What is the main message of Time of the Magicians?

The main message of Time of the Magicians is the exploration of four influential philosophers and their pursuit of truth and meaning.

How long does it take to read Time of the Magicians?

The reading time for Time of the Magicians varies depending on the reader's speed, but it typically takes several hours. The Blinkist summary can be read in just 15 minutes.

Is Time of the Magicians a good book? Is it worth reading?

Time of the Magicians is a thought-provoking book that delves into the lives and ideas of influential philosophers. It offers valuable insights and is definitely worth reading.

Who is the author of Time of the Magicians?

Wolfram Eilenberger is the author of Time of the Magicians .

Time of the Magicians Summary of Key Ideas and Review

Name: Time of the Magicians
Rating: 4.5 (196 reviews)
Author: Wolfram Eilenberger

Introduction

What’s in it for me? Take an intellectual flight of fancy with philosophical heavyweights of the twenties.

In 1919, Germany was in ruins. After the fall of the monarchy and the devastation brought by World War I, the country had to build a whole new social order. German philosophy, too, was in need of reform after the catastrophe of the war. So four philosophers set out to construct the world of the mind anew.

Things got pretty turbulent in the process: Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger argued about the nature of humanity, Walter Benjamin fell in love with a communist, and Ludwig Wittgenstein gave away all his money.

These blinks follow the footsteps of these four exceptional but very different philosophers as they turned the thinking of their time upside down. Along the way, you’ll learn how their thoughts can help us answer life's big questions today.

In these blinks, you’ll find out

what Walter Benjamin has in common with millennials;
why Martin Heidegger loved skiing; and
how Ludwig Wittgenstein came to the conclusion that philosophy is pointless.

Key idea 1 of 8

The Davos dispute between Heidegger and Cassirer exemplified the polarized mood of the 1920s.

The 1920s were an age of extremes. During the day, one technical innovation overtook the next: cinema, radio, and cars completely transformed urban life. And at night, people let themselves go in wild excesses at basement pubs and jazz clubs.

But it wasn’t all fun and games. In Germany, the economy groaned under reparation payments for World War I. Poverty and misery reigned in the freshly formed Weimar Republic. Politics, too, was turbulent: communists, fascists, social democrats, and conservatives all fought for power over the young republic – sometimes even in the streets.

Many Germans oscillated between a euphoric belief in progress and a desperate lack of prospects. No one really knew what the future would bring. And amid this uncertainty, two intellectual giants met for a legendary standoff.

Here’s the key message: The Davos dispute between Heidegger and Cassirer exemplified the polarized mood of the 1920s.

It was March 26, 1929, when every important name in contemporary philosophy gathered in the ballroom of the Belvédère Hotel in Davos, Switzerland, to watch the public debate of the decade.

Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer, the two opponents, couldn’t have been more opposite. Cassirer was older and cosmopolitan, and he’d made a name for himself as a professor at the University of Hamburg. His challenger, Martin Heidegger, was the enfant terrible of philosophy. He was young, tanned, and sporty, and had only recently started teaching in Freiburg. The night before the debate, he ruffled the feathers of his philosophical elders by wearing his ski gear to dinner.

The subject of their philosophical showdown? Nothing less than the nature of humanity and the fundamental role of philosophy. The humanist Cassirer asserted that man was a culture-forming being who asks questions and finds answers in morals and ethics. Heidegger waved it off: ethics and truth were nothing more than man-made illusions to console us over the fact that there was no eternal life.

Cassirer was convinced that by creating artistic and cultural symbols, humans could lift themselves above their own mortality. Heidegger shook his head at this: not culture, but fear and death were the basis of human experience.

Humans have to confront their metaphysical insignificance in order to become free. Accordingly, the task of philosophy was to confront humans with the harsh truth of his existence. Once again, Cassirer strongly disagreed. He thought that the purpose of philosophy was to free us from our fears to uplift and liberate us.

The two simply couldn’t agree – their worldviews were too different and young Heidegger too stubborn. But their opposing views fit perfectly into the ambivalent atmosphere of 1920s Germany.

