On Esoteric Ism- Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos

On Esotericism: Heidegger and/or Cassirer at DavosAuthor(s): Geoffrey WaiteSource: Political Theory, Vol. 26, No. 5 (Oct., 1998), pp. 603-651Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191766Accessed: 15/01/2009 05:46

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sage.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Political Theory.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/stable/191766?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sage

ON ESOTERICISM Heidegger and/or Cassirer at Davos

GEOFFREY WAITE Cornell University

There was a famous discussion between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer in Davos which revealed the lostness and emptiness of this remarkable representative of established academic philosophy to everyone who had eyes. Cassirer had been a pupil of Hermann Cohen, the founder of the neo-Kantian school. Cohen had elaborated a system of philosophy whose center was ethics. Cassirer had transformed Cohen's system into a new system of philosophy in which ethics had completely disappeared. It had been silently dropped: he had not faced the problem. Heidegger had faced the problem. He declared that ethics is impossible, and his whole being was permeated by the awareness that this fact opens up an abyss.... Only a great thinker could help us in our plight. But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger. The only question of importance, of course, is the question whether Heidegger's teaching is true or not. But the very question is deceptive because it is silent about the question of competence-of who is competent to judge.

-Strauss

Heidegger conceals nothing. He does not lie. He says what he really thinks.

-Janicaud2

It is important for us to understand, above all, the true intentions of our author, to illuminate what he thinks really needs to be said, and to surmise what is most critical for him.

-Levinas3

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is a revised version of a paper read at the conference Philosophy of Culture and Symbolic Forms: New Perspectives on Ernst Cassirer; Yale University, 4-6 October 1996. 1 thank its organizer Cyrus Hamlin for inviting my participation and Karsten Harries for his commentator's critique.

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 26 No. 5, October 1998 603-651 ? 1998 Sage Publications, Inc.

603

604 POLITICAL THEORY / October 1998

Only once or twice in my thirty to thirty-five years of teaching have I ever spoken about what really matters to me.

-Heidegger4

For a long time I have not said what I believed, nor do I ever believe what I say, and if indeed I do happen to tell the truth I hide it among so many lies that it is hard to find.

-Machiavelli5

The 'doctrine' of a thinker is what is unsaid in his saying, to which man is exposed so that he might expend himself for it.

-Heidegger6

But for those on the outside everything is in parables; so that they may see but not perceive, and hearing, they may hear but not understand; lest they should turn, and their sins be forgiven them.

-Mark 4:127

"Now do you recognize that I am a philosopher?" .... "I would have, had you remained silent."

-Boethius8

The same goes for Heidegger: It is necessary to know how to listen to the silences of philosophers. These are always eloquent.

-Althusser9

THE SCENARIO OF INTRIGUE

These nine epigraphs stage an intriguing scenario as the scenario of intrigue: a decisive victory (over academic philosophy) by a postethical human subject that never (quite) says what it really means to say, never uses all its weapons, and yet, at exactly the same time, concealing (almost) nothing, informs its interlocutors with the deception they desire to receive as truth, by saying aloud precisely what it really thinks in an (almost) undetect- able way-in eloquent silence. Which entails our own ethical silence, although rarely so eloquent as within and between these epigraphs. Extending in Western thought at least to Plato and to the Jewish-Christian Bible, this constitutive paradox can be named but never fully grasped: the double rhetoric, parabolic speech, sigetics (the rhetoric of silence), and the noble, holy, or prudent lie. I call it the 'paradox and paranoia'-the paradoxa and paranous-of exo/esotericism. 'Beside' and 'beyond' but also 'within' the

Waite / ON ESOTERICISM 605

so-called history of consciousness as its determining absence, exo/esotericism renders radically problematic our ability to grasp that long history, assuming (as we mostly do) that this history consists of exoteric statements alone, that philosophers necessarily mean what they say, and that when they do not this is due only to the structural interference of the unconscious. As a form of lying, as the manipulation of other subjects' consciousness by surreptitious means, every form of exo/esotericism nonetheless points-more or less tacitly-to its systemically and systematically unstated premise, its elusive surplus: truth. But what, then, is truth?

"Veritas norma sui, & falsi est," Spinoza says, articulating the constitutive tautology of all secular thought: "[T]ruth is the standard of itself, and of the false."10 "Truth," Kant says, is "a principle of cognition, indeed, the essential and inseparable condition of all its perfection"; by contrast, "[W]hat makes error possible ... is illusion, in accordance with which the merely subjective is confused in judgment with the objective."' " Such illusion, for post-Enlight- enment Marxism, is a root definition of ideology, by means of which particular interests are presented-consciously or unconsciously-in concealed form as if they were universally binding. 2 Exactly like Spinozist truth, Althusser notes, "[T]he world of ideology is its own principle of intelligibility."'13 But this argument entails that everything is irradicably ideological, both epistemologically and politically. In presecular terms, ideology is God; in secular terms, we have arrived at the paradox and paranoia that the only truth is that ideology is truth.'4 As Althusser further argued, coherent and frank Marxism must admit that it "cannot conceive that even a communist society could ever do without ideology, be it in ethics, art or 'world outlook.' ,15

"Ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time. . . is nothing but outside (for science and reality)."'6 Yet, it now appears that truth itself- impossibly-has been rendered relative; and the maximum that either science or Marxism then could ever know is to know ideology, and to struggle accordingly-one ideology pitted against another, one 'science' and 'reality' pitted against another. In the still tautological but now slyly bellicose terms of Heidegger's political ontology in 1936, "Truth happens only in the way that it instaurates itself in the dispute and scope which are opened up by it."'7 To be sure, in Lacan's terms, "The mirage of truth, from which only lies can be expected (this is what, in polite language, we call 'resistance'), has no other term than the satisfaction that marks the end of analysis."'8 Analysis, nevertheless, is also said to be interminable, an interminable struggle with no cure-save for the only ethic of "not ceding to one's desire": whatever that desire may be, wherever it may lead us and the world.'9

What, then, are the epistemological and political stakes here-inescapably inside 'truth and lie in the extramoral sense'? Epistemologically, we are


precariously close to a Nietzschean definition of nihilism insofar as, after the alleged 'death of God,' nihilism "is the state in which a being has the need to call itself continually into question, to raise continually the question of the grounds of its existence, without anything being able to count as such grounds."20 In political terms, and concomitantly, we also are precariously close to the self-definition of philosophically coherent fascism. Mussolini and other fascist philosophers publicly averred that ungrounded relativism is fascism's only ground, the conceptual precondition for the realization of Nietzschean Rangordnung or order of rank (translated into Italian as gerarchia: hierarchy). The sole thing that can decide-ultimately-between com- peting ideologies is raw power. For fascism, however, entailed is not any simple, immediate suppression of "equality" (I'ugualianza)-for that can be stupidly counterproductive.2' Fascism's argument, rather, is that order of rank "corrects" "natural inequalities" on behalf of the powerful who are equal only inter pares, who know that the truth is ungrounded and decisionistically arbitrary, and who are willing to use any means necessary-including con- trolled dosages of free debate-to maintain this truth and their own power.22 Poised to take state power in 1922, Mussolini boldly announced in his programmatic article "Relativismo e Fascismo" ("Relativism and Fascism") (1921) that "the philosophy of force" (la filosofia della forza)-on which Fascism is conceptually and institutionally grounded in explicit contrast to German national socialist (racist) essentialism-is nothing but relativist.23 For his primary authorities, Mussolini drew on Nietzsche himself and on Hans Vaihinger, the leading neo-Kantian Nietzschean and his "philosophy of the as-if." We know that relativism and fascism are ungrounded systems but we decide to act as if they were grounded, so that this very ungroundedness in effect becomes our ground. "In truth, we are relativists par excellence," Mussolini proclaimed, and "the moment relativism linked up with Nietzsche, and with his Will to Power, was when Italian Fascism became, as it still is, the most magnificent creation of an individual and a national Will to Power."24 Mussolini also argued that Marxist socialism simply cannot grasp the fact that there are no eternal verities: God is dead, all is permitted; only the strong decide what truth is; and if and when fascism itself is eventually crushed by a superior force, as history teaches us happens to all concepts and political movements sooner or later, then so be it. Logically rigorous fascist socialism was thus an explicit and publicly announced cynical, decisionistic, histori- cistic, and relativist solution, via Nietzschean nihilism, of a profound epistemological and political aporia that extends throughout history and has swallowed up the Left. Fascism, like capitalism (whose power fascism chooses to harness by channeling it into corporatism) is prepared to employ either exotericism or esotericism whenever the situation demands: exoteri-


cism when it feels unchallenged (as is exemplified by Mussolini in the 1920s), and exo/esotericism the rest of the time, be it conjoined with consent (hegemony) or with coercion. By contrast, all liberal apologists for capitalism and most Marxists, feeling equally secure in their Enlightenment tradition, naively think that everything is basically exoteric and that it is both necessary and sufficient to expose or critique ideology for it to be overcome. In this way, it is possible to grasp and combat effectively neither exo/esotericism nor fascism and capitalism.

The implications of the Nietzschean definition of nihilism are particularly all encompassing and omnipotent in our 'postideological,' pluralist, cynical, historicist, and relativist age (institutionally incorporated as deconstruction, new historicism, and cultural studies), where it is widely believed that Marxism and communism, and thus the major historical opposition to the status quo, have been definitively defeated conceptually and politically. What Nietzsche called nihilism is today global capitalism, and his "last men" have turned out to be those not of 'actually existing socialism' but of actually existing capitalism. Whether understood as an economic, social, cultural, ideological, logical, or discursive system, it is the radically ungrounded capitalist system that has demonstrated the supreme capacity-the greatest in human history-to "call itself continually into question, to raise continually the question of the grounds of its existence, without anything being able to count as such grounds." Specifically, capitalism calls itself continually into question by its own self-produced crises in all forms-maintaining and perpetuating itself through them. Capitalism is radically ungrounded, exactly like fascism, but in this cynical relativism lies its very strength and truth. The myth of capitalism appears to be invincible, renewing its strength from all opponents as long as it touches only ungrounded ground-in contrast to the mythical Antaeus. To date, no Hercules has been able to defeat capitalism as he did Antaeus: by holding him in the air to strangle him. For capitalism would have to be pushed onto the ground, but there seems to be no ground on which to stand to accomplish this feat. As Marx put it in Capital, "[T]he true limit [or barrier: die wahre Schranke] of capitalist production is capital itself."25 Disastrously read by evolutionary Marxists 'diachronically' to guarantee capitalism's inevitable demise, Marx's thesis can also be read 'syn- chronically' to the contrary; namely, "that it is this very immanent limit, this 'internal contradiction,' which drives capitalism into permanent development."26 I think the only, albeit preliminary, way out of this aporia (i.e., the antinomy between absolute optimism and absolute pessimism with regard to the possibility of destroying capitalism) is implied in the basic Althusserian thesis that Marx's Capital demonstrates "that the time of economic production is a specific time (differing according to the mode of production), but


also that, as a specific time, it is a complex and nonlinear time-a time of times, a complex time that cannot be read in the continuity of the time of life or clocks, but has to be constructed out of the peculiar structure of production. The time of the capitalist economic production that Marx analyzed must be constructed in its concept."27 And so must also be constructed in its concept the time of any alternative mode of production for it to exist in the first place. In other words (and I will discuss Marxist constructivism presently), it is obviously possible to read the future of capitalism (or fascism) either opti- mistically or pessimistically, or both, but it is also possible to construct at least a concept of economic, political, and discursive opposition to it. The exigent question today remains, however, how any oppositional system of thought, let alone action, can be grounded at a time when there is a common consensus (often appealing to Nietzsche) that nothing can be grounded after the 'death of God.' Yet, this God is not in fact dead but (the) unconscious.28 And if capitalism is today at once God, the unconscious, and the truth (i.e., the standard of itself and of any opposition to itself), then, to be grounded, any alternative or oppositional system must begin with this truth. Here, we return to the problem of exo/esotericism inasmuch as it controls when and how truth and lies ever become public in whatever may remain today of the res publica.

If the central problem of political theory today is to produce effective opposition to capitalism, and if the only reason to study the past is to find alternatives to the present, then the overall function of exo/esotericism is to obstruct both tasks. But this obstruction is not primarily accomplished by prohibiting the possibility of opposition and alternatives. Capitalism itself encourages crises and challengers, even produces them itself, to ensure that it remains dynamic. Generally, overt prohibitions are counterproductive insofar as they are easily identifiable and contestable as such. Therefore, I argue, the most effective way of keeping complex systems in power lies neither in prohibition nor even in producing hegemonic consent through "the diffusion of ideology (through the presentation and inculcation of culture),"29 but rather in rendering radical alternatives to appear logically impossible in the first place, in our case in rendering capitalism (the) unconscious-exactly like God, ideology, and absolute truth. Such is the general function of exo/esotericism in secular modernity.

For the tradition of thought linking Spinoza, Kant, Marx, and Freud (even Nietzsche, albeit, arguably, to radically opposed political ends), truth remains the absolute criterion of falsity, illusion, and ideology. However, unlike that aspect of this tradition which eventually leads to postlinguistic philosophical psychoanalysis (Lacan)-where "[t]ruth hollows its way into the real thanks to the dimension of speech. There is neither true nor false prior to speech"30-


Marxism has generally distinguished itself from this development, as well as from the Nietzschean exo/esotericism that leads to Heidegger and to Leo Strauss, by remaining prelinguistic. Concomitantly, most Marxism (and the remainder of the 'Left') has distinguished itself by its studied disinterest in, or simple ignorance of, the ancient tradition of exo/esotericism (first openly codified by Machiavelli) wherein falsity, illusion, and ideology are produced and manipulated by some subjects consciously so as to be incorporated by others unconsciously.3" The epistemological and political costs to Marxism of this disinterest and ignorance have been enormous, almost irredeemable; and this failure demands rectification. At the same time, Marxism has remained largely prepsychoanalytic. As Althusser put it, "Marx was unable to go beyond a theory of social individuality or historical forms of individuality. There is nothing in Marx that anticipates Freud's discovery; there is nothing in Marx that can ground a theory of the psyche."32 I would add that this applies more to almost all 'Marxism' than to Marx himself, but in any case this lacuna, too, has contributed to making it well-nigh impossible for Marxism even to read the great exo/esoteric tradition-let alone effectively combating capitalism philosophically or politically. In my terms, it cannot even read the psyche that is prepared to manipulate other psyches unconsciously by means of eloquent silence.

Truth does properly remain the precondition of any conceptually coherent and politically effective Marxist alternative to capitalism, just as it does of the philosophy of psychoanalysis in Lacan's voice: "Truth is based only on the fact that speech, even when it consists of lies, appeals to it and gives rise to it."33 But while it is impossible to articulate the whole truth, "[P]recisely because of this impossibility, truth aspires to the real."34 And this aspiration is what exo/esotericism, today in its 'late' or 'postmodernist' capitalist mode, best understands and most successfully exploits. If exploitation remains a Marxist concern, Marxists must turn to truth. This means they must turn to the unconscious and to lies, and hence to the problematic of exo/esotericism. And this means that they must grasp not only the position of all opponents but also the debates between them when they embody-consciously or unconsciously-the problematic of exo/esoteric manipulation.

In the remainder of this essay, therefore, I turn to one debate that has proven to be especially symptomatic both of the way capitalist hegemony works and of Marxism's inability to settle accounts with it and with exo/esotericism, and hence to mount cogent and effective opposition to either. This was the public confrontation in 1929 between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer in Davos, Switzerland. I argue that this seminal event, widely thought to end with the triumph of the former over the latter, means more than the triumph of the ideological 'Right' over the 'Left.' For it also means


that Heideggerian exo/esotericism triumphs over Cassirerian exotericism. To date, no Marxist or communist voice has been raised to protest what this alleged 'debate' conceals or to offer an alternative account.

