Cassirer and Heidegger on Kant's Legacy

by Jonathan Arriola

 

"Thinking only begins when we have learned

that the venerable faculty of reason

is the most stubborn adversary of thought."

Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (1950)

 

1.     Naphtha and Settembrini: The Philosophical Significance of a Meeting 

In 1929, the "Neokantian" philosopher Ernst Cassirer and the "existentialist" philosopher Martin Heidegger met in Davos, Switzerland to contrast two different readings of Kant's thoughts. Since its announcement, the dispute was marked by strong symbolism, as the two authors embodied "different epochs," as described by the Frankfurter Zeitung (Krois 1983, 147). On the one hand, there was the revered "giant" of the Marburg School, liberal rationalism, and political humanism, author of the recognized The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1929) and defender of the Weimar Republic - and on the other, the young "promise" of a "revolutionary philosophy," author of the successful Being and Time (1927), who had an anti-rationalist and anti-humanist disposition and would later collaborate with National Socialism. The meeting of these two philosophers caused great excitement and brought together more than 200 students and 30 teachers, including Carnap, Lévinas, Fink, Buber, Bollnow, Strauss, Rosenzweig, Cavailles, Brunschvicg, Ritter, etc.

The debate has been historically interpreted in various ways. For example, as the end of a kind of "humanism" (Lévinas), as the origin of the split between "continental" and "analytic" philosophy, or as the moment that announced the dark political course of Europe in the years to come. In a literary but very factual tone, the philosopher and diplomat Kurt Riezler (1882-1955) at the time compared the debate to the legendary meeting between Naphta and Settembrini in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924), which imitated the famous distinction between Nietzsche's Dionysus and Apollo. While Naphta (Heidegger) advocates irrationalism, "action," and violence and is politically an advocate of a new anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist "kingdom of God," Settembrini (Cassirer) sees himself as a "son of the Enlightenment," supporter of humanism, tolerance, and reason, and advocate of the "liberal democracy" and a "universal republic" (Coskun 2006, 5). With this metaphor, Riezler manages to capture the deepest symbolic core of the meeting: it was actually another struggle between two antagonistic political and philosophical traditions that arose with modernity: that of the Enlightenment and the counter-Enlightenment.

The meeting not only has a historical value but is also important for understanding the direction that contemporary (especially continental) philosophy (and politics) took since the beginning of World War II and which, with the reception of Heidegger (especially in France), again took up a "total critique" of the project of the Enlightenment: in many ways, this is what is called postmodernity. However, to understand this process, one must first grasp the fundamental points of contention between the two authors.

Kant: Father of Irrationalism or Culmination of Enlightenment?

If existence has two acts: the night from which it arises and the day that overcomes the night, then Cassirer directs his attention to the second act, that is, the day of culture; Heidegger, on the other hand, is concerned with the first act, he looks into the night from which we emerge. [...]

One has to do with the house of human creation, the other remains fascinated by the abysmal mystery of creatio ex nihilo [...]

Rüdiger Safranski, Ein Meister auf Deutschland (2009)

The dispute between Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos (and beyond) is about what the actual philosophical significance of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is. Heidegger argues that Kant's text presents neither a theory of knowledge of nature, as claimed by the Neo-Kantians (Cohen, Windelband, Kickert, Erdmann, Riehl, etc.), nor a theory of mathematical or scientific knowledge (Declève 1969, 525). On the contrary, according to Heidegger, Kant laid the foundation for an even more fundamental problem, namely the question of the conditions of the possibility of metaphysics as such and, in particular, of a "(fundamental) ontology" (ibid.). For Heidegger, the Königsberg philosopher analyzed these foundations in his a priori investigation of the finite nature of reason. Unlike the intellect of God, which is infinite, the human intellect necessarily depends on sensory intuition (whose formal conditions are space and time) because it is finite.

