The emergence of the German Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) as the object of scholarly attention has been both surprising and rapid. In the decades since his early death while in exile in the United States, Cassirer never fell into complete oblivion. His works remained known to specialists in German intellectual history; his participation in a famous 1929 debate with Martin Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland, one of the most iconic moments in modern Continental thought, made his name familiar to most students of modern philosophy. Yet Cassirer lacked the widespread recognition given to contemporaries such as Heidegger or Walter Benjamin, and his work never became the center of historical or philosophical study. This neglect stemmed, in part, from dismissal by his peers; as Edward Skidelsky explains in his new study, Rudolf Carnap found him “rather pastoral,” Isaiah Berlin dismissed him as “serenely innocent,” and Theodor Adorno thought he was “totally gaga” (125). The last few years, however, have seen the rise of a remarkable new interest in Cassirer in both Germany and the English-speaking world. Among this recent literature, Edward Skidelsky's and Peter Gordon's works lead the small “Cassirer renaissance” and offer the best English-language introduction to his thought.Footnote ¹ Both Gordon and Skidelsky ambitiously seek to relocate Cassirer at the forefront of modern German and European thought. Gordon goes as far as to call him “one of the greatest philosophers and intellectual historians to emerge from the cultural ferment of modern Germany” and one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century (11). In making such bold statements, Gordon and Skidelsky clearly set their sights beyond the person himself; they aspire to highlight a central strand of thought that enjoyed a powerful presence in early twentieth-century Germany but fell into neglect in the postwar era. In doing so, they seek to reevaluate the nature and legacy of Weimar thought, its complex relationship with the period's unstable politics, and its relevance today.

Throughout his life, Cassirer stood at a crucial crossroads of modern German thought and politics. Born into a wealthy and highly acculturated Jewish family in the German city of Breslau (today Wroclaw, Poland), his thought was shaped during the nineteenth century's closing decades. After studying with philosopher Hermann Cohen, the founder of the neo-Kantian “Marburg school,” Cassirer began a career publishing works on the philosophy of scientific knowledge. In 1919 he was offered the position of professor at the newly founded University of Hamburg, and by the end of the 1920s had became one of Germany's most established academics as well as the country's first Jewish rector. It was in this decade, against a backdrop of Weimar's intellectual and political turmoil, that he composed his most important and influential work, the three-volume The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, an ambitious attempt to unite scientific and nonscientific modes of thought within a single philosophical vision. Despite this monumental work, Cassirer is still best known for his debate with Heidegger, which was attended by some two hundred professors and students (among them notable figures such as Emmanuel Lévinas). After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Cassirer resigned his position in Hamburg and went into prolonged exile with his wife, Toni. For over a decade the two moved between Austria, Britain, Sweden, and finally the United States, where Cassirer died in April 1945, a few weeks before Nazi Germany's defeat.

How, then, is one to account for the rising tide of interest in this thinker? According to Skidelsky, the answer lies not in his thought, but in contemporary German politics. With the collapse of Communism and the country's reunification, Germany was in dire need of an iconic symbol of intellectual legitimacy. An ardent supporter of the Weimar Republic, a philosopher of humanism and rationalism, and a Jew, Cassirer appears to have been a convenient choice. This impressionistic assessment, however, cannot explain his importance or relevance to contemporary scholars and readers outside Germany. Skidelsky and Gordon thus share the goal of highlighting and defining Cassirer's place in the history of modern European thought and its legacy. Their styles, methods, and final assessments of his thought, however, are radically different. Skidelsky, who highlights Cassirer's thought but says little about the historical context in which it was created, believes that contemporary readers will find little that is valuable in his ideas. In his eyes, Cassirer was a great and historically important thinker, but his Weimar-era theories are irrelevant today. Gordon, on the other hand, explores in detail the social, institutional, and cultural frameworks within which Cassirer wrote. Ironically, Gordon's emphasis on historical contexts leads him to argue that Cassirer's philosophy has significance far beyond the interwar era of its conception. According to Gordon, scholars have often been overly focused on the political moment in which Cassirer wrote, and as a result failed to appreciate his profound—and timeless—philosophical achievements.

