At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell Page B

is just the state of mind Heidegger seeks to induce in us when we read his prose.
    A small incident like a stapler running out of staples doesn’t normally cause the collapse of our entire universe. After a skipped beat,the connections knit together again, and we carry on. But sometimes a more comprehensive failure occurs — and it is possible that an empty stapler could be the catalyst for questioning my entire career and path in life.
    A collapse of meanings on that scale was described by Austrian playwright and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal in a 1902 story translated as ‘The Letter of LordChandos’. Masquerading as a genuine letter written in 1603 by an English aristocrat, it evokes Hofmannsthal’s own experiences during abreakdown in which the whole structure of things and people around him fell to bits. Everyday items suddenly look to Chandos like things seen too closely through a magnifying glass, impossible to identify. He hears people gossiping about local characters and friends, but can make no coherent narrative out of what they are saying. Unable to work or look after his estate, Chandos finds himself staring for hours at a moss-covered stone, or a dog lying in the sun, or a harrow left abandoned in a field. The connections have gone. No wonder we call an experience like this a breakdown. It may sound familiar to anyone who has suffered depression, and it can also occur in various neurological disorders. For Heidegger, it would be an extreme case of the collapse of everyday Being-in-the-world, a collapse that makes everything obtrusive, disarticulated, and impossible to negotiate with our usual blithe disregard.
    Heidegger gives us a different way of understanding why, sometimes, it can be so disproportionately disheartening to have a nail bend under the hammer, and to feel everything turn against you. If you throw an apple core towards the bin and it misses, to borrow an example from the Philip Larkin poem ‘As Bad as a Mile’, it is not merely annoying because you have to get up and pick it off the floor. It can make everything feel awkward, questionable and uncomfortable. But it is in questions and discomfort that philosophy begins.
    This was the sort of powerful, personal stuff that people craved from philosophy in troubled times: it was one reason why Heidegger acquired such influence. His starting point was reality in its everyday clothes, yet he also spoke in Kierkegaardian tones aboutthe strangest experiences in life, the moments when it all goes horribly wrong — and even the moments when we confront the greatest wrongness of all, which is the prospect of death. There can’t be many people who haven’t experienced a taste of such moments in their lives, even in peaceful, stable times. In the Germany of the 1920s, with everything thrown into chaos and resentment after the First World War, almost everyone could have recognised something inHeidegger’s vision.
    By 1929, the Heidegger cult had spread beyond Freiburg and Marburg. That spring, he spoke at a conference in the Alpine resort ofDavos — the setting for Thomas Mann’s bestselling 1924 novel The Magic Mountain , which Heidegger had read, and which included a battle of ideas between the old-fashioned, rationalist Italian critic Luigi Settembrini and the mystical ex-Jesuit Leo Naphta. It is tempting to see parallels in the encounter that now occurred between the conference’s two stars, as Heidegger was set against a great humanist scholar of Kantian philosophy and the Enlightenment: Ernst Cassirer.
    Cassirer was Jewish, tall, calm and elegant, with his white hair swept up into a striking but antiquated bouffant style verging on a minor beehive. Heidegger was short, evasive and compelling, with a pinched moustache and hair combed severely flat. Their debates centred on the philosophy of Kant, for their interpretations of that philosopher differed dramatically. Cassirer saw Kant as the last great representative of the Enlightenment