As is well known, Kant identifies two important "abilities" in acquiring knowledge: on the one hand, sensitivity (receptivity of the psyche) and, on the other, understanding (the ability to generate representations). Although they work together, they are also independent of each other. However, in the chapter on "transcendental schematism," Kant explains that both abilities have a common root in transcendental imagination, which allows for the synthesis of knowledge and whose basis, according to Heidegger, is temporality. It is important to note that, according to Heidegger, Kant paradoxically destroys the traditional foundations of Western metaphysics, since he replaces the role of the logos (of reason) with temporality as the basis of ontology. And in this case, Kant, the central figure of the German Enlightenment, would ironically become the father of irrationalism. This is in nuce the argument that Heidegger developed over the course of the 1920s and which he explains both in Davos and in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929).

Cassirer, for his part, acknowledges the fundamental importance of the Kantian system, especially in the acquisition of mathematical knowledge (ibid., 526). However, he rejects the implications that Heidegger tries to assign to it. Cassirer argues that Kant never falls into a monism of transcendental imagination because if he did, the fundamental distinction that is at the heart of his philosophy between "noumenon" and "phenomenon" would be eliminated. His problem, says Cassirer, is not that between "being" and "time," but that between "being" and "should," "experience" and "idea." Based on his philosophy of symbolic forms, Cassirer believes that the fact that human reason is finite does not condemn human knowledge to be limited to the "irrational" realm of finitude (historically): rather, it has the consequence of transforming humans into symbolic animals.

Indeed, the symbol for the neo-Kantian author is precisely the expression of this state of finitude of human beings, as it represents the finite - and thus inevitably inadequate - conception of the infinite. At the same time, however, it also opens up the possibility of overcoming human finitude and thus achieving an infinite and objective sphere, that is, one of rational knowledge. In fact, for Cassirer, all of Kant's efforts consist precisely in solving this fundamental problem: that is, to show how it is possible for limited human reason to enter an objective level of necessary, universal, and eternal truths (such as those found in moral and mathematical knowledge). In this sense, Cassirer recalls Kant's attempt to answer this fundamental question: "How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?"

Contrary to what Heidegger thinks, according to Cassirer, Kant's philosophy seeks to overcome the original metaphysical "darkness" by explaining reason and its limits. Therefore, as he will later say in Remarks on Martin Heidegger's Interpretation of Kant (1931), Cassirer believed that Heidegger's "too Kierkegaardian" interpretation of Kant (especially in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics) exercises "hermeneutic violence" on Kant's philosophy, because such concepts as "fear of nothingness," "abyss of existence," and "thrownness" are completely foreign elements in Kant's thought (Ferrari 2012, 2). In contrast, Cassirer insists again on his thesis: "Kant is and remains - in the most sublime and beautiful sense of the word - a thinker of the Enlightenment: he strives for light and clarity, even where he reflects on the deepest and most hidden 'grounds' of being." (Cassirer 1931, 23). Furthermore, for Cassirer, to the extent that Kant's philosophy overcomes the greatest problems of epistemology generated during the Enlightenment period, the Königsberg philosopher also represents the pinnacle of the Enlightenment, as he will affirm in The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1933).

Cassirer asks Heidegger if his philosophy renounces the possibility of (scientific) objectivity and therefore all truths are relative to existence. If we insist that man is essentially finite, the problem arises as to how access can be gained to objective (that is, infinite, universal, and necessary) truths. Thus, Cassirer asks: "Does Heidegger want to renounce this entire objectivity, this form of absoluteness that Kant has represented in the ethical [sphere], the theoretical [sphere] and in the Critique of Judgment?" (Friedman 2000, 139). In contrast, Heidegger continues to insist that existence is limited in space and time and emphasizes the impossibility of man overcoming his finitude in any way. That is, man is condemned to live in a world without objective truths that can be understood as "corresponding" to an "objective structure" of being. Regarding the universal validity of truth, Heidegger responds with a typical perspective of life philosophy: "the peculiar validity that is attributed to a [truth content] is badly interpreted if one says that over and above the flux of experience there is something stable, the eternal, the meaning [Sinn] [...]" (Friedman 2000, 139-140).

For Heidegger, the main task of philosophy would be to hand over to existence the "hardness of its fate," which means its radical finitude, and thus place it in the hands of "anxiety," which necessarily accompanies its existence. According to Heidegger, one must avoid "abstractions" and “metaphysical foundationalisms” (whether in "reason," "cogito," "nature," "will to power," etc.) because they are "illusions" that deny the authentic essence of human beings, which is nothing other than their radical historicity, or, what is the same for Heidegger, the "abyss" (or nothingness). He calls this "groundless" state of existence "thrownness" (Gordon 2012, 7), which is supposed to be the basis of the so-called "fundamental ontology."

