Eli Gordon, Myth and Modernity Cassirer's Critique of Heidegger

Myth and Modernity: Cassirer's Critique of HeideggerAuthor(s): Peter Eli GordonSource: New German Critique, No. 94, Secularization and Disenchantment (Winter, 2005), pp.127-168Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30040953 .

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Myth and Modernity. Cassirer Critique ofHeidegger

Peter Eli Gordon

"The philosopher is a mythologist." - Plato

What is the relation between fascism and myth?l For the Frankfurt School, fascism was not a reversion to barbarism but a pathologized extremity of enlightenment itself. Following Weber's lead, Adorno and Horkheimer saw enlightenment as a transhistorical rather than a dis- cretely historical process, coordinating a host of distinct phenomena; the disenchantment of the world, the secularization of human consciousness, the "extirpation of animism," and the slow displacement of mime- sis by symbolic and conceptual thought. While they acknowledged fascism's atavistic appearance - especially its calls for a return to fate, blood and soil - they denied it could be characterized in essence as a merely retrograde departure from civilization. Still bound, however weakly, to Marxian habits of thought, Adorno and Horkheimer saw fascism not as a lapse but as the crisis-stage in history's development, as the apotheosis of bourgeois subjectivity and a dialectical consequence of "instrumental reason." Because myth is born from the desire to understand and thereby to achieve some mastery over one's environment, myth, in this sense at least, is "already" enlightenment. But in the con- text of technological proficiency and social rationalization, enlightenment devolves into a compulsive will to mastery without self-reflection

1. For comments and criticism, I am grateful to Martin Jay, Warren Breckman, Samuel Moyn, Jonathan Skolnik, Eugene Sheppard, John McCole, and Thomas Meyer.

127



128 Myth and Modernity

or normative orientation. Enlightenment, then, is already, in its one- sided and distorted form, at least, a new species of myth. And fascism, they claimed, was the indisputable spawn of modernity, the culminating phase of the laborious and collective effort by which humanity, having originally sought release from its mythic fear of nature, ended in the liquidation of the freedom it aimed to achieve. A political correlative of modern advertising, fascism succeeded by means of the cynical manipulation of desire: It was, in sum, "fake myth."2

This theory, which Adorno and Horkheimer put forth in the 1947 study, Dialectic of Enlightenment, is but one variant of the more com- mon observation that fascism is not truly "irrational" but only a simu- lacrum of mythic unreason. Similar, though less remembered today is Ernst Cassirer's last great contribution to intellectual history, The Myth of the State, a work composed in American exile and published, posthu- mously, in 1946. Like Horkheimer and Adorno, Cassirer saw the peculiarity of National Socialism in its effort to forge an entire tissue of belief by artificial means: "The new political myths," Cassirer wrote, "do not grow up freely; they are not wild fruits of an exuberant imagination. They are artificial things fabricated by very skilful and cunning artisans." In contrast to those liberal-minded theorists who found conso- lation in the view that Nazism was mere barbarism and primitive senti- ment, Cassirer discerned its specific modernity: "It has been reserved for the twentieth century, our own great technical age, to develop a new technique of myth. Henceforth myths can be manufactured in the same sense and according to the same methods as any other modern weapon-as machine guns or airplanes."3

A promising feature of this theory lay in the claim that fascism, while essentially modern, succeeds by manipulating the pre-modern or "mythic" dimension of human experience. From this perspective, fascism is a species of secularism cloaked only for effect in the guise of faith. This view has enduring merit not least because it promotes the watchful attitude that we moderns must never consider ourselves fully beyond the fascist danger. Indeed, there is no getting "beyond" hazards inhering in modernity itself. But the theory is not without its disadvan- tages. As Jiirgen Habermas has claimed, the thesis that fascism is the

2. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Philo- sophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002) 9.

3. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale UP, 1946) 355, hereafter, MS.



Peter Eli Gordon 129

spawn of instrumental reason may place too little trust in the emancipatory potential of human rationality and can quickly devolve into a totalizing polemic against reason as such. Indeed, the ceaseless critique of reason gone wrong can easily encourage a mood of fatalistic and stylish pessimism that sabotages the liberatory work of enlightenment before it has even begun.4 From another perspective, however, one might claim the theory places not too little confidence in reason but too much. By char- acterizing fascism as an outcome of modernity, the theory seems to rep- resent modernity as having truly surpassed myth. Only a free and disbelieving subject, it seems, is sufficiently demythologized to wield myth as an instrument of cynical control. The theory of fascism as a "technique of myth," in other words, may presuppose a human subject who has actually achieved thoroughgoing disenchantment.

My claim in this essay is that there may be no such thing as a modemrn and rational subject who is entirely "disenchanted," in the sense that this would entail the capacity to achieve rational mastery over one's constitutive meaning. Considered broadly, "myth" might indicate a structure of social meaning that seems both independent of the subject's agency and not fully transparent to human reason - the mythical notion, for example, that one's life-course is determined by the Fates rather than one's own rational choices. A "demythologized" subject, then, is capable of rational self-transparency, and thus capable of governing itself in accordance with nothing besides its own rules. The typical source for this secular model of the self is Kant's epistemology and moral philosophy, and in this respect, my argument is directed against the conspicuous Kan- tianism that underwrites the "modernist" theory of fascism.

The guiding insight of this essay is as follows: The modernist theory tends to regard any and all departures from liberal-enlightenment politics as manipulated - hence its frequent recourse to terms such as "fake," or "jargon," or "technique," - and it thereby presupposes that only the liberal view is "true." Thus, all other modes of political belief must be explained by imagining that a liberal-enlightenment subject somehow stands behind those politics as their disbelieving creator. But, one might object, this view rests upon an implausible theory of social meaning. An enlightenment ontology of the self has a peculiarly self- credentializing status in that it dismisses any alternative political beliefs as unreal. Yet the challenge - indeed, the true horror - of fascism is

4. Jiirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987) esp. 106-130.




that it represents a mode of political belief that cannot be categorized and consequently dismissed as a mere departure from the normative contents of modernity. Rather than offer some bold doctrine of my own, this essay merely seeks to reconstruct a possible alternative to the Kan- tian view by exploring the historical encounter between two philosophers, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger.5 As explained below, the disagreement between them hinged upon two contrasting sets of ideas concerning myth, subjectivity, and self-transparency.

The confrontation between Cassirer and Heidegger spanned more than two decades, from 1923 to 1946, and was punctuated by the famous encounter at Davos, Switzerland, in the spring of 1929. Witnesses to the Davos debate have recalled an almost mythic contrast between Heideg- ger's dark haired and youthful appearance, his abrupt, perhaps even aggressive demeanor, and Cassirer's prematurely white hair, his professo- rial eloquence, and his conciliatory, if perhaps less inspiring, style. While Cassirer represented the older values of humanist reason, the uncanny strains of Heidegger's so-called "existential" ontology bespoke a new sense of urgency and pathos seizing the younger generation at the end of the 1920s. Student memoirs of the event are almost unanimous in the judgment that Heidegger "won," but for many critics, Heidegger's deci- sion to embrace Nazism four years later expresses the already latent truth of their debate: Pierre Bourdieu, for example, has organized the entire narrative of his polemic, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, around the assumption that the Heidegger-Cassirer debate was an encrypted battle between liberalism and conservative revolution.6 Politics aside, the philosophical substance of their dispute remains definitive for Continental thought today: Cassirer's allegiance to an enlightenment model of the autonomous subject stands in stark contrast to Heidegger's view of the self as "thrown," as bound by meanings it cannot harness fully to rational command. The debate between them is thus a significant chapter in the ongoing struggle to define the ontologico-political subject of modernity.

Cassirer's Philosophy of Form

Emrnst Cassirer (1874-1945) was one of the most accomplished philosophers to emerge from Central Europe in the early decades of the

5. For important documentation and analysis, see John Michael Krois, "Cassirer's Unpublished Critique of Heidegger," Philosophy and Rhetoric 16.3 (1983): 147-159.

6. Pierre Bourdieu, L 'Ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1988). The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1991).




twentieth century.7 In 1894, Cassirer attended Georg Simmel's lectures on Kant, and beginning in 1896, he studied under Hermann Cohen in Mar- burg. Cassirer absorbed many of the characteristic assumptions of the neo- Kantian movement, including an admiration for the scientific model in philosophy, an unflagging confidence in the rationality of culture, and a strong attachment to progressive politics.8 Although of Jewish descent, Cassirer, like many German Jews in the age of assimilation, maintained limited ties to the Jewish faith.9 His real devotion was to scholarship. From his earli- est study, Leibniz' System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen (1902), his early four-volume investigation, The Problem of Knowledge in Philoso- phy and Science (1906-7) and his first contribution to the philosophy of science, Substance and Function (1910), he displayed an astounding breadth of erudition and an uncompromising fidelity to the rationalist principles of the Enlightenment. He wrote a biography, Kant' Life and Thought (1918), which was meant to accompany a new edition of Kant's collected works in the 1920s. Later, he authored the classic study of eighteenth-century thought, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932).

Beginning in the 1920s, Cassirer invested a great deal of energy in developing a philosophical account of mythological consciousness. His monumental, three-volume work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (hereafter, PSF), explores the "formative" activity of consciousness in the spheres of: "language" (Vol. I, 1923), "mythical thinking" (Vol. II, 1925), and the "phenomenology of knowledge" (Vol. III, 1929). A fourth volume, on "the metaphysics of symbolic forms," remained in

7. An excellent summary of Cassirer's thought can be found in John Michael Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (New Haven: Yale UP, 1987).

8. Simmel's lectures on Kant exerted a tremendous impact upon students of Cas- sirer's generation, since the lectures were meant "to serve as an introduction to philosophical thinking" as such. See Georg Simmel, Kant: Sechzehn Vorlesungen, gehalten an der Berliner Universitdt, 3rd ed. (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1913) iii. For Simmel's influence on Cassirer, see David R. Lipton, Ernst Cassirer. The Dilemma of the Liberal Intellectual in Germany, 1914-1933 (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1978) 3-5. On the general outline of neo-Kantianism, see Timothy Keck, "Kant and Socialism: The Marburg School in Wilhelmian Germany," diss., University of Wisconsin, 1975); also Klaus Kahnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus: Die deutsche Universitatsphilo- sophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus (Frankfurt/Main, 1991), and Ulrich Sieg, Aufstieg und Niedergang des Marburger Neukantianismus. Die Geschichte einer philoso- phischen Schulgemeinschaft (Wiirzburg: K6nigshausen & Neumann, 1994).

