Either by him or anyone else.
IN PARTICULAR, the hypothesis fundamental to the Tractatus that a meaningful proposition was a picture of reality now seemed to Wittgenstein increasingly dubious. Do all meaningful propositions without exception depict a possible state of the world? For example, what about a proposition like “The series of natural numbers is infinite”? Obviously meaningful, obviously not trivial, obviously true. But is there a conceivable state of the world that really shows the truth of this proposition? Indeed, can finite beings conceive of infinity as such? And if so, what might “conceive” mean in this context? Is the existence of an infinitely long series of natural numbers just as imaginable as the existence of an infinitely long piece of string? Or is it “conceivable” in a different way? Or might it perhaps be “infinite” in a different way? Such serious questions kept Wittgenstein awake at night during his first few months back in Cambridge. He was also troubled by a methodological question: How can we get a grip on the differences in the use of words such as “infinite” or “imaginable,” on which, in terms of their meaningful use as concepts, simply everything depends? By exposing the logical, subject-predicate structure of elementary propositions? No, it’s not quite as simple as that, as Wittgenstein was certainly coming to understand in the summer of 1929. During this phase he was thus abandoning the last lingering belief that really supported his depiction of the world in the Tractatus: faith in the language of logic as the primary language at the basis of our form of life.
HE SOON SHARED this U-turn in his thinking, the major development of his first months in Cambridge in 1929, with Schlick and Waismann. It wasn’t insignificant news for either of them, since as “logical empiricists” of the Vienna Circle, which now existed officially, they pinned their philosophical hopes much more consistently than Wittgenstein on an interplay of logic and experimentally verifiable experience, intended to exhaust all meaningful study. But Wittgenstein was traveling in another direction. And he let them know this very clearly:
I used to believe that there was the everyday language in which we all speak normally and a primary language that expresses what we really know, namely phenomena. . . . Now I would like to explain why I no longer maintain that view. I believe that in essence we only have one language and that is ordinary language. We do not need to find a new language or construct a set of symbols, rather everyday language is already the language, provided that we can liberate it from the obscurities that lie within it. Our language is already completely in order if only we are clear about what it symbolizes. Other languages than the ordinary ones are also valuable . . . for example artificial symbolism is useful in the depiction of the processes of deduction. . . . But as soon as one sets about considering real states of affairs, one sees that this symbolism is at a disadvantage compared to our real language. Of course it is quite wrong to talk about a subject-predicate form. In reality there is not one, but very many.37
Even Schlick was astonished by this. He asked Wittgenstein very directly whether, by bidding farewell to the notion of purely logical form as a foundation, he was not going straight back to that contradiction-riven hornets’ nest of fundamental questions on which Immanuel Kant had toiled away in his Critique of Pure Reason.
A breakthrough into infinity and eternity—on what basis could it be grasped: through experience of form, decision, or law? What about the role of human language within that process? And is it really a matter of only one language? How can the structure of experience that underlies all meaning be described, and with what methods: physical and experimental, phenomenologically varied, descriptive in everyday terms? What criteria exist for the unambiguous separation of being and seeming, sense and nonsense? And what role does time play, either as something physically measurable, experienced, or even collected through remembrance? During 1929, as if in a state of intoxication, Wittgenstein filled several notebooks with thoughts that revolved around precisely these questions from Davos. They dominated his discussions with his sparring partners Ramsey and Moore, Schlick and Waismann. In conversation all grew increasingly irritated—and overwhelmed—by the extreme dynamism of Wittgenstein’s development of his theses, which were by now changing daily.
THE RETURN OF GOD caused deep social consternation not least with his appearances in the social circles of the Cambridge Apostles—and the loosely related Bloomsbury Group around Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Certainly, even in 1912 Ludwig was an esoteric presence. But in this milieu the Wittgenstein of 1929 assumed the domineering role of know-it-all, or perhaps the peevish sourpuss. He suffered from particularly intense awkwardness, if not physical pain, when engaging in conversation with women. As a dinner guest he proved incapable of contributing anything more than stale one-liners. Not so amusing.
Even though they met several times in Keynes’s house, he never spoke properly with Virginia Woolf. A shame, for both of them. Particularly where communism and concrete social reality were concerned, however, a new and inspiring friend entered his life. This was the Italian economist Piero Sraffa. A convinced socialist and confidant of Antonio Gramsci, Sraffa fled Mussolini’s Italy in 1927. Thanks to Keynes’s intercession he found a new academic home in Cambridge. It was Sraffa whose robustly disputatious nature and quick-wittedness were a productive challenge to Wittgenstein during this period. When Wittgenstein insisted once again in conversation that a meaningful statement and what it described as a state of the world must have the same logical form, Sraffa responded with a gesture from his homeland. He rubbed his finger under his chin and asked: “And what is the logical form of that?”38
In terms of his philosophical impact, Sraffa was for Wittgenstein something like Benjamin’s Naples and Brecht in one. He grounded his thoughts about the foundations of language, brought them nearer to concrete contexts, and opened up perspectives for the labyrinthine twists and turns of the way we operate with signs. In the preface to his second major work, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein thanks Sraffa for “the most consequential ideas in this book.”