Cassirer, however, opposes this romantic pessimism of anxiety with something that could be called a "neo-Enlightenment anthropological optimism" that emphasizes the ability of human beings to create "symbolic worlds" through their "spontaneity." Cassirer was most afraid of the political consequences that Heidegger's views and the "global intellectual atmosphere" that allowed such interpretation would have. In particular, the "destruction" of the entire Western metaphysics and its foundation in logos and reason, which Heidegger - but not only he - wanted to carry out with his "fundamental ontology," seemed to Cassirer to be morally and politically very dangerous.

In fact, the author believes that his theory of "symbolic forms" can show that there is a dialectical process of the mind (in the Hegelian sense) that goes from myths to modern science through language and religion and that describes a - not strictly linear but rather teleological - development towards the discovery of objectivity. In this way, one could have the recognition of temporality that Heidegger demands, along with the possibility of objectivity. In this sense, Cassirer says that with the very concept of a "timeless being" and its correlate of "timeless truth," which one finds in Newton's physics - the culmination of "modern science" - and his concept of "absolute time," the transition from myth to logos and to modern science is completed.

Thus, Cassirer tries to show that reason can access the abstract ideas of the "unconditional (space)," the "absolute (time)," and "(subjective) freedom." These ideas are entirely independent of sensibility since it is clear that, as a finite being, humans cannot have sensory experience of something absolute or timeless: and that is precisely where Cassirer finds the evidence of the human capacity to transcend its finitude. In this context, philosophy has the role not of transferring the fear of finitude but rather of helping to overcome it by recourse to the infinity that culture enables. Here, Cassirer quotes Schiller's "The Ideal and Life": "Cast the fear of the earthly from you, flee from the narrow, oppressive life into the ideal realm!" According to Cassirer, it is in culture where one can see the "infinite seal" of humanity through symbolic forms, and that is precisely its "progressive potential for liberation."

Finally, Cassirer establishes against Heidegger's insistence on the historical perspective of existence as an answer to the Kantian question "What is man?":

 

3.      The effects of the debate: "The Forgetting of Reason"

 Reason, it's torture!

Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits (1994)

The meeting and its consequences were of great importance for the fate of contemporary philosophy. It explains, among other factors, the "postmodern turn" that contemporary philosophy took in recent decades, which essentially represented a radical critique of the modern (or enlightened) project. As we have seen, one can get a first idea of this critique of modernity in the discussion between Heidegger and Cassirer. The "symbolic" success of Heidegger over Cassirer in Davos and his enormous influence on an important generation of philosophers marked the transition from the domination of neo-Kantianism and Cassirer's rationalism to the new language of Heidegger's fundamental ontology. With this, Heidegger's philosophy of existence became the "king" of continental philosophy, and as Barret clearly sees it: "Existentialism is the counter-Enlightenment come at last to philosophical expression [...] The finitude of man, as established by Heidegger, is perhaps the death blow to the ideology of the Enlightenment, for to recognize this finitude is to acknowledge that man will always exist in untruth as well as truth" (Barret, 1962, 275).

The early death of Cassirer prevented the development of a philosophy of Neo-Enlightenment. The role that both Heidegger and the Frankfurt School of Adorno and Horkheimer played in the reconstruction of the German Academy - by the way, they were direct heirs of the Romantic critique of Enlightenment - is generally seen as the origin of the radical criticism of modern heritage and the project of Enlightenment, which we find today mainly in the French postmodernism. Paradoxically, the so-called postmodern left - which originally emerged with the Enlightenment - integrated much of the anti-modern, anti-democratic, anti-civilizational, anti-rationalist rhetoric that ironically shaped the German right and even the extreme right (with figures like Spengler, Heidegger, Schmitt, Klages, etc.) so strongly in the 1930s (Wolin 2006, 117).

