Erich Heller
Encyclopedia
Erich Heller was a British essayist, known particularly for his critical studies in German-language philosophy
and literature
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
in Bohemia
(then within Austria-Hungary
, now the Czech Republic
), to the family of a Jewish physician. He graduated a doctor of law from the German University in Prague (Deutsche Universität in Prag, Juridische Fakultät) on 11 February 1935, at the age of 23. In 1939 he emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he began his professional career as a Germanist, being active at Cambridge
and London
(England) and at Swansea
(Wales). Heller became a British subject in 1947. From 1960 onwards he was based in the United States, primarily at Northwestern University
in Evanston, Illinois
, where he was initially Professor of German, and subsequently Avalon Professor of the Humanities until his retirement in 1979.
For Heller, German letters as an academic discipline was something of an avocation
, a marriage of convenience to supply a vehicle for the conveyance of thought of a wider scope. He kept a certain distance from the scholarly community around him, believing (with Jacob Burckhardt
) this community's pedantry and unremitting quest for precision to be ‘one of the most cunning enemies of truth’, their cumulative effect being ‘the absence of true comprehension’.
that bridges Heideggerian and Biblical idioms, that:
Heller accepted the Fall, or rather its philosophical consequences. Writing elsewhere about Friedrich von Schiller Heller states that Schiller presented
The Disinherited Mind was first published in Britain; two years later it was issued under the title Enterbter Geist by Suhrkamp in Frankfurt. An Italian translation followed in 1965, and a Japanese rendering in 1969.
Heller saw Truth as the first casualty of the mechanistic theory of nature, set on its course by Darwin and others, which in alliance with applied sciences roots out the intrinsic meaning of things in favour of the 'how?' of their causal interrelatedness. The thing in itself is forgotten, and with it the meaning of Reality as such. Such theories succeed merely in feeding 'the body of superstitious beliefs that had grown rampant ever since medieval scholasticism suffered its final defeat at the hands of Francis Bacon'.
This process, of Reality's being eviscerated of deeper meaning in the course of being 'explained' by modern science, constitutes the main charge that Heller laid against supporters of what he called the Creed of Ontological Invalidity. The practical result of its implementation is that nothing can exist in and of itself: things' scientific explanation deprives them of their individual being as entities and reduces them to the position of mere links in a much more broadly conceived chain. Here there are echoes — and indeed a defence — of Martin Heidegger
's das Sein des Seinden, although Heller would probably have rejected these. This state of affairs leads to spiritual perdition, he felt, whereby man's own true significance as a higher being (his 'ontological mystery') is obscured, and whereby any attempt at a meaningful response to the world is stymied. For such a response can only take place vis-à-vis the question of what the world fundamentally is, not simply how it works.
The meaningful response that the fully realized human being makes to the world differs from the attitude of the frog-in-the-well scientist in the most fundamental of ways: the former — through his theorizing, which is the 'highest intellectual achievement' — actually shapes the Reality, rather than passively 'recording' it in the manner of the latter whose mere 'looking at a thing is of no use whatsoever'. Heller's best-known quotation is: "Be careful how you interpret the world; it is like that." The admonition is not addressed to those who 'find and accept' (as he put it), but to those who through the 'intuitive, visionary faculty of... [their] genius' essentially create the world we know.
Heller chose not to contest this charge. However, the book itself throws some light on this question. In the chapter 'Goethe and the Avoidance of Tragedy', a non-Jewish philosopher of stature, Karl Jaspers
, is quoted on Goethe's having become — in an important sense — obsolete after 1945. This is on account of his inadequate grasp of the problems of theodicy
, that is, chiefly, of the problem of the existence of Evil. The question posed is not whether the Holocaust was central to Erich Heller (as it was to all the Jews who survived), but whether any human being can avoid being conscious of its centrality.
For Heller, the Body was central to human identity. The Body was the principium individuationis (in the sense in that Nietzsche understood or misunderstood that expression, which was good enough for Heller). He once confessed privately that it is precisely because religions like Christianity offered a redemption that, for him, entailed the greatest sacrilege — a divestiture of the Body in Paradise in favour of some 'transfigured' entity that seemed to merge the individual personhood, eschatologically speaking, into a single collective state of all the blessed — it is for this reason that he was not interested in those religions. The Holocaust had a theological dimension for him, also. With its mass destruction of bodies it violated the principle of the sacred, of the spiritual, as manifested in the world. For Heller, the spiritual was never not a tissue of 'vague abstractions': it was always incarnate. The spiritual needed the Body in exactly the same measure in which it needed transcendence: the spiritual had to be 'known and felt to be real'. ‘Genius’ alone, he once wrote, 'is never the whole man'.
's views on Shakespeare — who supposedly modelled himself on Montaigne in formulating the character of Hamlet
— Heller took a commonsensical approach to literary borrowing. His position has broader applications. Eliot — Heller writes —
Heller adduces another case in point: 'If Dante's thought is Thomas Aquinas's, it is yet Dante's: not only by virtue of imaginative sympathy and assimilation, and certainly not as a reward for the supply of an "emotional equivalent" [sc. in its unique capacity as poetry]. It is Dante’s property by birthright. He has reborn it within himself –– poetically.’
The argument preempts criticism of Heller's philosophy, based on its roots in Nietzsche and Rilke, and (mutatis mutandis) of Kafka. The title itself of The Disinherited Mind might have been suggested by Rilke’s Seventh Elegy.
