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A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger

Article  in  Philosophical Review · January 2002

DOI: 10.2307/3182578

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A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger (review)
Geroulanos, Stefanos.

MLN, Volume 117, Number 5, December 2002 (Comparative Literature

Issue), pp. 1127-1131 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/mln.2003.0009

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mln/summary/v117/117.5geroulanos.html

Access Provided by CEFET/RN Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológica do Rio Grande do Norte at 03/07/13 12:48AM GMT
 MLN 1127

less as a painted picture than as a diagram of ideas, one would read the
following: . . .” (my emphasis, Henri Dorra, ed., Symbolist Art Theories: A
Critical Anthology [Berkeley: U of California Press, 1994], 173).
To sum up my objections to the descriptive cunning of La Fin de l’interiorité,
in order to offer a compelling narrative of événementialité of literary history,
Jenny is led to adopt the assumption that any literary or symbolic form has an
inherent, virtual potential that, more often than not, cannot realize itself at
the time due to the ideological structure presiding over its invention. Once a
literary historian identified this potential, he can arrange the works of the
past according to how well they realized this occluded immanence. This
insight into the essence of the form would also support his value judgments,
i.e., that one use of the interior monologue is better than another. At critical
points of his demonstration, Jenny appears to achieve such an insight by
treating chronological succession as a progressive [and teleological] revela-
tion oriented by the essence of the aesthetic form. If we fail to follow his suit
in this respect, the assumption of the immanent potential of symbolic form
and the corresponding notion that ideas (conceptual schemes, paradigms,
etc.) interfere with how one uses it should be put on probation as well.
The conceptual and descriptive problems outlined above are trivial be-
cause the ground of their banality is the enterprise of criticism itself. To the
extent that they are endemic to critical activity in the shape we know it today,
we should be grateful to Jenny’s scholarship for revealing their true magni-
tude. Plagued by the emergent properties of its objects, criticism that
succeeds neither in resolving nor dissolving the problems brought about by
its practice of handling concepts reaches a dead-end from which more
conceptual rigor is no exit. This is the picture of the status quo that emerges
from Jenny’s fascinating study.
University of Colorado, Boulder GINA FISCH (part 1)
Johns Hopkins University OLEG GELIKMAN (part 2)

Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger.

Chicago: Open Court, 2000. xv + 175 pages.

In the summer of 1929, the small Swiss city of Davos hosted one of the most
significant philosophical encounters in twentieth-century Europe, a debate
between Ernst Cassirer, leader of the Marburg School, and Martin Heidegger,
auteur celèbre of Sein und Zeit [SZ] and recent inheritor of Husserl’s chair of
philosophy at Freiburg. Cassirer had just completed the third volume of his
magnum opus, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms; Heidegger had just finished a
book on Kant, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. The debate pitted them, like
Thomas Mann’s Settembrini and Naphta, against each other over the
1128 REVIEWS

interpretation of Kant, generating considerable reaction from the philo-

sophical world in both Germany and the Continent as a whole. Besides
prominent Neo-Kantians, a number of philosophers, young and old, traveled
to Davos. Rudolf Carnap, one of the central figures of the Vienna School of
Logical Positivism, was there; participants from the French intellectual world
included Leon Brunschvicg (at the height of his Parisian glory), as well as the
young Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Cavaillès and Maurice de Gandillac; Franz
Rosenzweig wrote about the Disputation from his home. Many left Davos
having found Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant electrifying (3); others
appreciated Cassirer’s more seasoned appropriation and later pointed to a
certain contempt, perhaps anti-Semitic, on Heidegger’s part (5n).
Michael Friedman’s Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, Heidegger marks a
renewal of interest in this grosse Disputation. Focusing on the triangle that
graces his subtitle, Friedman treats the event as illustrative of the Analytic/
Continental division (xi), with Carnap on the one side and Heidegger on the
other, but also as the event whose aftermath instituted the rift, “to the point
of total mutual incomprehension,” between the two traditions (157). The
traditional story of the debate has interpreted the distance between the
thinkers by pointing to Cassirer’s later resentment of Heidegger, and has
treated Carnap’s 1932 book The Overcoming of Metaphysics, his damning
response to Heidegger’s own 1929 “What is Metaphysics?” (12–13), as largely
irrelevant to the Disputation. Friedman instead proceeds to complicate the
picture by showing the positive climate fostered by Carnap, Cassirer and
Heidegger in their meetings (5), as well as by contextualizing their respective
texts and differences in both their friendly personal relationships and the
larger sociopolitical context (3–4) in which they situated themselves.
Friedman weaves his story clearly and concisely, showing how this meeting
between three philosophers in the tradition of Kant and Neo-Kantianism
complicates the traditionally perceived divide between Analytic and Conti-
nental philosophy, and insisting on common points of interest and often-
unanticipated agreement. Succinctly put, his main preoccupations in this
context concern (i) the interweaving questions of truth, logic and objectivity
(ch. 3, 4, 7, 8), and (ii) the relationships between the various, often closely-
related dualistic conceptions in Kant, post-Kantian idealism and Neo-
Kantianism (phenomena/noumena, internal/external, subject/object, logic/
temporality, etc) (ch. 3, 6, 7; 143–44). Friedman underscores Cassirer and
Carnap’s philosophical agreements and mutual concerns (110, ch. 7), point-
ing to their fundamental reliance on science and logic, their search for a
philosophy with a ‘universally acceptable’ non-metaphysical ground, and
reading their ‘failed’ attempts effectively to join Kantian dualities as constitu-
tive of their rejection of Heidegger. By contrast, Heidegger’s insistence on
temporality, his analytic of finitude (49) and rejection of the philosophical
primacy of logic, mathematics and mathematical physics (21–22) helped
produce a serious philosophical alternative to Carnap’s ‘scientism’ and
Cassirer’s trust in the comprehensiveness and transcendental value of ‘sym-
 MLN 1129