Although in general the political projects directed against the Enlightenment (such as fascism, national socialism, Stalinism, etc.) in the West were (definitively?) defeated after World War II, we could say that the opposite happened in the field of philosophy: there is a philosophical triumph of anti-Enlightenment. In fact, the anti-objectivism, anti-foundationalism, and anti-scientism, the critique of the idea of logos or reason, the anti-Cartesianism that prevailed in the academy - which Žižek describes so well at the beginning of The Ticklish Subject (1999) - the “anti-humanist turn”, the glorification of epistemological, political, and ethical relativism, the pessimism about modern “progress”, the denial of a common human nature, all characteristics that postmodern philosophy shares, and that, as we saw, one can already find in Heidegger's work, as Cassirer warned in due course.

In this sense, one could ask, as Habermas does in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), to what extent the “postmodern” is not in fact a new “anti-modernity” or a new "counter-Enlightenment philosophy" because at its core, both thoroughly deny the role of reason, truth, and the significance of transcendence in human beings and society (13). In addition to nationalism, multiculturalism, and “identity politics”, etc., it is the consequences of this philosophy in the political realm that favor irrational entities such as “culture”, “identity”, or “religion”, at the expense of reason, universalism, and criticism. It would be fair to say that the “forgetfulness of being”, to use Juan Jose Sebrelli's words, was followed by the “forgetfulness of reason.”

At the time, Cassirer complained about the climate of counter-Enlightenment in fascist Germany in the 1930s: "the validity of fundamental insights of the Enlightenment era - about the nature of man, the meaning of the sciences, the course of history or the idea of inalienable, natural principles of law" could not "survive unscathed" the systematic “deformation” of the Enlightenment in the “political tendencies of the present [he refers to Nazism].” Perhaps it would be appropriate to reconsider this problem.

4.      Bibliography 

ADORNO, Theodor, HORKHEIMER, Max. Dialéctica de la Ilustración. Ed. Trotta. 1998. Madrid.

ASCHHEIM, E. Steven. Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem. Ed. University of California Press. London. 2001.

BANKOWSKI, Zenon. Epistemology and Ontology. Franz Steiner Verlag. Stuttgart 2005.

CASSIRER, Ernst. Kant und das Problem der Metaphyisik. Im: Kant-Studien, 36 (1931).

COSKUN, Deniz. Cassirer in Davos. An Intermezzo on Magic Mountain (1929). Im: Law and Critique (2006) 17: 1–26. Springer 200.

DECLÈVE, Henri. Heidegger et Cassirer interprètes de Kant. In: Revue Philosophique de Louvain. Troisième série, Tome 67, N°96, 1969. pp. 517-545.

FRIEDMAN, Michael. A Parting of the Ways. Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger. United States of America. 2000.

GORDON, E. Peter. 2010. Continental Divide. Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. England: Harvard University Press.

HABERMAS, Jürgen. Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Ed. Suhrkamp Verlag. Germany. 1985.

KROIS, John Michael. Cassirer's Unpublished Critique of Heidegger. Im: Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1983), pp. 147-159.

MASSINO, Ferrari. Cassirer, Kant et l’Aufklärung (2012). Im : Revue Germanique International.

PAUL, Jean-Marie. 1995. Des lumières contrastées: Cassirer, Horkheimer et Adorno. Im : Revue germanique internationale.

PAVESICH; Vida. Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology: After Heidegger and Cassirer. Im: Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 46, no. 3 (2008) 421–48.

WOLIN, Richard. The Frankfurt School Revisited. Ed. Routledge. New York. 2006.

WOLIN, Richard. The Seduction of Unreason. The Intellectual Romance with Fascism. Ed. Routledge. New York. 2004.

