One of the most momentous events in the history of Western philosophy, and certainly in the modern era, was the spirited disputation that took place between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger in Davos in March and April 1929. Contrary to a still widespread opinion about its ideological import, which Simon Truwant challenges in his excellent study of this event, the memorable debate should be remembered first and foremost for its philosophical significance. It illustrated and deepened divisions between analytic thought and major continental strains of philosophy—a cleavage that lasted for several decades and possibly even down to the present.
Although Heidegger provided the more original food for thought, his opponent at Davos was a prolific neo-Kantian scholar. Between 1923 and 1928 Cassirer published his massive work Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, in which Kant’s investigation of transcendental consciousness—that is, of a coherent human consciousness capable of incorporating inner experiences—is given a central role. The forms in which the human mind understands external reality reveal a unifying or synthesizing process, one through which, according to Kant and Cassirer, we inwardly develop the data of perception. Cassirer devoted his most widely read work to examining the variety of symbolic forms that human consciousness, understood in this Kantian or neo-Kantian way, brought forth in different societies at different times.
In a letter written after the debate to Karl Löwith, who was a close friend, Leo Strauss treated Cassirer’s performance at which he was present with striking condescension. His prolonged exchange with Heidegger, according to Strauss, “revealed the emptiness of this remarkable representative of established academic philosophy to anyone who had eyes.”
The young Strauss was dismissive of Cassirer, whom he depicts as recycling Kant’s philosophy passed down from earlier representatives of Germany’s neo-Kantian persuasion. But this matter may not have been as simple as Strauss suggested. Cassirer, a professor at the University of Hamburg, was not the sterile epigone of earlier Kantians and quasi-Kantians. He had carved out for himself an original area of research, by relating Kant’s theory of knowledge (Erkenntnistheorie) to a voluminous and still highly regarded study of symbolic forms.
Strauss believed (as did others who were present) that the German academic greats of the past, including the brilliant social thinker Max Weber, would have to move over to make room for the intellectually scintillating Heidegger, then a professor at the University of Freiburg. In his stirring responses, Heidegger did make a splash, speaking about Kant’s epistemology in a flamboyant manner. Kant’s understanding of consciousness was deficient because, by privileging the problem of knowledge over the given of existence itself, it paid insufficient attention to the ontological dimension present in our relationship to the world.
Behind our construction of perception, according to Heidegger, was a being (Dasein) trying to understand itself and its fate while engaging in self-discovery. Heidegger explains this insight in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, a work that he was finishing around the time of the Davos debate: “As an existing entity (ein Seiendes) that is already present in perception, we accept (hinnehmen) what our senses present. But this acceptance requires a predisposition and not any, but one that specifically allows an existential entity to open itself up to what it encounters.”
Kant, explains Heidegger, showed how consciousness operated. What he did not sufficiently consider were the phases of the subject’s self-discovery through the cognitive process described in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant supposedly became diverted from this task by stressing the “transcendental” nature of consciousness, namely that human consciousness functioned universally in the same way for everybody. That meant looking at our awareness of the world from the outside, not from the perspective of the subject.
The problem that Cassirer incurred in arguing for Kant’s interpretation is well summed up in Truwant’s account:
Cassirer abides by Kant’s claim that we cannot have any knowledge of things in themselves. Objectivity, for him, is a product of transcendental or symbolic consciousness, and all that we can examine is the process through which cultural meaning comes to be. Thus, the philosophy of symbolic forms sets out to examine the various ways—mythological, religious, linguistic, scientific, political—in which cultural objects are formed. But the flip side of Cassirer’s premise is that we also cannot have any access to a human subject either: we can only know what it produces. This means that his entire philosophy of culture is grounded in a transcendental subjective principle or mechanism that itself can be neither directly nor fundamentally understood.
The stated limits of Cassirer’s Kantian approach to knowledge, in which we look not at the subject, but at what it produces, may explain why Heidegger’s presentation at Davos had more appeal than Cassirer’s. Unlike Cassirer, Heidegger was saying something new when he focused on the subject engaged in self-discovery. He was also adapting the ancient field of metaphysics to the subject’s experience of “life-in-the-world.”
Even more important, by 1929 many of those who heard the debate firsthand or learned about that discussion afterwards had lost their interest in Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophy. This is understandable since what Cassirer represented had been a dominant force in German academic life from the 1870s onward. A list of renowned German academics who identified themselves with Kantian thought would be long and impressive. But by 1929 the educated public was looking for different ideas; and it was Heidegger, not Cassirer, who presented them.
Moreover, Heidegger’s rhetoric in the debate was lyrical and inspired, while Cassier’s presentation was stiff and dispassionate. If the listeners had been exposed (as I have) to that almost impenetrable book that Heidegger was then constructing on the subject of his remarks, the reaction to him at Davos might have been less enthusiastic. Fortunately for Heidegger, he reserved his murkiest passages for the printed word.
Heidegger was also a far more approachable figure than Cassirer, who was good at making enemies, like Leo Strauss. Cassirer pointedly refused to supervise Strauss’s Habilitationsschrift, (a second dissertation that was necessary for a German academic post) for what seem less than compelling reasons. He was offended that Strauss wrote a dissertation on the Protestant mystic Friedrich Jacobi, someone who offended Cassirer’s rationalist beliefs. Although Strauss may have judged the debate in much the same way as others did, it is hard not to read into his provocative comments about Cassirer his understandable resentment. Cassirer, a fellow-German Jew, on whose support he had counted, had treated him scornfully. It goes without saying that Cassirer would have found an erudite, eager disciple in the young Strauss if he had treated him differently.