Heller’s early article on Karl Kraus
, ‘The Last Days of Mankind’, was originally published in the Cambridge Journal in 1948, its title taken from one of Kraus’s plays, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (1919).
. An English-language collection of –– chiefly cross-cultural –– essays on the subject was brought out by the University of Chicago Press as The Importance of Nietzsche in 1988 to wide acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. The collection was posthumously published in Germany four years later. His essay on ‘Wittgenstein and Nietzsche’ appears in Portraits of Wittgenstein (1999).
Heller also contributed an introduction to Reginald John Hollingdale’s (1930–2001) translation of Nietzsche’s Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, published by Cambridge University Press in 1986.
’s short stories for a British publisher. Thomas Mann’s writings were collectively the subject of Heller’s doctoral dissertation, written under the supervision of Edwin Keppel Bennett
(1887–1958), which was presented to the University of Cambridge (where, it may be noted, he was a member of Peterhouse and the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages) in February 1949: in this work he considered Mann’s corpus in relation to the main currents of thought in nineteenth-century Germany.
Heller’s well-known study of Thomas Mann (The Ironic German, 1958; German ed., Thomas Mann, der ironische Deutsche, 1959; Jap. transl. (from the revised German), Tômasu Man: hangoteki doitsu-jin, 1975) is based on information derived from his personal acquaintance of the subject. Gabriel Josipovici
(b. 1940) called it in March 2006 one ‘of the most important books in my intellectual formation’.
Later, Heller would also write an introduction to the 1972 reissue of Kenneth Burke
's translation of Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (originally published in 1925), and to the American translation of Mann’s Wagner und unsere Zeit (ed. Erika Mann).
's background. He also studied at the same university, in the same department, and took the same degree as did Kafka, 29 years before him. The essay on Kafka (Kafka, London: Fontana Modern Masters
, 1974; U.S. ed., Franz Kafka, New York, 1975) is still valuable for its author’s synthetis of his subject’s multifaceted, cross-pollinated mindset and cultural heritage. Decades before this essay was published Heller had used the expression negative transcendence, for which he is still remembered, to describe the particular quality of the visible reality adumbrated in Kafka’s compositions, and particularly discernible in The Castle.
In Kafka’s world, contingent reality has been completely unhitched from the realm of the intelligible, from Truth that is—a positivistically ruled domain where the mutual causal relations between things preclude any reference to the transcendent in the elucidation of their meaning. Yet, it is the transcendent that constitutes a major part of that meaning (if indeed it does not exhaust it completely). In this situation, the meaning of reality methodically purged of what are taken to be illegitimate, because scientifically ‘unprovable’, elements becomes truncated, grossly incomplete, thereby producing a spiritual vacuum that, sealed off (as it were) ‘from above’, has no choice but to resolve the tension between the void and the plenum by sucking up ‘from below’ the stuff from Hell to replenish itself with. This is negative transcendence. For where the positive values are suppressed, Evil will take over with the force and inevitability of a physical necessity. One might call it Heller’s law.
Erich Heller had earlier been, famously, the co-editor of Kafka’s love-letters addressed to Felice Bauer (1887–1960), the revealing 782-page Briefe an Felice..., published in 1967, to which he wrote an introduction that became something of a classic in itself, being retained for the French translation of the correspondence in question. Subsequently Heller also contributed an introduction to an English translation of Der Prozess, and edited Kafka’s Der Dichter über sein Werk, and his Über das Schreiben.
Perhaps his most notable correspondent had been Hannah Arendt
.
Many important biographical details shared with him by other writers could only with the greatest difficulty, if at all, find their way into conventional studies and biographies, and remain hidden from public view (such as, for example, Thomas Mann’s verbal confession, made to Heller, concerning the circumstances attending upon the destruction, by his own hand, of his early diaries [their homosexual content was the immediate cause], or another concerning his reading and re-reading of Xenophon’s Symposium ‘nine times’ before writing his own narrative on love’s vicissitudes, Der Tod in Venedig).
Erich Heller's vivid intellect made him on occasion a principled controversialist, as evidenced by his long-running –– and sometimes acrimonious –– public exchanges with another prominent British Germanist, T. J. Reed
, in the weekly pages of the Times Literary Supplement in the 1970s.
is also known to have been an early friend.
in his works on Being, which were directly relevant to his own reflections on the nature of Reality. An obstacle to a deeper analysis of Heidegger’s œuvre was presented by that writer’s questionable but imperfectly explored association with National Socialism. At an early stage in his life Heller, in a bid to ‘absolve’ Heidegger in his own mind, went so far as to undertake a special trip to post-war Germany to meet the renowned philosopher in person; but his ‘Why?’ was met by stony silence. The encounter seemed to convince Heller that there was little one could add, by way of moral comment on Heidegger, that has not been expressed in Paul Celan
’s poem ‘Todtnauberg’, written later but in similar circumstances, with its well-known topos of suffocation at what Celan calls Krudes (an instance of smuttiness).