9. On Cassirer's Judaism, see the thoughtful essay by Thomas Meyer, "Ernst Cas- sirer - Judentum aus dem Geist der universalistischen Vernunft," Aschkenas 10.2 (2000): 459-502; also Oswald Schwemmer, Ernst Cassirer Ein Philosoph der europdischen Mod- erne (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997) and Steven S. Schwarzschild, "Judaism in the Life and Work of Ernst Cassirer," il cannocchiale 1.1-2 (1991): 327-344.




manuscript form and has only recently been published. Cassirer also wrote a shorter work, entitled Language and Myth (1925), which was his first substantive contribution to the cultural history series published by the Warburg Library, where he labored upon the PSF throughout the 1920s. In the midst of this work, Cassirer also wrote an historical monograph, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (1927) that investigates renaissance theories of "ego and world" and discerns the origins of the enlightenment ideal of spiritual creativity. Nevertheless, vigorous attention to political or social thought remains noticeably underdeveloped in Cassirer's scholarship, which, given his adherence to enlightenment ideals, might appear surprising.l0 The vari- ous essays collected in 1916 under the title, Freedom and Form, repre- sent an exception to Cassirer's largely scientific and cultural but unpolitical labors.1l Cassirer marshaled his intellectual resources only once in defense of the precarious Weimar Republic.12 In 1928, he delivered a famous address on "The Idea of a Republican Constitution," in which he attempted to prove an affinity between Kant's philosophy and political democracy.13 His final work, The Myth of the State, represents Cassirer's most sustained treatment of political matters, but it is also his last statement on the broader, philosophical significance ofmyth.14

10. The absence of a pronounced ethical theory in Cassirer's work was first noted by Leo Strauss, in a critical review of The Myth of the State, which is reprinted in Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1959) 292-96. For Strauss's earlier assessment, see Leo Strauss, "Religionsphilosophie: Zur Auseinandersetzung mit der europiischen Wissenschaft," Der Jude VIII. 10 (1924): 613-617. Also see Birgit Recki, "Kultur ohne Moral? Warum Ernst Cassirer trotz der Ein- sicht in dem Primat der praktischen Vemrnunft keine Ethik schreiben konnte," Ernst Cassir- ers Werk und Wirkung, Kultur und Philosophie, eds. Dorothea Frede, Reinold Schmlicker (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997) 58-78.

11. Ernst Cassirer, Freiheit und Form: Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte, 2nd ed. (1916; Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1918).

12. On Cassirer's political significance, see Lipton. 13. Cassirer, Die Idee der Republikanischen Verfassung, Rede zur Verfassungsfeier

am 11. August 1928 (Hamburg: Friedrichsen, de Gruyter & Co., 1929), hereafter, Die Idee. 14. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume I: Language, Volume

II: Mythical Thought, Volume III: The Phenomenology of Knowledge, trans. Ralph Man- heim (New Haven: Yale UP, 1957), hereafter PSF, followed by volume number and page. Sprache und Mythos was originally published in Studien der Bibliothek Warburg VI (1925). The English edition is Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (1946; New York: Harper - Dover, 1953), hereafter, LM. Ernst Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance (1927), in English as The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). Ernst Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufkliarung (Tiibingen: J.C.B. Mohr-Paul Siebeck, 1932), in English, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C.A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1951), hereafter, PE. Recently, John Michael Krois has edited Cassirer's essay, "Spirit and Life," which contains an extensive response to Heidegger, and was located in the previously unpublished manuscript for the projected fourth volume of PSR, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms that was completed in 1929.




Before specifically engaging Cassirer's discussion of myth, it is helpful to examine his more general philosophical commitments. For Cas- sirer, human consciousness is best conceived according to a Kantian model, where the mind stands as "lawgiver unto nature," granting objectivity and order to the world it represents. According to this model, the subject relates to its world as its transcendental ground: We encounter a world of "order and harmony" only because our reality has been structured in advance by the formative action of reason. We do not enjoy immediate access to things; indeed, without the structuring action of our own mental apparatus the world in itself would be presumably without order or sense. Kant called this structuring action "the spontaneity of human understanding," and the doctrine exerted a strong influence upon Cassirer in all of his philosophical and historical work. While it is true that his philosophy of symbolic forms moved away from the "spontaneity" thesis in significant respects, the essential view of the mind as a formative agency remained unchanged.15

The immediate importance of "form" in Kantian philosophy is evident in the idea that space and time are pure "forms" of intuition, but it gained a new prominence in Simmel's lectures on Kant. While still in his 20s, Cassirer absorbed Simmel's interpretation of transcendental idealism as a philosophy that concerned "the forms of experience" projected by the mind. For Simmel, Kant had shown that the "determination of Being" is only possible through "the forms and productive powers of Spirit," a mental agency which was characteristic not only of practical and theoretical reason, but also of aesthetic-expressive labor as well. In Simmel's view, the "unity" exhibited in a perfected work of art was itself a reflection of the "form of the soul itself."l6

15. An exemplary statement of Cassirer's method can be found in PSF: "It is one of the first essential insights of critical philosophy that objects are not 'given' to consciousness in a rigid, finished state, in their naked 'as suchness' [ihrem nackten An-Sich], but that the relation of representation to object presupposes an independent, spontaneous act of consciousness. The object does not exist prior to and outside of synthetic unity but is constituted only by this synthetic unity; it is no fixed form that imprints itself on consciousness but is the product of a formative operation [Formung] effected by the basic instrumentality of consciousness, by intuition and pure thought. PSF takes up this basic critical idea, this fundamental principle of Kant's 'Copernican revolution,' and strives to broaden it. It seeks the categories of the consciousness of objects in the theoretical, intellectual sphere, and starts from the assumption that such categories must be at work wher- ever a cosmos, a characteristic and typical world view, takes form out of the chaos of impressions." PSF II 29 (German 39).

16. Simmel, Kant 49.




While Simmel's interpretation emphasized the centrality of "form" in Kantian philosophy, Simmel also noted that specifically regarding art, Kant's concept of form remained "too narrow."l7 The combination - of Simmel's elucidation of Kantian form, and Cohen's "critical idealist" reading of Kant as a theorist of scientific discovery - no doubt exerted a powerful influence upon Cassirer's own philosophy of form. But Sim- mel's critical remarks on the limitations of Kant's original project especially helped move Cassirer toward a broader theory of culture.

Cassirer first introduced the idea of symbolic form in his 1921 study, Einstein ' Theory of Relativity, where he claimed that the theory of relativity demanded a "new concept [. . .] of the object," as "grounded in the form of physical thought." Einsteinian physics "strives to determine and to express in pure objectivity merely the natural object, but thereby necessarily expresses itself, its own law and its own principle." Now, physics abandons the notion of "substance" and replaces it with a notion of "function" anchored in nothing but the symbolizing capacities of human consciousness. This move, Cassirer noted, was essentially a restatement of the Kantian idea of the Copernican revolution, which claims that rather than conceiving of the mind as conforming to objects, objects are best conceived in conformity to the mind. But, Cas- sirer hastened to add that this transcendental principle was not only applicable in science; it expressed the far older notion that all religion, indeed all of human experience, rests upon anthropomorphic foundations.

Here is revealed again that "anthropomorphism" of all our concepts of nature to which Goethe [...] loved to point. "All philosophy of nature is still only anthropomorphism, i.e., man, at unity with himself, imparts to everything that he is not, this unity, draws it into his unity, makes it one with himself [. ..] We can observe, measure [.. .] weigh, etc., nature as much as we will, it is still only our measure and weight, as man is the measure of all things."'8

From the critique of religion to modern science, the principle of "anthropomorphism" was "not to be understood in a limited way but in a universal, critical and transcendental sense."19 Cassirer claimed that the

17. Simmel, Kant 180. 18. Zur Einstein schen Relitivitatstheorie, originally published in 1921; in English

as Substance and Function and Einstein " Theory of Relativity, trans. William Swabey and Marie Swabey (Chicago: Open Court, 1923) 445, hereafter, ETR.

19. ETR 445.




Kantian principle could now be applied to the investigation of all of human

experience. His global ambitions are clear in the passage below, which is generally accepted as Cassirer's first use of the term "symbolic form."

It is the task of systematic philosophy, which extends far beyond the theory of knowledge, [. . .] to grasp the whole system of symbolic forms, the application of which produces for us the concept of an ordered reality, and by virtue of which subject and object, ego and world are separated and opposed to each other in definite form, and it must refer each individual in this totality to its fixed place. If we assume this problem solved, then the rights would be assured, and the limits fixed, of each of the particular [...] as of the general forms of the theoretical, ethical, aesthetic, and religious understanding of the world.20

According to Cassirer, all of human culture, indeed the very sense of there being a "world" as distinct from an "ego," is consequent upon what Cassirer named the spontaneous "application" of form by a transcendental subject. And it is this form that "produces for us" the very "concept of an ordered reality."

It is worth noting that this definition considerably expands upon Kant's original model of mental spontaneity. Kant never suggested that the formative function might extend further than the basic, a priori application of space, time, and the categories. Cassirer closely followed Kant's idea that our world is the result of the transcendental consciousness "producing" an "ordered reality." However, he broadened the principle by claiming that symbolic forms govern the entire landscape of human expression. In his work throughout the 1920s, Cassirer set out to show how a Kantian investigation of transcendental consciousness might be applied to broad areas of "symbolizing" activity from language to myth. He laid out the basic presuppositions for the project in a programmatic essay from 1922, "The Concept of Symbolic Form in the Construction of the Human Sciences" [Der Begriffder Symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften]. Cassirer offered it as his inaugural publication for the Warburg Library, where he carried out research for much of the decade. The essay contains an important redefinition of symbolic form:

By "symbolic form" [is meant] that energy of the spirit [Energie des Geistes] through which a mental meaning-content is attached to a sensual sign and inwardly dedicated to this sign [. . .] [L]anguage, the

20. ETR 447, my emphasis.




mythical-religious world, and the arts each present us with a particular symbolic form. [I]n them all we see the mark of the basic phenomenon, that our consciousness [BewufJ3tsein] is not satisfied to receive impression [Eindruck] from outside, but rather [. . .] permeates each impression with afree activity of expression [mit einerfreien Titigkeit des Ausdrucks]. In what we call the objective reality of things we are thus confronted with a world ofself-created signs and images."21

Here, Cassirer characterizes symbolic forms as products of "free" mental energy and expression. Such forms are "self-created" and therefore announce, against empiricism, that a spontaneity of the spirit pervades all cultural life, most notably in science, but - and this proved just as important - in language, art, and myth.

Cassirer on Language and Myth The second volume of PSF focuses specifically on mythical thought.

Here the spontaneity thesis is put on bold display. Cassirer presupposed that myth can only be understood as the most primitive stratum of symbolic consciousness, and therefore that myth is grasped as an "expression" of spirit. He sharply differentiated this effort from any investigation into myth's origins or instrumentality. "To seek a 'form' of mythical consciousness," he wrote, "means to inquire neither after its ultimate metaphysical causes nor after its psychological, historical or social causes: it is solely to seek the unity of the spiritual principle by which all its particular configurations, with all their vast empirical diversity, appear to be governed."22 With a nod toward Husserlian phenomenology, Cassirer insisted that his method is merely "critical phenomenology" since it separated its phenomenological analysis from any discussion about the genesis or use of mythological systems. It addresses "neither from the godhead an original metaphysical fact nor from mankind as an original empirical fact" but instead theorizes "the subject of a cultural process" [das Subjekt des Kulturprozesses]. It presents a narrative of the "human spirit" in its "pure actuality and diverse configurations," in order to apprehend its own "immanent norms."23

Cassirer's analysis of mythological consciousness follows the Kantian principle that consciousness must obey its own, interior principles of

21. Ernst Cassirer, "Der Begriffder Symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissen- schaften," Bibliothek Warburg, Vortrage, 1921/22 (Leipzig: B.G Teubner, 1923) 11-39, 15.

