Heidegger, Benjamin, Eliot and Reichenbach: four clocks on one day

Martin Heidegger was born on 26 September 1889 in Messkirch, a small Catholic town on the edge of the Black Forest, to Friedrich Heidegger, master cooper and sexton of the parish church of St Martin, and his wife Johanna. He was buried in the same town on 28 May 1976, two days after dying in Freiburg. Between those dates he wrote the most influential and most compromised philosophical book of the twentieth century, ran a university for the National Socialist state for eleven months, and spent thirty years afterwards declining to say what he thought about it.

On 26 September 1940, fifty-one years to the day after Heidegger's birth, Walter Benjamin was found dead on the bed in room 3 of the Hostal França at Portbou, the first station on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, having taken a large dose of morphine the night before. He was forty-eight. The medical certificate said cerebral haemorrhage. The Portbou register records the 26th as the date of death, and the town buried him on the 28th, in a leased niche, number 563, in the Catholic section of the cemetery on the hill above the harbour.

Two more births belong to the day. Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis on 26 September 1888 and spent the years 1915 and 1916 writing a Harvard doctoral dissertation on F. H. Bradley that he never returned to defend. Hans Reichenbach was born in Hamburg on 26 September 1891, held the chair of philosophy of physics at Berlin from 1926, and was dismissed in 1933, the year Heidegger took the rectorship at Freiburg. All four spent a large part of their working lives on the question of what time is, and no two of them gave the same answer. That, rather than the coincidence of dates, is the reason to read them together.

Heidegger: time as the horizon of being#

The boy from Messkirch was meant for the priesthood. On 30 September 1909, four days after his twentieth birthday, he entered the Jesuit novitiate at Tisis near Feldkirch in Austria, and left on 13 October at the end of the two-week candidature, probably on grounds of health; his heart was thought weak. Tomorrow's entry in this series concerns the foundation of the order that turned him away. He read theology at Freiburg, then philosophy, took his doctorate in 1913, became Husserl's assistant, and in April 1927 published Sein und Zeit in the eighth volume of Husserl's Jahrbuch. The book's claim is in its title. Western philosophy since Plato, it argues, has forgotten to ask what it means for anything to be, and has covered the omission with a picture of beings as things present before a spectator. The way back is through the one being for whom its own being is at stake, which Heidegger called Dasein, and whose structure turns out to be temporal through and through: thrown into a past it did not choose, projecting onto possibilities it has not yet realised, and defined above all by being towards its own death. Time, in that book, is not a container in which Dasein happens to sit. It is what Dasein is, and the horizon within which the question of being can be asked at all.

The book was never finished; the promised second half, in which time itself was to be worked out as the meaning of being, did not appear, and Heidegger later said the language of the first half had not been equal to the turn he needed to make. What did appear, in the spring of 1933, was the rector. He was elected on 21 April, took office on the 22nd, joined the National Socialist party at the beginning of May, delivered the rectoral address on the self-assertion of the German university, and resigned in April 1934. The Black Notebooks, published from 2014, added anti-Semitic passages written in his own hand to a record that his defenders had spent decades describing as opportunism. Our reading of the technology essay, the one in which the danger is not the machines but the way the world shows up under them, addresses the record directly, and the seminars Giorgio Agamben attended at Le Thor in the late 1960s, now published in his notebooks, show the late Heidegger still at work on what he called the history of being. The question the birthday leaves open is the one everyone asks and nobody has settled: whether the philosophy of a thrown, finite, historical Dasein made the politics more likely, or whether the same book, read in Paris or Kyoto, produced nothing of the kind.

Benjamin: the crossing, the briefcase, the nameless#

Benjamin had left Berlin for Paris in 1933. When France fell in June 1940 he went south, to Lourdes and then to Marseille, where he obtained an American visa but not a French exit permit, without which he could not legally leave. The remaining route was over the mountains. On the afternoon of 24 September he walked part of the way with Lisa Fittko, a German socialist who had worked out the smugglers' path from Banyuls, together with Henny Gurland and her son Joseph, and instead of returning to the town for the night stayed alone in a stand of pines so as not to have to climb the first stretch twice. He had a heart condition. He also had a heavy black briefcase which, Fittko later wrote, he told her held "the only copy of his latest writing" and was "more important than I am, more important than myself".

They reached Portbou on 25 September and presented themselves at the police post in the railway station, where they were told that Spain would not admit them. The order had arrived that very day: the Franco government had cancelled transit visas and instructed the frontier police to send such travellers back to France, which in Benjamin's case meant the Gestapo. Had the party arrived twenty-four hours earlier it would have gone through. In room 3 that night Benjamin made some telephone calls and took the morphine. The Gurlands, after his death, were allowed to continue, and boarded a ship for America a few days later. The briefcase and whatever manuscript it contained have never been found. Hannah Arendt came over the same pass a few months afterwards, carrying the typescript of the theses "On the Concept of History" that Benjamin had entrusted to her, and delivered it to Adorno in New York.