This turn of events must needs be adjudged a most unfortunate one, given that much of Heller’s best thought can be viewed as a continuation in one sense or another of Heidegger’s preoccupation with Being; certainly Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, in its original edition, was a prized possession and remained part of Heller’s personal library to his last day (surviving the substantial paring down of his collection upon his moving into a retirement home in the final stages of his life). It is possible, and indeed probable, that if the outcome of his meeting with Heidegger, which might have taken place c.1947, had been more positive in providing answers to some of the burning questions, the final shape of The Disinherited Mind, Heller’s first book, would have been substantially different, and that we would have been presented therein with manifold instances of direct engagement with Heidegger’s propositions. As things stand, there are just a couple of perfunctory references to Heidegger in this, nolens volens, most ‘Heideggerian’ of books. (Those references do nevertheless reveal intimate acquaintance with his thought.) Just as Heidegger had not a single word for Heller during their meeting, so also he has barely a word to spare for Heidegger.
Another tribute from an unexpected quarter came five years later from the aforementioned Hans Egon Holthusen (see Life in Letters, above), who also taught at Northwestern between 1968 and 1981, and who, despite the criticisms meted out to him in The Disinherited Mind, delivered himself of a ‘Geburtstagsgruß an Erich Heller’ in Merkur (35, 1981; pp. 340–342) on the occasion of Heller’s 70th birthday.
Heller's personal papers, including private correspondence and manuscripts, are preserved in parts at the Northwestern University Archives in Evanston, and in parts at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (Schiller-Nationalmuseum) in the southwestern German city of Marbach am Neckar
(Baden-Württemberg). The files of the Northwestern University Archives contain some photographs. The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., for its part, holds facsimiles of some of his letters (in particular those addressed to Hannah Arendt
and Robert B. Silvers
), in addition to the sound recordings of two of his lectures, the one on ‘The Modern German Mind: The Legacy of Nietzsche’, which he delivered in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress on 8 February 1960, the other on ‘The Works of Nietzsche’, recorded in 1974.
He lacks an entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica, as he does in Bautz’ Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, although he does command a mention in the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie.
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
and literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Biography
Heller was born at ChomutovChomutov
Chomutov is a city in the Czech Republic, in the Ústí nad Labem Region.Chomutov has been a statutory town since 1 July 2006. It occupies an area of 29,26 km² and has 50 782 inhabitants , thereby making it the 20th largest town in the Czech Republic, the 4th largest in the Ústí nad Labem...
in Bohemia
Bohemia
Bohemia is a historical region in central Europe, occupying the western two-thirds of the traditional Czech Lands. It is located in the contemporary Czech Republic with its capital in Prague...
(then within Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary , more formally known as the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council and the Lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown of Saint Stephen, was a constitutional monarchic union between the crowns of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in...
, now the Czech Republic
Czech Republic
The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....
), to the family of a Jewish physician. He graduated a doctor of law from the German University in Prague (Deutsche Universität in Prag, Juridische Fakultät) on 11 February 1935, at the age of 23. In 1939 he emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he began his professional career as a Germanist, being active at Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
and London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
(England) and at Swansea
Swansea
Swansea is a coastal city and county in Wales. Swansea is in the historic county boundaries of Glamorgan. Situated on the sandy South West Wales coast, the county area includes the Gower Peninsula and the Lliw uplands...
(Wales). Heller became a British subject in 1947. From 1960 onwards he was based in the United States, primarily at Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....
in Evanston, Illinois
Evanston, Illinois
Evanston is a suburban municipality in Cook County, Illinois 12 miles north of downtown Chicago, bordering Chicago to the south, Skokie to the west, and Wilmette to the north, with an estimated population of 74,360 as of 2003. It is one of the North Shore communities that adjoin Lake Michigan...
, where he was initially Professor of German, and subsequently Avalon Professor of the Humanities until his retirement in 1979.
For Heller, German letters as an academic discipline was something of an avocation
Avocation
An avocation is an activity that one engages in as a hobby outside one's main occupation. There are many examples of people whose professions were the ways that they made their livings, but for whom their activities outside of their workplaces were their true passions in life...
, a marriage of convenience to supply a vehicle for the conveyance of thought of a wider scope. He kept a certain distance from the scholarly community around him, believing (with Jacob Burckhardt
Jacob Burckhardt
Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt was a historian of art and culture, and an influential figure in the historiography of each field. He is known as one of the major progenitors of cultural history, albeit in a form very different from how cultural history is conceived and studied in academia today...
) this community's pedantry and unremitting quest for precision to be ‘one of the most cunning enemies of truth’, their cumulative effect being ‘the absence of true comprehension’.
Main currents of his thought: anima naturaliter religiosa
Not a religious philosopher (and an agnostic by personal persuasion), he could show religious sensibility, as when he wrote, in an essay on Heinrich von KleistHeinrich von Kleist
Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist was a poet, dramatist, novelist and short story writer. The Kleist Prize, a prestigious prize for German literature, is named after him.- Life :...
that bridges Heideggerian and Biblical idioms, that:
according to Plato the human mind has been in the dark ever since it lost its place in the community of Truth, in the realm, that is, of the Ideas, the eternal and eternally perfect forms, those now unattainable models which man in his exile is able to see and recognize only as shadows or imperfect copies. And this Platonic parable of the damage suffered by man’s soul and consciousness is not unlike the Fall as it is narrated in Genesis. The Fall was the consequence and punishment of man’s free will that for the first time had asserted itself against the universal God and rejoiced in a consciousness and pleasure entirely its own –– tragically its own; for man had to forsake the indwelling in the supreme Intelligence and thus the harmony between himself and Being as such...
