On esotericism: Heidegger and/or cassirer at davos

Political Theory

Volumn 26, Issue 5, 1998, Pages 603-651

  Waite, Geoffrey ^a  

^a Department of Obstetrics Gynecology   (United States)

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EID: 84998075607     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591798026005001     Document Type: Article

References (226)

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, “Zürcher 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. Niccolò 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 côté de la philosophie,” in Édition posthume d'œuvres de Louis Althusser, vol. 5
10. Écrits philosophiques et politiques, Tome II, ed. François Matheron (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1995), 259.
11. Benedict de Spinoza, Spinoza opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1925), 2: 124;
12. 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.).
13. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic, ed. and trans. J. Michael Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 557, 561.
14. 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.
15. Althusser, “‘On the Young Marx’: Theoretical Questions,” in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Vintage, 1970), 57.
16. 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).
17. 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 Wissenschaftlichen Konferenz des Zentralkomitees der SED: “Karl Marx und unsere Zeitalter—Kampf um Frieden und sozialen Fortschritt” [Dresden: Verlag Zeit im Bild, 1983], 11).
18. Althusser, “Marx and Humanism,” in For Marx, 232.
19. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 175.
20. Heidegger, “Der Urprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1980), 47.
21. 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.
22. See The Seminar of 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.
23. Tracy B. Strong, “Nietzsche's Political Misappropriation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Bernd Magnus and Kathleen M. Higgens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 123.
24. 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 Petley, Capital and Culture: German Cinema 1933–45 [London: BFI, 1979], 101).
25. See Benito Mussolini and Alfredo de Marsico, as cited in Amerigo Montemaggiore, Dizionario della dottrina fascista (Turin: G. B. Paravia & Co., 1934), 369, 371 (from the entry “Gerarchia”).
26. See Mussolini, “Relativismo e Fascismo”, in Opera omnia, ed. Edoardo Susmel and Duilio Susmel (Florence: La Fireze, 1951–63), 17:267–69, 269.
27. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International, 1967), 3:250
28. (translation modified); Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, ed. Friedrich Engels (Berlin: Dietz, 1978), 3:260.
29. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 52.
30. Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, 2nd ed., trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1970), 101.
31. See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, 59.
32. Althusser, “Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists,” in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists & Other Essays, ed. Gregory Elliott, trans. Ben Brewster et al. (London: Verso, 1990), 93.
33. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953–54, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), 228.
34. 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.
35. 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).
36. Althusser, “The Tbilisi Affair, 1976–1984,” in Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, ed. Olivier Corpet and François Matheron, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 118 (emphasis eliminated).
37. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, 133.
38. 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 der Lektüre (Munich: Fink, 1997), esp. 74–157;
39. and “Negation and Its Reliabilities: An Empty Subject for Ideology?” in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 225–46.
40. Lacan, Télévision (Paris: du Seuil, 1973), 83.
41. 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.
42. 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;
43. 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.)
44. See Ernst Cassirer, Die Idee der republikanischen Verfassung: Rede zur Verfassungsfeier am II August 1928 (Hamburg: Friederichsen, 1929).
45. Jürgen 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 jüdischen 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.
46. See Heidegger, “Was Ist Metaphysik?” in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1967), 1–19.
47. See Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 2nd ed., trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 76.
48. 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. Supplementing 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.
49. See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 89–102.
50. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as cited in Otto Friedrich Bollnow, “Gespräche in Davos,” in Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger, ed. Günther Neske (Pfullingen: Neske, 1977), 28.
51. 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 Gespräche [Zurich: Artemis, 1944 ff], 22:512).
52. 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, “Gespräche 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.
53. 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).
54. Karlfried Gründer, “Cassirer und Heidegger in Davos 1929,” in Über Ernst Cassirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, ed. Hans-Jürg Braun et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 290–302.
