The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Philosophy in a time of chaos
Ivan Hewett is entertained by a witty study of four 1920s thinkers who tried to pin down the mystery of life
WTIME OF THE MAGICIANS: THE GREAT DECADE OF PHILOSOPHY, 1919-1929 by Wolfram Eilenberger, tr Shaun Whiteside 432pp, Allen Lane, £25, ebook £12.99
e like to think of philosophers as “philosophical”
– calm, undisturbed by sex or money, ambitious only in wanting to find the truth. This book gives the lie to that image. “Calm” is absolutely the last word you would use to describe any of the four philosophers in this book.
When they’re not contemplating suicide, they’re skiing down an Alpine slope to experience living at its most intense, travelling off to Russia to experience the excitement of Bolshevism at first hand, smoking dope or chasing a new lover. As for this “modern thought” which the author, Wolfram Eilenberger, claims they invented, it often seems closer to delirium or mysticism than actual thinking. To give you a flavour, here’s a snatch of a conversation Eilenberger imagines taking place around 1919 between two of these “magicians”, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein:
“How strange that anything exists! How miraculous! There, and there… do you see it too?” “Yes, I see it… and you know I always think; it is not how the world is that is mystical, but that it is.”
Well, we’ve all had that experience, perhaps at dawn when mist is rising off the fields and life seems for a moment utterly mysterious. We’re content just to be grateful for these moments, but these two philosophers and to a degree the other two – Walter Benjamin and Ernst Cassirer – want to pin the experience down in words.
That effort leads straight to another problem: how does our language relate to the world “out there”? These issues – the nature of “being”, the nature of language, and the difficulty of disentangling the two – are at the heart of the four intertwined philosophical journeys described in this book.
Eilenberger’s overall narrative could be described as a meeting of minds – partly real, partly imaginary – in the shadow of the First World War, followed by a gradual dispersal as each one realises their profound differences from the others. Heidegger wanted to escape the “rotten net of culture” as Eilenberger elsewhere describes it, and break through to an authenticity of “Being-in-theworld” rooted in concepts that sound much better in German – such as “Being-at-hand”, describing the quality that a hammer has of being ready for our use, and “Zeug”, which to my Anglo-Saxon tourist’s ear sounds like something to do with trains but actually means “equipment”. By contrast, Wittgenstein “saw predictable nonsense and false problems generated by language”, and ended up in a very different place.
It’s hardly surprising the two men went in contrary directions, as in every way they were like chalk and cheese. Wittgenstein was a scion of one of the richest Jewish families in Vienna, where Brahms would regularly pop by to play his latest intermezzo. Wittgenstein gave away his inheritance in order to become more “pure”, and for much of the decade covered in this book earns his living teaching primary schoolchildren in remote Alpine villages. He writes brilliant and pathetic letters to admirers like Bertrand Russell, gets more and more frustrated, and cuffs the children so hard that eventually one of them faints and
Wittgenstein has to flee to avoid a scandal and prosecution.
Heidegger, the son of a country church sexton, had the typical small man’s titanic ego problem. He was a self-consciously healthy Aryan, who liked to chop wood and ski when not sorting out the problem of Being. “Seek out the void” was his advice to students, but he never followed it himself. He assiduously pursued the top job at the University of Freiburg and built a grand house in proper haute-bourgeois fashion.
As for the other two “magicians” they also turn out to be all-toohuman. Walter Benjamin, another son of a wealthy Jewish businessman, is best known as a cultural critic and acute analyst of the early stages of consumer capitalism, above all in his immense, never-completed study of Parisian shopping arcades. But as Eilenberger shows, buried in his output is an original philosophy of language inspired by the Jewish mystical tradition. Here things are named by God, so the name is “necessary” – as opposed to our everyday language, where a name such as “cat” stands in a completely arbitrary connection to the four-legged feline (because after all, the name could have been “dog” or “zeug”).
Benjamin’s apparent otherworldliness and his tragic death by suicide when fleeing from Fascism have encouraged a Benjamin cult, to which this book offers a useful corrective. Eilenberger shows that, far from being other-worldly, Benjamin was deviously manipulative and violently contemptuous towards rivals, including Heidegger.
He is also alert to Benjamin’s comic side, as in his encounter with the fascinating Latvian theatre director Asja Lācis in Capri, where Benjamin is lounging about pretending to work. He tries to chat her up by offering to carry her shopping, and ends up dropping it all over the cobblestones.
His affair with Lācis is one of the gaudier threads in this manythreaded book, as is Heidegger’s affair with Hannah Arendt.
Perhaps the wisest remark in the
‘Benjamin exists now only as a head and genitals, and the head is easily overcome’
the front is Agnes, drinking stout, already scorning it as “too slow a bus for where she wanted to go”.
Like any tragedy, or any addiction, Shuggie Bain seems predestined by a wicked god. Britain’s worst decade, unless you were a southerner, grinds slowly from year to year, and Agnes’s drinking builds. Cans of Special Brew are cracked open by lunch, and dregs in mugs are gulped through bile each dawn; between one start and the next is a frightening abyss.