Heller accepted the Fall, or rather its philosophical consequences. Writing elsewhere about Friedrich von Schiller Heller states that Schiller presented
‘a striking instance of a European catastrophe of the spirit: the invasion and partial disruption of the aesthetic faculty by unemployed religious impulses. He [Schiller] is one of the most conspicuous and most impressive figures among the host of theologically displaced persons who found a precarious refuge in the emergency camp of Art.’
Disinherited Mind; or the Creed of Ontological Invalidity
Heller’s The Disinherited Mind, a seminal work published in 1952 (U.S. ed., expanded, 1957), earned him a following among intellectuals. The project of The Disinherited Mind was to analyze the disappearance of Truth from the immediate environment of man, and the ensuing compulsions of Art to fill the void. Such an intervention on the part of Art, in the circumstances, results in the impoverishment of the world, not in its enrichment. It entails the loss of ‘significant external reality’.The Disinherited Mind was first published in Britain; two years later it was issued under the title Enterbter Geist by Suhrkamp in Frankfurt. An Italian translation followed in 1965, and a Japanese rendering in 1969.
Formulating the 'Creed'
For Heller, Truth could be defined in the terms proposed by Paul Roubiczek in Thinking in Opposites, a book that appeared in the same year as did The Disinherited Mind: Truth must be embodied in external reality. (Heller says the same in The Disinherited Mind when he points out that the question, What is Truth? becomes irrelevant 'in the face of its embodiment'.) Roubiczek's grasp of the meaning of Truth is more philosophical than Goethe's, according to whom Truth is 'a revelation emerging at the point where the inner world of man meets external reality...'Heller saw Truth as the first casualty of the mechanistic theory of nature, set on its course by Darwin and others, which in alliance with applied sciences roots out the intrinsic meaning of things in favour of the 'how?' of their causal interrelatedness. The thing in itself is forgotten, and with it the meaning of Reality as such. Such theories succeed merely in feeding 'the body of superstitious beliefs that had grown rampant ever since medieval scholasticism suffered its final defeat at the hands of Francis Bacon'.
This process, of Reality's being eviscerated of deeper meaning in the course of being 'explained' by modern science, constitutes the main charge that Heller laid against supporters of what he called the Creed of Ontological Invalidity. The practical result of its implementation is that nothing can exist in and of itself: things' scientific explanation deprives them of their individual being as entities and reduces them to the position of mere links in a much more broadly conceived chain. Here there are echoes — and indeed a defence — of Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
's das Sein des Seinden, although Heller would probably have rejected these. This state of affairs leads to spiritual perdition, he felt, whereby man's own true significance as a higher being (his 'ontological mystery') is obscured, and whereby any attempt at a meaningful response to the world is stymied. For such a response can only take place vis-à-vis the question of what the world fundamentally is, not simply how it works.
The meaningful response that the fully realized human being makes to the world differs from the attitude of the frog-in-the-well scientist in the most fundamental of ways: the former — through his theorizing, which is the 'highest intellectual achievement' — actually shapes the Reality, rather than passively 'recording' it in the manner of the latter whose mere 'looking at a thing is of no use whatsoever'. Heller's best-known quotation is: "Be careful how you interpret the world; it is like that." The admonition is not addressed to those who 'find and accept' (as he put it), but to those who through the 'intuitive, visionary faculty of... [their] genius' essentially create the world we know.
Objections
An objection levelled against The Disinherited Mind (and registered in the Postscript, Part 4 of the essay entitled "The Hazard of Modern Poetry," which Heller appended to the U.S. edition of 1957) was that the Weltanschauung at the heart of its critique was in some aspects excessively Holocaust-centric. (Heller took exception to this term, preferring the English word 'genocide', or the Semitic words sho'ah and hurban (Hebrew, 'annihilation’), to 'Holocaust'.)Heller chose not to contest this charge. However, the book itself throws some light on this question. In the chapter 'Goethe and the Avoidance of Tragedy', a non-Jewish philosopher of stature, Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
Karl Theodor Jaspers was a German psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry and philosophy. After being trained in and practicing psychiatry, Jaspers turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to discover an innovative philosophical system...
, is quoted on Goethe's having become — in an important sense — obsolete after 1945. This is on account of his inadequate grasp of the problems of theodicy
Theodicy
Theodicy is a theological and philosophical study which attempts to prove God's intrinsic or foundational nature of omnibenevolence , omniscience , and omnipotence . Theodicy is usually concerned with the God of the Abrahamic religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, due to the relevant...
, that is, chiefly, of the problem of the existence of Evil. The question posed is not whether the Holocaust was central to Erich Heller (as it was to all the Jews who survived), but whether any human being can avoid being conscious of its centrality.
For Heller, the Body was central to human identity. The Body was the principium individuationis (in the sense in that Nietzsche understood or misunderstood that expression, which was good enough for Heller). He once confessed privately that it is precisely because religions like Christianity offered a redemption that, for him, entailed the greatest sacrilege — a divestiture of the Body in Paradise in favour of some 'transfigured' entity that seemed to merge the individual personhood, eschatologically speaking, into a single collective state of all the blessed — it is for this reason that he was not interested in those religions. The Holocaust had a theological dimension for him, also. With its mass destruction of bodies it violated the principle of the sacred, of the spiritual, as manifested in the world. For Heller, the spiritual was never not a tissue of 'vague abstractions': it was always incarnate. The spiritual needed the Body in exactly the same measure in which it needed transcendence: the spiritual had to be 'known and felt to be real'. ‘Genius’ alone, he once wrote, 'is never the whole man'.
