Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (review)

In the spring of 1929, Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer held a public “disputation” as part of a three-week conference in Davos, Switzerland. According to most accounts, the debate was carried out in a professional and courteous manner, even as it laid bare the profound philosophical disagreements between the two men. Nonetheless, there has been a tendency ever since to read the Davos disputation as a cultural-political allegory, with Cassirer embodying an aging tradition of liberal (Jewish) humanism, and Heidegger representing a new orientation toward “life,” “fate,” and the “irrational”—one that was associated with the generational revolt of the 1920s and that culminated in the Third Reich. Given what was to transpire a few years later (the Rektoratsrede, Cassirer’s exile from Germany, World War Two, and the Holocaust), such readings of Davos are understandable and inevitable, even if they threaten to obscure its actual philosophical content. In Continental Divide, Peter Gordon examines both aspects of the Davos encounter. First, he provides a careful historical reconstruction of the philosophical confrontation between Cassirer and Heidegger, relying on the transcript of the disputation and eyewitness accounts by Emmanuel Levinas, among others; at the same time, Gordon explores how philosophical debates can “ramify” well beyond their original contexts to touch on multiple issues of culture, history, and politics. The result is a brilliant study—lucid, insightful, even-handed, but always deeply engaged: in short, a model of what intellectual history can be.

To explain what was at stake at Davos, Gordon helpfully contrasts Cassirer’s emphasis on “spontaneity” with Heidegger’s emphasis on “thrownness.” The neo-Kantian Cassirer’s philosophical corpus can be seen as an attempt to examine and explain the creative activity of the free human subject, who constructs a world of forms relying at first on symbols and myths and later on the principles of science. Heidegger, by contrast, insisted that Dasein was always already “thrown” into a certain state of affairs and that the task of philosophy was to call Dasein back to an awareness of the necessary finitude upon which it takes up its existence.

At Davos, this opposition became evident in the context of a debate over the proper interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In his public lectures and in the debate with Cassirer, Heidegger claimed that Kant had evinced a deep awareness of the role of finitude and receptivity in human knowledge in the first edition of the Critique (1781), only to back away from this insight in the second edition (1787). Cassirer, for his part, stressed the ability of the Kantian subject to break through the limitations of finitude and achieve a knowledge that was universal and objective. In the process of elucidating their differences over Kant, however, both philosophers alluded to some of the more fundamental issues that divided them, including their understanding of freedom, anxiety, and the essence of human being. Meanwhile, they attempted to inscribe each others’ philosophies into their own historical schemes: thus Cassirer suggested that Heidegger was simply reviving a premodern metaphysics of substance, while Heidegger treated Cassirer’s philosophy as another episode in the “forgetting of Being.” In this sense, Gordon argues, the process of attaching cultural meaning to the Davos philosophical disputation was initiated by the contestants themselves.

Cassirer and Heidegger had taken an interest in each other well before their meeting at Davos, and this engagement would continue into the 1930s and 1940s. In particular, they shared a fascination with myth and an interest in the relationship between modern philosophy and “primitive” modes of thinking. Yet these common interests only served to highlight more fundamental differences: whereas Cassirer viewed myth as a stage of thought that had been overcome through enlightenment, Heidegger saw it as embodying a lost truth (a stance Gordon labels “epistemic nostalgia” [228]). Cassirer would eventually emerge as an outspoken critic of Heidegger, accusing him in The Myth of the State (1946) of weakening confidence in reason...