Skidelsky's Ernst Cassirer belongs to the genre of “intellectual biography,” which seeks to elucidate a thinker's body of work and the development of his ideas in chronological order. As such, this is a successful and impressive work. Skidelsky lucidly explains some of Cassirer's complex ideas, and distills the philosopher's all-encompassing theories about myth, culture, and science to their essential core. Moreover, the book provides the background to a set of philosophical discussions to which Cassirer explicitly responded. Most of the books’ chapters—six out of nine—outline a school of thought, specific writer, or intellectual trend that was related to Cassirer's work. These chapters describe the Marburg school, the philosophy of mathematics and science by Mach and Russell, the intense debates about the legacy of Goethe, logical positivism, and the Weimar-era “philosophy of life” (Lebensphilosophie). In these crisp introductions Skidelsky not only clarifies Cassirer's specific contribution but also ably demonstrates the philosopher's intellectual temperament. He portrays a moderate writer who invariably sought agreement and dialogue, even with thinkers dramatically different from himself. Cassirer's respectful response to Ludwig Klages, one of Germany's most vocal antirationalist, anti-Enlightenment and anti-Semitic thinkers, is the most striking example. Skidelsky breaks out of this chronological–thematic format only once, in a brief chapter that addresses Cassirer's most important work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Given the work's complexity and its significance for Cassirer's reputation, it is perhaps surprising that this is also the shortest chapter in the book. Like the rest of the book, however, it is well written and will serve as a useful text to many readers. As a whole, Skidelsky offers a successful and much-needed introduction to Cassirer's body of work and the philosophical debates with which Cassirer engaged.

Skidelsky's book, however, seeks to go further than simply introducing Cassirer. To him, the philosopher's work presents an opportunity not only to discuss a central figure in the history of European ideas, but, more importantly, to reflect on the relationship between philosophy and democratic politics. In the sphere of political theory, however, Skidelsky complains throughout the book that Cassirer's thought was a colossal “failure.” His engagement with politics was unsystematic, and for Skidelsky deeply unsatisfying. Skidelsky does take care to mention that Cassirer was a supporter of the Weimar Republic: in 1928 he delivered a famous address about the origins of republican ideas, claiming that they were not a foreign import but native to German traditions, and as rector of the Hamburg University he instituted Constitution Day as a university holiday, despite the resistance of many conservatives. Yet most of Cassirer's writings had little to say about contemporary political debates. As a member of the Humboldtian tradition, he was interested mainly in culture, music, literature, and philosophy. His theory of human symbols assumed the concept of progress, and he expected that the history of symbolization would lead to greater self-liberation. In Cassirer's thought, politics remained just another manifestation of cultural progress, a side effect of a deeper process. Skidelsky considers this aloofness to be almost tragic. In discussing Cassirer's 1945 The Myth of the State—his last work and the only one that took politics as its central topic—Skidelsky frequently disparages its focus on philosophy and political theory, instead of the immediate social conditions that brought about Nazism. In Skidelsky's view, this Olympian distaste for politics and obsession with culture drew attention away from brute political reality. It was symbolic of the impotence of German liberals and their inability to take politics seriously, and it thus contributed to Weimar democracy's ultimate collapse. Cassirer failed to leave behind him a systematic theory of democracy, and for Skidelsky this undermines his entire philosophical endeavor.

This assessment of Cassirer's political “failure” is problematic on several accounts. First, despite the importance that Skidelsky attributes to the political, social, and cultural contexts in which Cassirer operated, he does little to explore them. Given the book's format, it is perhaps not surprising that nothing is divulged about Cassirer's private life, and that Skidelsky mentions only briefly his relationships with family, friends, and colleagues, such as his wife, Toni; his two cousins, the publisher Bruno Cassirer and the art dealer Paul Cassirer; or his mentor Hermann Cohen.Footnote ² The book also offers, however, only a few impressionistic statements about the German Jewish environment in which Cassirer grew up, the anxious world of the middle class in which he spent his youth, the German academic world after World War I, or Weimar's tortured politics. While it is true that Cassirer's own writing rarely referred explicitly to the debates that characterized these worlds, they often informed his thought, and Skidelsky's analysis would have benefited from a more careful consideration of this influence. This lack of engagement with Cassirer's social and political environment is particularly apparent given Skidelsky's frequent references to his German Jewish background and to wider trends in German life as foundational aspects of Cassirer's thought. He confidently claims, for example, that Cassirer's work as a whole was “a characteristically Jewish attempt . . . to preserve the liberal ideal of culture under increasingly hostile conditions” (3), and that the Marburg school—the neo-Kantian school which Cassirer joined as a student—was representative of the German middle class. In light of the contested ideas about the self-definition within each of the communities of which Cassirer was a member—Jewish community, the middle class, academia, German liberals—the specific ways in which those backgrounds intersected with Cassirer's work remain vague and often unclear. A more careful consideration of Cassirer's environment could perhaps reveal more substantial—even if implicit—engagement between his writings and the society in which he lived.

