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.
Heller was born at Chomutov in Bohemia (then within Austria-Hungary, now the Czech Republic), to the family of a Jewish physician.
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).
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.
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.
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 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'.
[8] 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.
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.
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.
'[18] The argument preempts criticism of Heller's philosophy, based on its roots in Nietzsche and Rilke, and (mutatis mutandis) of Kafka.
[21] 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.
Already in 1940, soon after his arrival at Cambridge, the 29-year-old Heller annotated a collection of Thomas Mann's short stories for a British publisher.
(from the revised German), Tômasu Man: hangoteki doitsu-jin, 1975) is based on information derived from his personal acquaintance of the subject.
[25] 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),[26] and to the American translation of Mann's Wagner und unsere Zeit (ed.
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.
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][original research?
], 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).
Heller was a lifelong bachelor who cultivated several meaningful intellectual friendships, including with the Chicago writer Joseph Epstein.
[42] 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.
An obstacle to a deeper analysis of Heidegger's œuvre was presented by that writer's questionable but imperfectly explored association with National Socialism.
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,[44] with its well-known topos of suffocation at what Celan calls Krudes (an instance of smuttiness).
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.
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.
Reading Claudius received praise from the Sunday New York Times Book Review and the Boston Globe, among other newspapers and journals.