Otherwise, time is punctuated by loss. Big Shug, unfaithful and violent, walks out for good; Catherine lands a husband, and emigrates to the Transvaal in South Africa. When Leek, a talented artist, finally escapes the house himself, he tells Shuggie, “Don’t make the same mistake as me.
She’s never going to get better. When the time is right you have to leave.” People who love alcoholics will stay and bear it, until the day they can’t.
But Shuggie remains with
Agnes, because he’s never known her unruined, and his own being is an anxious thing. He was always “cannier” than other boys, as both he and his mother know; he was skimming her giro money at seven years old, to guarantee himself food when she left for the shop.
Something else was different, too. Before the raincoated men, there were furtive boys, made furious by shame at their own desires. Young Shuggie plays with a doll called Daphne; the miners’ boys call him a “poofter”, and several beat him up. Only in the final pages does the truth start to speak its name.
The streets of Pithead, an older Shuggie reflects at the novel’s close, had his family “stuck like flies on paper, bounding them in on four sides by nothing”. And nothing is on perpetual offer in this trashed economy and rotting city – a land of kids with no schooling, and festering adults, and a woman whose end was written in her opening scene. In one of many deft touches of dialect, Stuart describes Glasgow as dreich: dismal, drab or bleak.
And yet, throughout the story, tragedy is counterbalanced by light: the way Shuggie loves Agnes, with a love against hope, until events have run their course. The novel is an astonishing portrait, drawn from life, of a society left to die – forgotten by those who didn’t believe in society, and told it to care for itself. Shuggie Bain has been longlisted for the Booker Prize. In a just world, it would win.
His mother drinks stout, already scorning it as ‘too slow a bus for where she wants to go’
The European eel is a creature that defies our attempts at explanation. Born in the Sargasso Sea, its larvae float across the Atlantic on currents, transforming into glass eels along the way. On reaching Europe, elvers (young eels) swarm up the continent’s great west-facing rivers, turning into yellow eels.
Once in a suitable location they lie in wait for decades.
Then, at an indeterminate point known only to the eel, it is time for the final metamorphosis of its life cycle. The eel begins to turn silver, hauls itself out of whichever muddy bank it has deposited itself in, and heads back downstream and across the ocean. As it swims across the Atlantic, its reproductive organs develop, its digestive system shuts down and its stomach dissolves. Once back in the Sargasso Sea, its eggs are fertilised under a thick blanket of seaweed and the eel dies.
At least this is what we think occurs. To this day no scientist has
ever been able to fully map this return journey. Nobody knows what propels the eel home. In fact, nobody has ever even seen a European eel in the Sargasso Sea.
In The Gospel of the Eels, the Swedish journalist Patrick Svensson encapsulates these lingering mysteries as “the eel question” – one that has baffled humanity for millennia and left some of the most notable names in natural history perplexed.
Aristotle suggested that the presence of eels in ponds after periods of drought indicated rainwater somehow brought them into existence. Pliny the Elder posited that eels reproduced by rubbing themselves against rocks. In English folklore it was believed eels were born when horse tail hairs fell into waterways.
After failed attempts by scientists including Sigmund Freud to understand eel reproduction, it was the Danish biologist Johannes Schmidt who, in 1923, after two decades spent trawling the Atlantic for elvers, published a paper which narrowed in on the Sargasso Sea, a region of the northwest Atlantic bordered by four great currents and, fittingly, overlapping the Bermuda Triangle.
“The Sargasso Sea is like a dream,” the author writes in one of the lovely moments where his prose surges, eel-like, from languid to wriggling up your arm. “You can rarely pinpoint the moment you enter or exit; all you know is that you’ve been there.”
Svensson’s book has proved a surprise international bestseller. He combines natural history, detailing our long fascination with
eels, with childhood memories of fishing for the creatures with his father.
There is a stillness to Svensson’s writing that perfectly suits the eel and his enigmatic father, a road paver. “I can’t remember us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to catch them,” the author admits at one point. This is a book about tenderness, slime and savagery. Svensson’s father secures a still-twitching eel to a board with a five-inch nail through its head and urges his son to “take off its pyjamas” – pulling off the skin in one fluid motion.
This is also a book about class. Svensson’s family were able to build their white brick house due to Swedish social reforms but all the same he admits that while expensively attired fly fisherman cast for salmon upstream, their quarry was only ever eels. His father died young, aged 60, from a cancer which according to doctors
was partly a result of his work. Svensson understands without it ever being voiced that his father envisaged a different, upwardly mobile life for him – and that the eel remains a bridge between the two.
The power of their relationship is in the unsaid, but elsewhere the book feels lacking in other voices. Svensson describes Sweden’s eel coast, for example, and Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland, where people have caught eels for thousands of years, but neglects to interview any fishermen.
The conservation challenge facing the European eel, which is red-listed with numbers in catastrophic decline, is left to the very end of the book. A depressing combination of factors is blamed: Europe’s rivers are blocked, the oceans are warming and eels continue to be consumed in unsustainable numbers.
Extinction is a real possibility. Should the eel disappear for good, one of the great mysteries of the deep may never be resolved.
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