Skidelsky's negative assessment of Cassirer's politics is further undermined by his claim that it is in fact not the philosopher's thought but contemporary “cultural sensibilities” that render Cassirer's work obsolete. Skidelsky claims that while liberalism has perhaps triumphed in the political sphere, it is antiliberal philosophy that dominates Western culture. In this narrative, Heidegger developed a fiercely antirational and even fascist philosophy, which shaped Western thought through his influence on famous philosophers, including Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Herbert Marcuse, and others. “[T]his massive influence,” he argues, “has been almost wholly to the detriment of liberalism—as the political affiliation of so many post-Heideggerian philosophers attests. It is ironic that fascism, defeated on the battlefield, should enjoy this ghostly afterlife in the realm of ideas” (219). Moreover, Skidelsky argues that this influence far transcends philosophy to shape entire spheres of life. “Culture itself,” he writes in one of the book's hyperbolic moments, “is now a tainted word. Heidegger's exultation of bare existence, his denunciation of Geist as a refuge of the weak and dishonest, has filtered into popular consciousness. A thousand rock lyrics proclaim the authority of the immediate, the transient” (236). In this cultural mood, Cassirer's ideas about cultural progress seem naive and irrelevant. “Who now shares Cassirer's faith in the humanizing power of art or the liberating power of science? Who now believes that the truth will make us free?” (222). Cassirer's “failure” is thus a symptom of what Skidelsky calls “the dilemmas of our tragic age” (84): “Our political principles find no support in our cultural tastes, religious beliefs, or metaphysical insights. We pay tribute to Cassirer, but Heidegger remains the secret master of our thoughts” (219).

These broad generalizations aside—it is unclear who constitutes the “we” to which Skidelsky repeatedly refers, or how he measures present-day intellectual moods—such statements are problematic for several reasons. First, and most obvious, while Arendt, Marcuse, or Gadamer were not liberal, putting their ideas under the “fascist” banner is grossly misleading. The simplistic fascist/liberal opposition does not do justice to the complexity of their—or Heidegger's—thought, and many readers will find this characterization highly objectionable. Second, calling Cassirer's ideas a “failure” for their lack of appeal shifts the responsibility from contemporary culture to the philosopher. Most important, however, these broad statements and Skidelsky's critique of Cassirer's political weakness risk reducing the philosopher's multilayered thought to the sphere of politics alone. Cassirer, however, was not a political theorist and he never aspired to become one. His democratic convictions were clearly and publicly stated, but they were never the core or goal of his intellectual effort, and to blame him for this is to expect of him something he never promised to deliver. While it may be tempting to use his work as a window to the problems of democratic legitimacy—either of his era or of today—as a philosopher, Cassirer was guided in his inquiries by philosophical questions, and Skidelsky is at his best when he discusses them as such.

The complex relationship between Weimar-era philosophy and the republic's ultimate collapse is also a central theme in Gordon's Continental Divide. This, however, is the only similarity between the books. By telling the story of the famous intellectual exchange between Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos—at which the two officially discussed opposing interpretations of Kant but in fact presented two entirely competing philosophical systems—Gordon utilizes different materials, methodology, and stylistic choices. His evaluations of Cassirer's philosophy, its relevance, and the role of political environment in intellectual history therefore differ drastically from Skidelsky's conclusions.