On Nietzsche
Heller points out that Nietzsche's and Rilke's opposition to valid distinctions — in particular Nietzsche's relativization of Good and Evil — was an overreaction. It took against what both writers diagnosed as the 'barbarism of concepts' of a 'crudely interpreted world' (the expression is Nietzsche's), whereby the dual aspects of immanence and transcendence — closer to each other than human thought has been prepared to allow over the centuries — open the floodgates to a series of specious distinctions. Pre-eminent among the latter is the false distinction between thought and feeling. But, in their zeal to uncover the fraud of such bifurcations, the two thinkers carry their denunciation too far: Nietzsche, in particular, overstates his case when he links Good with Evil.Borrowing
In a critique of T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
's views on Shakespeare — who supposedly modelled himself on Montaigne in formulating the character of Hamlet
Hamlet
The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601...
— Heller took a commonsensical approach to literary borrowing. His position has broader applications. Eliot — Heller writes —
suggests that Shakespeare, in making Hamlet think in the manner of Montaigne, did not think himself, but merely 'used' thought for dramatic ends. This sounds true enough, and would be even truer if it were possible to 'use' thought without thinking in the process of using it. For thought is not an object, but an activity, and it is impossible to 'use' an activity without becoming active. One can use a table without contributing to its manufacture; but one cannot use thinking or feeling without thinking or feeling. Of course, one can use the results of thought in a thoughtless fashion. In this case, however, one does not use thought, but merely words that will, more likely than not, fail to make sense.
Heller adduces another case in point: 'If Dante's thought is Thomas Aquinas's, it is yet Dante's: not only by virtue of imaginative sympathy and assimilation, and certainly not as a reward for the supply of an "emotional equivalent" [sc. in its unique capacity as poetry]. It is Dante’s property by birthright. He has reborn it within himself –– poetically.’
The argument preempts criticism of Heller's philosophy, based on its roots in Nietzsche and Rilke, and (mutatis mutandis) of Kafka. The title itself of The Disinherited Mind might have been suggested by Rilke’s Seventh Elegy.
Other Works; or the Last Days of Mankind
Bibliographies are a dull business (as Erich Heller remarks in his ‘The Last Days of Mankind’). The Disinherited Mind was followed by another collection of essays, The Artist’s Journey into the Interior (1965; German ed., Die Reise der Kunst ins Innere und andere Essays, 1966; Japanese translation, 1972); then by The Poet’s Self and the Poem: Essays on Goethe, Nietzsche, Rilke and Thomas Mann (1976); and finally by Im Zeitalter der Prosa: literarische und philosophische Essays, published simultaneously in German and in English editions (the latter under the title In the Age of Prose: Literary and Philosophical Essays) in 1984.Heller’s early article on Karl Kraus
Karl Kraus
Karl Kraus was an Austrian writer and journalist, known as a satirist, essayist, aphorist, playwright and poet. He is regarded as one of the foremost German-language satirists of the 20th century, especially for his witty criticism of the press, German culture, and German and Austrian...
, ‘The Last Days of Mankind’, was originally published in the Cambridge Journal in 1948, its title taken from one of Kraus’s plays, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (1919).
Writings on Nietzsche
Heller’s German-language Nietzsche: 3 Essays appeared in 1964, establishing him as an authority on Friedrich NietzscheFriedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
. An English-language collection of –– chiefly cross-cultural –– essays on the subject was brought out by the University of Chicago Press as The Importance of Nietzsche in 1988 to wide acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. The collection was posthumously published in Germany four years later. His essay on ‘Wittgenstein and Nietzsche’ appears in Portraits of Wittgenstein (1999).
Heller also contributed an introduction to Reginald John Hollingdale’s (1930–2001) translation of Nietzsche’s Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, published by Cambridge University Press in 1986.
Writings on Thomas Mann
Already in 1940, soon after his arrival at Cambridge, the 29-year-old Heller annotated a collection of Thomas MannThomas Mann
Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...
’s short stories for a British publisher. Thomas Mann’s writings were collectively the subject of Heller’s doctoral dissertation, written under the supervision of Edwin Keppel Bennett
Edwin Keppel Bennett
Edwin Keppel Bennett, noms de plume: Francis Bennett, Francis Keppel , was an English writer, poet, Germanist, and a prominent academic...
(1887–1958), which was presented to the University of Cambridge (where, it may be noted, he was a member of Peterhouse and the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages) in February 1949: in this work he considered Mann’s corpus in relation to the main currents of thought in nineteenth-century Germany.
Heller’s well-known study of Thomas Mann (The Ironic German, 1958; German ed., Thomas Mann, der ironische Deutsche, 1959; Jap. transl. (from the revised German), Tômasu Man: hangoteki doitsu-jin, 1975) is based on information derived from his personal acquaintance of the subject. Gabriel Josipovici
Gabriel Josipovici
Gabriel David Josipovici FBA, FRSL is a British novelist, short story writer, critic, literary theorist, and playwright.-Biography:...
(b. 1940) called it in March 2006 one ‘of the most important books in my intellectual formation’.
Later, Heller would also write an introduction to the 1972 reissue of Kenneth Burke
Kenneth Burke
Kenneth Duva Burke was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics.-Personal history:...