FROM DAVOS TO CULTURAL STUDIES

What we call 'Davos' is actually the transcript of the second of four annual events, beginning in 1928 and terminating in 1931 as the geopolitical situation in Europe and the world dramatically worsened.35 The mandate of the colloquium series was to promote what its organizers called "understanding and cooperation between peoples [or nations: Volker], especially the French and German"-referring to all the still-festering traumas of World War I, desperately trying to staunch new ones looming in the darkening future. Other speakers besides Heidegger and Cassirer were given their chance to speak during the international colloquium held from March 16 to April 6, 1929, under the umbrella theme of "man and generation," although most of those present thought that the absolute watershed of philosophical history was occurring before their eyes: Cassirer incorporating the old philosophical regime, Heidegger the new. And so the other participants struggled as best they could to take the measure of this radical epistemological break. In addition to all his scholarly academic writings, Cassirer had just recently, in the autumn of 1928, gone on public political record at the University of Hamburg (where he was soon to be the first Jew in history to become rector of a German university) by defending the Weimar constitution-widely despised across the ideological spectrum-with what he claimed to be the authentically German heritage, exemplified by Goethean Weimar.36 In addition to mostly understated allusions to "the Jewish question," other signs of the times were evident at Davos: the students organized a workshop on "Marxism," another was held on "The Current but Difficult Problem of War Propaganda and National Incitement." A few months later, Heidegger delivered his inaugural lecture at Freiburg-"What Is Metaphysics?"-in which he decisively and affirmatively linked the question of radical, authentic thinking to anxiety in the face of being and nothingness.37 Cassirer was most widely known at the time for his philosophy of symbolic forms and myths.

Throughout the 1920s, philosophical discussions of myth in Europe were shadowed by several more explicitly political interventions: Mussolini's public declaration, in October 1922, that the fascists had created their own myth-that of the nation; and Carl Schmitt's subsequent open embrace of Mussolini's decisionistic myth making as being superior to all other available forms of political thought and action, in tandem with Schmitt's philosophi-


cally grounded rejection of the Weimar constitution and parliament, including its commitment to discussion, debate, and dialogue-all of which serve only endlessly to defer hard decisions about exceptional circumstances.38 Secularization, in particular Enlightenment, lent itself by structural necessity to this radically ungrounded auto ex nihilo act of decisionistic self- legitimation.39 Months after Cassirer's defense of the Weimar Republic, after Heidegger had had his say at Davos, a new word-the word-was passed around. Heidegger had defeated Cassirer decisively, and what Goethe had said about Napoleon and geopolitics in the previous epoch was finally taking place in philosophy: "From here and now on, a new epoch of world history begins, and you can say that you were present."40 Precisely such possibilities of radical geopolitical break, or renewal, 'postmoderns' by definition cannot grasp. Thanks, I argue, to Heidegger's willed 'victory,' Cassirer's unwilled 'defeat'-both of which postmoderns have inherited and embodied, know- ingly or not.

Generally speaking and with few exceptions, accounts of the Davos debate break down-now as then-along self-consciously ideological lines: the Cassirerian tends to be conciliatory and attempts to strike a balance, the Straussian to be more aggressively charged, the Heideggerian aloof.41 This difference is explainable as the effect of different conclusions reached from a common premise: in the final analysis, all three sides assume that Heidegger really won the confrontation; or at least they assume that this is the common perception of the outcome, and hence sociologically, if not also philosophically, simply the case. So it appears that Cassirerians have to adapt a strategy of reconciliation, whereas Heideggerians are free to go on to other tasks. As for Straussians, they have their own brief against Heidegger (and Cassirer) in a situation of minority against the Heideggerian (and Cassirerian) majority, fighting over the same turf, their overall mood bellicose (such are the wages of ressentiment).42 At the end of the day, however, Heideggerians and Straus- sians differ mainly about how to use exo/esoteric language prudently so as to ensure an identically elitist vision of the perceived necessity for Nietzschean order or rank (i.e., the socioeconomic division of mental from manual labor) to allow philosophy to exist. By contrast, Cassirerians do not worry about exo/esotericism at all, and so-in spite and because of some squeamish 'ethical' reservations about capitalism common to liberal humanism-they end up affirming unwittingly the same intellectual and economic divisions of labor that Straussians and Heideggerians affirm consciously. In short, I am arguing that the Davos 'debate' was never a debate in two primary regards. First, as Heidegger was aware but Cassirer was not, they held radically incompatible 'ethical' assumptions about the nature and proper use of philosophical language, and authentic debate can never occur,


for Heidegger, at the merely thematic and exoteric level. Second, both men shared the same basic class interest, and had no reason to debate this fact, no matter how much their respective political ideologies may appear as different or even opposed.

In any case, it remains a serious but common misperception that one could or can simply 'choose' at Davos: between 'Cassirer or Heidegger' and between them only, ignoring the possibility of a thus logically excluded middle term. Moreover, this dual delusion is far too partial in both senses of the term and to date has existed asymmetrically, as a one-way street. Whereas Heidegger and Heideggerians (and, for different reasons, Straussians) have always assumed that they definitively won the debate, excluding Cassirer from serious philosophy, Cassirer himself, unlike most Cassirerians, was less confident about the truth of his own position at Davos, trying-unrequited- to continue his Davos 'dialogue' with Heidegger in published and unpublished form to the bitter end. To be sure, merely by reconstructing yet another version of what happened-or even, as I say, what did not happen-between Cassirer and Heidegger at Davos, I myself risk contributing to the consensus myth that one's only 'choice' (then or today) is 'Cassirer and/or Heidegger' (both 'and' and 'or' being duplicitous little words, inclusive and exclusive). Nonetheless, refocus on the 'choice' between Cassirer and Heidegger makes sense heuristically if significant aspects of their debate remain occluded from view.

With regard only to exo/esotericism (i.e., leaving shared class interest momentarily to one side), Davos was a debate only in the guise of an open dialogue (between Cassirer and Heidegger) helplessly confronting a secret monologue (Heidegger's). This part of my claim is not fully original with me-noted as it was at Davos by those most familiar with Heidegger, especially by Strauss. Rather, it is the specific structures and consequences of this nondebate that have yet to be identified and analyzed. If unsettling obscurities remain to be excavated and exorcised from this foundational event in the history of consciousness, then this task is important not least if "Davos was an early form of our contemporary conference and symposium format"43_and for "symposium," read also essay.

This essay was originally conceived for the occasion of the first systematic attempt in North America (the international Cassirer conference in New Haven, 1996) to use a critical reconstruction and appropriation of Cassirer's published and unpublished ceuvre to provide-building on his "philosophy of symbolic forms" and "comprehensive philosophy of culture"-a critical counterpoint to the hegemony of cultural studies in the human and social sciences, including the history of science. Alternatively put, the perceived task of the occasion was to provide cultural studies, and multicultural


pluralism, with a conceptually rigorous, hermeneutically rich philosophical base that these predominantly empirical studies demonstrably lack. The strong thesis would be that Cassirer has created the only rigorous and coherent theory available to the project of providing a more or less critical philosophical grounding for cultural studies-a project I argue is doomed from the start.44

Today, Cassirer is being widely touted by liberal and conservative human- ists alike-a celebration symptomatic of an unacknowledged consensus- not merely for having engaged in a significant dialogue with something called "the postmodern thinking of pluralism" long before the fact, but also for having already surpassed it, on the grounds that Cassirerian "multiplicity" and "diversity" not ensue from the "weakness and skepticism" that is then imputed to postmodemism but stand instead for "a plurality of world-relations that must today take the place of the one-dimensionality of traditional rationalism."45 Be such claims (or pious wishes) as they may, Heidegger, too, is commonly understood also to have opposed "one-dimensional rationalism," as well as "weakness and skepticism"; but in his case this was hardly on behalf of pluralistic diversity. Who, then, has finally won the Davos debate? Should cultural studies in fact appeal to Cassirer (or Heidegger) for help in its broad ignorance of philosophy? Before asking, we need to know more what the real stakes and forms of the original debate were, and whether it was a debate at all. There can be no doubt that Cassirer can be resuscitated in purportedly 'avant-garde' disciplines, including those following Bakhtin, Foucault, and Panofsky-all of whom were very positively influenced by Cassirer. Nor has his influence been negligible on the more 'traditional' disciplines of literary criticism and aesthetics. I am thinking here not only, say, of the work of Susanne Langer and Philip Wheelwright,46 but also of the remark of Paul de Man in 1964: "Cassirer has curtailed the somewhat fantastic subjectivism that surrounded many American concerns with myth and symbol."47 I affirm the need to read philosophy in the academy today at a time when the current hegemony of cultural studies, particularly its an- titheoretical animus in which "philosophies," at best badly studied, "serve as an ideological substitute for the theoretical foundations that the human sciences lack."48 But not just any style of philosophy will help us in our non- and antiphilosophical plight. Before resuscitating Cassirer's corpse (or any other, including a fortiori Heidegger's), before incorporating any corpus of work in our own corps, we should know as much as possible about what and whom we are resuscitating, who did the killing at Davos, and how.

One of the most basic definitions of philosophy, as put by Althusser in one of his moods, is simply to draw lines of demarcation.49 And we will see that Heidegger, at the end of his Davos encounter with Cassirer, seems to say the


same thing. Drawing one such line, I claim that Marxism and communism are exactly like Platonism, Jewish-Christian theology, nihilism, fascism, and capitalism insofar as all are logically constructivist and decisionistic; that is, they all share the aporia that they are ultimately grounded on no logic save for tautology. But Marxism and communism can also be different from those other positions in three related respects: in terms of discursive practice they are in principle exoteric; in terms of socioeconomic and ethical aim they are in principle egalitarian; and in terms of epistemology they maintain in principle an open, heuristic, and asymptotic relation to the truth.50 In this last regard, Marxism and communism relate to the philosophical tradition (encompassing Spinoza, Kant, Marx, Lenin, Wittgenstein, Lacan, and Althusser) that continually aspires to point ('scientifically,' if you will) toward the truth. In this way, they are not logically decisionistic and constructivist, safeguard- ing as they do a certain surplus-truth-vis-a-vis the tradition against which they are in mortal combat. And, as Althusser cautions, "[T]he conflictuality of Marxist theory is constitutive of its scientificity, its objectivity"51-in other terms, its ethical performativity of the truth. However broad my claim, I will inscribe 'Davos' with a hitherto unremarked line of demarcation-the hitherto obscure interference of exo/esotericism in the debate-in order that we might better understand the relationship (or lack thereof) between Heidegger and Cassirer and what really went wrong (or right) at Davos. In any case, to draw a clear line is sooner my intent than it is to defend either Heidegger or Cassirer from their devotees (borrowing Adorno's quip about Bach); after all, in this case, it is the devotees who need defending.

A break with hegemonic systems (including fake debates disguised as genuine; monologues as dialogues) might appear to come, in Althusserian terms, "not from within butfrom without.... This idea, or rather this concept of an absolute (theoretical) exteriority is the enabling condition of a theoretical understanding of interiority itself.""2 On one hand, this position seems blatantly to contradict Althusser's (properly Leninist) position, which I elaborated earlier, to the effect that any system alternative or oppositional to capitalism can be grounded only on capitalism as Spinozian truth.53 Besides, in the Lacanian sense which Althusser there adapts, the real (le reel) is not exterior to anything but rather 'extimate' (intimately exterior)54-which is certainly no guarantee of anything 'alternative' or 'oppositional,' although it must remain their minimal precondition. Nonetheless, qua purely heuristic device, a certain hypothesis of exteriority can be productively applied to the foundational event that was 'Davos,' if it was only a fake debate; because then a provisional third position exterior to it, at least, is demanded. For Althusser (as for Lacan), this 'extimate' position is 'science' and 'the real,' and also in his case (but not Lacan's) 'class struggle' as the ultimate political


'line of demarcation.' For my purposes here, my tertium quid or "concept of an absolute (theoretical) exteriority" is the concept of exo/esotericism; and it entails substantial reservations about both Cassirer and Heidegger (and Strauss). What my argument will leave unspecified, however, is what a radically different philosophy or ethics beyond exo/esotericism might look like, if it is even possible. My own (neocommunist) methodological and ideological position should emerge more clearly as we proceed, but it is generally moie germane to the task at hand to understate my third position 'outside' the Davos debate, even as I remain 'extimately' within it-not in the guise of false objectivity, but on behalf of promoting real debates that point toward the exteriority prerequisite to grasp the interiority of long misunderstood and fake debates.

Symptomatically, the apposite analogy with which to describe 'Davos' is open to dispute. Does it recall to us "the important disputationes during the Middle Ages, when the best minds of the time struggled with one another," as one Heideggerian acolyte now tells us; or rather a boxing match that has suddenly materialized from a radio broadcast into living reality, as was remarked by a young man in the audience?"5 Or, as another participant, the philosopher Kurt Riezler, quipped at the time, was 'Davos' the uncanny coming to life of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain (1924)?56 Think of it: Cassirer embodying Settembrini, the liberal humanist son of the Enlighten- ment, and Heidegger the Jesuitical nihilist, Naptha. But now we are ahead of the argument.

FIRST PRELUDE TO DAVOS: A QUESTION OF STYLE

By shifting the axis not of philosophy, necessarily, but of one way to read philosophy, from what might be called 'content' to 'style' (thus making explicit a parallel move made by Heidegger against the history of metaphysics tacitly, in addition to all his explicit arguments), I supplement the disqui- eting reminiscence of Cassirer's most important doctoral student, Leo Strauss (who wrote his dissertation on Spinoza under him), about the post-ethical Heidegger by arguing that the truly silent question is not merely whether Heidegger's own "teaching is true or not," nor even whether we are "competent to judge" it in terms of any imagined 'content.' The question, rather, is whether what Heidegger himself implies is his own "unsaid" teaching is designed sigetically to be exo/esoteric, whether it is intended-in its very surface visibility that Spinoza and Althusser call "the opacity of the immediate"57-to be incorporated slightly, stealthily, silently beneath our capacity ever to perceive and judge it rationally. This, I argue, is indeed the


implication that Heidegger quietly drew for his own rhetorical use in his public lecture at Davos, "Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft und die Aufgabe einer Grundlegung der Metaphysik" (Kant's critique of pure reason and the task of a grounding of metaphysics). This is his reading of Kant's First Critique to the effect "daj3 der Ansatz der Vernunft zerstort ist" -which means, for Heidegger, not only that the beginnings, base, or approach of reason have been definitively destroyed by Kant, but also that the latter, along with Cassirer, "shrinks back" or even "draws back in terror" (zuriickschreckt) before the radical consequences.58 When specifying what he thinks these radical consequences are, Heidegger does not include the implications for language in general, and for his own rhetoric of persuasion in specific. It also would have made neither logical nor pragmatic sense, in his (and our) postlogical world, were Heidegger to have drawn these consequences publicly, if he wished to make effective use of them, as he doubtless did. This, then, is the lesson Cassirer overheard when debating Heidegger at Davos, as other members of the audience (especially Strauss) definitely did not.

Today a strong move is underway in the academy for ecumenical 'cultural-philosophical' reconciliation, arguing (as do I, albeit for very different reasons) against a simple 'choice' between Cassirer and Heidegger. On this view, the latter's far superior grasp of the question of ontology can and should be supplemented by Cassirer's richer hoard of cultural references and ostensibly more nuanced critique of the mathematical natural sciences. Yet in fact Heidegger's grasp of the sciences (especially physics and mathemat- ics) was considerably deeper than many today assume, and surpassed Cas- sirer's in important respects. One of the surprising things about Heidegger's stunning 1929-30 lecture course, "The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphys- ics," which gives an indication of his pedagogical approach at the time of Davos, is the length and depth to which he went to link his reflections on the topic to experimental biology and zoology, including the possibility of an "ontology of life."59 But the most surprising thing about these lectures- beyond even his remarkable analysis of boredom and solitude as the constitutive "fundamental moods" (or attunements: Grundstimmungen) of modernity alongside the anxiety (Angst) analyzed in Being and lime-is Heideg- ger's pattern of indirect allusions to the problem of exo/esotericism, that is, to silences, moods, cunning, and concealments of all kinds, as when he tells his students that his own lectures "could indeed be a mere deception-who can know?"60 Just so. This remark alludes to his 'question of style.'