Those theses, written in the first months of 1940, are Benjamin's last word on time, and they are the opposite of Heidegger's. History, for Benjamin, is not a continuum through which a being projects itself, but a heap of wreckage seen by an angel driven backwards into the future by the storm called progress; the historian's task is to seize an image of the past "as it flashes up at a moment of danger", and to do so from the side of the defeated. There is a further irony that the calendar supplies. Being and Time makes death the possibility that individualises Dasein and gives it its whole. Benjamin's death was not like that. It was a contingency of frontier paperwork, and the men who decided it were clerks.

Portbou has answered in kind. The memorial Dani Karavan built in the cemetery, commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary of the death, is a corridor of rusted steel cut into the cliff, about a hundred steps descending towards the sea and ending at a pane of glass on which is written a sentence from the drafts of the theses: "It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless." It is called Passages. The town registered him as Benjamin Walter, a Catholic dead of apoplexy; the niche was leased for five years and, when the lease expired, its contents appear to have been moved to the common grave, so that the most-visited memorial to a twentieth-century critic marks the burial place of nobody in particular, which is what the sentence asks for. Gillian Rose, whom this series reached on 20 September, built her account of Adorno's melancholy science on Benjamin's; and the argument about mechanical reproduction and the aura, which Glenn Gould stood on its head in yesterday's entry, is set against the present state of machine-made art here.

Eliot: the philosopher who did not come back#

Eliot's route to poetry ran through the Harvard philosophy department, where he studied under Santayana and Royce, took two years of Sanskrit and Indian philosophy, and worked mainly on idealism and Kant. In 1910 and 1911 he was in Paris, attending Bergson's lectures at the Collège de France and absorbing, for a time, the doctrine of duration, the lived time that the clock cannot measure. He then turned on Bergson and towards Bradley, and in the academic year 1915 to 1916 wrote a dissertation, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, which Royce praised and which Eliot, by then married and living in London, never came back to defend. Harvard never conferred the degree. Faber published the text in 1964 with a preface in which its author professed himself unable, after so long, to think in its terminology. Our piece on Bradley, and on what the dissertation did to Eliot's poetry, makes the case at length.

The point for this page is that the philosophical Eliot did not vanish when he stopped submitting to examiners. "Tradition and the Individual Talent", published in 1919, defines tradition as an order in which "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence". That is a theory of time, and a Bradleyan one: the past is not behind the poet in a line but present with him, altered by every new work as much as it alters the work. Set against Heidegger's thrown Dasein, which inherits a past it must take up, and Benjamin's angel, which sees the past as a single catastrophe, Eliot's simultaneous order is the most conservative of the three and the only one that has a use for the word "tradition" without irony. He was given the Nobel Prize in 1948 and died in London on 4 January 1965.

Reichenbach: time with the metaphysics removed#

Reichenbach is the member of the quartet least likely to be recognised on the street, and the one who would have found the other three's accounts of time unintelligible in the strict sense. His first books were on relativity, and he never wrote as if physics were a special case of something more general. From 1926 he held the chair of philosophy of physics at Berlin; in 1928 he founded there the Society for Empirical Philosophy, the Berlin counterpart of the Vienna Circle, with Hempel, von Mises and Grelling among its members; and in 1930 he and Carnap took over the editorship of Erkenntnis, the journal in which logical empiricism defined itself. In 1933 he lost his post and went to Istanbul, where he headed the philosophy department until 1938, and then to the University of California at Los Angeles, where he died on 9 April 1953. Heidegger, in the year Reichenbach was dismissed, was telling German students, in an appeal dated 3 November 1933, that "the Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law".

The Direction of Time, left unfinished at his death and published in 1956, is the book that belongs on this page. It separates two questions that the phenomenologists had run together. The first is temporal order: what makes one event earlier than another. Reichenbach's answer is causal, that an event A is before an event B if A can produce a physical effect on B, and it needs no observer. The second is temporal direction: why time runs one way. His answer there is thermodynamic, that direction is given by irreversible processes, in other words by increasing entropy, and that in a universe without such processes the question would have no content. Nothing in the account requires a being for whom its own being is at stake, or an angel, or Homer. Reichenbach would have said that this was its merit, and the reader who is inclined to agree should notice that the account also has nothing to say about why the morning of 26 September 1940 in Portbou was experienced by anyone as a morning at all. That, not any failure of the physics, is the ground on which the other three would have stood.

Also on the day#

Ivan Pavlov was born at Ryazan on 26 September 1849, though the date is 14 September in the Julian calendar then in use in Russia, and the Nobel Foundation's own biography prints the Old Style date; he received the 1904 prize for his work on the physiology of digestion, and gave the concept of the conditioned reflex, which he first defined in public at the International Medical Congress in Madrid in 1903, to a century of philosophy of mind that has been arguing with behaviourism ever since. Tomorrow this series turns to Bossuet and to the approval of the Society of Jesus in 1540; the entry for 24 September, on Cardano and Paracelsus, is here.