's translation of Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (originally published in 1925), and to the American translation of Mann’s Wagner und unsere Zeit (ed. Erika Mann).
Writings on Kafka; and the Question of Negative Transcendence
Heller shared Franz KafkaFranz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
's background. He also studied at the same university, in the same department, and took the same degree as did Kafka, 29 years before him. The essay on Kafka (Kafka, London: Fontana Modern Masters
Fontana Modern Masters
The Fontana Modern Masters was a series of pocket guides on the writers, philosophers, and other thinkers and theorists whose ideas were shaping the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century. The first five titles were published on 12 January 1970 by Fontana Books, the paperback imprint of...
, 1974; U.S. ed., Franz Kafka, New York, 1975) is still valuable for its author’s synthetis of his subject’s multifaceted, cross-pollinated mindset and cultural heritage. Decades before this essay was published Heller had used the expression negative transcendence, for which he is still remembered, to describe the particular quality of the visible reality adumbrated in Kafka’s compositions, and particularly discernible in The Castle.
In Kafka’s world, contingent reality has been completely unhitched from the realm of the intelligible, from Truth that is—a positivistically ruled domain where the mutual causal relations between things preclude any reference to the transcendent in the elucidation of their meaning. Yet, it is the transcendent that constitutes a major part of that meaning (if indeed it does not exhaust it completely). In this situation, the meaning of reality methodically purged of what are taken to be illegitimate, because scientifically ‘unprovable’, elements becomes truncated, grossly incomplete, thereby producing a spiritual vacuum that, sealed off (as it were) ‘from above’, has no choice but to resolve the tension between the void and the plenum by sucking up ‘from below’ the stuff from Hell to replenish itself with. This is negative transcendence. For where the positive values are suppressed, Evil will take over with the force and inevitability of a physical necessity. One might call it Heller’s law.
Erich Heller had earlier been, famously, the co-editor of Kafka’s love-letters addressed to Felice Bauer (1887–1960), the revealing 782-page Briefe an Felice..., published in 1967, to which he wrote an introduction that became something of a classic in itself, being retained for the French translation of the correspondence in question. Subsequently Heller also contributed an introduction to an English translation of Der Prozess, and edited Kafka’s Der Dichter über sein Werk, and his Über das Schreiben.
German writings
A selection of his essays on Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, and Karl Kraus appeared in Germany in 1977 under the title Die Wiederkehr der Unschuld: this collection includes the beautiful essay ‘Vom Menschen, der sich schämt’ in which Erich Heller surveys the human attitude the Greeks called aidos, as manifested in later history. Die Wiederkehr der Unschuld followed upon essays on Rilke, Nirgends wird Welt sein als innen (1975), and Essays über Goethe, which saw the light of day in 1970. These in turn were preceded by his Studien zur modernen Literatur of 1963. His article ‘Karl Kraus und die schwarze Magie der Sprache’ appeared in Der Monat (VI/64) in 1954; while his paper on Rilke, ‘Improvisationen zur ersten der Duineser Elegien’, presented at a congress in Italy in 1982, is published in a collective volume.Life in letters
Heller corresponded with a number of thinkers of his day, whose names include (in the chronological order of the date of birth, not necessarily in the order of the respective correspondents’ importance) the following.- Thomas MannThomas MannThomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...
- E. M. ForsterE. M. ForsterEdward Morgan Forster OM, CH was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society...
- T. S. EliotT. S. EliotThomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
–– who is repeatedly taken to task in The Disinherited Mind for what Heller considers to be egregious lapses of literary judgement - Conrad AikenConrad AikenConrad Potter Aiken was an American novelist and poet, whose work includes poetry, short stories, novels, a play and an autobiography.-Early years:...
- Moriz SeelerMoriz SeelerMoriz Seeler was a German poet, writer, film producer, and man of the theatre. He was also a victim of the Holocaust....
–– whose letters to Heller include some of Moriz Seeler’s rare poetic compositions - Carl ZuckmayerCarl ZuckmayerCarl Zuckmayer was a German writer and playwright.-Biography:Born in Nackenheim in Rheinhessen, he was four years old when his family moved to Mainz. With the outbreak of World War I, he finished school with a facilitated "emergency"-Abitur and volunteered for military service...
, the German playwright - C. M. Bowra
- Werner HeisenbergWerner HeisenbergWerner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist who made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics and is best known for asserting the uncertainty principle of quantum theory...
of uncertainty principle fame –– who is quoted approvingly in The Disinherited Mind on the wrongheadedness of modern science - Rudolf Arnheim
- Lionel TrillingLionel TrillingLionel Trilling was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. With wife Diana Trilling, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the leading U.S...
- Dolf SternbergerDolf SternbergerDolf Sternberger was a German philosopher and political scientist at the University of Heidelberg. Dolf Sternberger is known for his Concept of Citizenship in German Political Contemporary Thought and for coining the term "constitutional patriotism".- External links :* *...
, the German political scientist and moral philosopher (1907–1989) –– who had one of his books introduced by Heller - Victor LangeVictor LangeVictor Lange was a renowned Germanist, known primarily for his work at Princeton University.-Biography:Born in Leipzig, Germany, he obtained his M.A. degree from the University College of the University of Toronto in 1931, and his Ph.D...
