On Cassirer, Heidegger, and all that (pt 1)

This past week, I was in NYC for the eastern Apa after an absence of 6-8 years. Leaving aside the awful conference hotel [the Sheraton midtown has a litany of problems], it’s a nice way to catch up with academic friends or hatch plans with the academic press. But in the fields that I work in, the program is not as strong as the more specialist events. I was a bit sad about the many closed sessions. And with costs involved it's no surprise that attendance is much lower than during the period when it was a jobs fair back in the day. Sadly, it seems academic book publishing is in a tailspin not unlike the rest of the humanities. The presidential address by Michelle Moody Adams was quite Deweyan in its emphasis on the role of cooperation and listening in democracy, but with non-trivial emphasis on leadership (which made me think my own kind of project is part of the Zeitgeist).

At the APA, I played a parlor game that was quite simple; I would ask one question: what was the Davos debate really philosophically about? I asked because a few years I had come to the conclusion all the extant accounts I was familiar with treat it as a symbolic exchange (about fascism, continental philosophy, analytic philosophy, about the impact on Cavaillès, Strauss, Levinas, Carnap, etc.) In fact, I had been frustrated that those extant descriptions of the account — including Michael Friedman’s highly entertaining A Parting of the Ways — had left me mystified. Nobody among my friend-set at the APA could really give a concrete answer to the question (although quite a few were aware enough that it involved the reception of Kant and what one may call issues in ‘philosophical anthropology’).

During the holiday I read Peter E. Gordon’s (2010) Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Harvard), which had been on my shelves forever. This work is — and recall please I am no expert on Heidegger or Cassirer — a most excellent one because while the work is very interested in the social and institutional process by which a ‘debate’ becomes a symbolic event — Gordon calls this the ‘ramifying’ of concepts that is only partially controlled by agents involved — , it is also put the debate itself in intellectual context, including the pre-Davos history of interactions between Cassirer and Heidegger and the post-debate afterlife in the works of Heidegger and Cassirer.*

As an aside, I also found the work a gripping read; we learn for example about Heidegger’s competitive instincts in climbing and skiing; and about hiring decisions in German academy. While some of the (neo-Kantian) philosophy is quite abstruse, Gordon achieves a kind of presentational clarity rare in works on (say) Heidegger and the history of philosophy generally.

As a second aside, I actually went to a session in which Gordon’s new book was discussed with critics because I wanted to tell him how much I enjoyed his Davos book. But it was so packed that I decided there would be no opportune moment.

Some other time I hope to use Gordon’s book to say something about philosophical debates as such. Here I just want to focus on a minor comment on the final page of the book’s conclusion. Gordon writes:

I have also suggested that the politicization of the debate was a tragedy, not a grandly Shakespearean tragedy, to be sure, though a tragedy all the same, because it conspired to obscure our appreciation for the substantive questions at issue. It is one of the lessons of this book that the mutual entwinement of philosophy and politics was itself contingent, as all history is contingent, and it therefore cannot be used as a moralist’s solution to what was at core a disagreement between two normative images of humanity. (p. 364)

I agree that such obscuring takes place even among philosophers. Hence, the parlor game. And I am myself am somewhat happy to cast aspersions on moralist solutions based on historical episodes. But I deny that the book actually shows that [A] “the mutual entwinement of philosophy and politics was itself contingent,” or can show that [B] “all history is contingent.” In fact, since the book does not even begin to engage with arguments to the contrary, let’s leave [B] aside.

I believe Gordon makes a philosophical mistake in asserting [A]. What his book shows is that how philosophy and politics are entwined may be contingent. In fact, I suspect his book shows something even thinner: that is, that the manner in which philosophy and politics is partially out of the control of the participating agents.

But that philosophy and politics are so entwined is not contingent at all. Once there is philosophy it can become politically salient. I don’t mean to suggest all philosophy runs equal risks in becoming politically salient or that the same bits of philosophy do so over time and accross regimes (and that regime type and philosophical styles don’t matter, etc). But in no political order is philosophy a matter of indifference.

This fact has been obscured because of the popularity of a false interpretation of Mill’s On Liberty that was popular during the second half of the twentieth century. The false interpretation suggests that under conditions of pure freedom of speech the truth wins out in the long run. Somewhat surprisingly this commitment allows for a kind of Panglossian indifference to the content of speech. Panglossian Mill-ianism (and again that’s not J.S. Mill’s own view) encourages an indifference to, say, inductive risk among agents. In the Panglossian Millian paradigm the political order gets truth for free as a side-effect of the interactions in the market-place of ideas. (In that paradigm none of us can distort truth for long and mistakes are corrected by quiet arbitrage.)

Notice I am not claiming Gordon is an adherent of Panglossian Mill-ianism. All I am claiming is that he is a victim of its influence on the Zeitgeit such that he can come to think that there are circumstances in which philosophy can, in principle, stay unentwined with politics. Even the most optimistic of Enlightenment thinkers could not afford to think that.

In addition, [A] also presupposes/models philosophy as a ‘politics free’ zone. But the book shows otherwise. There is such a thing as a philosophical politics that is (alas) intrinsic to philosophy as such. (Recall this post on David Lewis and Graham Priest back in the day.) Throughout his book, Gordon himself is alert to the fact that the academic job market is characterized by scarcity. He notes that Heidegger and Cassirer competed for a number of prestigious posts. They are also shown to compete for attention (another scarce good) by students. It’s only if you stipulate that the job market and the attention of students is uniquely characterized by philosophical merit and intrinsic epistemic robustness that one can assume extra-philosophical commitments away. Nobody ought to believe that. In fact, one of the more unsettling features of Continental Divide is that it shows that despite lacking some cultural capital, Heidegger was actually quite good at philosophical politics — including in how he managed his career up until his ill-fated rectorate.

My suspicion is that Gordon here also falls victim to the impact of a certain historicism that was popular/fashionable in the formation of intellectual history as a discipline, and echoed repeatedly during the half century before he published his book. (I called it the ‘cult-of-contingency’ in more polemical pieces.) I have nothing against contextualism in the history of philosophy, but it need not rely on claims about contingency.

Okay, that’s all I wanted to say in this post. Even though I am an enemy of so-called ‘spoiler alerts,’ I am not going to tell you here what the Davos encounter was about philosophically in this post. But that’s because I want to do so in a more ramified way in the future.

---

*I didn’t think it handled Carnap’s response to the debate all that well, but that’s irrelevant to the larger argument.