The manifest theme of Heidegger's 1929-30 course is the continuing (nearly irreversible) swerve of modern metaphysics away from its ancient claim to be the "first philosophy" (tpwnr Xlkouo4ta), due to a mode of questioning (beings) that it can only falsely assume to be radical (regarding


Being), and culminating in its current state as merely one academic discipline inter alia inter pares. This Heidegger derisively calls a discipline limited to mere "content."'M Here begins his open assault on the bogus metaphysical desire to attain "the formal level of an absolute science."61 It is in this sense that the hegemony of modern metaphysics and science entails the victory of "content" over more radically and authentically "questioning." What Heidegger's definition of "content" here again leaves silent, however, is the stylistic and rhetorical consequence his position must have for the articulation of radical questioning insofar as it relates to what he calls "the authority" of "silent persuasion."63 Although sometimes appearing critical about his own authority in the pedagogical situation, what matters more than any stated valorization is not only that he thus hints at his awareness of the ancient tradition of silent persuasion, but also that he is logically required to make use of it to recruit the new philosophical lifeblood inasmuch as authentic questioning per definitionem can never transpire at the level of "content." At Davos, the most attentive listeners, and not only Strauss, intuited that it was Heidegger's style that helped carry the day over Cassirer's "content."64 They may even have intuited that, in a sense, in exo/esotericism (exoteric) style is (esoteric) content, although Heideggerians and Straussians are rarely so frank about this ancient problem.

Since at least Plato, "[T]he quarrel between philosophy and poetry is in the first instance political and moral."65 This thesis is crucial but insufficient. What is new since Plato is not exclusively a philosophical and/or poetic problematic, for this has remained remarkably constant, although increas- ingly less visible as it becomes dispersed throughout mass and junk culture. What is really new is capitalism on one hand, and on the other the radically diminished awareness of the ethical role of exo/esotericism in maintaining the discourses of philosophy and political economy alike, including with regard to ethics. It is "capital which creates the foundation for a general human morality," Kautsky noted in 1906, "but it only creates the foundation by treading this morality continually under its feet."66 And it is the forms of exo/esotericism collaborating with this destruction that would have to be identified and destroyed if the full socioeconomic preconditions for an alternative, oppositional ethics will ever be produced.67 Sit venia verbo, the exo/esoteric problematic logically-and also epistemologically, aestheti- cally, politically, and ethically-precedes any imaginable 'content' of philosophy or poetry. Here, 'firstness' is also to be understood, in properly Heideggerian terms, neither ontologically nor ontically but as their exo/ esoteric fusion in political ontology. Herein lies the underlying 'silent' problem of ethics at Davos. Pace the public remarks of Heidegger and Strauss, but as they knew full well, the basic post-Nietzschean question is not


whether ethical grounding is impossible or possible but rather how to speak, and to whom to speak, in either eventuality. At stake with exo/esotericism is the ethical problem of trust qua question of style: Who can trust us? Whom do we trust?

SECOND PRELUDE TO DAVOS: ON SOURCES, MYTHIC AND SYMBOLIC

Part of Cassirer's point in working out a comprehensive philosophy- although never quite ethics-of culture was indeed to appropriate critically all the mathematical and natural sciences, as well as the social and human sciences. This is also to say-with a nod to cultural studies-that Cassirer's work (nourished by the incomparable resources of Aby Warburg's library in Hamburg) was eminently interdisciplinary by inception and cross-cultural by implication. And for this very reason his project can be criticized by a cogent philosophical argument duly suspicious of the ideological traps of interdisciplinarity.68 Be this as it may, there is general agreement today that it is inaccurate to reduce Cassirer's sources, as was often done in the past, to a neo-Kantian problematic. Although I would add that one of the most important aspects of neo-Kantianism-Vaihinger's Nietzschean reformulation of the Platonic noble lie in terms of the "philosophy of as-if' and "doctrine of conscious illusion"-seems to have eluded Cassirer's conceptual net.69 As important for Cassirer as Kant undeniably is, however, other sources are equally influential. The proper names are familiar: Dilthey, Hegel, Herder, Humboldt, Leibniz, Plato, Rousseau, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, and not least Vico's seminal definition of man as animal symbolicum. Cassirer's notion of symbolic form is also indebted to the physical sciences, including Heinrich Hertz's concept of notation in mechanics. But wherever one seeks the articulation of the human and the natural sciences, especially in the German tradition, sooner or later the figure lying nearest the source is Goethe.

The most fitting, albeit characteristically ironic, epitaph for Cassirer's ceuvre may have been found by de Man, writing in 1957 that one of Cassirer's theses about Goethe serves as "a definition of the entire history of ideas"- namely, that Goethe "rejects history when history is imposed on him as mere matter [Stoffl; but he reclaims it as a necessary way finally to understand form in itself and its own creativity."70 In a sense, Cassirer's concept of symbolic form does indeed live and die on Goethe's most expansive definition: "Everything that happens is symbol, by representing itself entirely, it points to what remains. It seems to me that in this observation lies the highest degree of arrogance and the highest degree of modesty."71 But, far more important,


Cassirer's notion would also live and die on another Goethean definition, one playing little if any role in Cassirer's worldview: "Symbolism [or the symbolic function: die Symbolik] transforms the appearance into idea, the idea into an image, and in such a way that the idea always remains eternally efficacious and unattainable, and, even though spoken in all languages, nonetheless would remain unspeakable."72 Note that this second Goethean definition of symbol and symbolism is premised not on Hegelian expressivist causality, such as Cassirer's definition of symbolic form seems to require (e.g., in his often repeated but undertheorized claim that mythical consciousness "finds expression" as symbolic form), but rather as a mode of structural causality, as Althusser would argue; namely, that any structure "is immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, that the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects."73 (To use Spinoza's own concept, the cause 'indwells' its effects as causa immanens.74) But I do not want to overemphasize the fact that Cassirer's appropriation of Goethe overlooks the problematic of structural causality. After all, it would be left to us to give theoretical precision to the notoriously opaque relation, in all Cassirer's work, between (transhistorical) symbolic form and (historical) cultural form.75 In other terms, if Cassirer used the concept of structural causality without mentioning it, there is not necessarily any disgrace in that. Emphatically to be stressed, however, is that Cassirer never seems to have appreciated the fact that Goethe's enigmatic definition of the symbolic entailed the affirmation of its quintessentially esoteric dimension: something unsaid remains "eternally efficacious and unattainable" even as it is spoken in any natural language. Goethe's version of exo/esotericism sheds disruptive light on his relationship to both the Enlight- enment and the anti-Enlightenment Romantics.76 Worse, it threatens to shred into dysfunctional bits Cassirer's purportedly Goethean project of a philosophy of symbolic forms and of culture that (ostensibly in opposition to Heidegger's public embrace of the "errant path of thinking") would be open de jure et facto to logical scrutiny and public debate (Habermasian "commu- nicative action") by using a language that is in principle shared by all disputants. Cassirer and his followers simply cannot ground an exoteric theory of symbolic form on Goethe's profoundly esoteric definition of the symbolic.

Put differently, if Cassirer (consciously or unconsciously) 'silently' with- held his full insight about his sources, including Goethe, so as to conceal his own inability to ground his entire project, and hence also to conceal his lack of an ethics, or if for him this concealment was for any reason necessary for conceptual and social cohesion against opposing forces (including fascist


irrationalism), then we confront a quite serious irony both for him and for any cultural studies that would ground itself on him, inasmuch as it has always already given up even asking the question of intentionality. For if Cassirer was silent about the esoteric dimension of his key sources, he himself would have been accepting and even using-consciously or not-the Heideggerian double rhetoric and its antecedents. If Rosen is right, this problem is not merely neo-Kantian (as in Nietzsche and Vaihinger) but properly Kantian as well.77 And deeper still it is Platonic, as Cassirer never understood.78 Cassirer was a marvelous reader (or, if you prefer, paraphraser) of the vast Western philosophical and cultural heritage (hence, his interest for cultural studies)-but only on its exoteric plane. He simply did not grasp exo/esotericism and, thus, had no weapons with which to debate Heidegger on his own turf. What is more, Cassirer was thus ripe to become an unwitting member of the Nietzschean-Heideggerian corps/e.79

Like Heidegger, Nietzsche was a Platonist with regard to the double rhetoric and noble lie to secure social cohesion.80 But Heidegger was also Nietzschean in the sense of Nietzsche's famous position that Kant's formulation of the root epistemological question of Pure Reason-"How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?"-was the exoteric version of the esoteric political question: "Why is belief in synthetic judgments a priori necessary?"8' The consequences of overlooking this neo-Kantian moment in Nietzsche are severe-and this in two basic directions. On one hand, in terms of the history of consciousness, even Cassirer (since much of what is at stake at Davos and thereafter is his exceptionality as public debater with "the only great thinker in our time") may be folded into the tradition duped not merely philosophically by the Platonic noble lie and the doctrine of conscious illusion but also politically. Which is to say a dupe of Machiavellianism, Jesuitism, and the cynical reason described by Sloterdijk;82 a dupe of the anthropological and psychoanalytic structureje-sais-bien-mais-quand-me^me (I know [that it is not the case], but [I believe it] nonetheless) as described by Mannoni and Zi'zek;83 and, not least, a dupe of what Lenin excoriated as the "accursed period of Aesopian language, literary bondage, slavish speech, and ideological serfdom."84 On the other hand, any current ability to use Cassirer to ground a coherent philosophy of culture on the basis of a theory of symbolic forms-to counter the constitutive relativism and merely academic 'politics' of cultural studies-would be similarly compromised. And what about Cassirer's other major sources? Was his insight there as limited, dubious, or naive?

What, beyond Goethe, are the essential sources for grasping Cassirerian symbol and myth? According to Heidegger's extensive review (in the Deut- sche Literaturzeitung of 1928) of Cassirer's Mythical Thought (the second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 1925), the decisive influence


on Cassirer's notion of symbol, and hence myth, was Schelling.85 Heidegger also used this review to expand his own discussion of myth in Being and Time, as well as to set the table for his intervention in Davos a few months later.86 Heidegger begins with a comparatively neutral, even appreciative, paraphrase of Cassirer's argument-a paraphrase never contested either by Cassirer or by Heidegger's students.87 "The intention of the investigation," Heidegger writes of Cassirer's magnum opus, "is to pursue the disclosure of 'myth' as a unique possibility of human Dasein which has its own kind of truth. By posing the question in this manner, Cassirer explicitly takes over the view of Schelling that 'everything in mythology is to be understood as myth expresses it, not as if something else were thought or something else were said' (Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie)."88 What is here wholly unclarified, tacit, and therefore crucial in Heidegger's allusion to Schelliiig are both the implication that myth is exoteric and the deep structure of exo/esotericism to which Heidegger refers in passing. Any definition of 'myth' aside, at the level of 'content,' Heidegger's allusion to Schelling retains the category of esotericism in the phrase "as if something else were thought or something else were said." Opened up is the possibility, at least, that this "something" exists only insofar as it is the logical and linguistic precondition of the exoteric definition. What might this surplus "something else" be? How might its "as-if' function for Heidegger performatively?

Now, a specter haunts everything Schelling said-a specter created by himself. Schelling wrote in 1795 that "[i]t is a crime against humanity to conceal fundamental principles that are communicable to a general public." But Schelling (as a typical bourgeois revolutionary fearing reigns of terror from all directions) immediately appended a crucial esoteric rider that was audible to Heidegger as it was not to Cassirer. Schelling continued: "But Nature itself has set limits on this communicability; it has preserved a philosophy for the worthy that by its own agency becomes esoteric because it can not be learned, not mechanically echoed, not resimulated, and also not repeated by secret enemies and spies-a symbol for the covenant of free spirits [ein Symbol fir den Bundfreier Geister], by means of which they all recognize one another and yet which, known only to themselves, will be an eternal enigma to the others."89 In short: on the Schellingian and Cassirerian view, if myth and symbol are exoteric, then philosophy, on the Schellingian and Heideggerian view, is esoteric at its most radical conceptual, social, and rhetorical root. In effect, I argue, Heidegger sides decisively with Schelling against Cassirer, and thus radically undermines the very source of Cassirer's merely exoteric concept of symbolic form and myth.

In his 1928 review of Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Heideg- ger also paraphrases what he calls "a basic feature of the mythic object-


consciousness"; namely, "the absence of a clear delineation between dream- ing and waking experiences, between the imagined and the perceived, between the original and the copy, between the word (signification) and the thing, between wished-for and actual possession, between living and dead."90 This conceptual and terminological muddle might sound to some of us like a precocious defense of a postmodern, poststructuralist sensibility, or, alternatively, a critical analysis of just this sensibility qua myth. And we should recall Levi-Strauss's seminal structuralist definition of the general social function of myth as a "logical mode capable of overcoming a contradiction"-which is, Levi-Strauss adds parenthetically, "(an impossible achieve- ment, if, as it happens, the contradiction is real).""9 But here the properly Heideggerian complexity-the shift from the content and locution to the illocution and perlocution-is that this problematic must also entail, beyond all Heidegger's paraphrased Cassirerian binaries, a deeper binary. It is the exoteric-esoteric way of reading, thinking, and speaking as Heidegger did, and Cassirer did not-but, worse, that Cassirer also could not even perceive when encountering it in his primary sources and interlocutors.

It is because of this hermeneutic naivete that Heidegger could not consider Cassirer a worthy conversationalist at Davos on the Kantian Kampfplatz der Metaphysik (battleground of metaphysics)-not least because of Cassirer's perceived incompetence to teach the really hard philosophical, ethical, and political lessons to the next generation, his commitment to natca&u being insufficiently attuned to esoteric awareness and prudence. In private, Heidegger and Jaspers had concurred as early as 1925 that Cassirer was perhaps "instructive" but fundamentally "boring"-although instructive and boring people were handy to have around now and then.92 And for this pedagogic and pragmatic reason, Heidegger needed to debate him publicly in order to recruit for himself the younger generation of global philosophical talent (in addition to Germany and France, also represented at Davos were Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and perhaps Japan). Ultimately, however, the philosophical (logographic) task from Plato to Nietzsche and Heidegger and beyond, as Strauss writes of Machiavelli, is how to be a "captain without an army," and under modern conditions that means to recruit an army "only by means of books."93

Heidegger's 1928 review of Cassirer's book on symbolic forms includes a seemingly innocuous remark about the historical (and historicizing) dimension of Cassirer's argument. Heidegger writes: "The variations of the different feelings for time and the corresponding indications of conceptions of time account for 'one of the profoundest differences in the character of individual religions.' Cassirer shows ... the main features of the typical views of time among the Hebrews, Persians, Indians, Chinese and Egyptians as well as in


Greek philosophy."94 There is a Nietzschean subtext here, and Nietzsche is basically terra incognita, when not anathema, to Cassirer. As Heidegger would have known from reading Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (1886), one of the few places Nietzsche identifies the problem of esotericism by name, at the very core of great philosophy (i.e., philosophy not found in "books for all the world which are always foul-smelling books, the smell of small people clinging to them") lies the fact that the exoteric-esoteric distinction has been the founding principle of every society grounded on "order of rank"-and the one entails the other. This, Nietzsche continues, has been well known to all philosophers globally, giving as examples: "Indians as well as Greeks, Persians, and Muslims, in short, wherever one believed an order of rank, not in equality and equal rights."95 Typically, Nietzsche kept silent the specific consequences for his own rhetorical practice, preferring to produce and use, not mention, them. By leaving to readers the task of comparing Cassirer's remark to Nietzsche's, Heidegger offered certain cognoscenti a tacit but effective critique of Cassirer's ignorance of esotericism, without further exposing the great transhistorical and sociohistorical principle to public scrutiny.

