Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture
The “Introduction” to Edward Skidelsky’s recently published Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture paints a sad, timely portrait of that now familiar, ominous shift in German thought, circa 1929. Needless to say, the image of a powdered Levinas mocking pacifism and the virtues of civic engagement can’t help but strike a foreboding note.
On April 23, 1929, in the famous Swiss resort of Davos, two of the leading philosophers of the day met in debate. On the one side was Ernst Cassirer, distinguished representative of the German idealist tradition and champion of the Weimar Republic. On the other was Martin Heidegger, the younger man, whose recently published Being and Time had shaken the idealist tradition to its foundations, and whose politics, though still uncertain, were plainly far from liberal. It was a symbolic moment. The old was pitted against the new, the humanism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries against the radicalism of the twentieth. All agreed that Heidegger, not Cassirer, was the man of the future. No one realized just what that future held in store.
After the debate, some of the attendants staged a humorous reenactment. The part of Heidegger was taken by one of his students, Hans Bollnow, who parodied his teacher’s etymologies with lines such as “to interpret is to stand a thing on its head.” But the real satire was reserved for Cassirer, played by none other than the young Emmanuel Levinas. His hair covered in white powder, intoning “I am a pacifist” and “Humboldt, culture, Humboldt, culture,” the future maîtres-a-penser cut a sorry figure of decrepitude and defeat. Thus expired the once glorious tradition of German humanism.
“Humboldt, culture, Humboldt, culture.” What exactly did Levinas mean by those words? “Humboldt” referred to Wilhelm von Humboldt, philosopher, statesman, and pioneer of the modern university. “Culture” referred to his spiritual ideal. Together, the two words stood for the conviction, shared by most educated nineteenth-century Germans, that self-realization, not self-sacrifice, is the goal of life, and that we realize ourselves not by retiring from the broader world of culture but by embracing it.
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