Zerrissene Moderne: Descartes bei den Neukantianern, Husserl und Heidegger by Sidonie Kellerer (review)

In this interesting book, Sidonie Kellerer traces the path on which Descartes has been received by the Marburg Neo-Kantians and the phenomenologists Husserl and Heidegger. Since she discusses the time when Descartes first became big in Germany, and takes on, with the Neo-Kantian and phenomenological traditions, the big movements in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, the book might well have been called “Descartes in Germany.” From the start Kellerer makes it clear that the German reception of Descartes was never entirely a philosophical affair, but always had political overtones. This makes the book an original exercise in philosophical historiography and politically oriented intellectual history; the implicit thesis is that the two cannot be separated in assessing the meaning Descartes had for German philosophers. Zerrissene Moderne (“fractured modernity”) is an original approach to assessing of the role of Descartes in German philosophy. The book is meticulously researched, and the author is even-handed in her judgment and in full command of the philosophies she discusses.

Kellerer begins with a focus on the “legend of modernity” (Neuzeitlegende), in the way the picture of Descartes as a seminal thinker of modernity had been shaped by Hegel, who placed Descartes in the role of founder of modernity. In this capacity, he was heralded, also by many others, as a founding father (if not the founding father) of the Enlightenment, as well as a prime representative of French mentality and civilization. In Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, he had become a figure of both polarization and integration. Part of the ideological warfare surrounding the Great War was to paint Descartes as the paradigmatic French thinker of a decadent civilization; the French, in turn, celebrated “their” Descartes as a “bastion of humanity” against the “enormousness or rigidity” (l’énorme ou le rigide, 58) of the Germans. But equally, in the period between the wars, he was lauded as someone who could serve as the bridge between the nations. The interpretation of Descartes would amount, for the German thinkers treated in this book, to a true assessment of modernity, which was dominated by natural science and technology. As such, he is the thinker par excellence to define, against this “foreign” ideal, one’s own philosophy.

The following chapters deal with Descartes interpretations of the Marburg Neo-Kantians, Husserl, and Heidegger. The first two sections on Marburg and Husserl form a unity, insofar as both view Descartes positively without exception. The Marburgers praise him for his importance in founding modern science and philosophy on mathematics, and emphasize that their own achievements would not have been possible without Descartes’s groundbreaking work, despite all criticism. For them, Descartes stood above all for science, and philosophy’s status as scientific, and thus their own “attempt to counter the discrediting of philosophy as a science” (104). Albeit differently, Husserl credits Descartes as the “primal founder” (Urstifter) of modernity and expressly models his first presentation of transcendental phenomenology (in Ideas I) in the Cartesian fashion and uses Cartesian motives to declare his phenomenology as the bulwark against skepticism, calling Descartes the “primally instituting genius of the entire modern philosophy” (157). In his late philosophy Husserl not only battles against skepticism but, as a symptom of the crisis, against positivism as a fact-minded scientism that accounts for the forgetfulness of the lifeworld.

Things are very different with Heidegger, who has a negative assessment of Descartes from the start. For the early Heidegger, addressing Descartes was a veiled attempt at critiquing his teacher Husserl. Increasingly, however, Descartes comes into focus not so much as a philosopher of ultimate grounding, but as a founding figure of a modernity that has gone downhill from its inception. Indeed, Heidegger later sees in Descartes the “apex of the forgetfulness of being” that plagues modern philosophy. Importantly, however, Heidegger’s rejection of Cartesianism in the 1930s takes on political overtones. As she shows in part V, which widens the focus on Descartes in National-Socialism, German...