Heideggerian "courage" and "resoluteness" (philosophically legitimated already in Being and Time) entail an irreversible decision for exo/esotericism-including, in his later "turn," after World War II, their supplemental replacement by "releasement" (Gelassenheit), which, however hardly, means a turn away from exo/esotericism. All of Heidegger's utterances are contingent on this prior decision-which may appear courageous, modestly with- drawn, or whatever else the situation demands. As we have seen, at Davos, Heidegger's key rhetorical trope in this regard had been that Kant, followed by Cassirer, "shrinks back" or "draws back in terror" in the face of his own discovery that he had unwittingly destroyed the foundation of reason.96 Under the banner sapere aude! Kant's only partial and timorous ontological turn had also undermined all previous and future attempts to provide a foundation ethics, along with Geist and Xoyou, as well as Vernunft.97 By homology, for Heidegger as for Strauss, Cassirer is likely impaled on a version of a dynamic antinomy, in one Kantian sense, in which pure reason fails because two views of the same phenomenon are mutually exclusive and incompatible, and yet each is internally coherent logically and true.98 On one hand, Cassirer can "not face" an allegedfact; that is, the impossibility of founding an ethics. On the other hand, Cassirer still requires an ethics, indeed a presupposed one, but cannot develop it because it is sensu stricto impossible to do so. Pace Strauss, however, Cassirer does not entirely "drop" ethics out of his philosophy of symbolic forms or of culture.99 In his own mind, he develops a provisional ethics (particularly in the years 1935-41), and nothing has pre-

624 POLITICAL THEORY/ October 1998

vented Cassirerians from elaborating it further. 10 But the far more interesting problem, from the Heideggerian perspective, is what it might mean, as Strauss also says, if Cassirer dropped an ultimately impossible project silently. For Cassirer did not grasp eloquent silence-unlike Heidegger.

Turning to 'Davos' proper, we must keep in mind that the ultimate stakes in any debate for Heidegger (and for all those for whom he is "the only great thinker in our time") must depend not on any openly discussible 'content' but on the effective use of exo/esoteric 'silence'-its capacity to persuade and dissuade beneath consciousness and logic.

DAVOS: ELOQUENCE AND SILENCE

At Davos, Heidegger and Cassirer gave their independent lectures (one mornings, the other afternoons), culminating in the much-awaited weekend confrontation. Heidegger's student Otto Friedrich Bollnow remarked an essential point, apparently without knowing what it meant: Cassirer attempted to integrate discussion of Heidegger into each one of his talks, beginning by saying that basically they were in agreement in spite of some quibbles; whereas Heidegger, ostensibly using the occasion to develop his new interpretation of Kant, never once mentioned Cassirer and his ideas until the weekend debate made this studied lack of reciprocity formally unavoidable.101

The publicly debated topic at Davos remains well known: how exactly to define neo-Kantianism; the relations of finitude to infinity, time to temporal- ity, history to historicity; and the precise meaning of Kant's "Copernican revolution." As Heidegger seminally formulated the latter issue, "[T]he Dialectic is ontology," and hence "the problem of appearance [Schein] in the Transcendental Logic, which for Kant is only negative in the form in which it first appears there, is [actually] a positive problem."'102 And whereas Schein is positive, freedom is figured as negative. Finally, then, there is the entailed ethical problem, for Kant and his legacy, of freedom and free will in their relation to reason, to understanding, to imagination, and to intuition. In short, can ethical freedom be grounded at all, and if so, in which faculty, by what means, and to what effect?

Now, as Kant is commonly understood, Pure Reason seeks unity. (Like the Lacan's le reel, Spinoza's Deus sive Natura, and that to which Wittgen- stein rigorously can only point.) This unity is at once greater than the understanding (Verstand, a term defined by Kant only in terms of its discursive and logical deployment), and yet it must be expressed in understanding's terms; which means that understanding's grasp of unity, hence of reason, is always insufficient for reason.103 The requisite mediating functions, for Kant,


of imagination (the common root of sensibility and understanding) and intuition (knowledge in immediate relation to empirical objects)-as each bears on the problem of both symbolic representation and freedom, hence also ethics-was formulated by Cassirer at Davos as follows, setting the stage for the debate with Heidegger:

The power of imagination is the connection of all thought to the intuition. Kant calls the power of imagination synthesis speciosa. Synthesis is the basic power [Grundkraft] of pure thinking. For Kant, however, it [pure thinking] does not depend simply on synthesis, but depends instead primarily upon the synthesis which serves the species. But this problem of the species leads us into the core of the concept of image, the concept of symbol. If we keep the whole of Kant's work in view, severe problems surface. One of these is the problem of freedom. For me, that was always really Kant's main problem. How is freedom possible? Kant says that this question does not allow being conceived in this way. We conceive only of the inconceivability of freedom.104

As glossed by Heidegger in rebuttal, "Cassirer wants to show that finitude becomes transcendent in the ethical writings"; whereas the proper question is only "How is the inner structure of Dasein itself, is it finite or infinite?""0' Heidegger quickly answered his own question, provisionally remaining silent about the ethical implications, or lack thereof:

As a finite creature, the human being [der Mensch] has a certain infinitude in the ontological. But the human being is never infinite and absolute in the creating the being itself [des Seienden selbst]; rather, it is infinite in the sense of the understanding of Being [des Seins]. But, as Kant says, provided that the ontological understanding of Being is only possible with the inner experience of beings, this infinitude of the ontological is bound essentially to ontic experience so that one must say the reverse: this infinitude which breaks out in the power of imagination is precisely the most strongest argument for finitude, for ontology is an index of finitude.106

In this sense, ontology can be ontic and historical. And ontology is normally understood (at least constatively, as opposed to performatively) to be concerned not with the 'ought' but only with the 'is,' whereas the ontic per definitionem is closed to Being and open only to beings-hence potentially to the problem of ethics and other cultural concerns. For Heidegger, in Cassirer "the terminus ad quem is the whole of a philosophy of culture in the sense of an elucidation of the wholeness of the forms of a shaping consciousness"'107-whereas the terminus a quo is ontologically obscure or even nonexistent. Led by his thesis about Kant's Copemican turn as being only timorous and partial, Heidegger asserts with regard to Cassirer that "[m]y position is the reverse. The terminus a quo is my central problematic," which "occurs not in a Philosophy of Culture, but rather in the question: tC To 'ov, or rather: what in general is called Being?"''08 (Which Kant might have said


is the index of finitude, understanding, and the ontic-although this is not Heidegger's Kant.)

It would be a mistake, however, to think (in 'Cartesian' fashion) that what is here being contested by Cassirer and Heidegger is a binary opposition, division of labor, or choice between two rational systems: with the one focusing on ontological origins, the other on ontic effects. Nor (pace an otherwise salutary remark by Peter Gay at the Yale Cassirer conference) was 'politics' in any obvious sense at stake, either. Rather, as Cassirer himself worried, Heidegger was using or appropriating Kantian reason to undermine not merely Kantian reason, but reason tout court. Like Nietzsche, he was seeking appropriately postrational-that is, sub- and surrational-modes of speaking and writing, and any constated 'political' stand he might take is subtended by the problem of how it can be performatively transmitted and received."0 Although Heidegger's decision for exo/esotericism can be viewed as an authentically politico-ontological act, on his own definition, by the same token no specific "content" of this act can be publicly expressed. For, as Heidegger had said a year later (in 1930), the " 'doctrine' of a thinker is what is unsaid in his saying, to which man is exposed so that he might expend himself for it.""' To repeat, not 'content' but 'style'-the eloquence of silence-is ultimately operative.

Once in the Davos debate, Cassirer himself begins to approach this problem by addressing the problem of language. Interesting in this regard is the "philological comment," the only outside intervention recorded in the transcript, which the Dutch philosopher Henrik Pos directed to the two disputants: "Both speak a completely different language. For us, it is a matter of extracting something common from these two languages.""' But Pos, symptomatically, meant only the possible (Cassirerian) task of translating two somewhat different sets of philosophical terminology, rather than the impossible (Heideggerian) task of translating an intentionally exo/esoteric language exoterically. In other words, Pos sided with Cassirer. Before ana- lyzing this crucial moment for Cassirer in the debate, however, we will attend to the context in which it occurred.

Heidegger had said bluntly that not any mere anthropology (read also: cultural studies) was under dispute, but nothing less than "philosophy's central problematic itself, which leads man back beyond himself and into the totality of beings in order to make manifest to him, with all his freedom, the nothingness of his Dasein." He continued:

This nothingness is not the occasion for pessimism and melancholy. Instead, it is the occasion for understanding that authentic activity takes place only where there is opposition and that philosophy has the task of throwing man back, so to speak [or to a


certain extent: gewissermapien], into the hardness of his fate [die Harte seines Schicksals] from the shallowness of a man who merely uses [or lives off] the work of the spirit [der bloji die Werke des Geistes benutzt]." 12

To paraphrase the later Levinas, "The Da of Dasein is already an ethical problem.""13 And what a problem! The Davos audience must have gasped silently, if not aloud. For it was clear to "everyone who had eyes" that Cassirer-his person, institution, and tradition-was suddenly being accused of inauthentic, cowardly, opportunistic parasitism. The rule of academic decorum had been irrevocably broken: in Nietzschean fashion the ad hominem had invaded philosophical disputation.'14

A quasi-class distinction between the two debaters was visible and palpa- ble: on the one side of the podium there was the fifty-five-year-old haute- bourgeois, cosmopolitan, eloquent, conciliatory, immaculately dressed, white-haired, and momentarily ill-disposed Cassirer. On the other side stood a forty-year-old, swarthy, hale and hearty provincial Swabian citing impeccable Greek. This overall impression was to be recalled by all present as a mechanically reiterated trope or mantra. Cassirer, it was said, looked like "reincarnated Goethe," whereas Heidegger was perceived as the reincarna- tion of nobody known, wearing what his Marburg students had dubbed his "existential suit," the "costume of his own invention"-part forester, part peasant.' " As he had made clear before the debate, Heidegger had come to Davos not least for the superb skiing. Now, such anecdotes are not as incidental or exclusively ad hominem as they may appear. Bourdieu has shown that they are an intimate part of the habitus that informs the "philosophical field" (le champ philosophique) generally, including battles such as 'Davos.' 116 And, as defined superbly by Kant, "[A]n argumentum ad hominem is an argument that obviously is not true for everyone, but still serves to reduce someone to silence.""117

By way of response to Heidegger's veiled personal attack, Cassirer contests Heidegger's Nietzschean (indeed Schmittian) imputation to philosophy of opposition and struggle unto death. But in the end, Cassirer can offer only a rather pious and desperate observation under the circumstances, given the evident paradigm shift of the audience toward Heidegger and the latter's use of ad hominem argumentation. At this axial moment in the debate-the moment given to summarizing remarks-Cassirer replies to Heidegger's reference to "the hardness of fate" and "the shallowness of a man who merely uses the work of the spirit": "We are maintaining a position where little is to be accomplished through arguments that are purely logical.""'

Extremely interesting here-and this is one of my main points-is that with this remark Cassirer unwittingly confirms Heidegger's basic thesis


about Kant's First Critique, nominally under dispute: that Kant had "drawn back in terror" before the logical consequences of his own critique of reason. These consequences Heidegger understands not merely as devastating for the problem of grounding any ethics, but also as legitimating, indeed necessitat- ing, a mode of philosophical argumentation that is inherently postrational and postlogical, hence exo/esoteric. According to Heidegger's 1929 book Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, a fundamental philosophical problem lies in the general failure of Kant and his tradition radically to confront their own premises and conclusions. Specifically, "The Critique of Pure Rea- son ... threatens the supremacy of reason and the understanding. 'Logic' is deprived of its preeminence in metaphysics, which was built up from ancient times. Its idea has become questionable [Ihre Idee wird fraglich: i.e., not authenticallyfragwiirdig]."119 And this point is hammered home in the precis of Heidegger's public lecture at Davos, "Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft und die Aufgabe einer Grundlegung der Metaphysik," a lecture Cassirer cannot himself attend, since he has fallen momentarily ill, but the gist of which Heidegger conveys to him in Cassirer's hotel room-interpreted as a humane gesture by all present.120 By his plaintive admission that their debate had reached the point where "little is to be accomplished through arguments that are purely logical," Cassirer unwittingly incorporates Heidegger's core position on Kant, the very bone of contention at Davos, in spite and because of the fact that Cassirer could not rebut, nor even grasp, it conceptually. In other words, Heideggerian exo/esotericism was working, claiming its first important victim.

Heidegger's overall politico-ontological style of argumentation has been neatly summarized by Bourdieu (wedding Debordian detournement to a Marxist critique of political economy):

Philosophical strategy is inseparably a political strategy at the heart of the philosophical field: to uncover the metaphysics at the foundation of the Kantian critique of all metaphysics is to divert for the profit [c'est d6tourner au profit] of "essential thinking" (das wesentliche Denken)-which perceives in Reason, "glorified centuries," "the most relentless adversary of thought"-the capital of philosophical authority held by the Kantian tradition. It is this masterful strategy that allows the neo-Kantians to be combated, but in the name of Kantianism, and thus accumulates both the profits gained from attacking Kantianism and those gained from claiming Kantian authority. This is not a small thing on a field where all legitimacy emanates from Kant.121

And the implications of this Heideggerian strategy are certainly no small thing today as cultural studies struggles-impossibly-to appropriate Kant and neo-Kantianism to ground itself. Bourdieu is simply wrong, however, when he goes on to suggest that Cassirer, "one of the prime targets" of this


strategy, "was not deceived by it," and that the real power of Heidegger's rhetoric can be explained in cognitively graspable terms.122 To the precise contrary, Cassirer unwittingly incorporates as his own the same exo/esoteric Heideggerian phrases and concepts that he persists in disputing only exoterically and rationally.

With this unconscious incorporation, the Davos debate was effectively and definitively terminated-"for everyone who had eyes." It nominally droned on, of course, for all those who did not-most notably Cassirer himself. And so it is that Cassirer adds: "Hence we have been condemned here to a relativity. 'What one chooses for a philosophy depends on what sort of being one is.' But we may not persevere in this relativity, which would be central for empirical men."''23 This "may not" is what seems today so pious, so incredibly fragile and naYve, so finally incapable of grounding anything- except as an arbitrary, decisionistic, relativistic thrownness and project unto death. Precisely Heidegger's exo/esoteric turf.

Heidegger's earlier response in the debate to Cassirer's explicit charge of relativism-reminiscent of Dilthey's main charge against Nietzsche-had been this:

On the grounds of the finitude of the Being-in-truth of human beings, there exists at the same time a Being-in-untruth. Untruth belongs to the inmost core of the structure of Dasein. And I believe here to have found for the first time that upon which Kant's metaphysical "appearance" [or "illusion": "Schein"] is metaphysically grounded. Now to Cassirer's question concerning universally valid eternal truths. If I say: truth is relative to Dasein, this is no ontic assertion of the sort in which I say: the true is always only what the individual human being thinks. Rather, this statement is a metaphysical one: in general, truth can only be as truth, and as truth it only has a sense in general if Dasein exists.124

Just here is where Cassirer overhears the consequence for language and rhetoric-the exo/esoteric manipulation of "metaphysical illusion"-which is entailed by Heidegger's radical positioning of untruth as well as truth as an authentic modality of Dasein.'25 And it is also at this point in the debate that Cassirer attempts to address the problem of language.

Desperately seeking exoteric dialogue where there simply was none for Heidegger per definitionem, Cassirer persists in attempting to differentiate his position from Heidegger's in terms of content, before attempting to turn to the problem of style:

Like mine, his position cannot be anthropocentric, and if it does not want to be such, then I ask, where the common core of our disagreement lies. That it cannot be empirical is clear. We must search again for the common center, precisely in this disagreement.