bolic forms.’ It also produced an interpretation of Kant that, precisely by

turning these problematics on their heads (a favorite expression of Friedman’s),
in turn facilitated the destruction of the Neo-Kantian problematic and the
Continental move into a “humanistic” (157) existentialist phenomenology
that came to ignore problems of logic and to treat the intellectual/sensible
duality as a minor, if not already-solved, problem. It was Heidegger’s interpre-
tation of Kant and his political commitment, that helped launch “Continental
philosophy,” a politically-involved philosophy of a subject “revolting against
reason” (3), vastly different to the analytic domain of the émigrés Carnap and
Cassirer, an at once less political and more scientific, objectivist philosophy.
But if Davos generated in these philosophers a mutual understanding that
helped them define their diverging paths (and eventually led to “mutual
incomprehension”) (13, 22–23), Friedman thinks it can also facilitate a
reconciliation. In a bold, programmatic tone, Friedman uses their treatments
of Kant and of the problems of logic and truth to call for such, pointing out
that the opposition, between Carnap and Cassirer on the one hand, and
Heidegger on the other, may have been radical but that Cassirer’s “astonish-
ingly comprehensive” philosophical work, his “synthetic and conciliatory”
approach (159), and even his philosophical failures provides common
ground for a novel approach to the divide. The author’s approach to the
stakes he raises is quite convincing. Yet it is precisely in his raising of such
stakes that significant questions to Friedman’s approach to the three philoso-
phers arise. First, Friedman’s reading of Heidegger will be seen by many as
unorthodox if not awkward. In chapter two, while considering the latter’s
“remarkable agreement with Carnap concerning the underlying sources of
their opposition” (22–23), namely that Carnap treated logic as the ground
for any scientific philosophy while Heidegger regarded it as a constitutive
dimension to traditional metaphysics, Friedman effectively sides with Carnap
in providing an unfortunately insular reading of Heidegger that virtually
forgets that the latter’s own project was also one of ‘overcoming metaphysics’:

. . . Heidegger and Carnap are actually in remarkable agreement. “Metaphysical”

thought of the type Heidegger is trying to awaken is possible only on the basis of a
prior overthrow of the authority and primacy of logic and the exact sciences. The
difference is that Heidegger eagerly embraces such an overthrow, whereas Carnap is
determined to resist it at all costs. (13)

But to align Heidegger with metaphysical thought (13, 61) is not only to
adopt Carnap’s rejection, but also to miss the point of Heidegger’s “destruc-
tion of the history of ontology” (SZ §6). Similarly, Friedman follows Cassirer’s
reading of Heidegger’s engagement with Kant (141) in assuming that the
non-priority of subject-object relations, in Sein und Zeit, is grounded by the
primordiality of finitude (49), and not by problematics of mood, thrownness,
and modes of understanding/interpretation (SZ 1:III–IV). Finally, Friedman
follows both Carnap and Cassirer in looking at Heidegger’s criteria for the
validity of truth qua correspondence (56–58), all but ignoring its derivative
1130 REVIEWS