22. PSF, II 12. 23. PSF, II 19; English 13.




expression: Culture is ideally the work of autonomous spirit. Cassirer departed from Kant, however, in his portrait of consciousness as following a logic of immanent development. If one could demonstrate that myth is part of a "cultural process," then the Kantian principle of mental spontaneity must be fundamentally historicized. Here Cassirer's theory adopts a Hegelian view of mythical "activities" as a primitive stage in the unfolding narrative of spirit:

It is only in these activities as a whole that humankind constitutes itself in accordance with its ideal concept and concrete historical existence; it is only in these activities as a whole that is effected that progressive differentiation of "subject" and "object," "I" and "world," through which consciousness issues from its stupor, from its captivity in mere existence [aus der Befangenheit im blofien Dasein], in sensory impression and affectivity, and becomes a cultural consciousness [Kulturbewufl3tsein].24

The developmental thesis, however, implies that myth can not be understood as a perfect or complete expression of human consciousness. If myth is merely a "stage" in the "objectification" [Objektivierung] of spirit, it is difficult to avoid the judgment that myth is nothing but an imperfect and occluded mode of representation. "With the first dawn of scientific insight," Cassirer observed, "the mythical world of dream and enchantment seems to sink into nothingness" [die Traum- und Zauber- welt des Mythos [. . .] scheint sie wie ins Nichts hinabgesunken zu sein]. But questions concerning the accuracy or truth of their representational content of myth are not significant for Cassirer, since he is interested solely in their manner of objectification. Here Cassirer can affirm that myth is indeed "objective" in so far as it discloses "an immanent rule," and "a characteristic "necessity."25 Moreover, it is misleading to suggest that myth yields entirely to scientific modes of representation. "[E]ven the world of our immediate experience - that world in which all of us constantly live and are when not engaged in conscious, critical- scientific reflection - contains any number of traits which, form the standpoint of the same reflection, can only be designated as mythical."26

Cassirer was not alone in proposing such a "pan-mythic" theory of everyday belief. He drew inspiration from Wilhelm Wundt's monumental study, Volkerpsychologie, (published in ten volumes between 1900

24. PSF, I1 19; English 13, translation modified. 25. PSI II 19; English 14, translation modified. 26. PSF II 20; English 14.




and 1920), which lays out a comprehensive set of "developmental laws" guiding language, myth, and custom.27 But it is perhaps most instructive to compare Cassirer's work to contemporary theories in anthropology, which were breaking from the older, linear-progressivist model of myth as merely imaginative representation, and turning instead toward a view of myth as the "constitutive" framework of culture as such.

Consider Bronislaw Malinowski's so-called "functionalism." Mali- nowski follows Durkheim's claim in The Elementary Forms of Reli- gious Life (1912) that "all religion is true," and Lucien L~vy-Bruhl's holistic theory of myth in La Mentalitd primitive (1922), and he argues in Myth in Primitive Psychology (1926) that myth is "not merely a story told but a reality lived [. . .] As our sacred story lives in our ritual, in our morality, as it governs our faith and controls our conduct, even so does myth for the savage." Myth is not merely "primitive," but rather "a vital ingredient in human civilization." Malinowski's great advance is his suggestion that myth - like Durkheim's religion - provides the basic framework for human action. It is a "narrative resurrection of a primeval reality." Most importantly, myth lays down the conditions for intelligibility in all human conduct, without which life succumbs to "the most formidable and haunting idea" of mortality. Mythic structures serve as a bulwark against meaninglessness. "They would screen, with the vivid texture of their myths, stories, and beliefs about the spirit world, the vast emotional void gaping beyond them." Myth is for Mali- nowski not only the "backbone of primitive culture," but in fact "an indispensable ingredient of all culture" (my emphasis).28

The functionalist and panmythic perspective in early sociological and anthropological theory bears upon some of Cassirer's central

27. Wilhelm Wundt, Volkerpsychologie: eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungs- gesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte, 10 volumes (Vols. 1-5, Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1900-1920; Vols. 5-10, Leipzig: A. Kriner, 1920).

28. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912; Glencoe: Free Press, 1963). Lucien L6vy-Bruhl, La Mentalitd primitive (Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan, 1922). Bronislaw Malinowski, Myth in Primitive Psychology (New York: W.W. Norton, 1926); republished in the collection, Malinowski and the Work ofMyth, ed. Ivan Strenski (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992) 77-116. On the theme of death, see esp. 108: "Death [...] is not vague, or abstract, or difficult to grasp [ . .] [it] is fraught with horror, with a desire to remove its threat, with the vague hope that it may be, not explained, but rather explained away, made unreal, and actually denied." See also Malinowski as quoted in Cassirer, "Judaism and the Modem Political Myths," Contemporary Jewish Record 7 (1944): 115-126, reprinted in Cas- sirer, Symbol, Myth, and Culture. Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935-1945, ed. Donald Phillip Verene (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1979) 233-241, 237. All quotes in this paragraph are from Malinowski 77-106, inter alia.




philosophical themes. On the one hand, their generous view of myth anticipated and inspired the later, universalist structuralist view of myth, especially that articulated in Levi-Strauss's 1962 La Pensde sauvage. At the same time, the generalized theory of myth threatened to destabilize the objectivist relation between theorist and myth. If myth, like a pragmatist's framework, was "good for thinking," as Levi-Strauss proposed, this raised the question of how the explanatory methods of anthropological science differentiate themselves from the mythical objects it studied. If myth were truly universal, then the diachronic model of secularizing consciousness - from "myth" to "science" - must itself fall victim to anthropological description, a conclusion that prompted Levi-Strauss to announce, against Sartre, that historical progressivism is itself a myth.29

Cassirer went as far as possible to endorse the generalized pragmatist theory of myth, but he could not surrender the diachronic theory of progressive enlightenment that justified his own stance as a philosopher. On the one hand, he took great pains to demonstrate that myth is an objectification of spirit and therefore anchored in human rationality. As the neo-Kantian critic Kurt Sternberg observed in a brief review, Cas- sirer's method expands upon Marburg methods to embrace not only the logic of theoretical reason but also the "logic of the unlogical."30 How- ever, mythical consciousness, unlike "truly religious" consciousness, is incapable of distinguishing between its own symbolism and the world it symbolizes. "Every beginning of myth," Cassirer observed, "is perme- ated by this belief in the objective character and objective force of the sign." Language begins on the same plane, as a symbolic order perme- ated by a mythical belief in the identity between word and thing. But as language develops, the primal bond gives way to a new and higher "stage of detachment." Finally, with the modern understanding of art, "spirit" achieves a "truly free" relation with its surroundings. "Mea- sured by empirical, realistic criteria, the aesthetic world becomes a world of appearance; but in severing its bond with immediate reality, with the material existence and efficacy which constitute the world of magic and myth, [art] embodies a new step toward the truth." Despite his generous view of myth as an "objectification" of spirit, Cassirer

29. Claude L6vi-Strauss, La Pensde Sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962). For an accessible summation of L6vi-Strauss's views, see his Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code ofCul- ture (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1978).

30. Kurt Sternberg, "Cassirer, Ernst. Prof. an der Universittit Hamburg. Die Begriff- sform im mythischen Denken," Kantstudien, Band 20 (1925): 194-195, 194, my emphasis.




nonetheless retained an unmistakably evolutionist bias:

Thus, although myth, language, and art interpenetrate one another in their concrete historical manifestations, the relation between them reveals a definite systematic gradation, an ideal progression toward a point where the spirit not only is and lives in its own creations, its self- created symbols, but also knows them for what they are. Or, as Hegel set out to show in his Phenomenology of Spirit: the aim of spiritual development is that cultural reality be apprehended and expressed not merely as substance but "equally as subject."

For Cassirer this difference remained decisive. While granting that myth is a spontaneous expression of human consciousness, he still insisted that myth differs crucially from the disenchanted modes of expression - from both science and art. Whereas the mythical mind cannot recognize the world as its own thoroughly human creation, the secular mind "knows that the symbols it employs are symbols and comprehends them as such."31 This teleological premise, that assumes enlightened self- transparency as the natural endpoint of human development, remained a fundamental commitment in Cassirer's philosophy throughout his career. It is crucial for Cassirer's diagnosis of fascism, as I will explain.

Before examining that diagnosis, Cassirer's investigations of mythic consciousness must be considered more closely. In the same year as the publication of PSF II: Mythical Thought, Cassirer also published a shorter essay on Language and Myth (1925). As a sort of transitional study in PSF - between the first volume on language and the second volume on myth - it focuses on the original bond between these two modes of symbolization. Indeed, Cassirer takes pains to show that linguistic-theoretical expression is itself born from mythical consciousness. "Theoretical, practical, and aesthetic consciousness, the world of language and of morality, the basic forms of community and the state," all of these, he claims, are "originally tied up with mythico-religious conceptions." The mythic world is, in Cassirer's view, a sort of primal unity, which only broke apart into discrete spheres of expressive consciousness over the course of the advancement civilization. Certainly, Cassirer remained wedded to the view that spontaneity is an intrinsic feature of human consciousness whatever its developmental stage. But, he hastened to note, because mythical consciousness does not recognize

31. The same point is repeated forcefully in the closing passage of Cassirer's shorter, transitional study from 1925, Language and Myth, esp. 98-99.




its role in the creation of mythic phenomena, it ascribes autonomous and non-human authority to its own linguistic creations.

The single most dramatic piece of evidence for the mythical, non- human conception of language in primitive cultures, Cassirer claimed, is the Melanesian category of "mana," which a variety of anthropologists had subjected to intense theoretical scrutiny during the preceding decades.32 Though its definition is much disputed among scholars, mana seems to denote "supernatural power" which, in Cassirer's description, "permeates all things and events, and may be present now in objects, now in persons, yet is never bound exclusively to any single and individual subject or object as its host." It is less an objective feature of things than it is a medium to identify elements of the world that evoke mythic "wonder" and seem to "stand forth from the ordinary background of familiar, mundane existence."33 Mana is further proof that myth does not merely consist of a set of discrete agencies or local gods, but is, in fact, best understood as a primitive means for organiz- ing experience. "[T]he whole existence of things," Cassirer writes, "and the activity of mankind seem to be embedded, so to speak, in a mythical 'field of force,' an atmosphere of potency which permeates everything." Mana, like language, was to be catalogued among those "spiritual functions which do not take their departure from a world of given objects, divided according to fixed and finished attributes, but which actually first produce this organization of reality and make the positing of attributes possible." As Cassirer notes approvingly, the French anthropologists Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss go so far as to declare mana "a fundamental category of mythical thinking."34 And in his later, English-language summation, An Essay on Man, Cassirer therefore called mana "the first, or existential, dimension of the supernatural."35

The strongest evidence for this "mythic" understanding of language can be found in ancient cosmogony which once featured the "Word" as the privileged medium of creation. The native practice of word-magic functions by identifying word and object. It is predicated on an "essential identity between the word and what it denotes." But if the thing and its name are regarded as a primal unity, it suffices for something to be

32. For a short list of exemplary scholarship on mana, see Cassirer, PSE II 76, n. 2. 33. LM66. 34. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, "Esquisse d'une thdorie g6n6rale de la magie,"

Ann&e sociologique 7 (1902-03): 1-146, my emphasis. 35. EM99-100.




named in order for it to be brought forth magically into existence. More specifically, word-magic conceives of the human subject itself as utterly interwoven with the linguistic fabric of things. In mythic thinking, Cas- sirer writes, "even a person's ego, his very self and personality, is indis- solubly linked [. . .] with his name." The "unity and uniqueness" of the name serves not only to designate the person, but actually "constitutes it; the name is what first makes man an individual."36

The logical affinity between language and myth, however, is not merely a feature of primitive thought. In a brief and uncharacteristic moment, Cassirer admits that the modem subject depends upon the special, constitutive function of language in the formation of everyday experience. In science, of course, it is possible to supplant a great deal of organic language with the more artificial language of mathematical symbolization. But for everyday personal and interpersonal relations, organic language remains indispensable, not only as a means of com- munication but as the constitutive medium of meaning itself.