55. Gründer'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”).
56. 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).
57. Today, this problem is debated, more or less directly, within cultural and postcolonial studies perhaps most intensely in the journal 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 Über Ernst Cassirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen; and Kulturkritik nach Ernst Cassirer, ed. Enno Rudolph and Bernd-Otto Küppers (Hamburg: Meiner, 1995;
58. 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.
59. 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;
60. citing Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem 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.
61. Paetzold, Ernst Cassirer, 104.
62. See Susanne K. Langer, “On Cassirer's Theory of Language and Myth,” in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, 379–400;
63. and Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954).
64. 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 Criticism, 2nd rev. ed., introduction by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), esp. 242–44;
65. and the ‘orthodox’ Marxist position of Ursula Brumm, “Der neue Symbolismus in Amerika,” Neue deutsche Hefte 5 (1958–59);
66. 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.
67. De Man, “Spacecritics: J. Hillis Miller and Joseph Frank”, in Critical Writings 1953–1978, ed. Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 108.
68. Althusser, “Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists,” 91, esp. 83, 88.
69. Althusser, “The Tbilisi Affair,” 110.
70. Althusser, letter to Lacan, 4 December 1963, “Correspondence with Jacques Lacan 1963–1969,” in Writings on Psychoanalysis, 157.
71. See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, 139.
72. On Lacan's neologism ‘extimité’ (which combines ex-terieur with in-timité), see Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society, ed. Mark Bracher et al. (New York: New York University Press, 1994), especially the contribution of Jacques-Alain Miller.
73. 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 Gründer, “Cassirer und Heidegger in Davos 1929,” 299.
74. See Kurt Riezler's report on Davos (siding with Heidegger) in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 30 March 1929;
75. also cited in Rüdiger 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.
76. 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.
77. Heidegger, “Davoser Vorträge: Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft und die Aufgabe einer Grundlegung der Metaphysik,” in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 245.
78. See Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983);
79. GA, II/29/30;
80. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicolas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), esp. chs. 3–4.
81. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 12, 39–40, 55, 13.
82. 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).
83. Compare, for example, Bollnow, “Gespräche in Davos.”
84. Stanley Rosen, The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry: Studies in Ancient Thought (New York: Routledge, 1988), 13.
85. Karl Kautsky, Ethics and the Materialistic Conception of History, 4th rev. ed., trans. J. R. Askew (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, n.d.), 160.
86. 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 Vorländer—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).
87. On this topic, see Timothy R. Keck, “Kant and Socialism: The Marburg School in Wilhelmian Germany” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1975);
88. and Klaus Christian Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus: Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986).
89. 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).
90. 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]).
91. 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).
92. “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.
93. For a cogent attack against the ideology of interdisciplinarity, see Althusser, “Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists,” esp. 85–100.
94. See Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of “As-If,” 2nd ed., trans. C. K. Ogden (New York: Harper & Row, 1935).
95. 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]).
96. Cassirer, Goethe und die geschichtliche Welt: Drei Aufsätze (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1932), 26
97. as cited in de Man, “Thematic Criticism and the Theme of Faust,” trans. Dan Latimer, in Critical Writings, 80.
98. 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;
99. Idee und Gestalt: Fünf Aufsütze (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1921), chs. 1, 2;
100. and “Goethe und Platon,” Sokrates 48 no. 1 (1922), reprinted in Goethe und die geschichtliche Welt, ch. 3. In English
101. see his Rousseau Kant Goethe: Two Essays, trans. James Gutmann et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945), esp. 61–98.
102. Goethe, letter to K. E. Schubarth, 12 January 1818, in Artemis-Gedenkausgabe, 21:286.
103. Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen (Nr. 1113), in Artemis-Gedenkausgabe, 9:639.
104. Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 193.
105. Spinoza, The Ethics, 1:428 (pt. I, prop. XVIII);
106. Spinoza opera, 2:62. “Deus est omnium rerum causa immanens, non vero transiens.”
107. 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.
108. See Rosen, Hermeneutics 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.”
109. 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).