And I say, we do not need to search. For we have this center and, what is more, this is because there is a common, objective human world in which the differences between individuals have in no way been superseded, but with the stipulation that the bridge here from individual to individual has now been knocked down. This occurs repeatedly for me in the primal phenomenon of language. Each of us speaks his own language, and it is unthinkable that the language of one of us is carried over into the language of the other. And yet, we understand ourselves through the medium of language. Hence, there is something like the language. And hence there is something like a unity which is higher than the infinitude of the various ways of speaking. Therein lies what is for me the decisive point. And it is for that reason that I start from the objectivity of the symbolic form, because here "the inconceivable has been done" [Weil hier "das Unbegreifliche getan" ist].l26

Now, Cassirer is likely aware that Heidegger loathed Goethe- notwithstanding his appropriation from Faust of Care (Sorge) in Being and Time as a fundamental attunement of Dasein.127 Here, near debate's end, Cassirer's main line of defense against Heidegger is reduced to citing as shibboleth from his own humanist tradition. But Faust's culminating coda is different: "das Unbeschreibliche hier ist getan" (the indescribable here has been done).'28 Which Cassirer, appealing to "the objectivity of symbolic form," transforms into "the inconceivable has been done." Symptomati- cally, he thus displaces the linguistic (the indescribable) by the epistemological (the inconceivable)-at the expense of language. It is simply impossible to combat Heidegger on this ground insofar as in his exo/esotericism what cannot, and should not, be described exoterically can still be maintained esoterically. In short, there is never any radical 'linguistic turn' in Cassirer, as there certainly is in Heidegger, and any cultural studies that would ground itself on Cassirer and symbolic form should realize that it is grounding itself on quicksand. Cassirer here also makes the fundamental mistake, helpless against Heidegger, to assume a priori that there is one-exoteric-language, and that at Davos he is debating an opponent who, like any rational man, speaks (or at the very least presupposes the existence of) that same language.129 Cassirer's exoteric "die Sprache" (the language) should never be confused with the later Heidegger's exo/esoteric "die Sprache spricht" (language speaks), or with the Lacanian Ca parle. Cassirer, whose inability ever to take adequate account of Freudian psychoanalysis is well known, generally deluded himself that there is no difference between speaking esoterically and speaking exoterically-trapped as he was in an opening gambit of which he had never studied or even dreamt.

The last word, the checkmate, of the Davos transcript is Heidegger's. He turns away from Cassirer to look into the eyes of an audience already won over to him, whether it knew it or not.


Take one thing away with you from our debate: do not orient yourselves to the variety of positions of philosophizing human being, and do not occupy yourselves with Cassirer and Heidegger. Rather, the point is that you have come far enough to have felt that we are on the way toward once again getting down to business with the central question of metaphysics. And on top of that, I would like to point out to you that, in small measure, what you have seen here is the difference among philosophizing human beings in the unity of the problematic, which on a large scale expresses something completely different, and that it is precisely this freeing of itself from the difference of positions and standpoints which is essential in the debate with the history of philosophy; [it is essential to see] precisely how the differentiation of standpoints is the root of philosophical work. 130

Infine, ignore both Cassirer and Heidegger-but agree only with Heidegger. Some of the audience still wants the debate to continue the next day, as does Cassirer himself, although no continuation has been scheduled. Only Heideg- ger declines. For him and his own, the debate has definitively terminated for the simple reason that no open debate ever began in the first place, could ever occur. In the event, the exo/esoteric "differentiation of standpoints" had been definitively accomplished: hier war getan. Such is Heidegger 's way of 'drawing lines of demarcation.'

That was 1929: the first global catastrophe for not yet omnipotent Capital; the accelerating drift of Europe and the world toward fascism, national socialism, belligerent imperialism (and Stalinism)-against which the Briand-Stresemann accords, not to mention debates among international philosophers, were among the many hapless casualties. The death of the powerful foreign minister of the Weimar Republic, Gustav Stresemann, half a year after Davos (October 1929), was more than a symbolic event. It coincided exactly "with the changing economic conjuncture and the conclu- sion of reparations negotiations." '3' Almost immediately, the bourgeois parties shifted to oppose the older political coalitions and one important political result-the rollback of organized labor's economic gains-opened up a new field of political opportunities for all parties, most lethally the extreme Right. This turn of events played directly into the hands of the NSDAP. For one of its great strengths up to the seizure of power-when it was required to begin making policy itself, and thus threatened to cease being "The Movement" (as Heidegger and other Nazis preferred to call themselves) and to become yet another loathed political party, which eventually necessitated Hitler's 1934 purge of R6hm's S.A.-was the propagation of "a very dexterous and clever mixture of conservative capitalist and populist anticapitalist positions, "132

which were attractive to an economically disparate cross-section of Germany, including the bloc of urban petty bourgeoisie and peasantry. This otherwise heterogeneous constituency had been "short-changed in all the Weimar


coalitions or blocs since 1924 and had been reaggregated politically by the Nazi Party." 133 And it was with this political conjuncture and draconian solution that Heidegger most identified,'34 with Cassirer (and especially those more helpless and/or farther to the Left) paying the piper.

Now, my claim is not that Heidegger had yet fully honed his exo/esoteric technique at Davos, but that his forensic success against Cassirer there emboldened him to continue to seek ways to speak, write, and influence without ever being fully 'heard' or 'read.' Heidegger's own attitude in entering the debate in Davos appears to have been appropriately ambivalent, according to his important (but incompletely available) correspondence with his student, the philosopher Elisabeth Blochmann. On one hand, he wrote her on 14 April 1929 that he had gone to Davos a few weeks earlier aware of the "danger" that "the entire thing would become merely sensational," and that he had not wanted to be "pushed into the center" of attention. On the other hand, he wrote in the same letter that "Cassirer was extremely noble in the discussion and almost too friendly [verbindlich]. Thus I found too little opposition, which prevented giving the problems the necessary acuity of formulation"' 35-a remark that would likely come as a surprise to all present, and only makes sense in terms of perfecting his practice of exo/esotericism. If Heidegger had not been really "in the center of attention," it is only in the sense that his "unsaid" doctrine per definitionem can never be centrally identified in exoteric terms. His hesitation to Blochmann does mean, however, that he was not yet fully certain about his ability to use exo/esotericism effectively, at least not extempore. In a letter to Jaspers on 25 May 1929, Heidegger summed up his experience in Davos in these terms: "with all the unpleasantness unbefitting my style, in Davos I nonetheless experienced directly and powerfully that it still makes sense to be there [in Davos habe ich doch unmittelbar und stark erfahren, daJ3 es noch einen Sinn hat, da zu sein]; and so one has to take into account the fact that one will come into idle chatter [es in Kauf nehmen, daj3 man ins Gerede kommt].'36 This apparently offhand use of the phrase da zu sein is in fact extraordinarily important. It precisely articulates ontology to the political, in the sense of taking a resolute stand about Being by being existentially engaged in combat, putting one's body on the line-at the necessary risk of participating in idle chatter and entering into the quotidian gossip of the majority. Since, for Heidegger, 'even' Gerede can conceal and reveal an authentic comportment of Dasein to Sein, it can also be employed to exo/esoteric effect.'37

Given his own commitment to exo/esotericism, however, Heidegger also could not have really disagreed with anything Cassirer might say, that is, not in terms of "content" and not if it proves useful for dissemination in appropriate conceptual or social conjunctures. Nonetheless, on this particular


occasion-on the Kampfplatz der Metaphysik circa 1929 in the battle being waged over the next generation of select philosophers-Heidegger had to dispute Cassirer in a certain way. But, after having staked out the grounds on which recruitment could be carried out with reasonable hope of success, Cassirer was no longer as particularly interesting for Heidegger. Which is why Heidegger refused to continue the debate at Davos, and yet also felt perfectly comfortable months later when he invited Cassirer to speak at his own Freiburg (Cassirer chose to lecture on Rousseau, of all things). On the royal road to philosophy, noblesse oblige, particularly when the major opponents have been corps/ed and when, after Davos, 'the rumor of the hidden king' (Hannah Arendt) of philosophy was a rumor no longer.138 Sooner a public secret, if not noble lie. Liberal humanism, Enlightenment, and their 'publicity' are most useful, now and then, to maintain social cohesion when the Holderlinian gods have departed, the Nietzschean night of the soul is dark. And when political ontology stands poised-imperceptibly-to smash liberal humanism and Enlightenment from without and from within whenever the time is ripe and whenever it sees fit.

Alternatively posed as questions: Is Heideggerian political ontology a structural component of humanism and Enlightenment, developing within them immanently but, as Cassirer might argue, as such in principle suscepti- ble to exoteric critique and self-critique? Or is instead political ontology an externally imposed, radical other, that always eludes detection even as it is being incorporated through esoteric means, as Heidegger would affirm? Or, as I am suggesting in this essay, is there a third alternative that can compre- hend and combat both possibilities?

IDLE TALK, VIOLENT TALK

Today's hallmark of postmodernity in general and of cultural studies specifically is that academic discussions have lost their passion as well as their precision-rendering it ever more difficult to appreciate the precision and passion of earlier philosophical disputes. Yet, real precision and passion for Heidegger occur only at the exo/esoteric level. At Davos, any public dispute-whether there is a Copernican turn in Kant's First Critique, whether the nature of that turn is from the ontic to the ontological, and whether this turn can be grounded in an existing ethics or has consequences for a possible ethics-is all mere exoteric squabbling for Heidegger. All Cassirer's arguments, and mutatis mutandis those of liberal humanism generally, can only be Gerede.


Again, this is not to say that Gerede is somehow avoidable or even undesirable, as Being and Time had gone to impressive lengths to show; indeed, it can and must be used exo/esoterically, politico-ontologically. However, this is to say that we ignore at our own risk the covert as well as overt violence that has profoundly informed the history of consciousness in all its so-called conversations. This violence includes the ancient Greek xywv and tOXEgoa, later adapted by Nietzsche; Kant's Kampfplatz der Metaphysik; the Schmittian ideal that "it belongs only to human beings to make war, not only to kill but to die, for a high cause and ultimately for the highest cause, which is their faith";139 Heidegger's hair-raising teaching to his students in 1929-30 that the very mission of authentic thinking is to make us "again call out to him who is able to drive terror into our Dasein" 140-in short to the Fuhrerprinzip; and, not least, the Althusserian thesis that philosophy is "class struggle in the specific element of theory." 141 This violence in mind, we can confirm another of Strauss's brutal judgments: Cassirer at Davos shows that he only "represented the established academic position. He was a distinguished professor of philosophy but he was no philosopher. He was erudite but he had no passion. He was a clear writer but his clarity and placidity were not equaled by his sensitivity to the problems." 142 Which problems, exactly? In a word, the exo/esoteric problematic that is always already designed to crush-when it cannot exploit and manipulate-"clear writing," "clarity and placidity."

So it was that the limits of Cassirer's only partially grasped Goethean and Schellingian "symbolic form" and "myth" returned with a vengeance when, at the end of his life, he attempted to face the "myth of the twentieth century"-German national socialism-but with inadequate weapons and with what Strauss called "weak-kneed eclecticism." 143 Which is to say with a Xoyoa or philosophy that has always already unknowingly conceded the field to poetry or gvOom. Any distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric (and hence crucial differentia specifica among the various totalitar- ian myths of the State, notably between Italian fascist relativism and German national socialist essentialism) is effectively obliterated in Cassirer's posthumously published The Myth of the State (1946)-his last will and testament in terms of applying his theory of myth to the most pressing current events. Cassirer was thus simply incapable of providing an effective analytic and theoretical weapon both retroactively against national socialism in 1946 and proleptically for his followers' use in combat today against neo-Nazism-let alone against the neofascist relativism that is transnational capitalism. Heidegger's victory over Cassirer at Davos had 'predicted,' as it were, that the philosophy of symbolic forms and its capacity to analyze fascism are politically inadequate, in addition to serving ontologically as yet another


apologist for the age-old concealment of the question of Being. When Cassirer concluded The Myth of the State (and his life work) by admitting that "it is beyond the power of philosophy to destroy the political myths," because "a myth is in a sense invulnerable . .. impervious to rational arguments," and hence "cannot be refuted by syllogisms,"'" he was still confirming one of Heidegger's basic arguments, was still unwilling or incapable of taking the next step and asking how myth might then work so supremely well as illocutionary act and perlocutionary effect. For his part, Heidegger's exo/esoteric intervention in the Third Reich was capable of not just producing at that time what he notoriously called "the inner truth and greatness of the Movement" (i.e., national socialism)"45 but later reproducing his brand of fascism to live to fight another day exo/esoterically long after it had suc- cumbed politically-as is the inevitable fate of any ontic phenomenon during the long march of the transhistory of Being.

As helpless as virtually any isolated individual or philosopher is in the face of historical disaster, in The Myth of the State Cassirer could add only one qualification to his admission that "it is not in the power of philosophy to destroy the political myths": "But philosophy can do us another important service. It can make us understand the adversary better. In order to fight the enemy you must know him.... We should see the adversary face to face in order to know how to combat him."'46 The uncanny problem, however, is that this enemy may be us. And it is us, if grasping the exo/esoteric dimension of modern myth is indeed impossible, "impervious to rational arguments," and without our ability fully to know how the enemy debates, thinks, writes. One thing is certain. In 1929 Davos, Ernst Cassirer had met his enemy face to face-absolutely clueless about how to combat him effectively. And today this is the Cassirerian ball that is in 'our' court, including the conceptually foundationless court of cultural studies.

CABARETAFTER DAVOS

But in one important respect Heidegger did not simply 'win' the Davos debate whereas Cassirer simply 'lost' it. In terms of class struggle (not to be conflated with political ideology), Cassirer and Heidegger always say the same thing-albeit the one exoterically, the other exo/esoterically. In this sense, they both won the real debate, the one 'extimate' to all academic philosophical disputes: the debate on behalf of capitalist interests.

At the very end of the Davos event, a slapstick cabaret was organized with the inevitable caricature of the main participants. 4" Cabaret-like the carnivalesque generally-is an established institution to legitimate dominant


systems by critiquing them only within carefully policed limits. One of Heidegger's assistants, the aforementioned Otto Friedrich Bollnow, played the 'victorious' Heidegger-repeating over and over again: "interpretari heiBt eine Sache auf den Kopf stellen" (interpretari means turning a thing on its head). To which the figure playing Cassirer repeatedly retorted, "Ich bin versohnlich gestimmt" (I'm in a conciliatory mood)-shaking flour out of the wig he was wearing, in mimicry of Cassirer's flowing white hair. But then flour continued to pour out of holes in his pockets-a more cruel allusion to Cassirer's now perceptible intellectual poverty and abject 'defeat.' Playing the role of Cassirer was the twenty-three-year-old Emmanuel Levinas.

Was this the same man who would later, as he said, "never forgive" Heidegger for associating with national socialism, who swore an oath during World War II never to return to Germany, but also who would continue to aver that the early Heidegger had written "one of the most beautiful books in the history of philosophy"?'48 With this question, we find ourselves stuck still today in an uncanny aporia of the history of consciousness: Who among us dares to be Cassirer, who Heidegger, who Bollnow, who Levinas? How separate are they from one another, and-if our subject positions are distrib- uted equally or unequally between them internally-is there no external alternative? Is the upshot of our own slapstick cabaret called the History of Consciousness that we are all only impersonating some past philosopher or philosophy, all footnotes to Plato-or to Heidegger? Given the elusive existence of their exo/esotericism, can we ever know whom we are ventrilo- quizing? Can we ever speak not merely in our own voice, but in an alternative, oppositional voice? Is life just a cabaret?

Even remaining within this anecdote and metaphor, however, there is at least weak hope. As Althusser once remarked: "With philosophers you know what to expect: at some point they will fall flat on their faces. Behind this mischievous or malevolent hope there is a genuine reality: ever since Thales and Plato, philosophy and philosophers have been "falling into wells." Slapstick. But that is not all !"149 But the intractable problem is that we do not always know what to expect with philosophers, let alone exo/esoteric ones. And do they eventually fall flat on their faces? Finally, what is this "not all" that exceeds them?

Near the outset of this essay, I said that I hoped to avoid contributing to the myth that at Davos Cassirer and Heidegger represented the only two major possible choices for the next generations of philosophers-with Heidegger's camp carrying the day, at least for a long time and the time being. An alternative, oppositional position might have been present at Davos. Canoni- cal myth to the contrary, it may not be true necessarily that everyone


witnessing the great event thought that Heidegger had triumphed, and not merely because a tiny minority stubbornly insisted on giving the laurel to Cassirer. But were there any real dissenters to the dominant consensus? Among the audience were several young self-described Marxists: including Alfred Sohn-Rethel, later the leading Frankfurt School economist, and Herbert Marcuse, although the latter was already swimming fast toward Heidegger's undertow."5' The record shows that they were all silent. But then vulgar Marxists-here defined as all those unaware of, and hence victims of, exo/esotericism-are always reduced to silence. And justly so.