In contrast to Skidelsky's limited interest in history, the structure of Gordon's book seeks to strike a balance between the debate's philosophical content and the variety of historical contexts that shaped it. In gripping and lucid prose, each of the opening chapters explores the philosophical, personal, and institutional frameworks which gave Davos high visibility in the European intellectual community, while other sections interpret Heidegger and Cassirer's philosophical arguments. The first and most explicit goal of this detailed investigation is to strip the debate of the mythical meanings it has accumulated over the years. People who attended the debate and historians alike have come to regard the 1929 meeting as a symbolic moment in German history, where Heidegger's antiliberal thought triumphed over Cassirer's liberal convictions to signal democracy's imminent destruction. According to Gordon, however, such assessments project Germany's horrific politics backward onto a philosophical discussion that had little to do with politics. They deeply distort the background, content and legacy of this meeting. In particular, Gordon refutes the common myth that Heidegger “won” the debate (in as much as one can “win” a philosophical discussion); according to Gordon, it was only Heidegger's embrace of Nazism in 1933 that led observers to describe Davos in terms of victory and defeat. “[T]he ultimate tragedy of the Davos encounter,” Gordon writes, “is not that it ended in victory for politics of the wrong kind. The deeper tragedy is that it ended in politics at all” (357).

If Davos was not about politics, then, what was the meaning of these famed discussions? Gordon opens the book with a lengthy introduction, in which he presents Davos as a philosophical debate. Heidegger and Cassirer's tense encounter was a meeting of different understandings of human existence, or, as Gordon calls it, “two normative images of humanity.” On one side stood Cassirer, who believed that the human being was endowed with a special capacity for “spontaneous self-expression.” To be human, according to this interpretation, is to create “in complete freedom whole worlds of meaning, and these self-created worlds become in turn the objective spheres we experience as beautiful, moral, and true” (6). Heidegger, however, defined human beings by their “finitude,” by living in the midst of circumstances they did not create and could not hope to control. Humans, he claimed, were completely shaped by their historical and cultural environments, a condition which he often called “thrownness” (Geworfenheit). While the difference between these positions is profound, Gordon emphasizes that this was not a radical opposition. Both philosophers shared Kant's claim that the world is intelligible to us as human beings only by virtue of certain conditions that we impose upon it a priori. Furthermore, Cassirer and Heidegger were allies in a broader campaign to liberate philosophy from its ties to science—from the dominant schools that saw philosophy as either modeled on science or as a transcendental groundwork for science. Indeed, one of Gordon's most important achievements is to uncover the concepts and goals that the two thinkers shared and which facilitated the discussion between them in the first place. It was because they regarded each other as “possible allies and later as competitors” (11), rather than as bitter intellectual adversaries, that the two sought to confront each other.

The debate, however, reflected more than the philosophical differences between the two thinkers. As the book's first chapter shows, it echoed the intense pressures, hopes and anxieties that dominated Germany's cultural elite. Gordon paints a picture of a culture whose intellectual life, much like its political and social institutions, was in a state of crisis. Thinkers of all political and philosophical convictions agreed that earlier intellectual frameworks could not provide clear directives for thought and action. Indeed, the connections between philosophical debates and the broad social pressures of the time seemed clear to contemporaries, and philosophical events such as conferences on Kant's legacy drew the participation of Weimar's highest echelons (President Friedrich Ebert himself was scheduled to attend the events celebrating the philosopher's 200th birthday). Gordon goes beyond general impressions, however, to detail the specific forms in which this crisis manifested itself. The hegemony of neo-Kantian philosophy, he asserts, which endured in Germany from the late nineteenth century and throughout the early twentieth, was now beginning to erode as new forms of thought became more popular in educated circles. Existential philosophies, such as Friedrich Nietzsche's, the philosophical anthropology of Helmut Plessner and Ludwig Klages, and Edmund Husserl's school of phenomenology all offered powerful alternatives. Gordon explains how these intellectual energies informed both Heidegger's and Cassirer's work. In their competing interpretations of Kant, both sought to respond to these newer philosophical challenges. The feeling that European life had entered a dramatic turning point and that philosophy encompassed a key to understanding these unfolding changes explains the sense of urgency felt by all participants in the philosophical debate.

After exploring the philosophical backdrop to the debate in detail, the book's second chapter locates it in its institutional context. As Gordon reminds the reader, the encounter was part of the International Davos Conference (Hochschule), a springtime colloquy that brought together intellectuals from all over Europe between 1928 and 1931. Dubbed by journalists the “Locarno of the intellectuals,” its organizers sought to foster international understanding, especially between Germany and France, by providing an intimate and peaceful setting for academic lectures and public discussion. During its short existence, the conference drew Europe's leading thinkers and scientists, from Albert Einstein to theologian Paul Tillich, as well as journalists, professors, students, and occasional skiing enthusiasts from across the Continent. Finally, Gordon sets the Davos debate in a third context—the personal. By the time Cassirer and Heidegger arrived at the conference, he shows, they had already met and interacted with each other on several occasions. Their first meeting took place in 1923, during a professional gathering of the Kant Association (Kant-Gesellschaft) in Hamburg, at which the two discussed the significance of myth as an object of philosophical inquiry. Their exchanges continued during the next six years, as they read, reviewed, and responded to each other's work. They remained in contact after 1929, although as Heidegger's philosophy continued to evolve, and obviously after his embrace of Nazism in 1933, agreement between the philosophers became increasingly difficult and eventually impossible. The two therefore were not each other's nemesis. Rather, they were important interlocutors whose opinions shaped each other's thought over a long period.

After thoroughly setting the stage, Gordon dedicates the third chapter to Cassirer's and Heidegger's lectures. Cassirer began with a critique of Max Scheler's philosophical anthropology, which most participants took to be an implicit criticism of Heidegger. Philosophical anthropologists, he claimed, focused their explorations on the pragmatic and environmental strata of human understanding, failing to acknowledge the human capacity to surpass these through self-reflexive symbolic “transcendence.” Heidegger, in response, offered his interpretation of Kant, in which he criticized Cassirer's school of neo-Kantianism. As Heidegger saw it, neo-Kantian philosophy reduced Kant's Critique of Pure Reason to a theory of science, thereby disregarding its real purpose as the “groundlaying for metaphysics.” The Davos lectures formed the basis for future publications and teachings, in which Heidegger further developed this provocative claim. In later years, however, he came to acknowledge that his work on Kant was an “over-interpretation” (161), an analysis that in essence presented his own ideas.

In the book's fourth chapter, which is also the richest and most impressive, Gordon examines the focal point of the Davos encounter: the debate between Heidegger and Cassirer. He reproduces the entire dialogue as transcribed by two young philosophers, attaching his own clarifications and interpretations to each paragraph, frequently utilizing Cassirer's and Heidegger's previous or future works to elucidate the arguments. Gordon divides the debate into ten thematic sections to help the reader follow the dense discussion. Cassirer opened the dialogue by wondering whether Heidegger had correctly assessed the mission of neo-Kantianism. This school, he complained, had become “the scapegoat of the newer philosophy” (137), and thinkers such as Heidegger overlooked the affinity between it and their own work. Heidegger responded with some irritation, repeating his accusation that neo-Kantians had submitted to rigid scientism, and believed that “the sole task left for philosophy was to furnish a theoretical ground-work for natural scientific knowledge” (139). The two men then found some common ground over the role of transcendental imagination in Kant's philosophy, only to disagree again over his thoughts on objectivity. Cassirer argued that the concept of pure, practical reason implied an objective validity, which extended beyond the subject's experience and was not relative to human finitude. Heidegger's philosophy, Cassirer implied, relied so heavily on human finitude that it risked “renouncing objective knowledge” (156). Heidegger in response insisted that Kant's philosophy was governed by acknowledgment of the human's unbreachable finitude. “[T]he human being,” he said, “is never infinite and absolute in the creating of the being itself; rather, it is infinite in the sense of the understanding of being” (166). Gordon narrates how the two philosophers discussed the implications of their opposing views on a variety of topics, ranging from anxiety through culture to freedom, pointing to what they believed was their counterpart's shortcomings, and repeatedly disagreeing about the core issue of humans’ ability to transcend their finitude. At the core of the discussion lay two different understandings of the human condition, from which stemmed two opposing visions of the purpose of philosophy. Cassirer and Heidegger, Gordon again emphasizes, asked very similar questions and thus saw each other as crucial interlocutors. Thus while the Davos debate exposed unbridgeable gaps, it also enabled an equally important, closer look at hidden similarities.

The book's closing chapters reach to the core of Gordon's argument and follow the processes through which philosophers and historians alike forgot the debate's philosophical content, and instead invested Davos with symbolic meaning. Only a month after its conclusion, Swiss journalists hyperbolically described it as a broad generational-cultural conflict, referring to Davos as “a confrontation of representatives between two epochs” (214). Gordon notes, however, that it was Germany's post-1933 political catastrophe and the two philosophers’ contrasting paths that truly shaped the memory of the debate. “Had the Nazis not come to power,” he writes, “our memory of the Heidegger–Cassirer debate would appear very different indeed” (258). With Heidegger's enthusiastic embrace of Nazism and Cassirer's escape to exile, observers and historians alike came to view the debate as an intellectual precursor to the clash between humanistic liberalism and irrational, anti-Semitic totalitarianism. Read from this perspective, it is no surprise that many attributed a philosophical “victory” to Heidegger. After the war, they maintained that the future Nazi-sympathizer had firmly convinced the philosophical world of the irrelevance of his German-Jewish colleague's work. As Gordon demonstrates, this assessment was far from accurate. As far as the German philosophical establishment was concerned, Cassirer remained the more dominant of the two. Yet far more important than the question of who “won” the debate, the later political allegory distracted historians’ attention from the encounter's philosophical content. It overshadowed the trends and traditions that the philosophers’ work reflected, ignored the power of Cassirer's work, and sidelined the philosophical arguments themselves. The memory of Davos, and with it the reputation of Cassirer's thought, was among the casualties of Germany's political catastrophe.

Stripping Davos of its symbolic meanings and focusing on its actual intellectual content, however, is only part of what makes Gordon's book an important contribution to the study of European intellectual history. In its combination of sensitivity to philosophical arguments and careful historical reconstruction lies an implicit yet powerful suggestion for the writing of Weimar intellectual history more broadly. Continental Divide places ideas at the center of the story, emphasizing the two scholars’ unique contributions to European philosophy, with all their complexities and idiosyncrasies, and taking care not to reduce them to their cultural situations or political ramifications. At the same time, the book locates these ideas in the immediate contexts in which they emerged and, more importantly, resonated. Rather than attributing Cassirer's and Heidegger's works to vague notions of “crisis” or to an undefined “German Jewish” heritage, and instead of reading them through the retrospective lens of the Nazi experience, Gordon explores the specific discussions that facilitated their work, the milieus that made their ideas relevant to other contemporaries, and the personalities and institutions that led them to Davos and beyond. This precision makes Continental Divide not only a valuable read for those interested in philosophy and history alike, but also a milestone in the analysis of the vibrant and turbulent world of Weimar Germany and early twentieth-century European thought.

Above all, the Weimar era was characterized by a startling plurality of social, political and cultural pressures, which both shaped and were shaped by competing intellectual visions, schools, and personalities. While no period is intellectually or politically homogeneous, Weimar's broad variety, as well as the radical views that characterized many of its thinkers and politicians, makes it extremely difficult to untangle and accurately map its multidirectional influences of thought and environment. In such a context it is even more difficult to mark the places in which thought not only reflects its surroundings but has the power to resonate owing to its intrinsic value. Gordon's impressive ability to do just this therefore offers promising directions for the future study of German and European thought.

The question of Cassirer's role in this future scholarship, however, remains open. In their different ways, both Skidelsky and Gordon effectively introduce Cassirer to the English-reading audience, and there is no doubt that those curious about his work and more broadly about Weimar thought will benefit from this refreshing attention. Indeed, the fact that the organizers and participants of the Davos exchange regarded Cassirer, above any other European thinker, as the appropriate respondent to Heidegger's revolutionary philosophy demonstrates how important it is to appreciate his work in order to gain a complete picture of the period's intellectual landscape. It is unclear, however, whether his philosophy contains the potential to enrich other fields of knowledge in a way that will sustain prolonged attention and research. Gordon admirably summarizes Cassirer's writings about myth and culture, but he leaves it to the reader to decide why and how Cassirer's ideas could resonate in present-day debates. While calling Cassirer's work, as Skidelsky does, a “failure,” is unjustified, his contribution to European thought will most likely live on as an object for historical investigation rather than a source of contemporary discussion.