110. And compare, indeed, Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher, “General Introduction,” in Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato, trans. William Dobson (London: John William Parker, 1836), esp. 5–19.
111. Whereas Schleiermacher had to at least take the question seriously, Cassirer did not. In addition to Cassirer's “Goethe und Platon,” see in mis regard his Die Philosophie der Griechen von den Anfängen bis Platon (Berlin: Ullstein, 1925), esp. pt. 2, ch. 3: “Platon.”
112. 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.
113. For another view of this Nietzschean problematic, see Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's “Zarathustra” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
114. But this is not how Rosen views Heidegger in The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
115. Nietzsche, “Jenseits von Gut und Böse: 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.
116. 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.
117. See Octave Mannoni, Clefs pour l'imaginaire (Paris: du Seuil, 1968), 14–32;
118. and Žižek'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.
119. V. I. Lenin, “Party Organization and Party Literature,” in Collected Works, various trans. (Moscow: Progress, 1972), 10:44.
120. See Heidegger, “Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. 2. Teil: Das mythische Denken,” Deutsche Literaturzeitung 21 (1928): 1000–1012;
121. “Review of Ernst Cassirer'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.
122. 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. François Renaud, in Reading Heidegger from the Start, 282). For discussion of Heidegger's own views on myth and symbol, see 281–84.
123. See Bollnow, “Gespräche in Davos.”
124. Heidegger, “Ernst Cassirer,” 1000.
125. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, “Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kriticismus,” in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta'scher Verlag, 1856), 1/1:341 (emphasis added).
126. 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: Klostermann, 1988];
127. GA, 2/42;
128. Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh [Athens: Ohio University Press 1985]).
129. 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).
130. 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.’”
131. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 229.
132. Karl Jaspers to Heidegger, 21 June 1925, Martin Heidegger/Karl Jaspers: Briefwechsel 1920–1963 (Munich: Piper, 1992), 50.
133. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 154.
134. Heidegger, “Review of Ernst Cassirer's Mythical Thought,” 36.
135. Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse; KGW, 6/2:44–45 (pt. II, aphorism 30).
136. Heidegger, “Davoser Vorträge,” 245;
137. “Davos Lectures,” 171.
138. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 405–568; B 432–596.
139. 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 conflict between 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 Heidegger and Jaspers, ed. Alan M. Olson [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994], 17).
140. 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: “[I]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).
141. See, for example, Paetzold, Ernst Cassirer, 157–90 (“Cassirers Jahre in Göteborg/Schweden [1935–1941] und die Wende der Kulturphilosophie zur Ethik”).
142. Bollnow, “Gespräche in Davos,” 27.
143. “Davoser Disputation,” 247 (Heidegger);
144. “A Discussion,” 193;
145. and “Davos Disputation,” 172.
146. 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).
147. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A486; B 514.
148. “Davoser Disputation,” 248 (Cassirer);
149. “A Discussion,” 193;
150. “Davos Disputation,” 172–73, 252.
151. “A Discussion,” 195;
152. “Davos Disputation,” 175, 260.
153. “A Discussion,” 199;
154. “Davos Disputation,” 180.
155. 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 Intellectual 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 underscored 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. 115)—a thrust, however, that was as radically new as it was shrouded in obscurity.
156. This basic point is missed by most extended recent attempts to reopen the question of Heidegger's relation to Kant: Daniel O. Dahlstrom, “Heideggers Kant-Kommentar, 1925–1936,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch (1989): 343–66;
157. and “Heidegger's Kant-Courses at Marburg,” in Reading Heidegger from the Start, 293–308;
158. Frank Schalow, The Renewal of the Heidegger-Kant Dialogue: Action, Thought, and Responsibility (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992);
159. and (building on the work of Pierre Aubenque) Christopher Macann, “Heidegger's Kant Interpretation,” in Critical Heidegger, ed. Christopher Macann (London: Roudedge, 1996), 97–120.
160. This is true also of the great earlier treatment of the Kant-Heidegger nexus: Jules Vuillemin, L'héritage kantien et la révolution copernicienne (Paris: P.U.F., 1954), 210–96.
161. See further Pierre Aubenque, “Le débat de 1929 entre Cassirer et Heidegger,” in Ernst Cassirer: De Marburg à New York; L'itinéraire 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).
162. See Heidegger, “Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit,” 109.
163. “Davoser Disputation,” 259 (Pos);
164. “Davos Disputation,” 180.
165. “Davoser Disputation,” 263 (Heidegger);
166. “A Discussion,” 201;
167. “Davos Disputation,” 182.
168. Heidegger repeated such terms, again with veiled reference to Cassirer, in his contemporaneous lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 11.