, the American-based German literary scholar (1908–1996) - Friedrich TorbergFriedrich TorbergFriedrich Torberg is the pen-name of Friedrich Kantor, an Austrian writer.- Biography :...
, the Austrian writer –– with whom Heller shared a Bohemian-Jewish background - Stephen SpenderStephen SpenderSir Stephen Harold Spender CBE was an English poet, novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work...
–– whom at one time he persuaded to deliver lectures at Northwestern - Oskar SeidlinOskar SeidlinOskar Seidlin ; German-born American literary scholar, poet, and writer of children’s stories. He is also said to have co‑authored several detective novels or Kriminalromane in collaboration with Dieter Cunz and Richard Plant under the collective pen‑name of Stefan Brockhoff.Born Oskar Koplowitz...
, the Silesian-born Jewish literary scholar - Hans Egon HolthusenHans Egon HolthusenHans Egon Holthusen was a German lyric poet, essayist, and literary scholar.Holthusen was born in Rendsburg the Province of Schleswig-Holstein, the son of a Protestant clergyman...
, the German poet and littérateur –– who stands accused in the pages of The Disinherited Mind of that ‘spiritual timidity’ whose ‘coarser symbols are the fig-leaves of the Vatican Museum’ - Noel AnnanNoel AnnanNoel Gilroy Annan, Baron Annan, OBE was a British military intelligence officer, author, and academic. During his military career, he rose to the rank of Colonel and was appointed OBE...
- Marcel Reich-RanickiMarcel Reich-RanickiMarcel Reich-Ranicki is a Polish-born German literary critic and member of the literary group Gruppe 47. He is regarded as one of the most influential contemporary literary critics in the field of German literature and therefore was in Germany often called the 'Pope of literature' .-Life:Marcel...
, the celebrated Polish-born German literary critic
Perhaps his most notable correspondent had been Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt was a German American political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact...
.
Many important biographical details shared with him by other writers could only with the greatest difficulty, if at all, find their way into conventional studies and biographies, and remain hidden from public view (such as, for example, Thomas Mann’s verbal confession, made to Heller, concerning the circumstances attending upon the destruction, by his own hand, of his early diaries [their homosexual content was the immediate cause], or another concerning his reading and re-reading of Xenophon’s Symposium ‘nine times’ before writing his own narrative on love’s vicissitudes, Der Tod in Venedig).
Erich Heller's vivid intellect made him on occasion a principled controversialist, as evidenced by his long-running –– and sometimes acrimonious –– public exchanges with another prominent British Germanist, T. J. Reed
Terence James Reed
T. J. Reed is a prominent British Germanist, an emeritus fellow of the Queen's College, Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy; he was formerly Taylor Professor of German in the University of Oxford....
, in the weekly pages of the Times Literary Supplement in the 1970s.
Private life
Heller was a life-long bachelor who cultivated several meaningful intellectual friendships, including with the Chicago writer Joseph Epstein (b. 1937). W. H. AudenW. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden , who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,The first definition of "Anglo-American" in the OED is: "Of, belonging to, or involving both England and America." See also the definition "English in origin or birth, American by settlement or citizenship" in See also...
is also known to have been an early friend.
Views on America
Although he apparently never sought to become a citizen of the United States, a country where he spent upwards of a third of his life, Heller nevertheless had a deep respect for American democracy, which he felt embodied values directly opposed to those that informed the political realities of the Central Europe he fled in 1939. This pietistic stance however never prevented him from espousing views considered by the mainstream opinion in America to be outdated or otherwise ‘politically incorrect’ whenever he thought them valid on objective grounds; nor did he shrink from considering America an intellectual desert.The Heidegger Question
Much interested in the thought of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein (he contributed a ‘Vorwort zum Tractatus logico-philosophicus’), Heller had also a natural attraction for the basic issues raised by Martin HeideggerMartin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
in his works on Being, which were directly relevant to his own reflections on the nature of Reality. An obstacle to a deeper analysis of Heidegger’s œuvre was presented by that writer’s questionable but imperfectly explored association with National Socialism. At an early stage in his life Heller, in a bid to ‘absolve’ Heidegger in his own mind, went so far as to undertake a special trip to post-war Germany to meet the renowned philosopher in person; but his ‘Why?’ was met by stony silence. The encounter seemed to convince Heller that there was little one could add, by way of moral comment on Heidegger, that has not been expressed in Paul Celan
Paul Celan
Paul Celan was a poet and translator...
’s poem ‘Todtnauberg’, written later but in similar circumstances, with its well-known topos of suffocation at what Celan calls Krudes (an instance of smuttiness).
This turn of events must needs be adjudged a most unfortunate one, given that much of Heller’s best thought can be viewed as a continuation in one sense or another of Heidegger’s preoccupation with Being; certainly Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, in its original edition, was a prized possession and remained part of Heller’s personal library to his last day (surviving the substantial paring down of his collection upon his moving into a retirement home in the final stages of his life). It is possible, and indeed probable, that if the outcome of his meeting with Heidegger, which might have taken place c.1947, had been more positive in providing answers to some of the burning questions, the final shape of The Disinherited Mind, Heller’s first book, would have been substantially different, and that we would have been presented therein with manifold instances of direct engagement with Heidegger’s propositions. As things stand, there are just a couple of perfunctory references to Heidegger in this, nolens volens, most ‘Heideggerian’ of books. (Those references do nevertheless reveal intimate acquaintance with his thought.) Just as Heidegger had not a single word for Heller during their meeting, so also he has barely a word to spare for Heidegger.
