Climbing the Mountain: The Cassirer-Heidegger Debate, the Paths to Davos, and the Crisis of Weimar Germany PDF Download

Author: Matthew Eric Brown
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781109887402
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
My dissertation takes its point of departure from the famous Davos debate held in 1929 between the German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer. The goal of my project is to revise how the significance of the debate is understood, confronting the standard interpretation that it signaled a generational conflict pitting the fading liberal humanism of Cassirer against the ascendant revolutionary thought of Heidegger. On this reading, held by those in attendance in 1929 and adopted by interpreters afterward, the differences between the two philosophers were obvious and absolute. Cassirer represented the last of a generation discredited by its inability to respond to the crises of selfhood and society in the aftermath of the First World War, while Heidegger initiated the twentieth century turn toward anxiety and nihilism. My work challenges this image by tracing the intellectual path that each thinker took to Davos from around the time of the war into the period of Weimar Germany. I argue that, far from representing a clash between two obviously opposed philosophies and worldviews, the Cassirer-Heidegger debate reveals a more complex historical moment that must be reconstructed in order to uncover the fundamental issues that were at stake, and to locate the actual fundamental philosophical and ethical issues over which they parted ways. Their earliest training in Neo-Kantianism, the dominant academic philosophy of the day, creates the basis for a productive comparison of their philosophies formed in this shared intellectual milieu, revealing the important points of convergence in their early experiences and ideas. Ultimately, my work situates their divergence in rival interpretations of the intellectual heritage of Europe and Germany during and in the immediate aftermath of the war. This divergence did not involve the new generation overthrowing the old, but instead reflected competing visions of personal, cultural, and political life that formed the key existential questions in their own day and which continue to have relevance more than seventy years later.