Indeed, it is the Word, it is language, that really reveals to man that world which is closer to him than any world of natural objects and touches [him] more directly than physical nature. For it is language that makes his existence in a community possible; and only in society, in relation to a "Thou," can his subjectivity assert itself as a "Me." But here again the creative act while it is in progress, is not recognized as such; all the energy of that spiritual achievement is projected into the result of it, and seems bound up in that object from which it seems to emanate as by reflection.37

From this comment, one might discern an element of hesitation in Cas- sirer's thinking. The original bond between mythic and linguistic modes of symbolization never vanished entirely. Language, "while it is in progress," appears as a force independent of its user. To be sure, secular consciousness lost the illusion of non-human existence in mythic imagery. Further, scientific explanation sought to dispense with all but the most artificial systems of symbolization. But if myth is disenchanted and has consequently forfeited its power of social cohesion, language still preserves something of the same quasi-mythic opacity.

Language, then, even "secular" language, might bear persistent traces of mythic elements, in so far as language and myth constitute individual and

36. LM49-51. 37. LM61. Cassirer emphasizes "community," the other emphasis is mine.




social identity. Ordinary experience might preserve the sense of passivity that originally belonged to the mythic conception of language. If, so, then Cassirer would admit a non-spontaneous character in all meaning-structures, mythic and secular alike. But whether Cassirer really meant that an element of mythic receptivity remains in the secular conception of reality might be disputed. In any event, the qualification poses no significant problem for his theory more generally. Even without this prerequisite, it is instructive to compare Cassirer's model of mythical consciousness to Heidegger's analysis, since Heidegger admits no transformation whatso- ever in the basic structures of meaning. Indeed, the passivity that belongs to Cassirer's chief characteristics of the mythic conception of language closely resembles the "thrownness" that Heidegger considers a basic characteristic of all human meaning, as summarized in his statement that it is not man, but instead "it is language that speaks."38

It is important to emphasize that Cassirer's overall theory of secularization introduced a crucial distinction into the comparison of mythic and modern consciousness. Whereas mythic thought remains confined to the illusion of receptivity, modem consciousness can, at any moment, free itself from the language-like texture of its surroundings to recognize its own agency. Cassirer concluded that

we are faced with a characteristic of mythic thinking which divides it sharply from the way of"discursive" or theoretical, reflection. The latter is characterized by the fact that even in apparently immediately "given" data it recognizes an element of mental creation [...] Even in matters of fact it reveals an aspect of mental formulation; even in sheer sense data it traces the influence of a "spontaneity of thought" that goes to their making. - But while logical reflection tends [ . .] to resolve all receptivity into spontaneity, mythic conception shows exactly the opposite tendency, namely, to regard all spontaneous action as something receptive, and all human achievement as something merely bestowed.'9

For Cassirer, the difference between "mythical" and modern, "theoretical" thought remained decisive. Whereas myth regards meaning as something "bestowed" and does not recognize the primitive evidence of its own mental activity in mythic forms, theoretical reflection emerges

38. Martin Heidegger, "...Poetically Man Dwells...," Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1971) 211-229; 216.

39. LM60, my emphasis.




from the self-negating "dialectic of mythical consciousness," and passes through the higher and more self-consciously symbolizing stage of religion, to reach at last the apogee of development where human consciousness sees worldly experience - even experiences of mere fact - as governed by its own mental principles. This essentially Kantian insight into the "spontaneity of thought" is only possible for a subject who has achieved the self-transparency and demythologized understanding characteristic of secular modemrnity.40 In its final stages, the symbolizing function "leaves [. . .] behind" both myth and religion, and rises to a mode of "aesthetic consciousness" in which the imagistic expressions of mind relinquish any claim to non-subjective "reality." In art, the fruits of symbolizing consciousness

confess themselves to be illusion as opposed to the empirical reality of things; but this illusion has its own truth because it possesses its own law. In the return to this law there arises a new freedom of consciousness: the image no longer reacts upon the spirit as an independent material thing but becomes for the spirit a pure expression of its own creative power.41

In sum, Cassirer's philosophy rested upon a teleological premise that takes the enlightenment subject as the necessary goal of human development. Moreover, it provides an unapologetic defense of secularism as the precondition for any truly philosophical account of myth: Because only secular consciousness can recognize the "spiritual necessity" from which myth is derived, it follows that only secular consciousness can possibly possess the requisite instruments to subject mythological systems to genuinely philosophical understanding.42 It is worth noting that Cassirer's commitment to the Kantian conception of a transcendental self marks the decisive difference between his theory of myth and that of Levi-Strauss, which Paul Ricoeur aptly summarizes, in a phrase cited approvingly by the author, as "Kantism without a transcendental sub-

ject.'"43 The danger attendant with this view is that the anthropological description is robbed of its non-mythic status, an implication which Levi- Strauss embraced in the introductory remarks to The Raw and the Cooked

40. See esp. PSF II, Part IV, "The Dialectic of Mythical Consciousnes" 235-61. 41. PSF II 261, my emphasis. 42. PSE II, English 21. 43. Paul Ricoeur, "Symbole et temporaliti," Archivo di Filosofia 1-2 (1963): 24;

quoted in L6vi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, Introduction to a Science of Mythology, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Octagon Books, 1979) 11, originally Le Cru et le Cuit (Paris: Plon, 1964).




(1964) and he affirmed that his own reconstructions were themselves a species of myth. While this generalized and fully synchronic theory risks collapsing the distinction between science and mythology, Cassirer's historicized model of Kantian spontaneity wards off the specter of anthropological relativism and in so doing, equips him with a preemptive justification for his own analysis.44 It was precisely Cassirer's assumption of a "secular" or transcendental consciousness that Heidegger disputed.

Cassirer and Heidegger on Myth and Subjectivity For more than twenty years, Cassirer and Heidegger engaged in an

uneasy and often interrupted philosophical discussion that revolved chiefly around the question of myth. The debate began in 1923 when the two philosophers exchanged thoughts during a local "Kant society" meeting in Hamburg. In Being and Time, Heidegger acknowledged Cas- sirer for having "recently made the Dasein of myth a theme for philosophical interpretation," and the following year he published an extended review of Cassirer's myth-philosophy as presented in PSF, Volume II. Their most extensive discussion occurred in the spring of 1929, when they met publicly at Davos, Switzerland for a dramatic disputation concerning the broader aims of Kantian philosophy. Once again, the conversation hinged on contrasting models of human subjectivity, and Heidegger energetically disputed the Kantian premises of Cassirer's ideal of freedom. There is some evidence, albeit uncertain, that Heidegger might have behaved toward Cassirer with noticeable aggression.45 It is certain, however, that relations between them soured shortly thereafter. Cassirer's 1932 review of Heidegger's book, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, in Kantstudien, expanded on and sharpened the criticism of Heidegger's work he made public three years

44. This doctrine of secularization as a self-justifying description of philosophical practice is repeated most forcefully in the introductory comments to volume three, which is devoted to the logic of scientific explanation. "For the concept of philosophy attains its full power and purity only where the world view expressed in linguistic and mythical concepts is abandoned, where it is in principle overcome. The logic of philosophy first constitutes itself by this very act of transcendence. To achieve its own maturity, philosophy must above all come to grips with the linguistic and mythical worlds and place itself in dialectic opposition to them. Only in this way can it define and assert is concepts of essence and truth." PSF, III 16.

45. According to Hendrik J. Pos, Heidegger did not shake Cassirer's hand, see, "Recollections of Ernst Cassirer," The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp, Vol. 6, The Library of the Living Philosophers (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1949) 61-72, 69.




earlier. More recently, a little-known manuscript from 1929 entitled "Spirit and Life" has come to light that Cassirer had meant to include in a projected fourth volume of PSF. In it he accuses Heidegger of aban- doning philosophical objectivity and falling into a religiously-tinged solipsism. Even more dramatic are the closing pages of The Myth of the State, where Cassirer condemns Heidegger for having endorsed "modern political myths."46

In order to understand the stakes of this dispute, one must consider Heidegger's remarks on mythic consciousness in Being and Time. It is also helpful to recall that the book's broader aim was to lay out a phenomenological description of the basic structure of human understanding. Moreover, he insists from the outset that human understanding only shows itself in the unfolding process of existence itself. There is, in other words, no core "essence" of human being besides that which takes shape in the course of living one's life and interpretatively developing one's identity along the way. "Dasein's 'essence,'" Heidegger claimed, "just is and is nothing other than its existence." First and most trivially, this means that understanding the world is something that occurs wholly "in-the-world." Heidegger, like Kant and Cassirer following him, showed little patience for extramundane speculation. More importantly, this implies that the basic structures of human understanding are grounded in everyday life. There is no special "spirit" or "transcendental self," Heidegger claimed, that lies somewhere beneath the worldly self as its logical support. There is, however, a "logic" to existence itself, in that one's interpretative activity in the world exhibits certain modes of understanding that admit of formal description. In Being and Time Heidegger strove to differentiate those modes through what he called an "existential analytic."

This so-called existential analytic was clearly offered as a corrective to what Kant had called the "transcendental" analytic in the Critique of Pure Reason. An important difference is Heidegger's belief that human understanding does not enjoy "transcendental" prestige, as it does not rest upon a foundation other than its own temporal existence, or Dasein. This belief sets Heidegger at odds with Cassirer, whose entire philosophy, as shown above, rests upon the presupposition that human understanding exhibits an unmistakable moment of "spontaneity." Heidegger rejected any philosophy that sought to isolate principles of mental spontaneity

46. MS 355.




within the structure of human understanding. Rather than beginning with any so-called "transcendental" logic and analyzing reason in abstraction from practice, Heidegger claims that the basic rules of human meaning are best discerned by concentrating upon the way our interpretative activity actually works in medias res. Thus he rejects any attempt to isolate rules of meaning from existence, specifically, the method of epoch&, or "bracketing" that is the hallmark of Husserl's "transcendental phenomenology." Instead, he concentrates his analysis on that always-situated sort of interpretative practice which Husserl identifies with "the natural conception of the world."47 In Heidegger's own terminology, the task is to explicate the meaning-structure of human existence in its "everydayness" [Alltaglichkeit].48

Heidegger's interest in myth and "primitive" consciousness arose directly from his methodological focus on everydayness. In the final section of the expository chapter of Being and Time, Heidegger announces "the task of a preparatory analysis of Dasein," and warns readers not to mistake the philosophical engagement of everydayness for a sophisticated rejection of modernity: "Everydayness does not coin- cide with primitiveness," he explains, and it must be considered a con- stant modality of Dasein's being, "even when that Dasein is active in a highly developed and differentiated culture.'"49 Heidegger is strongly opposed to nostalgic attempts to locate the more "genuine" aspects of human life in what is merely "some primitive stage of Dasein with which we can become acquainted empirically through the medium of anthropology." With "everydayness" he wishes only to draw philosophical attention to the fact that human interpretative activities are, for the most part, lived in the manner of absorbed and non-discursive concern. Everydayness is a modality for all human understanding, and, among other things, this implied that primitive Dasein exhibits everydayness no less and no more than does any sort of "developed" culture. Heidegger was therefore wary of anthropological studies, which tended in his view to rely upon a naively empiricist technique for gathering information

47. Indeed, Husserl suggested that working out a logic of the natural conception of the world was a crucial task for phenomenology. See Ideas, I. General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1931), esp. 101-103.

48. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 11th ed. (Ttibingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967), hereafter, SZ. Translations from Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquar- rie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), hereafter, BT. Quotation from SZ s 9, 67-71, esp. 70, translation modified.

49. SZ s 11, 76-77, 76, original emphasis.




about native systems of meaning. "Ethnology itself," he warned, "already presupposes as its clue an inadequate analytic of Dasein."50

Despite this warning, Heidegger's existential analysis of myth closely resembled that of Malinowski's functionalism, according to which myth serves a universal human purpose: to render livable that sense of "over- whelming foreboding, behind which, even for the native, there lurks the idea of an inevitable and ruthless fatality."51 What Malinowski called the "pragmatic charter of primitive belief," and the "backbone" of community, Heidegger now identified as the "background" to the lived-pragmatic world.52 Like Durkheim and Malinowski, Heidegger sees that a certain methodological advantage can be derived from fixing one's attention on the "life of primitive peoples," because:

'primitive phenomena' are often less concealed and less complicated by extensive self-interpretation on the part of the Dasein in question. Primitive Dasein often speaks to us more directly in terms ofa primordial absorption in 'phenomena' [. . .] A way of conceiving things which seems, perhaps, rather clumsy and crude from our standpoint [therefore], can be positively helpful in bringing out the ontological structures of phenomena in a genuine way.53

Although Heidegger sees human culture as the ongoing work of self- interpretation, he suggests that there might be an added benefit in attending more specifically to primitive cultures, in which the basic out- lines of "everydayness" remain most vivid.54 As evidence of how philosophers can learn from the study of primitive culture, Heidegger specifically cites Cassirer's PSF II: Mythical Thought, which contains "clues of far-reaching importance." However, he already registers

50. SZ 5 1; BT 76. 51. Malinowski, "Myth in Primitive Psychology" 108. 52. Malinowski, "Myth in Primitive Psychology" 82. 53. SZ51;BT 76. 54. It is worth noting that Heidegger's attraction to primitive systems of meaning

that are "less concealed" in their ontological structure resembles Malinowski's arguments, and also those put forth by Emile Durkheim in his classic study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). For Durkheim, "all religion is true," and all cultures express some variant of religion, just as Heidegger finds "everydayness" in all culture. More importantly, both Heidegger and Durkheim believe that the focus on "primitive" belief is most useful methodologically, that it discloses the structure of human meaning in "simpler" and more vivid fashion. Primitive religion, he argues, is "crude and rudimentary," and not yet "elaborated" to the point of obscuring their deeper structure. See Durkheim, The Elemen- tary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (New York: The Free Press, 1995) 7.




doubts concerning Cassirer's transcendental presuppositions. "[I]t remains an open question," he writes, "whether the foundations of this Interpretation are sufficiently transparent - whether [...] the architec- tonics and [. . .] systematic content of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason can provide a possible design for such a task, or whether a new and more primordial approach may not here be needed."55

If Heidegger did not make sufficiently clear what he found unsatisfac- tory, the broader drift of his remarks is evident. Cassirer's study of myth presupposes a Kantian model of subjectivity and it regards myth through the distorting lens of transcendental consciousness. But, Heidegger argues, if mythological study is to have any bearing on the philosophical analysis of everydayness, it must be anchored in a very different model of the subject. Heidegger's focus on the practical and situated quality of "everyday" meaning offers a superior model of human Dasein precisely because it avoids any reference to a "consciousness" that is split off from its interpretative activity. But then a "new" and "more primordial" method is needed. For such a task, Heidegger suggests, only phenomenology will do. To strengthen his case by comparison, he observes, rather disingenuously, that Cassirer himself concedes the usefulness of a phenomenological approach in PSF II. Moreover, he notes that, in his 1923 conversation with Cassirer in Ham- burg, "we had agreed in demanding an existential analytic."56

Heidegger's doubts regarding the validity of transcendental subjectivity when applied to myth was most explicit in his lengthy criticism of Cassirer's PSE II that he published in 1928.57 Now there was no mis- taking his criticism. "The neo-Kantian orientation to the problem of consciousness," wrote Heidegger, "is so disadvantageous, that it [. . .] hinders a firm footing in the center of the problem."58 The difficulty was that Cassirer already assumed the "ontological constitution" of the subject prior to his investigation, while "a radical ontology of Dasein in

55. BT 290, n. xi. 56. SZ Div. I, Ch. 1, n. xi. 57. Martin Heidegger, "Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. 2.

Teil: Das mythische Denken. Berlin 1925" (Review). Originally, Deutsche Literaturzei- tung, N.F. 5, Heft 21 (1928): 1000-1012. Reprinted as Appendix II in Kant und der Prob- lem der Metaphysik, 5th ed. (Frankfurt/Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991) 255-270; in English as "Review of Mythic Thought," The Piety of Thinking: Essays by Martin Heideg- ger, trans. James Hart and John Maraldo (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1976) 32-45, hereafter, MH: Review ofPSFII.

58. MH: Review of PSFII 42.




the light of the problem of Being in general" was required. The analysis of mana, for example, seemed to highlight the fact that mythic human existence does not conceive of its meaning-systems as mere "representations" that are simply "present" [vorhanden] to a consciousness. Mana, in particular, was a powerful illustration of the fact that, for "mythic Dasein," the meaningfulness of the world could not be por- trayed as born from the sovereign capacities of an expressive subject.

Which is the mode of being of mythic "life" which enables the mana- representation to function as the guiding [. . .] understanding of Being? The possible answer to this question of course presupposes a previous working out of the basic ontological constitution of Dasein. If this basic constitution is to be found in "care," [.. .] then it becomes clear that mythic Dasein is primarily determined by "thrownness" [Geworfenheit].59

For Heidegger, mana indicates a mode of meaning not subject to human control. Therefore, it is presumptuous for Cassirer to describe mana from the point of view of a specifically "modern" and enlightenment consciousness, as if it is obvious that mythic thinking expresses the dis- engagement and "presence" characteristic of a Kantian subject. "In 'thrownness,'" Heidegger concludes, "mythic Dasein, in its manner of being-in-the-world, is delivered up to the world in such a way that it is overwhelmed by that to which it is delivered up."60

The difference is dramatic. For Heidegger, the analysis of mythic meaning can only succeed if it presupposes a subject characterized by "thrownness" and not "spontaneity" as its methodological point of departure. This implies that one should not presume a subject that is split from the "objects" it represents on the ontological level. The sense of being "overwhelmed" by representations is not, as Cassirer supposed, merely an illusion inflicted upon a primitive consciousness that lacks rational insight into its own powers of creation. Instead, it is an experience of all human existence in its "everyday" mode. Cassirer assumes as "a basic rule which governs all development" that "spirit achieves true and complete inwardness only in expressing itself."61 But even this model of expression points away from the Kantian model of subjectivity as sovereign and toward a model of subjecthood as dependent. To

59. MH: Review ofPSFII 43. 60. MH: Review of PSFII 43. 61. MH: Review of PSFII44; citing German of PSFII 242; and English PSFII 196.




emphasize this point, Heidegger poses a purely rhetorical question: "What is the ontological constitution of human Dasein which accounts for the fact that it, as it were, comes to its proper self only by way of a detour through the world?"62

As this abbreviated summary may suggest, the disagreement between Cassirer and Heidegger concerning the appropriate subject-model for the study of myth was not an isolated affair. It was rooted in more basic, ontological assumptions regarding the constitution of language, meaning, and the self. As noted above, Cassirer regarded the primitive understanding of myth as essentially a misunderstanding, since he took it as a given that all myth and language are the projections of sovereign human consciousness. Because only the modern subject could recognize culture as the effects of its own creative agency, the only proper analysis of myth was that performed by the modemrn, secular mind.63 Heidegger, by contrast, wished to address myth on its own terms, which meant that he saw the experience of dependency as something inelim- inable from phenomenological description. He also supposed that myth promises a "more direct" or simplified illustration of how "everydayness" functions more generally. He concluded that the mythical sense of dependency - myth as thrownness - could afford philosophy a crucial glimpse into the ontological constitution of human existence as such.64

62. MH: Review of PSFII 45. The Heideggerian perspective implies that myth is a structure without transcendental anchor, and without a "center" or point of naturalistic contact with the real - a view that closely anticipates Jacques Derrida's criticism of Claude Ldvi-Strauss's views in his address, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," first published in Derrida, L'dcriture et la dfference (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967); in English as Writing andDifference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1978).

63. Habermas eloquently summarizes Cassirer's view: "The position of human being in the world is defined by a form-giving power which transforms sense impressions into meaningful structures. Human beings master the forces of nature which rush in upon them through symbols which spring from the productive imagination. Thus they gain a distance from the immediate pressure of nature. Of course, they pay for this emancipation with their mental dependence on a semanticized nature, which returns in the spellbindingforce of mythical images. That first act of distantiation must therefore be repeated in the course of cultural development." Jiirgen Habermas, "The Liberating Power of Symbols: Ernst Cassirer's Humanistic Legacy and the Warburg Library," The Liberating Power of Symbols: Philosoph- ical Essays, trans. Peter Dews (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) 1-29, 24, my emphasis.

64. This view of dependency is summarized in Heidegger's almost "mythical" pro- nouncement that humanity does not possess language, since language is the "house of Being." See Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cam- bridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1998) 254.




The Davos Encounter and the Myth-Debate The contrast between thrown and spontaneous subjectivity was

brought to a head during Heidegger and Cassirer's famous meeting at Davos in 1929. The proposed topic was Kant's philosophy, which remained a major touchstone for any broader philosophical discussion. Even in the Weimar era, Kant was, in Heinrich Rickert's phrase, the "philosopher of modem culture."65 It seemed natural to organize the public encounter between Cassirer and Heidegger as a debate over the proper interpretation of Kantian doctrine.

It quickly became obvious that not only did Cassirer and Heidegger disagree about how best to read Kant, but more profoundly, about the status of philosophy as such. Indeed, Cassirer quickly discerned that Heidegger deploys Kant as an opportunity to promote his own "existential" brand of phenomenology. After listening to Heidegger's attempt to transform Kantian epistemology into what he called a "groundlaying for metaphysics" for three weeks, Cassirer complained that

there is hardly a single concept which has been paraphrased with so little clarity as that of neo-Kantianism. What does Heidegger have in mind when he employs the phenomenological critique in place of the neo-Kantian one? Neo-Kantianism is the scapegoat [Stindenbock] of the newer philosophy.66

Heidegger's entire presentation of "existential" philosophy is, Cassirer claimed, based upon a one-sided caricature of the Marburg neo-Kantian legacy. Heidegger spoke as if Cohen's entire teaching could be reduced to a mere theory of scientific discovery, whereas, in fact, Cassirer suggested, the term "neo-Kantianism" was best understood not "substan- tially" but "functionally." The Kantian view is not reducible to a "kind of philosophy as dogmatic doctrinal system" [als dogmatisches Lehr- system] but is instead "a direction for posing questions." [eine Richtung der Fragestellung]67

65. Heinrich Rickert, Kant als Philosoph der modernen Kultur; ein geschichtsphil- osophischer Versuch (Tilbingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1924).

66. "Davos Disputation," cited in the original Davos transcript from Otto Friedrich Bollnow and Joachim Ritter, Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, GS, Band 3 (1973) 274-296, in English, in Heidegger, Kant and the Problem ofMetaphys- ics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1990) 171-185; 171, translation ammended. Hereafter cited as Davos. For documentation and interpretative esssays, see most recently, Dominic Kaegi and Enno Rudolph, eds. Cassirer - Heidegger 70 Jahre Davoser Debatte (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 2002).