Key idea 2 of 8

Martin Heidegger wanted to shake people awake by giving them a metaphysical scare.

“I believe I have an inner calling to philosophy,” Martin Heidegger once claimed confidently. And even though he came from a humble background, he quickly made a career for himself in the field – bringing with him a completely new way of thinking.

When he gave his first lecture at the age of 29, he challenged the students to muse over the words “There is something.” Wasn’t it simply unbelievable that anything was at all; that people and the world existed? The task of philosophy, Heidegger explained, was to unravel this monstrous truth.

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Key idea 3 of 8

The humanist Ernst Cassirer promoted a philosophy of diversity.

Heidegger’s most famous opponent, Ernst Cassirer, had also made a good career for himself in the German university system. But he did so advocating for a measured, bourgeois lifestyle that Heidegger resented.

Following the example of his intellectual guiding stars Goethe and Kant, Cassirer was a man of composure. Even when the power suddenly went out during one of his lectures at Berlin’s Humboldt University, he kept his cool. That was in January 1919, when street fighting was part of everyday life in the young Weimar Republic. During one of those fights, someone shot through an electrical line near the university. Cassirer was unmoved: he simply finished his lecture in the dark.

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Key idea 4 of 8

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an enigmatic loner who explored the limits of human thinking.

Wittgenstein experienced World War I first-hand. When he finally returned from imprisonment in Italy to his Viennese family, he surprised them with a strange gesture: he signed over all of his belongings to his siblings.

The Wittgensteins were among the richest families in Europe, and their money had opened all kinds of doors for their children, including Ludwig. They’d encouraged his extraordinary intellectual talent and enabled him to attain a degree from Cambridge. Why on earth would Wittgenstein reject this wealth?

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Key idea 5 of 8

Bohemian Walter Benjamin was an astute observer of the zeitgeist.

Today, Walter Benjamin is fondly remembered by many as an academic rockstar. But his life as a freelancer in the 1920s was anything but glamorous. Unlike Wittgenstein, Benjamin lacked the money and connections to achieve much success during his lifetime.

He was chronically broke and constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Sounds a bit like the precarious lifestyle of a millennial creative? Well, it was already a bitter reality for Walter Benjamin in the 1920s.

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Key idea 6 of 8

All four philosophers believed that humans are beings of language.

As different as they were, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Cassirer, and Benjamin could agree on one thing: language is the most fascinating human trait of all. To them, it was much more than a means to communicate – it was an instrument with which humans shape and form the world. And they all set out to examine it more closely.

For Ernst Cassirer, language was one of the important symbolic forms through which humans gain access to the world and themselves. He believed that the essence of a human being is formed through language. It's when a small child utters her first words that her spirit and personality are formed. Cassirer himself mastered Sanskrit and Chinese, on top of German, English, and French.

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Key idea 7 of 8

Heidegger, Benjamin, and Wittgenstein harbored a deep mistrust of modern science.

It wasn’t just the war that shook the world view of young German philosophers. Recent theories from the natural sciences also began to cast old philosophical problems in a new light. For some, the advance of Einstein’s theory of relativity from 1905, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Darwin’s theory of evolution raised the question of whether philosophy had become obsolete altogether.

Self-confident Heidegger wasn’t intimidated by such musings. He even lamented the purely theoretical approach to the world that characterized modernity. For him, science imprisons humans in superficial self-avoidance and blocks their access to unadulterated Dasein, the word he uses for human existence.

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Key idea 8 of 8

Philosophical opinions on German politics differed greatly.

In 1928, the young Weimar Republic was in deep trouble. One chancellor after the other had quit the job. Hunger and unemployment plagued the citizens. In addition, many Germans were resentful of democracy, considering it to be an “un-German” import of their enemies from the war.

In the midst of this tense atmosphere, Ernst Cassirer delivered a speech celebrating the anniversary of the Weimar Constitution. As an antidote to the German disenchantment with democracy, he evoked the philosophical legacy of his hero Immanuel Kant. He skillfully explained why Kant himself – arguably the most German of all German philosophers – would have supported a democratic republic.

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