a warm hug

"The neverending struggle that is life in New York City gives us a warm hug.

"'Hey Sistah, get the lead out, willya!'

"'I am not your sister and I carry no lead.'"

~~ from The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt by Ken Krimstein

The New World 1941

"Some New World! Martha and Blucher and I land in a fourth-floor walkup in a two-room flat in a West 95th Street rooming house. Down on the streets every variety of German, Yiddish, Slavic, and Greek fills the sooty air."

~~ from The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt by Ken Krimstein

The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt by Ken Krimstein

 

Bernhard's Heidegger

"Heidegger was a philosophical market crier who only brought stolen goods to the market, everything of Heidegger's is second-hand, he was and is the prototype of the re-thinker, who lacked everything, but truly everything, for independent thinking."

~~ from Old Masters: A Comedy by Thomas Bernhard

the book that he was reading

"'[Ernst Cassirer] tried to push his way through to the back of the tram, and stood there occupying as little space as possible, with one hand reaching for a support so that he didn't fall over, and in the other holding the book that he was reading. Noise, jostling, poor light, bad air—none of it got in his way.'"

~~ from Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger

life as a teacher

"As [Martin] Heidegger was praising the primordial wisdom and natural integrity of his Black Forest farmers, the provincial teacher saw his fellow adults only as cattle, maggots, or, at best, three-quarters human. [Ludwig] Wittgenstein loved the idea of the "simple people," but not the reality, just as he loved the idea of life as a teacher, but not the rapidly changing job of teaching in Austria under the educational reforms instituted by the Social Democrats. His revulsion at the teaching methods that were being introduced was clear[.]"

~~ from Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger

the deadly melancholy of the Christmas season

"As early as December 20, [Walter] Benjamin made the analogy between cities and people explicit: 'For me, Moscow is now a fortress, the harsh climate which is wearing me down, no matter how healthy it might be for me, my ignorance of the language, Reich's presence, Asja's utterly circumscribed mode of existence, all constitute so many bastions, and it is only the total impossibility of advancing any further, only the fact that Asja's illness, or at least her weakness, pushes our personal affairs into the background, that keeps me from becoming completely depressed by all this. Whether I will achieve the secondary purpose of my journey—to escape the deadly melancholy of the Christmas season—remains to be seen.'

"On December 31, this question also seemed to have been answered. Benjamin was standing in front of a theater poster with Asja when he admitted: 'If I had to be sitting alone somewhere tonight, I would hang myself with misery.'"

~~ from Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger

a project-based teacher

"[Ludwig] Wittgenstein was a project-based teacher. He always tried to make his subject matter visible in objects. He was particularly keen on animal skeletons, which he prepared and assembled with his pupils. The carcasses, which included cats and other roadkill, he collected from the village streets, skinned and disemboweled them himself, before boiling the bones for several days. Even in Trattenbach the resulting foul stench led to fierce complaints from the neighborhood. But this didn't stop Wittgenstein from persisting with all the further stages of these projects. In the end he wasn't doing it for himself, he was doing it for education. Moreover, he couldn't have cared less about the opinions of his fellow villagers, unlike those of the children under his tutelage. Whenever complainants showed up at his house, he slammed the door in their outraged faces and told them that if the smell bothered them so much, they should simply leave, ideally forever!"

~~ from Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger

Giants in the Earth

I've recently come across two authors I read years ago but have neither heard discussed nor read about in the decades since. First came O.E. Roolvag's novel Giants in the Earth, presented in the subtitle of "A Norwegian American Journey." This essay from The American Conservative is presented as part memoir, part literary review, and with a substanatial section on Norwegian film. Second was Ernst Cassirer, most likely the least well known of the four famous philosophers discussed in Wolfram Eilenberger's Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy. I read Giants in the Earth as an 11th grader at Central High School in Philadelphia, and I read Ernst Cassirer as a first-year student in Wesleyan University's Freshman Integrated Program. I wonder if anyone anywhere is working through Roolvag and Cassirer as assigned reading right now.

the actual basis of all symbolic forms

"In the winter of 1919, as he passed through the machine-gun fire of the Spartacist uprising, this time on his way to the university rather than the press office, he was already working on the manuscript of the first volume, concerning the phenomenon of human language as the actual basis of all symbolic forms. Cassirer was sure that he was working on something of consequence, the great idea of his life. And, as if summoned by fate, in May 1919—around the time that the corpse of Rosa Luxembourg, murdered in January, was fished out of the Landwehr Canal—he received a letter from the newly established Hamburg University."

~~ from Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger