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Reviewed by:
  • Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos by Peter E. Gordon
  • Alick Isaacs
Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 448 pp.

In his description and analysis of the Davos encounter between Heidegger and Cassirer, Gordon’s primary concern is to show that politicization of the debate “obscures our appreciation for the substantive questions at issue.” He objects to fixing epochal consequences to the debate on grounds that were only later supplied by Heidegger’s public declaration of support for Hitler and Cassirer’s quiet resignation of his chair in Hamburg. One misses the genuine significance of the philosophers’ substantial disagreement about Kant. To repair the damage done to intellectual history, Gordon details the differences among the schools of neo-Kantian philosophy in early twentieth-century Germany, carefully marking out distinctions between Marburg and Freiberg, Cohen and Husserl, and shows how these evolved before, during, and after the encounter of Cassirer and Heidegger at Davos.

I must say that I finished reading this book convinced by Gordon’s argument but unconverted to his point of view. It is simply too hard to resist [End Page 393] iconic symbolism of a debate between an assimilated Jew and a future Nazi, at the summit of Mann’s Magic Mountain, over the philosophical foundations of the Enlightenment. The outcome has too much existential significance for anyone worried about the trust that modern Jewry has invested in Enlightenment liberalism and rationalism. Given the misgivings of many modern Jewish intellectuals—such as Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Leo Strauss, Martin Buber, Jacques Derrida, and George Steiner—about the Enlightenment’s legacy, it is perhaps not so odd that, while reading this book, I found myself rooting for Heidegger and against both Kant and his humble servant Cassirer. Among the most exhilarating moments for me came where Gordon describes a lecture Heidegger gave, in which for the first time he publicly made the argument that Kant himself knew—but found intolerable—that his analysis of the transcendental imagination suggests that reason might not be the final arbiter of knowledge. I was frustrated by what struck me as Cassirer’s pathetic rejoinder and found myself disappointed when I reached Gordon’s account of how, on this crucial issue, Cassirer’s subsequent review of Heidegger’s book on Kant led Heidegger to concede the point. Gordon’s Cassirer character elegantly holds his own (though he was not feeling well on the day) against the crudely charismatic Heidegger, and yet I felt entranced by the power of Heidegger’s quest for the primordial night from which man emerges aware of his own existence. How could one not, when the alternative given is the extension of Cohen’s theory of scientific cognition to a comprehensive philosophy of symbolism and human creativity? My fascination with Gordon’s Miltonic Heidegger confirmed for me the urgency of Strauss’s argument that what Cassirer exhibited at Davos was the type of anemically liberal rationalism that led Weimar Jewry to its catastrophic end.

Despite these high points and surprises in the text, the most remarkable is encoded deep in the book’s acknowledgments. Surely it was no casual gesture that the author, who says nothing about himself throughout, would put the Hebrew letters (an abbreviation for “of blessed memory”) in brackets after his father’s name. Finding it felt like a Masonic handshake, a subtle wink to Gordon’s Hebrew-literate Jewish readers. Like a parent who awards a child his sweet only after he has finished all of his vegetables, Gordon seemed to be reaching out to say, “Since you’ve done your philosophy homework, you can have your iconic political moment now. Go play.” [End Page 394]

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