STARTING FROM THE INSIGHT that we have only one true primary sign system—namely the natural language of the everyday—the importance of this work lies in its will to explore the inner diversity and the context-relatedness of that language. Because essentially, at least from a philosophical point of view, everything is in excellent order and hence unquestioned—assuming, of course, that one is in the position to make the clearest general impression of all the ways in which that language can symbolize.
From this point of view the assumption that something like genuinely philosophical problems exists is nothing other than the product of a confusion, of what Wittgenstein would call the “bewitchment of our understanding by means of language.”39 The philosophical process of clarification or healing must therefore assume the form of a constant, patient disentangling, revelation, and diagnosis of the confusions that have arisen. This main method consists in recalling the contexts in which one has used which words truly meaningfully. To philosophize is to issue reminders for a purpose.40 And that purpose would be a liberatory clarification of the role that words play in our lives. But their true significance is found and shown only in concrete and correct usage, which therefore guarantees meaning: “The meaning of a word is its use in the language.”41
FOR WITTGENSTEIN, this new program was also reflected in the formal shape of his philosophizing. He was no longer concerned with pouring his own thought into the rigid, hierarchically structured, and rigorously demonstrative form of a treatise. His philosophizing had much more in common with the genre of the commonplace book or the notes of a flâneur in equal measure astounded and fascinated by detail. Wittgenstein set off on this path in 1929. And by consistently following it, he completed his Philosophical Investigations in 1945. It is a collection, as he writes in the preface, of remarks “like a number of sketches of landscapes that were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings.” Travel pictures, then, thought-pictures, produced in the course of an exploration of the diversity of human speech itself: “The same points or almost the same points,” Wittgenstein goes on, almost in the spirit of Benjamin the flâneur, “were always being approached afresh from different directions, and new sketches made . . . so that you could get a picture of the landscape. Thus this book is really only an album.”42
Because in the end, Wittgenstein says in his second major work, a philosophical problem is akin to the feeling “I have gotten lost, I can no longer find my way.” Which is why he compares language itself to a labyrinthine city of narrow alleys, in which one can all too easily (and perhaps all too willingly) get lost. The task of philosophers, then, is to draw a map of that city so that it is clear to the lost people (the philosophers themselves) where they actually are, and hence which paths are available to them at this point, so they can continue walking with the greatest possible self-determination and clarity of direction. Let the way praise the master! The rest is advertising. Or fate.
In order to render an accurate picture of the city, we must of course thoroughly explore it for ourselves—starting from the spot where we find ourselves questioning. No one has their map in their head a priori, and in any case it would be of no use. In the end this city (of words) is understood through the comings and goings of those who live in and with it, who are themselves constantly in a state of motion and change. New passages, one-way streets, and cul-de-sacs constantly appear, including some features that are recognized as such only very late, indeed too late. For Wittgenstein—and at the same time for Heidegger, Benjamin, and Cassirer—the modern philosophy that began with Descartes was the textbook example of this massive transformation that had by now defined the whole “cityscape” from within and given it an all-too-artificial sheen. More or less as cars and electricity do in our cities even today. Progress assumes different appearances.
PROGRESS—the keyword that, according to Wittgenstein, dazzles and misleads our culture more than any other. For that reason progress cannot exist in philosophy. For that to be so, philosophy would need to have genuine problems of its own, and its own methods for solving them. But according to Wittgenstein it lacks these. It has language, and the confusions it entails. And the possibility, always open, of freeing ourselves from them through the use of language and the exercise of memory. That is all. Nothing in this world is fundamentally hidden from us. That is the new direction that Wittgenstein’s thought took in the summer of 1929, with the same apodictic rigor and poetic precision that characterized the Tractatus.
While the image that Wittgenstein had of language might have changed radically with his return to Cambridge, his vision of the goals and boundaries of philosophizing remained precisely the same as at the time of the Tractatus. In fact, there are no philosophical problems. The essential insights cannot be said, let alone decreed, but must show themselves and be shown through their own implementation. The whole sphere of ethics, of value, of religion and the true meaning of life is an illusory sphere of assertions that cannot be factually confirmed and that are hence meaningless, and about which, for that very reason, we must remain silent, because they concern the genuinely crucial ideas and emotions.
It was with these very messages that Wittgenstein directly approached the Cambridge student body in November 1929. At the invitation of the “Heretics”—as their name suggests, after the Apostles the second elite association at the university—he delivered a popular lecture to their Moral Sciences Club. In it he had the following to say:
My tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever wanted to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind, which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.43
He was already familiar with the experiences most likely to encourage this tendency, the treasures of his life:
I will describe this experience in order, if possible, to make you recall the same or similar experiences, so that we may have a common ground for our investigation. I believe that the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as “how extraordinary that anything should exist” or “how extraordinary that the world should exist.” I will mention another experience straight away which I also know and which others of you might be acquainted with: it is, what one might call, the experience of feeling absolutely safe. I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say “I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens.”44
At his best, Wittgenstein was able not only to inhabit this liberatory state of wondrous absorption himself but also to communicate it as a guiding model to others. Whatever else happened that evening, it was his true initiation as a philosophy teacher in Cambridge.