169. On the import for Heidegger at the time of the Davos debate of the term Härte, including its fascoid resonance already then, see Winfried Franzen, “Die Sehnsucht nach Härte und Schwere: Über 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 Pöggeler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 78–92.
170. 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 œuvres de l'esprit un profit utilitaire), which is Henri Declève's translation. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe cites Declève'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” (La fiction du politique: Heidegger, l'art et la politique [Breteuil-sur-Iton: Christian Bourgois, 1987], 25).
171. 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-à-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.
172. Levinas, “Apropos of Buber: Some Notes,” in Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 48.
173. In the recollection years later by his student and acolyte Bollnow, Heidegger's “sharp” tone of voice “bordered on the impolite” (“Gespräche 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 (“Gespräche 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;
174. and George Leaman, Heidegger im Kontext: Gesamtüberblick zum N-S Engagement der Universitätsphilosophen, trans. Rainer Alisch and Thomas Laugstien (Hamburg: Argument, 1993), 32–33, 40–41.
175. Bollnow, “Gespräche in Davos,” 26.
176. See Bourdieu, L'ontologie politique, ch. 2: “Le champ philosophique et l'espace des possibles.”
177. Kant, Lectures on Logic, 241.
178. “Davoser Disputation,” 264 (Cassirer);
179. “A Discussion,” 201;
180. “Davos Disputation,” 182.
181. Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 236;
182. 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.’
183. For the précis, see Heidegger, “Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” 245;
184. “Davos Lectures,” 170–71.
185. Bourdieu, L'ontologie politique, 71, 76–77.
186. “Davoser Disputation,” 264 (Cassirer);
187. “A Discussion,” 201;
188. “Davos Disputation,” 183, 253.
189. “A Discussion,” 196;
190. “Davos Disputation,” 176.
191. 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 und das Problem der Metaphysik: 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.
192. “Davoser Disputation,” 264–65 (Cassirer);
193. “A Discussion,” 201;
194. “Davos Disputation,” 183.
195. 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.
196. 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 Hölderlin in passing when he was not dealing with him in depth. If Cassirer embodied Settembrini plus Goethe, then mirabile dictu Heidegger embodied Hölderlin plus Naptha.
197. 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).
198. 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).
199. 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).
200. “Davoser Disputation,” 268 (Heidegger);
201. “A Discussion,” 203;
202. “Davos Disputation,” 185.
203. 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, 310, 314.
204. Heidegger's “inward turn” with regard to the Nazi Party seems to have come only after—indeed because of—the 1934 Röhm purge. This has been confirmed not only in the notoriously erratic work of Victor Farías (Heidegger und der National Sozialismus, 2nd ed., with a foreword by Jürgen Habermas [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1989])
205. 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 Göring (see pp. 146–66).
206. Martin Heidegger/Elisabeth Blochmann: Briefwechsel 1918–1969, ed. Joachim W. Storck (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1989), 30.
207. Martin Heidegger/Karl Jaspers: Briefwechsel, 123.
208. 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).
209. Levinas comes somewhat closer to the properly Heideggerian problematic of exo/esotericism with his remarks in Totalité 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).
210. 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 est Autrui)—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.
211. 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.
212. 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).
213. 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.
214. Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik; GA, II/29/30:255.
215. Étienne Balibar, “Althusser's Object,” Social Text 39 (Summer 1994): 157.
216. Strauss, “Kurt Riezler, 1882–1955,” in What Is Political Philosophy? 246.
217. Note the context of this remark: “Riezler delivered his speech on Gebundenheit und Freiheit des gegenwärtigen 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 explicitly 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).
218. Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” 34.
219. Cassirer, The Myth of the State (Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Anchor, 1946), 373.
220. On Heidegger's manipulation of this remark after he wrote it in the Third Reich, see Otto Pöggeler, “Heideggers politisches Selbstverständnis,” in Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie, esp. 38–39.
221. Cassirer, The Myth of the State, 373.
222. See Gründer, “Cassirer und Heidegger in Davos 1929.”
223. Levinas, “Bewunderung und Enttäuschung,” in Antwort: Martin Heidegger im Gespräch, ed. Günther 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.
224. Althusser, “Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists,” 76.
225. 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, “Beiträge zu einer Phänomenologie des historischen Materialismus,” Philosophische Hefte 1 [1928]: 45–68).
226. The article immediately caught the bemused eyes of Heidegger and Jaspers (see Jaspers to Heidegger, 8 July 1928, Heidegger/Jaspers: Briefwechsel, 102).