Our entire picture of the Davos debate is complicated by later historical events, namely Heidegger’s decision to endorse the Nazi regime after Hitler took power and the subsequent flight of Cassirer and his wife Toni from the Third Reich. These events have led some to depict the disputation in 1929 as a dress rehearsal for the struggle between Nazism and anti-Nazism. Supposedly Heidegger’s remarks in 1929, most of which could be extracted from his magnum opus Being and Time published two years earlier and his exploration of Kantian metaphysics published in 1929, foreshadowed his rectoral address at Freiburg in support of the Nazi regime in 1933.
Without getting into the problem of sub- and meta-texts, it is hard to see any connection between the two events; and as many have observed even Heidegger’s notorious Rektoratsrede, delivered at Freiburg in 1933 after he became the institution’s rector, does not seem specifically designed to defend Hitler’s dictatorship. A year later Heidegger withdrew from all political activity but without ever emphatically disavowing his shocking faux pas. On the other side, Cassirer’s responses appear in no way to be a political statement, but an attempt to defend the once prevalent neo-Kantian perspective in German philosophy and the German social sciences. Although a philosophically noteworthy occasion, there is nothing in this debate between two distinguished German philosophers that foreshadowed the battles of the Third Reich.
We know that Cassirer was forced to leave Germany after the Nazi accession to power; and one might believe this caused him to recall his relationship to Heidegger quite bitterly. But none of this comes through in his widowed wife’s detailed recollections of her husband’s life, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer, a manuscript that was largely completed by 1948, three years after her husband’s passing, but which did not appear in book form until 1981.
In this account, Heidegger was shown to have developed cordial personal relations with Cassirer after the debate. Although Heidegger took what might be interpreted as a “hostile stance (feindliche Haltung)” toward his colleague in the debate, it was not because of personal reasons, explains Toni, but because Heidegger was “goaded on by his hangers-on” who showed up in throngs and then “declared him to be victor.” Soon afterwards Heidegger invited Cassirer to give a lecture at Freiburg, where he held a friendly conversation with his former debating opponent. According to Cassirer’s note to his wife at the time, Heidegger expressed eagerness to review the third volume of Cassirer’s work on symbolic forms, having already reviewed the second one.
What seems jarring about the debate is the fact that the participants were clearly not on the same page. Cassirer was making a reasonable defense of Kant’s epistemology and its ethical implications, while Heidegger used the occasion to showcase his existential philosophy. Given Heidegger’s preoccupation with this theme, Cassirer should have suspected how the debate would go, but from his responses, it seems that he didn’t. According to his wife, Cassirer may not have been ready for Heidegger’s “frontal attack,” since the two had not been enemies before the disputation.
Cassirer could not have disagreed more with Heidegger’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which his opponent presented not as an epistemological study about the processing of sensory data and the construction of concepts but as an “ontological” exploration. Heidegger extracted as the salvageable part of Kant’s philosophy the judging and sorting out of knowledge by a subject who was trying to make sense of his own being. The original starting point for the philosophical journey was, for Heidegger, the solitary being, das Seiende, forced to define his fate. Nothing could have been further removed than this discourse from Cassirer’s traditional neo-Kantian reading of the same texts. Even if Cassirer had some foreknowledge of what he’d be up against in his debate with Heidegger, he must have shuddered at what he heard.
According to Strauss, Heidegger maneuvered Cassirer into admitting “ethics is impossible,” with the supposed result that Cassirer’s “whole being was permeated by the awareness of this fact, which opened an abyss.” Why would one think that Cassirer saw his ethical universe crumble as he was debating Heidegger? He had never defined himself primarily as an ethicist. It would seem from his work that he concentrated on cognitive questions and symbolic forms. Also like his teacher Hermann Cohen at Marburg, Cassirer was interested in the Kantian foundations of modern scientific method. Finally, Cassirer’s efforts to be polite toward a colleague who was trying to overpower him rhetorically does not indicate that he was collapsing philosophically. He was just unsettled by the turn taken by the debate.
And to the extent that value issues do come up in the debate, nothing would lead me to believe that Cassirer didn’t raise appropriate questions, such as when Heidegger insisted that there is no single truth but many truths, which “exist in relation to the Seiendem,” the finite being trying to discover its place in the universe. In opposition to this formulation, Cassirer upheld Kant’s position that in making proper ethical judgments we express truth and thereby “enter the realm of freedom.” It is not at all clear that the person who gave such an answer was staring into an abyss. He was just providing a conventional Kantian position, which of course assumed Kant’s view that ethical judgment and the autonomy it presupposes, unlike sensory perception, provides an entry point into a reality that is beyond the world of appearance.
What makes this debate fascinating but also irritating is that the discussants were speaking past each other. This too is something Cassirer’s widow acknowledges in recollecting the disputation after the Second World War. At Davos in 1929, there was neither winner nor loser but the confrontation of starkly different philosophical positions. Heidegger was the more interesting debater and the more original philosopher but not necessarily the more rigorous thinker.
