Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (review)

This is a curious book, because the soul of its author is torn.

On the one hand, the book is a monograph on the philosopher-intellectual Ernst Cassirer. It is scholarly, noticeably well-written (not surprisingly, as the author also writes articles for British and American newspapers), philosophical to the extent that it does not distort its subject matter too much, and a splendid piece of intellectual history, which places its subject, Cassirer, in a rich cultural, historical, and intellectual context. In terms of presenting the gist of Cassirer’s thought in relatively few pages, the author does everything right, disregarding minor quibbles. So far, so good.

But already reading the introduction, the author makes a confession that bathes the entire book in a different light. Here we learn that the precursor of the present tome was a “straight-faced” account of the philosopher of culture, Cassirer. But over the course of writing it, Skidelsky admits, doubts crept in. Little by little, he came to see Cassirer as a dinosaur of a past age, his philosophy as a “rearguard action on behalf of a vanishing civilization” (3), which died on the battlefields of the Second World War. The “Olympian” Cassirer had an “enchanting vision” and dreamt a “happy dream” of human culture, all of which went down the drain with the advent of Nazism and has now, in our own age of postmodernism, been completely washed away.

Instead, the real hero of the book is Heidegger. It was Heidegger, the existentialist, who rebelled against Western metaphysics, who won the day against Cassirer in the 1929 Davos encounter, and it is to him that we, today, owe our sensibilities. The liberalism of Cassirer—a unified vision, not just some narrowly political manifesto—“lost out to the Existenzphilosophie of Heidegger,” he writes, and, “Such unity of vision [as in Cassirer] is impossible for us. Our political principles find no support in our cultural tastes, religious beliefs, or metaphysical insights. We pay tribute to Cassirer, but Heidegger remains the secret master of our thought” (219).

Hence, the book is written, or rather re-written after the author’s conversion, in an ironic, sometimes melancholy style, looking back at Cassirer as a relic of a different era, his thought being “a stranger to our age” (7). Why read and study him at all then? The argument—the only argument—is weak: “he was the twentieth century’s most accomplished defender of the Humboldtian ideal” (6). Is this all? Yes, and this is how Cassirer is presented: with some sympathy, but at bottom as a creature from a different age that one observes like an exotic animal. Once more, why is this so? Skidelsky explains: “We have inherited Cassirer’s liberal political attitudes, but not the cultural sensibility that underlay them. With our skepticism toward progress, our distaste for ‘bourgeois’ formalities, our fascination with charisma, and our endless talk of commitment, authenticity, and roots, we remain, consciously or not, Heidegger’s children” (8), leaving “us” “with a dilemma” between both sentiments (ibid.).

But who is this “we”? This reviewer’s suspicion is that it is first and foremost the author himself. Not denying that this dilemma might ring true to many contemporaries, it seems that the one who is troubled by it is primarily the author, who would like the world to be according to Cassirer, but who has become disenchanted with the latter’s synthetic vision due to the fragmented world around him. He would like to bring himself to believe, but cannot. But why is this? Because he has tacitly bought into the idea of all us being “Heidegger’s children.” There can be no doubt—we simply have to accept this fate.

But it is this self-assurance that irks this reviewer about the author’s sentiment. Who is this “we” that he invokes? What right does he have to lump “us” together in this category of Heideggerians and to speak about “us” ex cathedra? That one...