I conclude. Whatever will be the 'final' outcome of the encounter between Cassirer and Heidegger (i.e., their mutual victory disguised as a 'debate' 'won' by Heidegger), and whether any academic discipline could ever find its philosophical base or ethics in Cassirer and/or Heidegger, the present essay has attempted to rectify the evident vulgar Marxist silence-not only at Davos. My argument hardly amounts to a philosophy or an ethics that constitutes an effective opponent of capitalism, fascism, Stalinism, and exo/esotericism. But, drawing one line of demarcation, this may be one exoteric start.

NOTES

1. Leo Strauss, "An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 28.

2. Dominique Janicaud, The Shadow of That Thought: Heidegger and the Question of Politics, trans. Michael Gendre (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 60.

3. Emmanuel Levinas, "Martin Heidegger and Ontology," Diacritics 26, no. 1 (1996): 11. 4. Martin Heidegger, "Zurcher Seminar," in Seminare, Gesamtausgabe, ed. Curd Ochwadt

(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1986), I/15:426. I will cite this edition as GA, followed by section, volume, and page numbers.

5. Niccolo Machiavelli to Francesco Guicciardini, May 17, 1521, in The Prince: A New Translation, Backgrounds, Interpretations, Peripherica, ed. and trans. Robert M. Adams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 135.

6. Heidegger, "Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit," in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1967), 109 (emphasis added).

7. Compare also Isaiah 6:9-10. The passage from Mark is the core exhibit in Frank Kermode's The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

8. Boethius, Philosophiae consolationis, II, 74-77. 9. Louis Althusser, "Du cotd de la philosophie," in Edition posthume d'aeuvres de Louis

Althusser, vol. 5, Ecrits philosophiques et politiques, Tome II, ed. Fran,ois Matheron (Paris: Stock/lMEC, 1995), 259.


10. Benedict de Spinoza, Spinoza opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1925), 2:124; The Ethics, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 1:479 (pt. II, prop. XLIII, schol.).

11. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic, ed. and trans. J. Michael Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 557, 561.

12. For the standard account of this and other (often contradictory) definitions of ideology, see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 153-57.

13. Althusser, " 'On the Young Marx': Theoretical Questions," in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Vintage, 1970), 57.

14. On the way the prudent discourse peculiar to sacred thought was eventually replaced by another discourse informed by its own problematic relation to reality and intersubjectivity, see Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone, 1996). In Stalinist humanism, Marx replaces God in the presecular definition, truth in the Spinozist and Kantian, and ideology in the Althusserian. For Stalinism, "The teaching of Marx is omnipotent because it is true" (Rede Erich Honeckers auf der Internationalen Wissen- schaftlichen Konferenz des Zentralkomitees der SED: "Karl Marx und unsere Zeitalter-Kampf um Frieden und sozialen Fortschritt" [Dresden: Verlag Zeit im Bild, 1983], 11).

15. Althusser, "Marx and Humanism," in For Marx, 232. 16. Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy and

Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 175. 17. Heidegger, "Der Urprung des Kunstwerkes," in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main:

Klostermann, 1980), 47. 18. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-

Analysis, 1964, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), viii.

19. See The Seminarof Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 311-25.

20. Tracy B. Strong, "Nietzsche's Political Misappropriation," in The Cambridge Compan- ion to Nietzsche, ed. Bermd Magnus and Kathleen M. Higgens (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1996), 123.

21. This is something grasped not only by fascism but by Nazism. As the master of propaganda, Goebbels, memorably put it in March 1933, the strong state does not need overt propaganda, which indeed is a sign of weakness: "The best propaganda is not that which is always openly revealing itself; the best propaganda is that which as it were works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge at all of the propagandistic initiative" (cited in Julian Pedley, Capital and Culture: German Cinema 1933-45 [London: BFI, 1979], 101).

22. See Benito Mussolini and Alfredo de Marsico, as cited in Amerigo Montemaggiore, Dizionario della dottrinafascista (Turin: G. B. Paravia & Co., 1934), 369, 371 (from the entry "Gerarchia").

23. See Mussolini, "Relativismo e Fascismo", in Opera omnia, ed. Edoardo Susmel and Duilio Susmel (Florence: La Fireze, 1951-63), 17:267-69.

24. Ibid., 269. 25. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick Engels, trans.

Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International, 1967), 3:250 (translation modi- fied); Das Kapital: Kritik derpolitischen Okonomie, ed. Friedrich Engels (Berlin: Dietz, 1978), 3:260.

26. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 52.


27. Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, 2nd ed., trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1970), 101.

28. See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, 59. 29. Althusser, "Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists," in Philoso-

phy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists & Other Essays, ed. Gregory Elliott, trans. Ben Brewster et al. (London: Verso, 1990), 93.

30. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book : Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-54, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), 228.

31. Antonio Gramsci's profound grasp and appropriation of Machiavelli in the 1930s is of course the great Marxist exception in this regard (see Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith [New York: International, 1971], 125-205), but there is no theory of the unconscious in Gramsci. And fascist prison turned him into the greatest leftist practitioner of exo/esotericism. Althusser, too, practiced a form of exo/esotericism ("aleatory materialism") to critique Stalinist humanism, inevitablism, and totalitarianism-although mainly from within them. This is becoming evident with the publication of his opus postumus (e.g., see Sur la philosophie, ed. Olivier Corpet [Paris: Gallimard, 1994], esp. 34-44).

32. Althusser, "The Tbilisi Affair, 1976-1984," in Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, ed. Olivier Corpet and Fran,ois Matheron, trans. Jeffrey Mehiman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 118 (emphasis eliminated).

33. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, 133. This follows Lacan's analytic caveat about the relation of the unconscious to conscious knowledge: "All I can do is tell the truth. No, that isn't so-I have missed it. There is no truth that, in passing through awareness, does not lie. But one runs after it all the same" (p. vii). Although Lacan focused on lies in relation to the unconscious much more than on the possibility of their exo/esoteric manipulation, and although Althusser largely followed suit, elements of Althusserian theory are just now being used to critique this perceived lacuna in the Lacanian system, as well as in Marxism generally. See Robert Pfaller, Althusser: Das Schweigen im Text; Epistemologie, Psychoanalyse und Moninalismus in Louis Althussers Theorie derLektaire (Munich: Fink, 1997), esp. 74-157; and "Negation and Its Reliabilities: An Empty Subject for Ideology?" in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Zizek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 225-46.

34. Lacan, Tilivision (Paris: du Seuil, 1973), 83. 35. The Davos transcript has been published as "Davoser Disputation zwischen Ernst

Cassirer und Martin Heidegger," in Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 4th rev. ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1973), 246-68. It has been partially and badly translated as "A Discussion between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger," trans. Francis Slade, The Existentialist Tradition: Selected Writings, ed. Nino Languilli (Garden City, NY: Doubleday/ Anchor, 1971), 192-203; and more fully and precisely as "Davos Disputation between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger," in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 171-85. (This translation of the book supersedes the one in 1962 by James S. Churchill.)

36. See Ernst Cassirer, Die Idee der republikanischen Verfassung: Rede zur Verfas- sungsfeier am 11. August 1928 (Hamburg: Friederichsen, 1929). Jurgen Habermas has argued that Cassirer's "unclarified" relationship to Judaism was responsible for Heidegger's "questionable victory" at Davos insofar as the latter was able to articulate contemporary avant-garde existentialism with the claim to return to the deepest origins of "Occidental" thought. To this potent mixture, the Enlightenment humanist Cassirer could find no antidote because the Enlightenment, on Habermas's account, had only partially freed Jews and Jewish thought from the ghetto, but at the expense of "the depth of its own tradition, the Cabala," which alone could


have met ancient Greek thought, as exemplified by Heidegger, in terms of profundity ("Der deutsche Idealismus und die judischen Philosophen," in Philosophisch-politische Profile, 3rd ed. [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981], 53-54). In other terms, Habermas implies that Cassirer failed in not being authentically or sufficiently Jewish, whereas Heidegger was victorious in being what? Authentically and sufficiently Greek? In any case, historicizing 'explanations' can grasp nothing of transhistorical exo/esotericism.

37. See Heidegger, "Was Ist Metaphysik?" in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Kloster- mann, 1967), 1-19.

38. See Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 2nd ed., trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 76. The great rival myth that Schmitt had in mind was of course Sorel's "myth of the general strike." See Mark Neocleous, "Friend or Enemy? Reading Schmitt Politically," Radical Philosophy 79 (September-October, 1996): 13-23. Sup- plementing Neocleous's argument, I'd say that the paradoxical complexities of Schmitt's relationship to fascism and national socialism, in tandem with his generally positive influence on our own contemporary Left, are due to his commitment to the double rhetoric of exo/esotericism.

39. See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 89-102.

40. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as cited in Otto Friedrich Bollnow, "Gesprache in Davos," in Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger, ed. Gunther Neske (Pfullingen: Neske, 1977), 28. The reference is to Goethe's Die Compagne in Frankreich, published in 1822 but dating back to his experiences at the siege of Mainz in 1792-93. It was also Goethe's habit to use aesthetic categories to describe Napoleon. Goethe told an acquaintance that "Napoleon directed the world according to about the same basic principles as he [Goethe] did the theater" (J. D. Falk, 14 October 1808; Goethe, Artemis-Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gesprache [Zurich: Artemis, 1944 ff], 22:512).

41. The Straussian view remains informed by Leo Strauss's eyewitness accounts, to which I refer. (Strauss's academic career was launched by letters of recommendation from the unlikely pair of Cassirer and Carl Schmitt-yet another story there.) The main Heideggerian eyewitness is Bollnow, "Gesprache in Davos." The Cassirerian eyewitness is Henrik J. Pos, "Recollections of Ernst Cassirer," trans. Robert W. Bretall, The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp (Evanston, IL: The Library of Living Philosophers, 1949), 61-72. As we will see, Pos directed a remark to Cassirer and Heidegger during their debate, which is the only intervention from the audience recorded in the available transcript.

42. Strauss's only extended analysis of Heidegger is "An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," yet we are warned by Alan Udoff that "[t]he relationship of Strauss to Heidegger is not at all adequately suggested by the titles of his works or their indices-Natural Right and History being an outstanding example" ("On Leo Strauss: An Introductory Account," in Leo Strauss's Thought: Toward a Critical Engagement [Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1991], 27).

43. Karlfried Grunder, "Cassirer und Heidegger in Davos 1929," in Uber Ernst Cassirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, ed. Hans-Jurg Braun et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 290-302. Grunder's essay provides basic anecdotal information about the Davos event and its prehistory, as does Heinz Paetzold, Ernst Cassirer-Von Marburg nach New York: Eine philosophische Biographie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995), 86-105 ("Die Davoser Disputation zwischen Ernst Cassirer und Martin Heidegger 1929").

44. To be sure, cultural studies may not need a philosophical base; or, more precisely, as a form of historicism, it can and does not perceive such a need (on this issue avant la lettre, see Leo Strauss, "What Is Political Philosophy?" in What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], esp. 20-27). Today, this problem is debated, more or less directly, within cultural and postcolonial studies perhaps most intensely in the journal

Waite I ON ESOTERICISM 641

Cultural Critique (specifically, vol. 33, spring 1996; see especially Mario Moussa and Ron Scapp, "The Practical Theorizing of Michel Foucault: Politics and Counter-Discourse," 87-112). I know of no specific analytic yield supposedly indebted to Cassirer's methodology that could not have been arrived at from another route; and it is symptomatic that none of the contributions to the 1996 Cassirer conference at Yale attempted to apply Cassirerian concepts to specific problems. This holds true as well of the major anthologies on his work that are now appearing in Germany, including Uber Ernst Cassirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen; and Kulturkritik nach Ernst Cassirer, ed. Enno Rudolph and Bemd-Otto Kuppers (Hamburg: Meiner, 1995; Cassirer-Forschungen, vol. 1), both of which contain more or less insightful articles about Cassirer and his relationship to other thinkers, but neither of which really attempts to use Cassirer himself. But this reluctance or even incapacity would make sense if the Cassirerian symbolic form is indeed a conceptual night in which all cows are black. Certainly, Cassirer was never able to define and critique his own most basic concept-symbolic form-in the terms he used in 1907 to depict one of Spinoza's own basic concepts-substance. As paraphrased by Negri, "This concept of substance, Cassirer continues, is indeterminate, and when one tries to grasp its content, it appears at times as 'existence,' at times as a 'totality' of the particular determinations, 'ordering of the singular beings'; finally, the positivity of the concept of substance seems to reside in the mathematical dependence that the things establish, once and for all, among themselves" (Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991], 78; citing Cassirer, Das Erkenntnis- problem der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, vol. 2 [Hildesheim: Olms, 1973], 107-112). Finally, does cultural studies have reason to be concerned about exo/esotericism? No more and no less than any other discipline or would-be discipline.

45. Paetzold, Ernst Cassirer, 104. 46. See Susanne K. Langer, "On Cassirer's Theory of Language and Myth," in The

Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, 379-400; and Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain (Bloom- ington: Indiana University Press, 1954). For two important, very different critiques of the fascination of North American literary criticism in the 1950s with the Cassirerian concepts of symbol and myth, see Paul de Man's early 'deconstructionist' position in "The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism," in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criti- cism, 2nd rev. ed., introduction by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), esp. 242-44; and the 'orthodox' Marxist position of Ursula Brumm, "Der neue Symbolis- mus in Amerika," Neue deutsche Hefte 5 (1958-59); along with the later elaboration of her argument by one of East Germany's leading literary theorists, Robert Weimann, in his Structure and Society in Literary History: Studies in the History and Theory of Historical Criticism, rev. ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 131-45.

47. De Man, "Spacecritics: J. Hillis Miller and Joseph Frank", in Critical Writings 1953-1978, ed. Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 108.

48. Althusser, "Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists," 91. 49. Ibid., esp. 83, 88. 50. By repeating the rider "in principle," my intent is not to beg the question but rather to

acknowledge that Marxism and communism have not always lived up to these principles. 51. Althusser, "The Tbilisi Affair," 110. 52. Althusser, letter to Lacan, 4 December 1963, "Correspondence with Jacques Lacan

1963-1969," in Writings on Psychoanalysis, 157. 53. The contradiction I identify here is constitutive of Althusser's entire ceuvre. Its cause is

overdetermined, including by his manic psychopathology, but can also be explained (although not explained away) by the fact that all the writings Althusser published are exo/esoteric. In brief, the comparatively esoteric Althusser is more cogent than the comparatively exoteric.


54. See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, 139. On Lacan's neologism 'extimite' (which combines ex-terieur with in-timite), see Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Struc- ture and Society, ed. Mark Bracher et al. (New York: New York University Press, 1994), especially the contribution of Jacques-Alain Miller.

55. For the first analogy, see Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger 1929-1976, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 13; the second is Ludwig Englert's, as cited by Grunder, "Cassirer und Heidegger in Davos 1929," 299.

56. See Kurt Riezler's report on Davos (siding with Heidegger) in the Neue ZurcherZeitung, 30 March 1929; also cited in Rudiger Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland: Heidegger und seine Zeit (Munich: Hanser, 1994), 220-21. According to Safranski, Heidegger had read Mann's novel in the summer of 1924 together with his lover, the philosopher Hannah Arendt.

57. See Warren Montag, "Spinoza and Althusser against Hermeneutics: Interpretation or Intervention," in The Althusserian Legacy, ed. E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1993), 51-58.

58. Heidegger, "Davoser Vortrage: Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft und die Aufgabe einer Grundlegung der Metaphysik," in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 245. This pr6cis has been translated as "Davos Lectures: Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and the Task of a Laying of the Ground for Metaphysics," in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 169-71.

59. See Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe derMetaphysik: Welt-Endlichkeit-Einsamkeit, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983); GA, 11/29/30; The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicolas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), esp. chs. 3-4.

60. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 12. 61. Ibid., 39-40. 62. Ibid., 55. 63. Ibid., 13. On silence as a constitutive feature of Heidegger's thinking-although the

author is unaware of the problem of exo/esotericism and its rhetorical implications for Heidegger- see Berel Lang, Heidegger's Silence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).

