Erich Heller (27 March 1911 – 5 November 1990) was a British essayist, known particularly for his critical studies in German-language philosophy and literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Biography Heller was born at Chomutov 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. 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'.Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1961), p. 64.
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 Kleist 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
Disinherited Mind; or the Creed of Ontological Invalidity
Heller's The Disinherited Mind, a seminal work published in 1952 (US ed., expanded, 1957), earned him a following among intellectuals. The project of The Disinherited Mind was to analyse 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.Op. cit., p. 149. It entails the loss of 'significant external reality'.Op. cit., p. 151.
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,Erich Heller, Lo spirito diseredato, transl. Giuseppina Gozzini Calzecchi Onesti (Milan, Adelphi, 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.Paul Roubiczek, Thinking in Opposites: An Investigation of the Nature of Man as revealed by the Nature of Thinking (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952); ch. 9. Erich Heller wrote an introduction to Roubiczek's diaries when those were posthumously issued in English translation in 1982, affirming more than simply ethnic kinship with the Cambridge thinker. (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'.Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1961), p. 214.) 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...'Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes sämtliche Werke. Jubiläums-Ausgabe in 40 Bänden... (Stuttgart, Berlin, etc., 1902–1907); vol. 39, p. 70; quoted in Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1961); p. 27.
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'.Erich Heller, 'Goethe and the Idea of Scientific Truth'; in id., The Disinherited Mind (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1961); p. 14. This important essay first appeared separately as: id., Goethe and the Idea of Scientific Truth: Inaugural and Goethe Bicentenary Lecture of the Head of the Department of German delivered at the College on 17 November 1949 (Swansea, University College of Swansea, 1949).
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.Ibid.; cf. id., The Disinherited Mind (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1961), pp. 164–165.
The meaningful response that the fully realised 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 theorising, 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'.Op. cit., p. 22. Heller's best-known quotation is: "Be careful how you interpret the world; it is like that."Op. cit., p. 23. The italics are Heller's. 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 US edition of 1957The Hazard of Modern Poetry was originally published as a separate volume: Cambridge, Bowes & Bowes, 1953.) 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, 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 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 a tissue of 'vague abstractions': it was always incarnate.Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1961); p. 46. 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'.Op. cit., p. 230. 'Genius' alone, he once wrote, 'is never the whole man'.Op. cit., p. 44.
On Nietzsche Heller points out that Nietzsche's and Rilke's opposition to valid distinctions — in particular Nietzsche's relativisation of Good and Evil — was an over-reaction. 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.Erich Heller, 'Rilke and Nietzsche, with a Discourse on Thought, Belief, and Poetry'; in id., The Disinherited Mind; passim.
Borrowing In a critique of T. S. Eliot'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.'Op. cit., p. 134.
The argument preempts criticism of Heller's philosophy, based on its roots in Nietzsche and Rilke, and (mutatis mutandis) of Kafka. The title of The Disinherited Mind itself 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'Erich Heller, 'Karl Kraus: The Last Days of Mankind'; in id., The Disinherited Mind (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1961), p. 206.). 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.The book was posthumously issued in Italian as Nell'età della prosa, transl. from the English by Vittorio Ricci (Parma, Pratiche editrice, 1991).