Festschrift
On his 65th birthday in 1976 (the year of Heidegger’s death) Erich Heller was presented with a commemorative volume of Goethe studies written in his honour, entitled Versuche zu Goethe (ed. Volker Dürr and Géza von Molnár), which includes an extensive bibliography of his own works.Another tribute from an unexpected quarter came five years later from the aforementioned Hans Egon Holthusen (see Life in Letters, above), who also taught at Northwestern between 1968 and 1981, and who, despite the criticisms meted out to him in The Disinherited Mind, delivered himself of a ‘Geburtstagsgruß an Erich Heller’ in Merkur (35, 1981; pp. 340–342) on the occasion of Heller’s 70th birthday.
The end; and the Nachlaß
Erich Heller died on 5 November 1990 in a retirement home in Evanston, Illinois. He was 79. His body was subsequently cremated. His library, including the complete set of the Musarion-Ausgabe of Nietzsche’s works with which he never parted during his lifetime, became dispersed among second-hand bookshops.Heller's personal papers, including private correspondence and manuscripts, are preserved in parts at the Northwestern University Archives in Evanston, and in parts at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (Schiller-Nationalmuseum) in the southwestern German city of Marbach am Neckar
Marbach am Neckar
Marbach am Neckar is a town on the river Neckar in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The nearest larger cities are Ludwigsburg and Stuttgart ....
(Baden-Württemberg). The files of the Northwestern University Archives contain some photographs. The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., for its part, holds facsimiles of some of his letters (in particular those addressed to Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt was a German American political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact...
and Robert B. Silvers
Robert B. Silvers
Robert Benjamin Silvers is an American editor who has served as editor of The New York Review of Books since 1963. According to a 2007 Vanity Fair article, "Jason Epstein's assessment of Silvers as 'The most brilliant editor of a magazine ever to have worked in this country' has been 'shared by...
), in addition to the sound recordings of two of his lectures, the one on ‘The Modern German Mind: The Legacy of Nietzsche’, which he delivered in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress on 8 February 1960, the other on ‘The Works of Nietzsche’, recorded in 1974.
He lacks an entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica, as he does in Bautz’ Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, although he does command a mention in the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie.
Quotations
- Be careful how you interpret the world; it is like that.
- We have not yet grasped the demonic possibilities of mediocrity.
- No lasting universe of beauty was built from the fragments of creation.
- The notorious obscurity of modern poetry is due to the absence from our lives of commonly accepted symbols to represent and house our deepest feelings.
- Experience is not in the impressions we receive; it is in making sense.
- The workshops in which our truths are manufactured are surrounded by swarms of unemployed affections.
- All relevant objective truths are born and die as absurdities. They come into being as the monstrous claim of an inspired rebel and pass away with the eccentricity of a superstitious crank.
- At the end there may be neither words nor deeds, but merely, for all we know, a slight disease, a rash of matter that matters little to so robust a body of nothingness.
Supplementary references (not included in Notes, below)
The sources listed below provide further information on the man and his thought or document the latter’s reception.- Robert Alter, ‘The Jewish Voice’, Commentary, vol. 100 (October 1995).
- Aristides, ‘Will You still Feed Me?’, American Scholar, vol. 66 (Spring 1997).
- Sven Birkerts, An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on 20th-century Literature (New York, Morrow, 1987), pp. 4, 8, 271–274, 410.
- Elizabeth Boa, Kafka: Gender, Class and Race in the Letters and Fictions (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. xi, 28, 48, 244, 287.
- Margaret Church, Time and Reality: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1963), pp. 136–137, 142, 149, 158, 178, 184.
- F.W. Dupee, ‘The Ironic German, by Erich Heller; Last Essays, by Thomas Mann’, Commentary, vol. 28, No. 2 (August 1959).
- Kathleen Powers Erickson, At Eternity’s Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent Van Gogh (Grand Rapids, Mich., W.B. Eerdmans, 1998), p. xv.
- Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, transl. Kevin O'Neill & David Suchoff (Lincoln, Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 187.
- Joshua Foa Dienstag, ‘Wittgenstein among the Savages: Language, Action and Political Theory’, Polity, vol. 30 (1998).
- Giles Fraser, Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (London, Routledge, 2002), pp. 1, 103, 119, 167, 175.
- Ronald Douglas Gray, Kafka’s Castle (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1956), pp. 6–7, 58, 60, 110–112.
- John Gross, ‘Growing up Anglo-Jewish’, Commentary, vol. 111 (June 2001).
- Giles Gunn, The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (New York, Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 20, 115, 140, 204–205.
- Thomas Rice Henn, The Harvest of Tragedy (London, Methuen & Co., 1956), pp. ix, 36, 219, 249, 256.
- Alfred Kazin, Contemporaries (Boston, Little, Brown, 1962), pp. 278–279, 282–283, 498.
- Roger Kimball, ‘Schiller’s “Aesthetic Education”’, New Criterion, vol. 19 (March 2001).
- Terrance W. Klein, How Things are in the World: Metaphysics and Theology in Wittgenstein and Rahner (Milwaukee, Marquette University Press, 2003), p. 27.
- Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips, eds., Literature and Psychoanalysis (New York, Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. v, 7, 67, 72, 402.