64. Compare, for example, Bollnow, "Gesprache in Davos." 65. Stanley Rosen, The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry: Studies in Ancient Thought

(New York: Routledge, 1988), 13. 66. Karl Kautsky, Ethics and the Materialistic Conception of History, 4th rev. ed., trans.

J. R. Askew (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, n.d.), 160. As noted by Steven Lukes, Kautsky is one of very few Marxists to address the problem of ethics in any depth. And he did so within a problematic basically established by the Marburg neo-Kantians, including Cohen, Natorp, Lange, Stammler, Staudinger, and Vorlander-all of whom attempted "to supplement Marx with Kant, whose practical philosophy, they thought, could provide the ethical justification for the pursuit of the socialist goal" (Lukes, Marxism and Morality [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985], 15). On this topic, see Timothy R. Keck, "Kant and Socialism: The Marburg School in Wilhelmian Germany" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1975); and Klaus Christian Kohnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus: Die deutsche Universitatsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986). As Lukes also points out, other Marxists who were influenced also by Kant (including the Austro-Marxism of Adler, Bauer, and Mach) did not share Kautsky's need for ethical grounding, and still others attempted to mediate the two positions. I would add that by his neglect of ethics, Cassirer was indirectly opposing this 'ethical' moment in socialism. At least he was neglecting ethics compared to Marburg neo-Kantians-most notably Cassirer's teacher, Hermann Cohen. As Pierre Bourdieu has put it, Cohen had "proposed a Socialist interpretation of Kant, in which the


categorical imperative enjoining us to treat the other person [le personne d'autrui] as ends, not means, is interpreted as the moral program of the future" (L'ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger, 2nd rev. ed. [Paris: Minuit, 1988], 55-56). Heidegger's rejection of the validity of even the question of ethics was in this context a more direct attack on at least this socialism. Heidegger here followed Nietzsche (who had learned much of what he knew of Kantianism and socialism from Friedrich Albert Lange's History of Materialism). All this is not to deny that many think they have found an ethics in Heidegger (as others have found one in Cassirer); or, to be more precise, they have invented one for Heidegger by reading him only exoterically (e.g., the articles by John D. Caputo and Jean Grondin in Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought, ed. Theodore Kisiel and John von Buren [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994]).

67. As for the existential prerequisites, they may be found in Trotsky's depiction of Lenin (or, if one prefers, Lenin as ego ideal): "the 'amoralism' of Lenin, that is, his rejection of supra-class morals, did not hinder him from remaining faithful to one and the same ideal throughout his life; from devoting his whole being to the cause of the oppressed; from displaying the highest conscientiousness in the sphere of ideas and the highest fearlessness in the sphere of action; from maintaining an attitude untainted by the least superiority to an 'ordinary' worker, to a defenseless woman, to a child. Does it not seem that 'amoralism' in given a case is only a pseudonym for higher human morality?" (Leon Trotsky, "Their Morals and Ours," in Their Morals and Ours: Marxist versus Liberal Views on Morality; Four Essays by Leon Trotsky, John Dewey, and George Novack, 4th ed. [New York: Pathfinder, 1969], 34). "As for us," Trotsky wrote in 1920, "we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about 'sacredness of human life.' We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron" (Terrorism and Communism [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961], 82). On this occasion, Trotsky neglected to add: but not by blood and iron alone.

68. For a cogent attack against the ideology of interdisciplinarity, see Althusser, "Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists," esp. 85-100.

69. See Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of "As-If, " 2nd ed., trans. C. K. Ogden (New York: Harper & Row, 1935). Vaihinger's position was developed independently of, but finds its great philosophical precedent in, Jeremy Bentham's posthumously published "Theory of Fictions" (Bentham's Theory of Fictions, ed. C. K. Ogden [Paterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1959]).

70. Cassirer, Goethe und die geschichtliche Welt: Drei Aufsatze (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1932), 26, as cited in de Man, "Thematic Criticism and the Theme of Faust," trans. Dan Latimer, in Critical Writings, 80. Readers of the first paragraph of Nietzsche's Untimely Meditation on "The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" will recognize a key source of this view of Goethe. Prior to Davos, Cassirer had of course written extensively about Goethe (as both scientist and man of letters), including Freiheit und Form: Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1916), ch. 4; Idee und Gestalt: Fuinf Aufsdtze (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1921), chs. 1, 2; and "Goethe und Platon," Sokrates 48 no. 1 (1922), reprinted in Goethe und die geschichtliche Welt, ch. 3. In English, see his Rousseau Kant Goethe: Two Essays, trans. James Gutmann et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945), esp. 61-98.

71. Goethe, letter to K. E. Schubarth, 12 January 1818, inArtemis-Gedenkausgabe, 21:286. 72. Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen (Nr. 1113), in Artemis-Gedenkausgabe, 9:639. 73. Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 193. 74. Spinoza, The Ethics, 1:428 (pt. 1, prop. XVIII); Spinoza opera, 2:62. "Deus est omnium

rerum causa immanens, non vero transiens."


75. This returns us to the irony behind de Man's affirmation of Cassirer's paradigm shift of European and North American literary criticism "from the history of themes" (Stoffgeschichte) "to the history of ideas" (Geistesgeschichte), by which the demand for a 'history of images' is elided and obviated ("Thematic Criticism and the Theme of Faust," 80). De Man took a refreshingly candid neoformalist stand with regard both to the history of ideas and to presuppo- sitions about the idea of history, and was entirely justified in his imputation to Cassirer of "a certain theory of history" that "is shown to bring order and coherence in the apparently erratic development of literature"-but this means, for de Man, an illicit order and coherence in its actually erratic development ("Modem Poetics in France and Germany," in Critical Writings, 157). In other words, Cassirer simply presupposed the existence of a philosophy of history commensurate with his philosophy of symbolic forms, thus rendering their precise epistemological status basically undecidable. Are these forms ahistorical or transhistorical relational structures, not to say archetypes? Or are they merely concatenations of empirical observations without conceptual grounding?

76. Contrast Cassirer's view of Goethe's relation to Enlightenment and Romanticism as presented in both Rousseau Kant Goethe: Two Essays and The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), esp. 360.

77. See Rosen, Henmeneutics as Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), ch. 1: "Transcendental Ambiguity: The Rhetoric of the Enlightenment," which includes a close analysis of an often overlooked section of Kant's First Critique: "The Discipline of Pure Reason with Respect to Its Polemical Use" (B 766-97). Also compare Vaihinger's related view of Kant's argument (based particularly on the opus postumus) to formulate "the philosophy of as-if."

78. Cassirer's writings on Plato, and on Greek philosophy generally, confirm Strauss's remark that, after Schleiermacher's dismissal of the thesis that Plato was an esoteric writer, German philosophy began to lose its contact with the exo/esoteric problematic, which thus effectively ended with Lessing. For Schleiermacher "failed to see the crucial question," introducing as he did "that style of Platonic studies in which classical scholarship is still engaged" (Strauss, "Exoteric Teaching," in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 67-69). And compare, indeed, Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher, "General Introduction," in Introduc- tions to the Dialogues of Plato, trans. William Dobson (London: John William Parker, 1836), esp. 5-19. Whereas Schleiermacher had to at least take the question seriously, Cassirer did not. In addition to Cassirer's "Goethe und Platon," see in this regard his Die Philosophie der Griechen von den Anfangen bis Platon (Berlin: Ullstein, 1925), esp. pt. 2, ch. 3: "Platon."

79. On this term, see Geoffrey Waite, Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), esp. 51-58.

80. For another view of this Nietzschean problematic, see Rosen, The Mask of Enlighten- ment: Nietzsche's "Zarathustra" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). But this is not how Rosen views Heidegger in The Question ofBeing: A Reversal of Heidegger (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

81. Nietzsche, "Jenseits von Gut und Bose: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft," in Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1967 ff), 6/2:19 (pt. I, aphorism 11). I will cite this edition as KGW, followed by section, volume, and page numbers.

82. See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Sloterdijk distinguishes "cynicism," a form of modern "enlightened false consciousness," from the premodern (Diogenes) and also postmodern mode of liberatory, carnivalesque belly laughter that he calls "kynicism." Here, Nietzsche and


Heidegger are axial points for Sloterdijk's own explicitly left-Nietzschean and left-Heideggerian brand of kynicism, which, I would argue, wholly misses what Nietzsche and Heidegger themselves were about exo/esoterically. v

83. See Octave Mannoni, Clefspour l'imaginaire (Paris: du Seuil, 1968), 14-32; and Zi zek's many appropriations of Mannoni's work, including in For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 245-53.

84. V. I. Lenin, "Party Organization and Party Literature," in Collected Works, various trans. (Moscow: Progress, 1972), 10:44.

85. See Heidegger, "Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. 2. Teil: Das mythische Denken," Deutsche Literaturzeitung 21 (1928): 1000-1012; "Review of Ernst Cas- sirer's Mythical Thought," in The Piety of Thinking, ed. and trans. James G. Hart and John C. Maralso (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 32-45.

86. Jacques Taminiaux has pointed to the great importance of Heidegger's review for the development of a crucial aspect his thinking: the thematization of the attribution to primitive Dasein of an understanding of Being-a thematization more extensive and precise than the presentation in Being and Time ("The Husserlian Heritage in Heidegger's Notion of the Self," trans. Fran,ois Renaud, inReading Heideggerfrom the Start, 282). For discussion of Heidegger's own views on myth and symbol, see 281-84.

87. See Bollnow, "Gesprache in Davos." 88. Heidegger, "Ernst Cassirer," 1000. 89. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, "Philosophische Briefe uber Dogmatismus und

Kriticismus," in Samtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta'scher Verlag, 1856), 1/1:341 (emphasis added). Symptomatically, the problematic of exo/esotericism in Schelling is one of the only significant issues in his work not touched on by Heidegger in his 1936 lecture course on Schelling's concept of freedom (Heidegger, Schelling, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809), ed. Hildegard Feick [Frankfurt am Main: Klos- termann, 1988]; GA, 2/42; Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh [Athens: Ohio University Press 1985]). To be precise, Heidegger does allude to this problematic of silence here: once. But he does so obliquely and by way of Nietzsche, whom Heidegger tells his charges in his "Introductory Remarks" is "The only essential thinker after Schelling" (Schelling's Treatise, 3). Heidegger then mysteriously adds: "During the time of his greatest productivity and his deepest solitude, Nietzsche wrote the following verses in a dedication copy of his book Dawn of Day (1881): 'Whoever one day has much to proclaim / Is silent about much/ Whoever must one day kindle the lightning / Must be for a long time-cloud (1883)' " (pp. 3-4).

90. Heidegger, "Review of Ernst Cassirer's Mythical Thought," 33. As Heidegger further argues, this problematic is neo-Kantian insofar as Cassirer's "analysis of the mythic form of thought begins with a general description of the way in which objects stand over against mythic consciousness. The object-consciousness of mathematical physics as understood by the Kantian interpretation of Hermann Cohen serves as a guide to the characterization: There is an active forming of a passively given 'chaos of sensation' into a 'cosmos.' "

91. Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 229.

92. Karl Jaspers to Heidegger, 21 June 1925, Martin Heidegger/Karl Jaspers: Briefwechsel 1920-1963 (Munich: Piper, 1992), 50.

93. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 154. 94. Heidegger, "Review of Ernst Cassirer's Mythical Thought," 36. 95. Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Bose; KGW, 6/2:44-45 (pt. II, aphorism 30). 96. "Drawing back in terror" is also a central term in Heidegger's pedagogical repertoire,

particularly around 1929, as when he warned students to whom he was introducing metaphysics


that they might do precisely this, "when faced with the peculiar effort in grasping metaphysics directly" (The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 4).

97. Heidegger, "Davoser Vortrage," 245; "Davos Lectures," 171. 98. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 405-568; B 432-596. 99. Of course, even the most cursory look at Cassirer's more popular late works (e.g., the

1944 Essay on Man and the 1946 The Myth of the State) gives the impression that they are chock full of ethical concerns, and this leads to observations such as that of the theologian Paul Tillich about Davos; namely, that it was "the conflictbetween one who, like Cassirer, came from Kantian moral philosophy with rational criteria for thinking and acting, and one who, like Heidegger, defended himself on the notion that there are no such criteria" ("Heidegger and Jaspers," in Heideggerand Jaspers, ed. Alan M. Olson [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994], 17). But the claim of Heideggerians and Straussians is rather different; namely, that Cassirer could not ground his ethical concerns, which may well be a legitimate complaint. Appealing to arguments by Jacques Rivelaygue and Alexis Philonenko, Luc Ferry suggests laconically that "one of the principle issues in the quarrel between Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos" was about an impassable aporia between ethics and epistemology that was inscribed already deep within Kant himself: "[l]t is very hard to reconcile the idea of freedom (of intelligible and noumenal causality) with Kant's theory of meaning which requires that a concept be temporalized (schematized) to have meaning. It is then so hard to see how freedom and causality are reconciled in a particular case (the historical event) that one cannot imagine setting forth the various interpretations proposed by the commentators of Kant" (Ferry, Political Philosophy, vol. 2, The System of Philosophies of History, trans. Franklin Philip [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], 148-49).

100. See, for example, Paetzold, Ernst Cassirer, 157-90 ("Cassirers Jahre in Gote- borg/Schweden [1935-1941] und die Wende der Kulturphilosophie zur Ethik").

101. Bollnow, "Gesprache in Davos," 27. 102. "Davoser Disputation," 247 (Heidegger); "A Discussion," 193; and "Davos Disputa-

tion," 172. Gadamer has suggested that "[a]fter his encounter with Cassirer in Davos and, more important, following his growing insight into the inappropriateness of this transcendental self-interpretation for his own thinking, Heidegger began to interpret Kant's philosophy as being more entangled in the history of the forgetfulness of Being, as shown by his later works on Kant" (Hans-Georg Gadamer, "The History of Philosophy," in Heidegger's Ways, trans. John W. Stanley [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994], 162).

103. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 486; B 514. 104. "Davoser Disputation," 248 (Cassirer); "A Discussion," 193; "Davos Disputation,"

172-73. 105. Ibid., 252 (Heidegger); "A Discussion," 195; "Davos Disputation," 175. 106. Idem. 107. Ibid., 260 (Heidegger); "A Discussion," 199; "Davos Disputation," 180. 108. Idem. For a concise depiction of the changing complexity of Heidegger's position on

culture, see Jeffrey Andrew Barash, "Heidegger's Ontological 'Destruction' of Western Intellec- tual Traditions," in Reading Heidegger from the Start, 111-21. Noting Heidegger's apparent dismissal of the term 'culture' in his Davos response to Cassirer, Barash rightly argues that "[t]his deliberate neglect of a philosophical concept whose significance Heidegger himself had under- scored in his early Freiburg courses by no means indicates a suspension of Heidegger's critical thrust in this direction but rather a broadening of its focus" (p. 11 5)-a thrust, however, that was as radically new as it was shrouded in obscurity.

109. This basic point is missed by most extended recent attempts to reopen the question of Heidegger's relation to Kant: Daniel 0. Dahlstrom, "Heideggers Kant-Kommentar, 1925-1936,"


Philosophisches Jahrbuch (1989): 343-66; and "Heidegger's Kant-Courses at Marburg," in Reading Heideggerfrom the Start, 293-308; Frank Schalow, The Renewal of the Heidegger-Kant Dialogue: Action, Thought, and Responsibility (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); and (building on the work of Pierre Aubenque) Christopher Macann, "Heidegger's Kant Interpretation," in Critical Heidegger, ed. Christopher Macann (London: Routledge, 1996), 97-120. This is true also of the great earlier treatment of the Kant-Heidegger nexus: Jules Vuillemin, L'heritage kantien et la revolution copernicienne (Paris: P.U.F., 1954), 210-96. See further Pierre Aubenque, "Le debat de 1929 entre Cassirer et Heidegger," in Ernst Cassirer: De Marburg a New York; L'itin6raire philosophique, ed. Jean Seidendgart (Paris: du Cerf, 1990). Aubenque is also right to highlight the "violent" tone of the Davos discussions-not only clearly on Heidegger's side but also, although more understated, on Cassirer's (see esp. pp. 87, 92).