67. Davos 171.




But if Cassirer is right, then the difference between his own quasi- Kantian "direction" of philosophical inquiry and Heidegger's "existential" orientation is even more dramatic than it appeared at first. Kantian- ism is merely the "scapegoat" for a general disagreement concerning the status of the "modern" subject in philosophy. Cassirer insists that the theory of symbolic forms illustrates the validity of the Kantian-transcendental subject-model, since the theory shows how human experience in diverse spheres is governed by the formative action of human spirit itself. It is the principle of form, Cassirer said, that allows the subject to "transpose everything in him which is lived experience into some objective shape," in which he discovers nothing but his own mental energy "objectified" as world-meaning. There is, Cassirer affirms, "a true spiritual realm," but it is nothing more or less than "the spiritual world created from himself."68 Moreover, whatever one's doubts concerning the origins of human culture, it is clear that ethics provides an illustration of the human capacity to live by forms one has oneself created. Cassirer concludes that this is the essence of Kantian autonomy and through the categorical imperative, the human being is capable of a "breakthrough" [Durchbruch] to a plane "which is no longer relative to the finitude" of mere existence.69

Heidegger, not surprisingly, found such arguments unacceptable, and he noted that any inquiry into the "essence" of human being must be founded on an ontological basis quite different from the neo-Kantian premise of mental spontaneity. "How is the inner structure of Dasein itself," he asked, "is it finite or infinite?" To answer this question, Heidegger claimed, one must return to "philosophy's central problem- atic," which implies throwing man "into the totality of beings" in order to "reveal to him there, with all his freedom, the nothingness of his Dasein." Heidegger understood that from the neo-Kantian position, a philosopher's fixation on themes of world-dependency or finitude appear as little more than an "occasion for pessimism and melancholy." But it was in fact an "occasion for understanding [...] that philosophy has the task of throwing man back, so to speak, into the hardness of his fate from the shallow aspect of a man who merely uses the work of the spirit."70

Cassirer's allusion to ethics does not prove the self's "infinite" formative agency, since even the categorical imperative requires a finite

68. Davos 179. 69. Davos 291. 70. Davos 291.




being whose capacities for self-transparency are, Heidegger claims, necessarily limited to mortal existence.

In the Categorical Imperative we have something which goes beyond the finite creature. But precisely the concept of the Imperative as such shows the inner reference to a finite creature. Also, this going-beyond to something higher is always just a going-beyond to the finite creature, to one which is created (angel). This transcendence too still remains within the [sphere of] creatureliness [Geschapflichkeit] and finitude.71

For Heidegger, the transcendental capacities of the self are severely limited by the constitutive features of "creatureliness." What Cassirer celebrates as the human ability to "live" in obedience to one's own rules is, from another perspective, further evidence of the fact that mental agency cannot achieve, as Cassirer contends, any true "breakthrough" to a sphere of absolute objectivity. Heidegger's startling reference to an "angel" demonstrates that his philosophical rejection of an enlightenment model of mental spontaneity draws upon religious resources.

The Davos disputation has remained a reference point in the history of philosophy, not least because it has afforded many commentators with a dramatic illustration of the cultural rift which threatened Ger- man culture in 1929.72 There is some evidence that the public confrontation between the two philosophers was not entirely amicable. One of Cassirer's students has written that when Cassirer offered his hand to his interlocutor at the end of the discussion, Heidegger refused to take it.

71. Davos 279. 72. On the Davos disputation, see the excellent study by Michael Friedman, A Part-

ing of the Ways (Chicago: Open Court, 2000); and also Pierre Aubenque, Luc Ferry, Enno Rudolph, Jean-Francois Courtine, and Fabien Capeillires, "Roundtable Discussion on 'Philosophie und Politik: Die Davoser Disputation zwischen Ernst Cassirer und Martin Heidegger in der Retrospektive'," Internationale Zeitschriftfiir Philosophie, Heft 2 (1992): 290-312; Aubenque, "Le Ddbat de 1929 entre Cassirer et Heidegger" Ernst Cassirer: De Marbourg /i New York, L'intindraire philosophique, ed. Jean Seidengart (Paris: Les Edi- tions du Cerf, 1990) 81-96; Wayne Cristaudo, "Heidegger and Cassirer: Being, Knowing and Politics," Kantstudien 82 (1991): 469-483; Karlfried Griinder, "Cassirer und Heidegger in Davos, 1929" Ober Ernst Cassirers Philosophie der Symbolishen Formen, eds. Hans- Jirg Braun, Helmut Holzhey, and Emrnst W. Orth (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1988); John Michael Krois, "Aufklrung und Metaphysik: Zur Philosophie Cassirers und der Davoser Debatte mit Heidegger," Internationale Zeitschriftfiir Philosophie 2 (1992): 273-289; Den- nis A. Lynch, "Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger: The Davos Debate," Kantstudien 81 (1990): 360-370; Frank Schalow, "Thinking at Cross Purposes with Kant: Reason, Fini- tude, and Truth in the Cassirer-Heidegger Debate," Kantstudien 87 (1996): 198-217; and Calvin O.Shrag, "Heidegger and Cassirer on Kant," Kantstudien 58 (1967): 87-100.




Moreover, four years later, Heidegger assumed the position of Rektor at Freiburg University under the aegis of the National Socialists, whereas Cassirer and his wife fled Hamburg in 1933, first to Vienna, and then to England and Sweden, before settling in the United States in 1941.

Many critics have been tempted to read Cassirer's confrontation with Heidegger in a straightforwardly political fashion. For Pierre Bourdieu, it appeared obvious that Heidegger's language is little more than a barely encrypted "irrationalism," a "conservative revolution" directed against liberal-democracy and the cultural legacy of Kant.73 Even Jtir- gen Habermas transforms Cassirer's arguments into presentist political material when he notes that the "humanist legacy which Cassirer bequeaths to us through his philosophy consists not least in sensitizing us to the fake primordiality of political myths." In what seems an inten- tional reference to Heidegger, Habermas hastens to add that "Cassirer makes us wary of the intellectual celebration of archaic origins, which is widespread today as in the 1930s."74

It would be rash, however, to read the Heidegger-Cassirer dispute in any directly "political" fashion.75 The Davos encounter was only one moment in an ongoing philosophical discussion as to whether the mod- emrnist's faith in the autonomy of the subject is warranted. Cassirer's essentially Kantian view of spontaneous consciousness contrasts dramati- cally with Heidegger's theory of human being-in-the-world as essentially "thrown." Significantly, Cassirer's portrait of mythic consciousness bears striking resemblance to Heidegger's portrait of Dasein, notwith- standing its historical status, primitive or modern. For example, what

73. Bourdieu's violent reduction of philosophy to little more than a field of cultural power seems remarkably inconsistent with any defense of rationalism. Of course, this is not Bourdieu's point, since he reflexively admits the embeddedness of his own perspective. Still, he risks making a merely ad hominem allegory when he suggests that "Heideg- ger's hostility to the grand masters of Kantianism, especially Cassirer, was rooted in a profound incompatibility with their alien habitus," which included the tension between "this dark, atheletic little man," and the "white-haired man, Olympian not only in appearance but in spirit." One should note that Bourdieu is quoting the memoir of an audience member at Davos; the question remains what Heidegger's "dark" appearance is supposed to indicate in contrast to Cassirer's prematurely white hair. Needless to say, the contrast, Olympian reference aside, calls upon a panoply of mythical oppositions. See Pierre Bour- dieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991) 48.

74. Habermas, "The Liberating Power of Symbols" 26. 75. For a longer treatment of the problems involved in the political interpretation of

the Davos encounter, see my essay, "Continental Divide: Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger at Davos, 1929 - an Allegory of Intellectual History," Modern Intellectual History 1.2 (2004): 219-248.




Cassirer considered peculiar to the mythic conception of space - where "zones and directions [Orte und Richtungen] of space stand out from one another because a different accent of meaning is connected with them" - anticipates the "existential" of space-as-environment that Heidegger considered a structural feature of being-in-the-world. "If Dasein, in its concern, brings something close by, this does not signify that it fixes something at a spatial position with a minimal distance from some points of the body"; it signifies a "regional" and ready-to-hand involvement insofar as it is "something [. . .] we can come across [...] as having form and direction [wird das Zuhandene nach Form und Richtung vorfindlich]."76

The apparent similarity between these two theories of space is even more striking, because Cassirer emphasizes the merely provisional status of the mythic conception. He claims that myth, by force of its own dialectical logic, must eventually "go beyond" itself to the more abstracted symbolism of religion, and eventually to the enlightened frameworks of science.77 On Cassirer's view, myth necessarily outgrew those very modes of understanding that Heidegger considered permanent and structural "existentials" of human being.78 Moreover, in a footnote to PSF, Cassirer hinted at a resemblance between the mythic conception of language and certain characteristics of "psychopathology."79 This is a profound, but politically indeterminate remark. Still, it contains a force- ful anticipation of Cassirer's later claim that Heidegger's philosophy is itself symptomatic of the modern reversion to myth. Almost twenty years later, once Cassirer had begun teaching in America, he expanded on this argument in his own, expressly political assessment of Heidegger's thinking in what was to be his final work, The Myth of the State.

Cassirer's Political Testament Cassirer's The Myth of the State is one of the faded classics of mid-

twentieth-century intellectual history. A genealogy of National Socialism,

76. Cassirer, PSF II 96 (German 122); Heidegger, BT 144-45; SZ 110-111. 77. See esp. PSF, II, Part IV, "The Dialectic of Mythical Consciousness" 235-261. 78. For Cassirer's explicit remarks on surpassing Heideggerian pragmatic space, see

the remarks in PSF, Vol. III: "What distinguishes our own undertaking from that of Heidegger is above all that it does not stop at this stage of the at-hand and its mode of spatiality, but without challenging Heidegger's position goes beyond it; for we wish to follow the road leading from spatiality as a factor in the at-hand to space as a form of existence, and furthermore to show how this road leads right through the domain of symbolic formation." 149 n. 4, my emphasis.

79. See PSF II 41-42, n. 13.




it presents the history of political thought as an ongoing struggle between "logos" and "mythos," between a "rational" theory of the state promoting freedom and autonomy, and a "mythic" theory presenting the world as governed by forces beyond human control, condemning us to unfreedom and ontological passivity. Within this broad scheme, Cassirer emphasizes those moments of struggle between logos and myth that anticipate the modern clash between the republican ideal of autarky and the fascist myth of collective submission. He takes particular care to prove how the contemporary encounter with mythic politics is rooted in ancient sources. Plato's "struggle against myth" and the consequent ban- ishment of the arts from the polis is only an expression of that deeper, "rationalist" tendency in Platonic thought, which, Cassirer claims, teaches "how to classify and systematize our concepts," to impose form upon the world and bring "the chaos of our minds, of our desires and passions, of our political and social life [.. .] into order and harmony."80

For Cassirer, a rational theory of politics cannot be defined in isola- tion from broader philosophical commitments. A politics of reason gains its definitive character only insofar as it draws upon a transcendental theory of mind, and as a rational epistemology implies spontaneity, it demands a model of the subject that is capable of actively forging the rules that order its experience. Similarly, rational politics imply "autarky" or self-rule: To be rational is to enjoy an active share in self- governance. But for Cassirer, there is more than an analogy between the epistemological and political manifestations of reason. As discussed above, Cassirer believes that "mythic" consciousness is essentially incapable of recognizing its own formative agency. It follows that a mythical vision of the world lacks the experience of self-transparency that autarky requires. Only a fully secular consciousness achieves the full measure of self-recognition and therefore self-governance.81

Cassirer illustrates this point by assessing some of the paramount fig- ures of Western political theory. Machiavelli's theory of statecraft, for example, can hardly be considered a perfect expression of autarky, since government is solely for the prince and not the people. Nonetheless, it is an important step in the "secularization of the symbol of Fortune."82 Although originally a mythic force beyond human appeal, Fortuna

80. MS 93. 81. For a summary of this theme in German Idealism, see my review essay, "Self-

Authorizing Modernity, Problems of Interpretation in the History of German Idealism," History and Theory 44 (Feb. 2005): 121-137.

82. MS 199, emphasis in original.




becomes in Machiavelli's thinking a principle at least potentially responsive to human agency. Cassirer notes that for Machiavelli the true measure of princely skill is the ability to achieve some measure of rational mastery. "Man is not subdued to Fortune; he is not at the mercy of winds and waves. He must choose his course and steer his course." But, Cassirer hastened to add, "if he fails to perform this duty Fortune scorns and deserts him." Machiavelli is admittedly "the first philosophical advocate of a resolute militarism," but as a theorist of political logos he is most significant for his belief that statecraft must be achieved by "a clear, cool, and logical mind."83

From Machiavelli to the seventeenth-century foundations of social contract theory, Cassirer saw only a small step. Here, too, he celebrates the freedom and rationality of the subject. What he calls the "rational character" of the seventeenth-century's political philosophers is founded on their revival of an originally Stoic principle concerning the "autarky" of human reason. "Reason is autonomous and self-dependent. It is not in need of any external help; it could not even accept this help if it were offered. It has to find its own way and to believe in its own strength." As in Machiavelli, social contract theory supplants the notion of submission to mythic forces with the doctrine of rational control; it is now entirely purged of "mystery."

[F]or if we reduce the legal and social order to free individual acts, to a voluntary contractual submission of the governed, all mystery is gone. There is nothing less mysterious than a contract. A contract must be made in full awareness of its meaning and consequences; it presupposes the free consent of all the parties concerned.84

Vanquishing "mystery" requires stripping the political sphere of all meaning in which one could not recognize one's own agency. Contrac- tual politics presuppose demythologization: the mythical experience of dispossession can be fully dissolved into the experience of self-reflec- tive reason.

Today, much of Cassirer's political analysis may appear naive. The contrast between reason and myth seems too stark to be serviceable in identfying more specific doctrines in the history of political thought. Indeed, the argument makes the choice of correct politics so obvious that

83. MS 200, 202-203. 84. MS 216.




the real divergence of opinion appears inexplicable. The entire narrative seems bent toward unifying diverse political philosophies into the general drama of an ongoing battle, between the hypostasized and transhistorical forces of "mythos" and "logos," a schema, ironically, which seems to call upon the very style of mythic thought it wants to combat.

One explanation for this weakness is Cassirer's uncritical fidelity to the Enlightenment. His public address, "The Idea of the Republican Constitution," which was delivered on the constitutional anniversary of August 11, 1928, presents an eloquent and moving defense of democracy as rooted deep in Kantian thought. The principle of republican government, Cassirer claims, drew upon Kant's enlightenment faith in the "intelligible" character of the human being in relation to its sensual surroundings, and its capacity to lift itself above the "causal nexus" of "empirical-historical events" as a "subject of freedom." The rhetorical urgency of this claim is unmistakable: At a moment when a nationalist prejudice was gathering force in the belief that Weimar democracy was "un-German," Cassirer wished to prove that "the idea of a republican constitution was hardly a 'foreigner' [Fremdling] to German intellectual history [deutschen Geistesgeschichte]," but had in fact "grown from its native ground" and had been "nourished upon its most unique ener- gies [. . .] of idealist philosophy."85 Cassirer's other widely read work of intellectual history, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), is also an encomium to the period which "discovered and passionately defended the autonomy of reason [. . .] in all fields of knowledge."86 Indeed, it is the essentially Kantian principle of mental agency, which Cassirer believed brought all of the diverse currents of eighteenth-century thought to perfection. This admiration, however, admits little qualification. The prefatory remarks for the 1932 edition urged readers that "[m]ore than ever before" it was important to hold up to "the present age" that "bright clear mirror fashioned by the Enlightenment," and that the "age which venerated reason and science as man's highest faculty cannot and must not be lost even for us."87

While Cassirer was perhaps right to think that the Weimar experiment was under assault due in part to the reemergence of "anti-Enlighten- ment" sentiments, he lacked insight into the limits of the Enlightenment itself. He was unmoved by the spirit of rueful paradox that allowed the

85. Die Idee 31. 86. PE, English xi, my emphasis. 87. PE, English xi, my emphasis.




Frankfurt School, among others, to discern in the dialectical relation between myth and enlightenment the specifically modern sources of fascism. Indeed, the entirety of Cassirer's scholarship seems immune from any and all doubt concerning the ambivalent consequences of secular modernity. But this raises the troublesome question as to whether his commitment to the Enlightenment was itself a species of rationalist mythology.

In the closing pages of The Myth of the State, Cassirer turns back to reflect one last time upon the cultural and political ramifications of Heideg- ger's philosophy. Its core idea, Cassirer observes, is that "existence has a historical character" and "is bound up with the special conditions under which the individual lives. To change these conditions is impossible."

In order to express his thought Heidegger had to coin a new term. He spoke of the Geworfenheit of man (the being-thrown). To be thrown into the stream of time is a fundamental and inalterable feature of our human situation. We cannot emerge from this stream and we cannot change its course. We have to accept the historical conditions of our existence. We can try to understand and interpret them; but we cannot change them.88

Although one might quarrel with this summary of Heideggerian "thrownness," Cassirer makes it clear that he is not interested in Heidegger's philosophy itself; he is concerned solely with its cultural consequences: "I do not mean to say that these philosophical doctrines had a direct bearing on the development of political ideas in Germany. Most of these ideas arose from quite different sources." But Heideg- ger's thinking, Cassirer observes, helped at the very least to "enfeeble and slowly undermine the forces that could have resisted the modern political myths." It was judged not on its merits as philosophy, but instead as an "instrument" of Nazi propaganda:

[. . .] a theory that sees in the Geworfenheit of man one of his principal characteristics has given up all hopes of an active share in the construction and reconstruction of man's cultural life. Such a philosophy renounces its own fundamental theoretical and ethical ideals. It can be used, then, as a pliable instrument in the hands of the political leaders.89

This is Cassirer's final judgment of Heidegger: "Thrownness" had become

88. MS 368-9. 89. MS 369. My emphasis.




a "pliable instrument" to be manipulated as a myth for the benefit of National Socialism. Existentialism itself represented but one variant of what Cassirer calls "the return of fatalism in our modern world."90

The peculiarity of this criticism is that it does not address Heideg- ger's philosophy as such. It claims only that its philosophical themes were made serviceable as "political myth," as cultural beliefs that encouraged submission to the state. To be sure, Cassirer claims fatalism was already latent in Heidegger's philosophy. Moreover, by capitu- lating to Nazism, Cassirer observes, Heidegger betrayed the ideal of non-partisan philosophical inquiry. But Cassirer's charge nonetheless ignores the possibility that thrownness and mythic dependency are in fact constitutive features of the human subject - a possibility which requires philosophical discussion quite apart from the disastrous consequences of drafting such an insight for its political effects. Cassirer, however, seems to have believed his condemnation of Heidegger's own complicity in mythic politics suffices as proof that the idea of thrownness is itself a myth. But the analogy is specious, since the popular efficacy of an idea has no self-evident bearing on whether that idea is true. Indeed, Cassirer's argument implies evaluating philosophical ideas solely in terms of their political application, which is to say, evaluating them as political "myths." But this breaks down the distinction between philosophy and politics to such a degree that the only concepts to be praised are the ones which promote liberal-enlightenment effects when set loose in the broader circuit of political culture.

This argumentative shift - from conceptual truth to pragmatic efficacy - was most apparent in a 1944 lecture that Cassirer delivered at Connecticut College and closely followed the arguments of The Myth of the State. The lecture repeated almost verbatim the book's attempt to indict Heideggerian "thrownness" along with Oswald Spengler's theories of cultural decline as signals of Germany's atavistic return to the "general mythical concept [. . .] of fate." But here, Cassirer inserted the additional claim that philosophy must fulfill "its most important educational task," which is to "teach man how to develop his active faculties in order to form his individual and social life." According to Cassirer, however, Heideggerian thinking could not fulfill this mission:

As soon as philosophy no longer trusts its own power, as soon as it

90. MS 369.




gives way to a merely passive attitude, [...] it cannot teach man how to develop his active faculties in order to form his individual and social life. A philosophy that indulges in somber predications about the decline and inevitable destruction of human culture, a philosophy whose whole attention is focused on the Geworfenheit, the Being- thrown of man, can no longer do its duty.91

Here Cassirer conflates truth and pragmatic effect. He assumes that it is the presiding duty of philosophy, its "educational task," to promote the enlightenment of subjects for republican rule. To fulfill this task, however, Cassirer claims that a philosophy must endorse an ontology of freedom rather than fatality, since only the widespread belief in freedom would "teach man" how to "develop his active faculties in order to form his individual and social life." But this argument remains open to the charge of political partisanship, since it is based chiefly upon an empirical observation concerning the popular advantage of certain beliefs rather than a philosophical vindication of their truth. Ironically, by conflating what is true and what is merely an effective belief-framework for action, Cassirer found himself in dangerous proximity to the universal-pragmatist theory of myth he claimed to oppose.

How did Cassirer fall into this paradox? One explanation is that he failed to appreciate the phenomenon of modernist technique. As an unapologetic partisan of the Enlightenment, he embraced the view that secularization means liberation from mythic dependency, and that political liberty is therefore contingent upon achieving a fully demythologized subjectivity. At times his commitment to the Enlightenment seems to verge on dogmatic and perhaps religious foundations. In an essay published in 1944, Cassirer, following his teacher Hermann Cohen, extols the Jewish people - the mythical "enemy" in Nazi propaganda - for representing certain "ethical ideals," which, once "brought into being by Judaism," have "found their way into general human culture, into the life of all civilized nations." As the first religion to break from myth, Judaism has contributed to the ethical ideals that are required "to break the power of the modern political myths," and it has "done its duty, having once more fulfilled its historical and religious mission."92

This paean to Judaism is suggestive, since Cassirer identified the "duty" to break from myth not only with Judaism but also, as noted

91. "Philosophy and Politics," Symbol, Myth, and Culture 230. 92. Cassirer, "Judaism and the Modem Political Myths" 241. My emphasis.




above, with the liberatory impulse of secularizing philosophy itself. But the comparison only serves to show how Cassirer's philosophical project is committed - almost as an article of faith - to the possibility of a wholly disenchanted subjectivity. This moment of dogmatism in Cassirer's thinking becomes obvious if one contrasts the earlier writ- ings on myth, which display a generously functionalist view of myth, and the judgments in The Myth of the State, where Cassirer seems to deploy the term "myth" itself as a near-synonym for illusion. His antipa- thy for mythic unreason ran so deep that it blinded Cassirer to the question of modernity's independent share in spawning fascist thinking: He criticized the status of "myth" (as if the problem were solely mythic consciousness) but neglected the propagandistic "manipulation" of myth.

Cassirer never adequately addressed the modernist-subjective assumptions underlying this so-called "technique." As noted at the start of this essay, Cassirer recognized that the peculiarity of the "modern technical age" is that "myths can be manufactured [. . .] according to the same methods as any other modern weapon." Fascism, he claims, works by means of a "technique of myth," which is not to be confused with myth itself. But if so, it made little sense for Cassirer to attack Heidegger's philosophy as supporting "mythic" consciousness. He should have directly condemned the philosophical cast of mind that enables an instru- mentalist relation to myth, since he finds this instrumentalism the most peculiar feature of National Socialist rule. In other words, if fascism is a "technique of myth," which is more to blame, myth or technique?

It is easy to see why Cassirer avoided this question. Any scrutiny into the ontological sources of modern domination would have pushed Cas- sirer toward the recognition that fascism would not have been possible were it not for the modern ideal of autonomy. Cassirer refused to see any continuity between autonomy and fascism because he could not admit that the enlightenment subject itself bore at least some responsi- bility for modern domination. Heidegger, by contrast, had argued that the ideal is an illusion, since on his view the human being is always thrown into historical and social meanings that cannot be made fully available for subjective command. It is crucial to note that Cassirer misses the point that Heidegger's philosophical claims are primarily about how we are constituted as human beings, and not how we should believe ourselves to be constituted. In Heidegger's own jargon, such claims are ontological, not normative. But Cassirer did not take care to




distinguish between the conceptual understanding that we are thrown, and the normative proposal that one should submit to this condition. Of course, if normative claims on behalf of National Socialism appear to follow from "ontological" inquiries into human constitution, Heidegger himself is chiefly to blame. By lending an imprimatur of philosophical dignity to the execrable vernacular of National Socialist propaganda through his many speeches (which were replete, moreover, with his own philosophical terminology), Heidegger succeeded far more than Cas- sirer in opening an empirical route from ontology to politics.

Concluding Remarks Whatever its limitations, The Myth of the State has made an impor-

tant contribution to a broader discussion concerning the relation between secularization and reason in modern political life. Indeed, a chief point of dissension in both the Anglo-American and continental secularization debates is whether myth can be defined, with Cassirer, as a mystified expression of human imagination that must yield to the more "sophisticated" works of the self-transparent mind, or whether it is salutary to admit myth, with Heidegger, as the constitutive background of all human action and the name for a fundamental receptivity that cannot be expunged. I have tried to reconstruct the debate between Cas- sirer and Heidegger in order to illuminate some of their deeper assumptions. My aim is chiefly confined to exposition, but I also hope to advance a certain measure of skepticism regarding Cassirer's basically "Kantian" view that there can be such a thing as fully self-transparent subjectivity, i.e., a human being which enjoys the capacity to direct its action without reliance upon external meaning.

It is worth noting that this sort of skepticism is typically associated with the conservative critique of liberal autonomy. It can be found, for example, in such diverse works as Michael Oakeshott's 1947 essay, "Rationalism in Politics," which is widely regarded as the paradigm of conservative theory, as well as Alisdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981), and even Charles Taylor's politically more progressive reflections in Sources of the Self (1989). While divergent in many respects, these works share an appeal to the necessity of inherited "frameworks,"

93. Michael Oakeshott, "Rationalism in Politics," Rationalism in Politics and other essays (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1991); Alasdair C. Maclntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: U Notre Dame P, 1981); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989).




which are often understood in religious terms and are supposed to guide human action, and a correlative emphasis upon the limits of post-enlightenment reason, which they assail as "Cartesian," or "managerial," or, in Oakeschott's words, as "technique." On the Continent, such concerns lay at the heart of the so-called "secularization debate" of the 1960s, which pitted Hans Blumenberg's modernist defense of self-assertion in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966) against Karl L6with's indictment of "secular presumption" in Meaning in History (1949) as the transfig- ured face of an originally eschatological Heilsgeschichte. Most recently, Marcel Gauchet investigates the birth of political agency from religious otherness in his book, The Disenchantment of the World (1985), and offers liberal-democratic theory a deepened awareness of that "radical dispossession" which characterizes the most primal forms of religion.94

But it would be a mistake to assume that the critique of modern autonomy as illusory must result in conservative politics.95 There is no obvious or axiomatic relation between politics and ontology. Cassirer believed that "modern political myths" were both politically undesir- able as well as false. But what if autonomy is itself a "myth"? Cas- sirer's error was to have presumed that there is necessarily a link between "demythologized" subjectivity and political emancipation. It is this linkage - between enlightenment and freedom - that permits the self-justifying thesis that only liberalism is "true." But the two are in fact distinct. As Richard Rorty suggests, the beliefs that guide our actions in the political sphere are not bound to how we are constituted as human beings. One of the uncomfortable things about political action is that it cannot claim authority based on some deeper, putatively ontological

94. Karl L6with, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philoso- phy ofHistory (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1949); Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimitit der Neu- zeit (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1966) in English, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1983); Marcel Gauchet, Le disen- chantement du monde: une histoire politique de la religion (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), in English, The Disenchantment of the World: a political history of religion, trans. Oscar Burge, foreword by Charles Taylor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997).

95. The recognition that modem autonomy is founded upon a false ontology does not necessarily imply that it is dispensable. Ben Halpern has noted "the historical process whereby both 'myth' and 'ideology' acquired their derogatory connations and came to mean a 'subjective' or 'interested' approach to reality. Etymologically, 'myth' means simply a 'relating'; hence it was originally quite objective in meaning. It took on negative connotations through the very ancient Greek criticism of myth [. . .] and through the sub- sequent criticism of myth by monotheistic iconoclasm." See Halpern, "'Myth' and 'Ideol- ogy' in Modem Usage," History and Theory 1.2 (1961): 129-149, 131 n. 5.




knowledge about who we "really" are. Political judgments do not get their credence from metaphysical insight, although political actors fre- quently wish and behave as if this were the case. Liberalism is no more "true" to the self than any of its political alternatives, and to believe so is to subscribe to a faulty model of social meaning. Moreover, it is characteristic of many liberal political theories that they mistrust precisely those sorts of political movements that claim to embody the "truth" of human existence, since political appeals to certitude quite often turn pernicious.96

Ironically, it was Cassirer, not Heidegger, who wished to found his political philosophy upon the final and incorrigible knowledge of the wholly "demythologized" subject. But it is not obvious that human beings possess such knowledge, and it is even less obvious that such knowledge would inform a palatable political order. Cassirer presupposed human spontaneity, which forced him, however unwillingly, to regard myth merely as occluded spirit. Heidegger, on the other hand, believed that the study of myth could provide insight into the existential structure of all human meaning; he was not merely making a plea for "more" tradition. But it follows that there are always such myths independent of one's choice of political program. The significance of Marcel Gauchet's recent contribution to the secularization debate is, among other things, to suggest that a truly "liberal" theory of politics might best emerge from the post-Heideggerian recognition of human finitude rather than the quasi-Kantian presumption of self-transparency and ontological independence.

Here one can discern a difference between enlightenment and disenchantment: Whereas Cassirer described history as enlightenment through reason, Heidegger described history as disenchantment with metaphysics - especially, the metaphysics of rational control.97 Their philosophies seem to embody the two, distinct paths by which the subject of philosophy has moved from religion to modernity. For Heidegger, what distinguished the post-metaphysical subject of modernity is not that it has achieved a position of god-like sovereignty over its own constitutive meaning. On the contrary, the modern subject for Heidegger was

96. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1989).

97. This anti-foundationalist view may also underwrite a charistmatic, yet stoic "strength" in the face of nothingness. It is a feature of Weber's theory that Terry Maley has called the "politics of disenchantment." See Maley, "The Politics of Time: Subjectivity and Modernity in Max Weber," The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment, eds. Asher Horowitz and Terry Maley (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1994) 139-166.




one which had arrived at the "disenchanted" recognition of its own existential constitution: it knows itself to be thrown and no longer thinks itself capable of wresting itself free of this condition. It is aware that there are always background conditions to its action, and it concedes those conditions are without metaphysical ground. Heidegger's doctrine of myth thus implies the constitutive permanence of human finitude. It sustains the Christian doctrine of human fallenness, while recasting the- ism as the metaphysical theory of"nothingness."

According to Cassirer's philosophy, on the other hand, myth is the manifestation of human "infinite" capacities. It models epistemic and political action after the Hegelian image of a self-expressive spirit, and it regards the work of culture as a canvass upon which spirit leaves the traces of enlightenment freedom. One can rightly accuse Heidegger of anti-modernism, since his theory of the subject presumes the irrevoca- bility of the fall. For Heidegger, history cannot be dissolved, since its meanings are what lend subjectivity its grounding in the world. Thrownness is constitutive, and therefore unmasterable. Ironically, Cas- sirer's model of spiritual development that is supposedly the standard of modernity illicitly relies on Christian-eschatological hope.98 If so, then autonomy is the political trace of a theologically-inspired plenitude, the dream of meaning without dispossession.

On this point, the Frankfurt School took a position equidistant between Heidegger and Cassirer. Whereas Heidegger turned "nothingness" into the last metaphysical dogma, the Frankfurt School upheld the Kantian doctrine of self-regulating critique, without, however, indulging in the enlightenment view of freedom as an intelligible idea metaphysically at odds with historicity. This "qualified" faith in the promises of modernism, however, placed them at odds with Cassirer, whose own fidelity to the Kantian ideal of autonomy prevented him from recognizing modernity's own inner demons. Certainly, Adorno and Horkheimer are also famously critical of Heidegger, since they claim the critique of myth points toward an ideal of autonomy, which, though forever unrealized, must be sustained in thought if the unfinished project of enlightenment is to provide normative guidance. Even in Adorno's late work, Negative Dialectics, freedom retains its regulative function, but only at what

98. This is a point made by Karl L6with. The modernist "self-assertion" LiSwith criticized was later defended by Blumenberg. For a discussion of the latter, see Martin Jay, "Blumenberg and Modernism: A Reflection on The Legitimacy of the Modern Age," Fin de Siccle Socialism and Other Essays (New York: Routledge, 1988).




Albrecht Wellmer has called the "vanishing point of demythologization." Whether this meant the ideal was itself a "myth" remains unclear.99

What is certain is that the Frankfurt school locates fascist domination in an uncritical moment of freedom itself, and one might therefore charac- terize their position as a qualified modemrnism. They take up a position at some distance from Cassirer and are critical of his attempt to resur- rect the Enlightenment on its own terms, without, however, assuming with Heidegger an attitude of mere "piety" external to subjectivist metaphysics. But the Frankfurt "left" and the Heideggerian "right" critique of technological domination nonetheless converge in the claim that idealism's celebrated notion of spontaneity has spawned a specifically modern will to mastery and decontextualized technique. Against Cas- sirer, however, they locate the pathology of instrumental reason not in its truth, as if full enlightenment were an actual condition, but instead in the compulsive effort to proclaim as truth a species of unconditional freedom that was, on their view, constitutively impossible. From their perspective, then, autonomy might well figure as the most consequen- tial myth of modernity.

99. Adorno's comment is particularly revealing, that, "beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters." From Theodor W. Adorno, "Finale," Minima Moralia, Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978) 247. Wellmer, perhaps controversially, finds in Adorno the residues of a "theological motif." But Wellmer is right that the stance is aporetic, in alliance with metaphysics but only "at the moment of its fall." On the diffi- culties of this self-collapsing ideal, see Albrecht Wellmer, "Reason, Utopia, and the Dia- lectic of Enlightenment," ed. Richard J. Bernstein, Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985) 35-66, and Wellmer, "Metaphysics at the Moment of its Fall," End- games, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 'theological motif' from the latter, 193. On the Habermasian attempt to rescue conceptual form itself as a non- repressive ideal, see Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), and "Die Moderne-ein unvollendetes Projekt," Die Moderne ein unvollendetes Projekt, Philosophisch-politische Auf sitze (Leipzig: Reclam, 1994) 32-54.



Documents

Eli Gordon, Myth and Modernity Cassirer's Critique of Heidegger