character from truth qua unconcealment (this only appears in 59n). It is only
via this ‘forgetting’ that Friedman can paradoxically assert that Heidegger
was a “direct realist” (55) in regard to truth and being-in-the-world. The
result is a far less ‘breathtakingly original’ Heidegger (151), a rather
analytical Heidegger—even for Friedman, a contradiction in terms.
Except for a rather cursory identification of Carnap’s politics with Neue
Sachlichkeit (whose own politics was by no means as indisputably progressive as
Friedman reads it—18), no such problems plague Friedman’s explications of
Carnap. The second problem is more general and, beyond its own signifi-
cance, ultimately affects the reading of Cassirer. In order to identify Conti-
nental philosophy with Heidegger (xi), Friedman ignores a mass of writing in
France (Bergson, Brunschvicg, as well as a then-younger, German-influenced
generation), and the influence of recent and contemporary German thought
(e.g. Kierkegaard, Hegel, Nietzsche, Scheler, Jaspers, not to mention early
Western Marxism and contemporary German-Jewish thought). The author
implicitly acknowledges this limitation (xii), but both his analysis and his
program remain unaffected. Especially if one considers that the book
considers the trajectories of these thinkers from the early twenties well into
1935, there are several other participants whose thought and intellectual role
in the period not only complicate the image of Continental philosophy, but
also question the significance of Kant and especially the Neo-Kantian legacy
in the gradual split. Moreover, this neglect facilitates Friedman’s somewhat
easy handling of Heidegger as the ‘only major philosopher left’ on the
Continent (156; trivia: Cassirer did not leave Europe [Sweden] until 1941)
and, by extension, his grounding of the Analytic/Continental split can in the
rise of Nazism and the resulting intellectual migration of Carnap and Cassirer
(4–5, 16–18, 22n, 155–56).
Given Friedman’s explicit lack of interest toward a wider consideration of
the split, it might be somewhat disingenuous to insist on this problem. Yet
Friedman’s approach to Cassirer, which continually compares him to Kant
“himself” (105–10, 131), all the while stressing the teleological and Hegelian
elements in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, interestingly displaces the predict-
ability expected in the mediating figure Friedman uses to retrieve connec-
tions between Carnap and Heidegger. In contrasting Cassirer’s rejection of
Kant’s treatment of the intellectual/sensible division to Kant himself, and in
presenting, and rejecting (34–37, 89, 155–56), Cassirer’s dismantling of that
division, Friedman demonstrates that the Davos debate was not just about
competing interpretations of Kant, that it cannot be sufficiently considered
through this lens. It is then Cassirer’s own ‘divergence’ from Kant, as
presented by Friedman even with regard to his most orthodox NeoKantian
works—like the Erkenntnisproblem —that cries out for a wider consideration of
the philosophical traditions of the period and their importation into the
debate. For what is the rigor of squeezing Carnap and Heidegger into the
Neo-Kantian box while allowing Cassirer, the ‘mediator’ and Neo-Kantian par
excellence, to wander from Kant by simply discarding the validity of his
 MLN 1131

interpretation? Had Friedman not insisted on reading Carnap and Heidegger

in the light of Kant, would not the question of Neo-Kantianism itself be more
complex than he allows? Would not the “split” that, according to Friedman,
became established after these philosophers’ 1929 encounter look very
different and indeed irreconcilable on the basis of the Kantian connection
that Friedman’s hopes depend on?
Problems aside, Friedman’s synthesis is remarkable: for its retrieval of the
status and significance of the Davos Disputation for intellectual history, for its
reintroduction of Carnap and Cassirer to ‘continentalists’ and of Cassirer and
Heidegger to analytic philosophers, for its intelligent dislodging of the often
facile appreciation or rejection of Cassirer among contemporary Kantians,
and for its understanding of sociopolitical context in the thought of its three
subjects. Friedman is encouraging in his hope that further work on the
‘others’ of one’s tradition can only help the transformation (I would not say
the dismantling) of an often-overblown philosophical division. In setting up,
in practicing this hope, Friedman is aiding philosophers and historians to
raise significant questions, and complicating what might be called the right
to philosophical strategy.
Johns Hopkins University STEFANOS GEROULANOS

David Wittenberg, Philosophy, Revision, Critique:

Rereading Practices in Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Emerson.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001, 283 pages.

David Wittenberg’s Philosophy, Revision, Critique is an intriguing venture into

the rhetorical strategies of philosophical thought and interpretation. With-
out concealing its own indebtedness to these strategies, the book manages to
convey the importance of a hypothesis that easily escapes our attention—that
philosophy is revisionary in a way far more radical than anticipated even by
the most adventurous branches of hermeneutics.
Wittenberg bases his argument on two premises: first, philosophy is
historical, in the sense of being conducted according to historically determined
canons; and second, philosophy is textual, in the sense of being concerned
with a body of written artifacts (2). Both premises owe a great deal to Hegel’s
philosophy, especially as it is played out in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the
so-called Differenzschrift. When combined, however, they initiate a ‘productive
view of philosophical interpretation as […] “paralipsis,” or sideways-speaking
of intellectual power’ (8–9). Wittenberg’s “productive view of philosophical
interpretation,” akin to the post-Hegelian strategies of Luce Irigaray and Paul
de Man, is arresting on several fronts. Most importantly, it questions the myth
of the solitary philosopher, and draws our attention to the everyday moods of
philosophy—the way philosophy gossips, talks idle talk, and manipulates its

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