 

5.      Notes

1. The significance of such a meeting was even greater because the Davos conferences, of which Heidegger's and Cassirer's was just one, pursued a deeper political purpose: to promote understanding, cooperation, and (intellectual) friendship between France and Germany after the trauma of World War II in neutral Switzerland.
2.  Given the size of the debate, it was surrounded by an epic atmosphere, which Levinas summarizes very well: "Un jeune avoir l'étudiant pouvait avoir l'impression qu'il assistait à la création et à la fin du monde." Bollnow described that the meeting awakened in him a "sublime feeling" since it seemed to represent "the beginning of a new era in the history of the world, in this case in the history of philosophy" (Gordon 2012, 2).
3. This is the thesis that Michael Friedman defends in his book A Parting of the Ways Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (2000): “I do believe that these events have particular importance for our understanding of the analytic/ continental divide, and the reason, in the first instance, is simply that we here find a direct and self-conscious intellectual confrontation between Heidegger as an emerging leader of what later become known as the continental tradition, Carnap as an emerging leader of what will later become known as the analytic tradition, and Cassirer as a leading representative of the then dominant neo-Kantian tradition against which, at least in part, both new traditions were defining themselves. (Friedman 2000, 264).
4.  Heidegger read this novel together with Hannah Arendt in 1924 (Aschheim; Halberstam 2001, 122-123).
5. Settembrini's profile could not fit Cassirer better: "In August 1928, at the tenth anniversary of the Weimar Republic, Ernst Cassirer defended the Weimar Constitution, in his speech entitled Die Idee der republikanischen Verfassung (The Idea of the Republican Constitution). In 1930, as rector of Hamburg University, despite strong protest from within the university, he set himself the task of commemorating the constitution in an effort to search for a common notion of the state and its tasks."
6. This interpretation of Heidegger is of course in line with what the author argues in Being and Time (1927).
7. The so-called civilization and criticism of reason movements, which were prominent in Germany with figures such as Spengler, Schmitt, Jünger, Jaspers, Baeumler, Unger, Klages, but also Adorno and Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, etc., considered the Enlightenment as a movement that was responsible in various ways for "the decadence of the West."
8. Regarding the success of Heidegger's philosophy, Friedman says: "There is no doubt that Heidegger's revolt against the 'rationalism' of the neo-Kantian tradition was to be brilliantly successful throughout the European continent and beyond." (Friedman 2000, 3)
9. I am not the first to notice this connection between the Frankfurt School and the romantic criticism of the Enlightenment. Jean-Marie Paulus says: "[...] Horkheimer and Adorno's critique, however violent it may be, is not without precedents, the oldest of which are also contemporaries of the Enlightenment. Hamann, Herder, Novalis, Fr. Schlegel, and more generally, the romantics, have already developed similar arguments and warnings." (1998: 93). Moreover, Adorno and Horkheimer themselves recognize the romantic heritage of their critique in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1998: 93). Regarding the similarities between them, Rudiger Safranski says the following: "In all of this, as already mentioned, Adorno's actual concern - the expression of the 'jargon' would have been used for it - was very similar to Heidegger's. And he knew it. In 1949, Adorno had urged Horkheimer to review Heidegger's just-published book Holzwege for the 'Month'. He had written to Horkheimer that Heidegger was 'for Holzwege, in a way not far removed from us'. Adorno and Heidegger both diagnose a similar illness in modernity." (My emphasis, Safranski 1998, 456)
10. James Schmidt in What Enlightenment Project? (2000) and Dennis Rasmussen in Contemporary Political Theory as an Anti-Enlightenment Project (2007) detail the contemporary anti-Enlightenment sentiment that is prevalent in academia today.
11. I am referring to the philosophy of Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault, Gray, Vattimo, among others, just to name a few.
12. Richard Wolin describes this process very well: "Since the reception of Heidegger in France remained ahistorical and decontextualized, the ideological implications of his thought remained largely unremarked. Nevertheless, during the 1960s, his philosophical antihumanism, as mediated through indigenous French theoretical traditions, became an obligatory right of passage for many intellectuals on the French left. Among this contingent, one would have to include the names of Lacan, Foucault, and Lyotard, as well as Derrida. This transposition of the conservative revolutionary critique of modernity from Germany to France gave rise to a phenomenon that might aptly be described as a left Heideggerianism. Thereby, a critique of reason, democracy, and humanism that originated on the German Right during the 1920s was internalized by the French left. The French philosophical left remained staunchly “post-Marxist,” insofar as it believed that Marxism, too, was beholden to the foundationalist delusions of Western thought. After all, in Marx’s work did not the proletariat function as the apotheosis of the Cartesian ideal of self-positing subjectivity?” (Wolin, 2004, 247)