110. See Heidegger, "Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit," 109. 111. "Davoser Disputation," 259 (Pos); "Davos Disputation," 180. 112. "Davoser Disputation," 263 (Heidegger); "A Discussion," 201; "Davos Disputation,"

182. Heidegger repeated such terms, again with veiled reference to Cassirer, in his contempora- neous lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 11. On the import for Heidegger at the time of the Davos debate of the term Harte, including its fascoid resonance already then, see Winfried Franzen, "Die Sehnsucht nach Harte und Schwere: Uber ein zum NS-Engagement disponierendes Motiv in Heideggers Vorlesung 'Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik' von 1929/30," in Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie, ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert and Otto Poggeler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 78-92. Heidegger's riposte to Cassirer is also disturbing to several French readers, particularly his verb benutzen, in which they hear "exploit" (exploiter) or even "draw utilitarian profit from" (tirer des ceuvres de l'esprit un profit utilitaire), which is Henri Decleve's translation. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe cites Decleve's translation along with Alain David's "Levinas en France" (1986), an unpublished essay that "interprets this statement as an anti-Semitic topos, corroborating in this regard the famous (and disputed) testimony of Madame Cassirer" (Lafiction du politique: Heidegger; l'art et la politique [Breteuil-sur-Iton: Christian Bourgois, 1987], 25). Lacoue-Labarthe adds, "[I]f anyone is surprised by Heidegger's 'revolutionary radicalism' in 1933 ... then let him re-read the minutes of the 1929 Davos colloquium" (pp. 36-37). For Toni Cassirer's remarks about 'Davos' and Heidegger's then allegedly well-known anti-Semitism, see her Aus meinem Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (New York: privately published, 1950), 165. All this seems to me both right and altogether too simple. Heidegger's anti-Semitism, as serious as this problem is in existential terms, is a red herring in terms of grasping his thinking and writing, in which all conceivable prejudices (including adherence to racialist or racist political movements) are contingent epiphenomena vis-a-vis the prior decision (in the strong Schmittian sense of legal decisionism) to employ exo/esotericism. And it is this decision that 'debates' about 'Heidegger, art and politics,' 'Heidegger and Nazism,' 'Heidegger and anti-Semitism,' and 'Heidegger and the Holocaust' effectively occlude from view. If Heidegger was racist, he was not essentially racist, at least not in his own terms.

113. Levinas, "Apropos of Buber: Some Notes," in Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 48.

114. In the recollection years later by his student and acolyte Bollnow, Heidegger's "sharp" tone of voice "bordered on the impolite" ("Gesprache in Davos," 28). In using Bollnow's recollections of Davos, which were commissioned for a final Festschrift for Heidegger, my intention is not to imply that they should be taken at face value. Rather, I want to recreate some of the atmosphere, indeed pathos and bathos, of that occasion in order to deconstruct it from within, 'extimately,' partially in its own terms. For his part, Bollnow's main agenda, in telling his version of Davos, was that Heidegger was never really a Nazi. As often happens with


Heideggerians, Bollnow's eulogy is really an apologia. Bollnow adds that he, a basically shy man embarrassed to be in proximity to greatness, saw Heidegger really only twice after Davos (up to that point, he had attended Heidegger's seminars, had devoured Being and Time when it came out in 1927, and had been personally invited by Heidegger to come to Davos): once in 1936, when Heidegger apparently told Bollnow that " 'one must go into the catacombs,' " and once in 1974, near the end of Heidegger's life, when he told Bollnow that one of his last greatest pleasures was that he had been discovered in Japan ("Gesprache in Davos," 28-29). In the intervening years, however, Bollnow had joined Heidegger, Gadamer, and many other German professors (on 12 November 1933) in signing the open letter "Allegiance to Adolf Hitler"; and, like them, became one of the more prominent Nazi-affiliated university professors (lecturing extensively on Nietzsche during the Third Reich). See Martha Zapata Galindo, Triumph des Willens zur Macht: Zur Nietzsche-Rezeption im NS-Staat (Hamburg: Argument, 1995), 99, 212-13; and George Leaman, Heidegger im Kontext: Gesamtuberblick zum N-S Engagement der Universitatsphilosophen, trans. Rainer Alisch and Thomas Laugstien (Hamburg: Argument, 1993), 32-33, 40-41.

115. Bollnow, "Gesprache in Davos," 26. 116. See Bourdieu, L'ontologie politique, ch. 2: "Le champ philosophique et l'espace des

possibles." 117. Kant, Lectures on Logic, 241. 118. "Davoser Disputation," 264 (Cassirer); "A Discussion," 201; "Davos Disputation," 182. 119. Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 236; Kant and the Problem of

Metaphysics, 166. Generally, Heidegger is rigorously indifferent to whether statements are true or false, what matters only is whether they are 'worthy of question.'

120. For the pr6cis, see Heidegger, "Kants Kritik der reinen Vemunft," 245; "Davos Lectures," 170-71.

121. Bourdieu, L'ontologie politique, 71. 122. See ibid., 76-77. 123. "Davoser Disputation," 264 (Cassirer); "A Discussion," 201; "Davos Disputation," 183. 124. Ibid., 253 (Heidegger); "A Discussion," 196; "Davos Disputation," 176. 125. Cassirer persisted in this overhearing. Thus, in his 1931 review of Heidegger's Kant

book, he lists several binary oppositions that he thinks inform the First Critique, where they had been held apart, whereas Heidegger conflates them: "sensible and intelligible world," "experience and idea," "phenomenon and noumenon," and so on. But Cassirer does not push on to see the deeper implication of two types of language, exoteric and esoteric, which are concomitantly also to be held apart or conflated. Hence, he admits that he is baffled by a "strangely paradoxical aspect" of Heidegger's entire work, something he cannot quite put a finger on. Finally, Cassirer feels the need to emphasize that, in his review, "[N]othing was further in my mind than any kind of personal polemic" (Cassirer, "Kant unddas Problem derMetaphysik: Bemerkungen zu Martin Heideggers Kant-Interpretation," Kant-Studien 36, nos. 1-2 [1931]: 9, 18, 25). Indeed, the real polemic does lie elsewhere-concealed and revealed between the lines of Heidegger's language.

126. "Davoser Disputation," 264-65 (Cassirer); "A Discussion," 201; "Davos Disputation," 183.

127. See Taminiaux, "The Husserlian Heritage," 283-84. But I disagree with Taminiaux's otherwise lucid discussion on one crucial point; namely, when he relates Heidegger's notions of Care and symbolism by suggesting that "the symbol is not here the trace of a lost treasure or of an enigma that could be make one wonder. Symbol does not lead to thinking anything unusual. It can at the most illustrate, by confirming it, that which fundamental ontology claims to be able to see by itself' (p. 284). This is at best an unwitting depiction of the exoteric half of Heidegger's relation to myth and symbol.


128. It has been suggested that Cassirer's habit of citing Goethe to Heidegger conceals his lack of an effective counterargument, his frustration that his philosophy of culture "cannot reach the question of Being, because he accepts uncritically the traditional demarcations of philosophy, including those ratified by Kant. The foundation Cassirer believes he possesses is 'the idealism from which I have never wavered.' This position is more than a philosophical doctrine, as Cassirer's use of Goethe in his responses to Heidegger shows. Heidegger's antagonism is directed against the cultural ensemble in and for which this use of Goethe sufficed to address fundamental issues" (James F Ward, Heidegger's Political Thinking [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995], 60-61]). However, I would add that, aside from Cassirer's several detailed analyses of Goethe in essays devoted specifically to him, Cassirer in other writings and lectures tended-as he did at Davos-to hold up Goethe as an unquestioned shibboleth to ward off demons. This is roughly analogous to the way Heidegger cited Holderlin in passing when he was not dealing with him in depth. If Cassirer embodied Settembrini plus Goethe, then mirabile dictu Heidegger embodied Holderlin plus Naptha.

129. According to Gadamer, a deep problem with Cassirer's work lies in his limited concept of language, all the many appearances to the contrary: "Even when Ernst Cassirer included the phenomenon of language in the topic of the neo-Kantian idealism, he did so methodically with the methodical idea of objectification" ("The Marburg Theology," in Heidegger's Ways, 30). This is not to deny, in the words of Susanne Langer, that Cassirer's "knowledge of linguistics on which he bases vol. I of his Philosophie der symbolischen Formen is almost staggering" ("On Cassirer's Theory of Language," 399). But it is a radically different kind of 'linguistics' that is at work for both Heidegger and Gadamer, committed as they are to (fascoid) exo/esotericism. On Gadamer in this regard, see Teresa Orozco, Platonische Gewalt: Gadamers politische Hermeneutik der NS-Zeit (Hamburg: Argument, 1995).

130. "Davoser Disputation," 268 (Heidegger); "A Discussion," 203; "Davos Disputation," 185.

131. David Abraham, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis, 2nd ed. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), 309. I am aware of the problematic status of this book (particularly in the first edition) but believe that its basic thesis is correct.

132. Ibid., 310. 133. Ibid., 314. 134. Heidegger's "inward turn" with regard to the Nazi Party seems to have come only

after-indeed because of-the 1934 Rohm purge. This has been confirmed not only in the notoriously erratic work of Victor Farias (Heidegger und der National Sozialismus, 2nd ed., with a foreword by Jurgen Habermas [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1989]), but also by the impeccable work of Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1988), 275-76, 304-305. Ott also shows that Heidegger remained committed, from within the Party, to the positions taken by Goring (see pp. 146-66).

135. Martin Heidegger/Elisabeth Blochmann: Briefwechsel 1918-1969, ed. Joachim W. Storck (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1989), 30.

136. Martin Heidegger/Karl Jaspers: Briefwechsel, 123. 137. For this reason, Levinas's paraphrase of Heidegger's position on Gerede is misleading,

remaining as it does on the exoteric surface of the problem: "In Heidegger, for whom the 'language that speaks' is not subject to the hazards of human speech-for whom it is language that speaks in human speech (die Sprache spricht)-it is the revelation of being that coincides with that speaking. Hence the language of everyday life can only be a fallen language; it becomes Gerede, its own 'object' and its own goal, conforming to what they say, what they do, what they read, motivated by a vain curiosity, comfortable with ambiguity. It has fallen from the ontological status of language, and appears to have no other subject than the anonymous 'they,' once it loses


the horizon of the being of beings, the field of truth" ("Everyday Language and Rhetoric without Eloquence," in Outside the Subject, 141). Levinas comes somewhat closer to the properly Heideggerian problematic of exo/esotericism with his remarks in Totalite6 et infini (1961) on "rhetoric and injustice" when he argues that "[n]ot every discourse is a relation with exteriority"-if by that Levinas were to mean that not every discourse is to be understood only exoterically (Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969], 70). Much is at stake for Levinas on this point, since he grounds his own ethics on the principle that "The other qua other is the Other" (L'Autre en tant qu'autre estAutrui)-l'Autrui being Levinas's term for "you qua personal other" in relation to l'autre, "the impersonal other." As he elaborates, "Equality among persons means nothing of itself; it has an economic meaning and presupposes money, and already rests on justice-which, when well-ordered, begins with the Other. Justice is the recognition of his privilege qua Other and his mastery, is access to the Other outside of rhetoric, which is ruse, emprise, and exploitation. And in this sense justice coincides with the overcoming of rhetoric" (p. 72). This argument was, in effect, Levinas's riposte to the total impasse in ethics reached between Cassirer and Heidegger at Davos insofar as their problematic was neo-Kantian in inspiration, if not indeed Platonic. In Levinas's own formulation, "Hermann Cohen (in this a Platonist) maintained that one can love only ideas; but the notion of an Idea is in the last analysis tantamount to the transmutation of the other into the Other" (p. 71). However, for a critique of Cohen's grasp of Platonism-and of the unresolved contradiction in his thinking between freedom and faith-see Strauss, Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors, trans. Eve Adler (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), esp. 26-27, 46-51, 129-33. Finally, for an effective critique of Levinas's overly clear distinction between l'Autrui and l'autre and his concomitant theological commitment to the existence of an Absolute Other identified with God, see Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 79-153.

138. This is the point of departure of John van Buren's meticulous book, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

139. Joseph Cropsey, foreword to Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), ix.

140. Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik; GA, 11/29/30:255. 141. Etienne Balibar, "Althusser's Object," Social Text 39 (Summer 1994): 157. 142. Strauss, "Kurt Riezler, 1882-1955," in What Is Political Philosophy? 246. Note the

context of this remark: "Riezler delivered his speech on Gebundenheit und Freiheit des gegenwartigen Zeitalters in Davos before the same audience which immediately before had listened to a debate between Heidegger and Cassirer. Riezler took the side of Heidegger without any hesitation. There was no alternative. Mere sensitivity to greatness would have dictated Riezler's choice. Cassirer represented the established academic position. He was a distinguished professor of philosophy but he was no philosopher. He was erudite but he had no passion. He was a clear writer but his clarity and placidity were not equaled by his sensitivity to the problems. Having been a disciple of Hermann Cohen he had transformed Cohen's philosophic system, the very center of which was ethics, into a philosophy of symbolic forms in which ethics had disappeared. Heidegger on the other hand explicidly denies the possibility of ethics because he feels that there is a revolting disproportion between the idea of ethics and those phenomena which ethics pretended to articulate" (p. 246). Interesting here the use of a characteristically Straussian trope of exo/esotericism. Cassirer is faulted for having eliminated something (ethics) which Heidegger had shown is simply impossible. So the most Cassirer can be faulted for is a lack of courage in facing this fact, not in eliminating something that is impossible anyway. Exoterically translated: by not facing up to impossibility of ethical grounding (which Heidegger did face up


to), Cassirer eliminates ethics from his philosophy for the wrong reasons, not because it is impossible (as only Heidegger fully realized) but rather because Cassirer was not courageous enough to face up to its impossibility, and so ignored not ethics per se but rather its impossibility. But the real clue in Strauss's remark is the phrase, "He was a clear writer but his clarity and placidity were not equaled by his sensitivity to the problems"-that is, his failure was in the clarity of his (logographic) writing, whatever its content-and lack thereof-might have been. In other words, between the lines, Strauss follows Heidegger to recommend to students less a "content" of philosophy than a style of speaking and writing philosophy: between the lines. "The problems" to which Strauss alludes are intentionally unspecified-involving as they do the How, but not the What, of what is silently meant. Strauss's rhetorical strategy here follows the properly Platonic dictum, for him, that "One cannot separate the understanding of Plato's teaching from the understanding of the form in which it is presented. One must pay as much attention to the How as to the What" (The City and Man [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977], 52).

143. Strauss, "An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," 34. 144. Cassirer, The Myth of the State (Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Anchor, 1946), 373. 145. On Heidegger's manipulation of this remark after he wrote it in the Third Reich, see

Otto Poggeler, "Heideggers politisches Selbstverstiindnis," in Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie, esp. 38-39.

146. Cassirer, The Myth of the State, 373. 147. See Grunder, "Cassirer und Heidegger in Davos 1929." 148. Levinas, "Bewunderung und Enttiiuschung," in Antwort: Martin Heidegger im

Gesprach, ed. Gunther Neske and Emil Kettering (Pfullingen: Neske, 1988), 163. Levinas places Being and Time in the select company of Plato's Phaedrus, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, and Bergson's Time and Freedom.

149. Althusser, "Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists," 76. 150. In 1928, Marcuse, then a basically uncritical advocate of Heidegger, had written in an

article in a new Berlin philosophical journal that had devoted its first issue to discussion of Being and Time. Marcuse attempted to bring Heidegger into contact with Marxism, so as to work out a "phenomenology of historical materialism" (see Herbert Marcuse, "Beitrage zu einer Phano- menologie des historischen Materialismus," Philosophische Hefte 1 [1928]: 45-68). The article immediately caught the bemused eyes of Heidegger and Jaspers (see Jaspers to Heidegger, 8 July 1928, Heidegger/Jaspers: Briefwechsel, 102).

Geoffrey Waite is associate professor of German studies and comparative literature at Cornell University, where he teaches philosophy, political theory, and visual culture. He is the author of Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Duke University Press, 1996).

Documents

On Esoteric Ism- Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos