SOURCE: "Thinking Cassirer," in Criticism, Vol. XXV, No. 3, Summer, 1983, pp. 181-95.

[In the following essay, Adams reexamines Cassirer's thought in light of recent trends in philosophy, especially the widespread acceptance of Martin Heidegger's philosophy.]

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, when Ernst Cassirer was a doctoral candidate at Marburg preparing his study of Descartes and Leibniz, there was a movement led by his teachers, the Marburg philosophers Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, which had as its rallying cry "Back to Kant." One was not simply to return to Kant to accept all he said, but to start from Kant again. Cassirer's thought was formed in this atmosphere, and it proved to be a liberation for him. More recently it has been regarded as a limitation everywhere present in his work. Contemporary phenomenologists have particularly regarded it as so. Cassirer is not any longer in the high style of contemporary literary theory. Ricoeur mentions his theory of the symbol only to declare it too broad for his use, though Foucault, it is said, has shown some liking for him. Even in the earlier days of twentieth-century American theory he was never quite in, in spite of his lurking in Susanne Langer's various books, Wilbur M. Urban's Language and Reality, some of Philip Wheelwright, Frye's notion of the symbol, Eliseo Vivas' appropriation of him to justify certain procedures roughly associated with the New Criticism, Kenneth Burke's transfer of his concept of the symbolic from its neo-Kantian base into Burkeism, and Charles Feidelson's use of him to study symbolism in American literature.

But it can be said on the whole that in academic literary fashion three things are true that bear on Cassirer's present reputation: 1.) many academic critics are not very happy about commitment to any philosophical position, especially Americans, who would rather use things than embrace them, turning commitment to method; 2.) Cassirer seemed to lose out to Heidegger sometime in the sixties; and 3.) post-structuralism would regard Cassirer as someone who never managed to come to a true appreciation of difference.

Right now we do not have a true appreciation of Cassirer and what his difference from certain contemporary trends may mean to us and possibly lead us to. I do not have in mind a "Back to Cassirer" movement; however, I do want to advocate that we think Cassirer anew, but not by rejecting the Heideggerian opposite. Indeed, my point will be that Cassirer and Heidegger are true contraries in the Blakean sense of prolific use, and I like to think of them in the phrase of Empedocles: "Never shall boundless time be emptied of that pair." Empedocles was thinking of concord and discord, and these terms will serve for my characterization of Cassirer and Heidegger respectively.

Cassirer was a prodigious writer, and his work covers such a vast array of subjects and disciplines that I cannot begin to claim a grasp of a whole that contains writings on Leibniz, Descartes, the Platonic Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Rousseau, Kant, Goethe, Einstein's theory of relativity, concepts of substance and function, freedom and form, the problem of knowledge, myth, language, the phenomenology of science, the myth of the state, and of course the symbolic. But as Blake suggests that fools should, I shall persist in my folly. With a touch of the prudence Blake warns against, I shall try to speak only about the Cassirer that seems important to literary theory and criticism, leaving aside his works in intellectual history and the philosophy of science. But to limit my task in this way is exceedingly difficult, because (as it is with most philosophers) Cassirer's writings on literature and art are not the ones that are most provocative for criticism and theory. In any case, Cassirer's whole way of thinking about any symbolic form such as art was to emphasize its relations (his term for "difference") to other human symbolic activities.

I want to begin with a story that interested him and that he retells and comments on in An Essay on Man, one of his last works. It is a story on which he came to base much of what he had to say about the symbol. I want to end by recalling a once well-known story about him. In between I shall endeavor to show what seems to be his specific importance to literary theory through brief consideration of Cassirer on language and his connection with structuralism, Cassirer on mythical thought and myth's connection with art, and Cassirer and phenomenology. My view is that Cassirer stands at a critical point between his romantic forebears and the post-modern. At one time he seemed to me a way into the future from the romantic. Now he seems to me an important link to attitudes it would be well to recall though not necessarily call up, for the sake of the future.

The story that interested Cassirer and that he retells in An Essay on Man is the well-known one about Helen Keller and her progression from the use of the sign to possession of symbols. The story begins when her teacher, Mrs. Sullivan, one day casually spelled out the word "water" for her. I now read directly from Mrs. Sullivan's account of Helen Keller's life and education, quoted at greater length by Cassirer:

This morning, while she [Helen] was washing, she wanted to know the name for "water." When she wants to know the name of anything, she points to it and pats my hand. I spelled "w-a-t-e-r" and thought no more about it until after breakfast … [Later on] we went out to the pump house, and I made Helen hold her mug under the spout while I pumped. As the cold water gushed forth, filling the mug, I spelled "w-a-t-e-r" in Helen's free hand. The word coming so close upon the sensation of cold water rushing over her hand seemed to startle her. She dropped the mug and stood as one transfixed.

From this moment, Helen Keller knew that everything had a name, that, to quote Cassirer, "the symbolic function is not restricted to particular cases but is a principle of universal applicability." Words had become instruments of thought. This famous case, and that of Laura Bridgman, which Cassirer also mentions, shows that human beings are not dependent entirely on the quality of their sense impressions. The cultural world is not based on materials but on its form and structure, and this form can be expressed in any sense material. Further, form and structure are always seen as function. One of Cassirer's most important early works in the philosophy of science, his Substance and Function, concerns itself with the shift in physics from the notion of things to events, substance to function—a function that is the form or structure by which physics constitutes the world. This notion in science Cassirer applies with modifications everywhere in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. In every case—myth, art, religion, history, science—these symbolic forms show the breakdown of the notion of a substance to be copied or represented and transform that old notion into the mobile, variable, relational, dynamic, reflective, constitutive world made in the symbol. Even the word "form" itself undergoes this change.

In the story I have retold from Cassirer's retelling, Helen Keller came suddenly to understand the symbolism of speech, passing in the process from a more subjective state to an objective state, from an emotional attitude to a theoretical attitude. That was the first step. The second step was recognition that "a symbol is not only universal but extremely variable." This term "variability" is Cassirer's for Saussure's idea of the arbitrary nature of the sign. It is characteristic of Cassirer that this term tends to express positively the power of language as an instrument. The third step was to see the symbol as belonging to a system of "relations," Cassirer's term for the linguistic "difference" of structuralism, again a positive term. (I use the term "positive" not by any means to identify Cassirer with positivism, which he opposed, but to emphasize Cassirer's sense of the cultural potentiality of language.) Now the important thing about Cassirer on this matter is that he reminds us of the constitutive power of language, which maintains some element of referentiality, even as he recognizes difference, though a difference which always belongs to some system or anti-system and is therefore relational. Cassirer holds to a connection to the world even as he sees language as differential (or, as he says, relational). The connection lies in language's power to constitute, in the Kantian sense, culture. And this is what the Helen Keller story illustrates for him. In his short book Language and Myth and the later An Essay on Man, Cassirer makes reference to the old search for the origins of language and says only that language and myth must have been of a twin birth. His Helen Keller story begins language in the individual case. Language is already there, of course, but it is discovered by the individual in its fullness, and the discovery particularizes the word all over again, rather in the way that Usener's theory posits primitive creation of the "momentary deity," a theory Cassirer mentions in Language and Myth. Helen Keller's moment is a Crocean moment where the general term is recognized as general but in a unique context so that its constitutive power momentarily dominates its differential character and forces reference.

On the matter of language and this point in particular Cassirer is quite self-consciously in the debt of the neo-Kantian theorist of language Wilhelm Von Humboldt. Writing in the late forties, Wilbur M. Urban remarked: "Ernst Cassirer is, in my opinion, the first of modern philosophers to see the full significance of the relations of the problems of language to problems of philosophy and, therefore, the first also to develop a philosophy of language in the full sense of the word." It was Cassirer who shifted the epistemological question to the area of language. Cassirer fully embraces the Humboldtian notion that "languages are not really means for representing already known truths but are rather instruments for discovering previously unrecognized ones" and that "no object is possible without [language] for the psyche." Humboldt also wrote:

The least advantageous influence on any sort of interesting treatment of linguistic studies is exerted by the narrow notion that language originated as a convention and that words are nothing but signs for things or concepts which are independent of them. This view up to a point is surely correct but beyond this point it is deadly because as soon as it begins to predominate it kills all mental activity and exiles all life.

Humboldt's aim here is to emphasize the constitutive element. What Cassirer calls the variability of the symbol allows for constant renewal of this constitutive power, since language in its relationality and variability is dynamic, always on the move, and people gather experience into themselves by means of it.

But both Humboldt and Cassirer recognize that in another sense language is an enclosure. Humboldt says:

Man thinks, feels, and lives within language alone.… But he senses and knows that language is only a means for him; that there is an invisible realm outside it in which he seeks to feel at home and that it is for this reason that he needs the aid of language. The most commonplace observation and the profoundest thought, both lament the inadequacy of language.

Cassirer says:

Man cannot escape from his own achievement. He cannot but adopt the conditions of his own life. No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art, and religion are parts of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. [An Essay on Man]

Language, you note, is something man-made, not something given by God. There was, then, an origin. Man was not always already in language, as Derrida's differential philosophy implies. But the origin can't be known. A sort of beginning, in Edward Said's sense (as I understand it), might be imagined. One assumes it has the shape of Helen Keller's experience and is tied to personal emergence from a sign world to a symbol world at the moment when one begins the art (and science) of one's life. There are ominous metaphors in Cassirer's statement, as I am sure Paul de Man would be the first to observe—the net and the tangled web—figures that surely a student of Blake like myself cannot let pass. They are, of course, mild compared to those with which de Man himself characterizes language, figures of seduction, aberration, subterfuge, illusion, lies, underhandedness, secretiveness, pretence, deceit, and complicity. And there are others in Cassirer: Man is so "enveloped" in this web that he "cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium." Yet Cassirer is inclined not to emphasize the sense of loss that Edward Said notices in all beginnings, or the element of transgression.

Cassirer is interested in the other side by temperament and ethical stance; and that, today, could be his value to us. He will study language outside the limits that naturalistic assumptions create, and he will see man as the animal potentially liberated by his capacity to symbolize. But he must liberate himself, and the task never ends, for not only is the symbol dynamic itself, but its constitution of the cultural world never ceases to require interpretation and reinterpretation. For Cassirer man is the animal symbolicum. Now, as you can see, the symbol as Cassirer understands it is not the miraculous or theological symbol of religious tradition, so much deplored by Walter Benjamin. Cassirer would hold with Croce that the symbol symbolizes nothing on the other side from nature or from us. Rather, it symbolizes relations, functions, differences, which its system constitutes from human experience for the future. The symbolic always has a further potential of meaning, and this idea, though not, I think developed adequately by Cassirer is, nevertheless, an important reflection of his general attitude and ethic, which connects the use of language with spiritual growth.

The notion of reference implicit in the constitutive symbolic system—system as reference—makes it possible, as Cassirer shows in his Substance and Function, to evade the necessity of a material object of reference and to constitute the world of physics as one of functions. Helen Keller constituted the idea of water in the word as physics constitutes function as substance or, shall we say, dissolves the idea of substance in function. Helen Keller made possible a life for herself, which she had been shut out from until the age of seven. "What's water but the generated soul?" asks Yeats, whose line might be an epigraph for the Helen Keller story. Cassirer says:

In the usual logical view, the concept is born only when the signification of the word is sharply delineated and unambiguously fixed through definition according to genusproximum and differentia specifia. But to penetrate to the ultimate source of the concept, our thinking must go back to a deeper stratum, must seek those factors of synthesis and analysis which are at work in the process of word formation itself, and which are decisive for the ordering of all our representations according to specific linguistic categories. [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms]

When water generated Helen Keller's spirit or Helen Keller projected her spirit into "water," a polarity also occurred; as Urban remarks, "Without the element of polarity, and therefore of the reference of the presentation to that which is presented, that is without some elements of representation, the entire notion of knowledge collapses." Cassirer displaces the polarity itself into language as a symbolic form—or almost, for I think he was not as radical as he could have been in this matter. By this I mean that the polarity of subject-object regarded as a product of language becomes a category of the symbolic form of science.

That Cassirer employs the term "relation" rather than "difference," for the most part, emphasizes his notion of the synthetic process of language as thought generating wholes from differences, which the wholes then contain. Language, then, is for Cassirer neither closed, nor open, or it is both closed and open. It is referential by means of its relationality and constitutive power. It is "fictive," in the sense of making, a term Cassirer takes over from the mathematician Heinrich Hertz, though he could have gotten it from Vaihinger and elsewhere. However, Cassirer would no doubt have rebelled against Vaihinger's neo-Kantian critical positivism. Language is a vehicle of making; the idea of the made henceforth takes the place, for the most part, of truth.

But Cassirer does not deny that this forming, making language can go wrong. It often does:

The philosophy of language is here confronted with the same dilemma as appears in the study of every symbolic form. The highest, indeed the only, task of all these forms is to unite men. But none of them can bring about this unity without at the same time dividing and separating men. Thus what was intended to secure the harmony of culture becomes the source of the deepest discords and discussions. This is the great antinomy of the religious life. This same dialectic appears in human speech. Without speech there would be no community of men. Yet there is no more serious obstacle to such community than the diversity of speech. [An Essay on Man]

One cannot help noting here the curious remark that language was "intended to secure the harmony of culture." By whom? By a God who gave language to man? Then certainly language cannot be called a human achievement. By man who consciously invented it? Impossible. Man was not man before language. A slip? The ghost of theology? Perhaps. I deliberately resist the temptation of deconstruction for the possibility and the risk of construction: Cassirer must, indeed has to, (at least I want him to) mean that language embodies the possibility of attaining a cultural whole of differences. But this whole is imagined not as a fixed substance but as on the move, as function. It should be noted too that Cassirer's notion of language is fundamentally not that of communication, but rather of creation. Still, creation can go as easily wrong as communication, and Cassirer is well aware of this. But for him language is fundamentally all we have, for better or for worse. He hopes it can be for better. Also one notes that when language goes wrong, it ought to be regarded as doing so not vis d vis some truth independent of function but vis a vis making a liveable culture, which suggests that truth is relative to the nature of each form of the symbolic and is a product of those forms rather than something retrieved by them. This, in turn, suggests that symbolic forms generate an ethic of human relations. The ethical world, for Cassirer, is never given. It is always in the making.

Cassirer tried to broaden epistemology beyond the boundaries of scientific cognition where the Marburg neo-Kantians left it. He chose this path rather than the rejection of epistemology characteristic of modern phenomenology. He himself began as a student of scientific cognition, but his development was toward consideration of other ways of knowing or making. These ways are themselves systems or symbolic forms. In addition to language, the fundamental or primordial form is mythical thought. On the matter of myth Cassirer's principal forebears are Vico, Herder, and Schelling. From Vico he takes the idea of "poetic logic" and "imaginative universals" as well as the idea of trying to know something from inside itself even while maintaining the polarity necessary to knowledge. In The New Science, Vico speaks of the difficulty of such a vantage: "We had to descend from these human and refined natures of ours to those quite wild and savage natures, which we cannot at all imagine and can contemplate only with great effort." Cassirer writes: "We cannot reduce myth to certain fixed static elements; we must strive to grasp it in its inner life, in its mobility and diversity, in its dynamic principle." These words embody description of what Cassirer means by a phenomenological approach. He uses the term in a roughly Hegelian sense of understanding from within and grasping the whole in the form of its internal relations.

"Myth" for Cassirer does not mean "myths" but the dynamic which gives rise to them. He rejects the tradition of allegorical interpretation of myths as of no use in determining the dynamic of myth. He accepts what he regarded as Vico's notion of mythical thought as an independent configuring power of human consciousness. He emphasizes the creative element in Vico's notion of the poetic and turns the imagistic element into the creative. He thinks that Schelling's characterization of myth as requiring "tautegorical" interpretation expresses a similar attitude, but he is suspicious of Schelling's tendency to blur all difference. Myth is one of the means by which consciousness moves from passive captivity in sense to a world of its own theoretical creations. He would, I think, accept Lévi-Strauss' characterization of myth as a "science of the concrete" only if one were to allow the term "science" to enlarge itself to contain other forms of making from that of normal science. This would have to include the rule of metaphorical relation. In Cassirer's view this means that one tries to grasp myth on its own terms. These matters are discussed at length in volume two of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Myth, on the whole, operates with "concrete unifying images" instead of ideal relational forms. In scientific cognition relation comes between elements as an ideal signification, but in myth there is simply a concrescence or coincidence of the members of a relation. The ground here seems to be one of the sort of relation implicit in the tropes of metaphor and synecdoche, freed of their rationalistic, rhetorical definitions. In the cultural world myth eventuates in arts and religion, which are two quite different forms. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms stops just short of a discussion of art or of a systematic, or let us say anti-systematic, discussion of tropes. I say his discussion would have to have an element of anti-system (by way of irony about his predicament) in order to keep trying to see myth from its own point of view—an impossibility, of course, because in myth there is no point of view, no subject or object. Still the effort is the important thing, and has an ethical element and achieves a balance. In An Essay on Man the chapter on art leaves us somewhat dissatisfied because of a fundamental ambiguity in Cassirer's approach, not this critical balance which would seem to be necessary between rational and aesthetic constitution. The ambiguity arises because Cassirer's discussion of art and language draws a contrast between art and language even though most of his examples of art are linguistic in nature. Further, he has already treated language and myth, which prefigures art, as a twin birth. This problem has its roots in a scientific positivism that lingers in his vocabulary. In considering language, he tends to assume that language's progressive development is strictly toward the conceptual abstractions of science. Language, in this view, gradually emancipates itself from myth. Art is contrasted to language and science by being shown to perform another function. Language and science abbreviate reality, while art intensifies it:

Language and science depend upon one and the same process of abstraction; art may be described as a continuous process of concretion. In our scientific description of a given object we begin with a great number of observations which at first sight are only a loose conglomerate of detached facts. But the farther we proceed the more these individual phenomena tend to assume a definite shape and become a systematic whole. What science is searching for is some central feature of a given object from which all its particular qualities may be derived.… But art does not admit of this sort of conceptual simplification and deductive generalization. It does not inquire into the qualities or causes of things; it gives us intuition of the form of things. But this too is by no means a mere repetition of something we had before. [An Essay on Man]

This statement unfortunately suggests an "actual" world that can be known and that can be abbreviated or intensified. But Cassirer's basic view, to which he comes at the end, is that knowledge is made symbolically, not copied from a previous given. There is a more difficult problem: The distinction between art and language leaves poetry in the void unless Cassirer is prepared to make an addendum that offers a theory of the poetic use of language as somehow special and explains its nature. But his theory of myth as born a twin with language ought to lead him to a notion not of the special nature of the poetic but rather of the scientific. The relation of myth to art awaits development here, for in Cassirer art clearly ought to be regarded as surpassing myth in the direction of the emancipated Viconian "imaginative universal" as science does in the direction of the "abstract universal." Cassirer's last work The Myth of the State worries the dangers of a myth not surpassed. It stands, incidentally, as an answer to those who thought Cassirer saw all through rose-colored glasses.

The analogy of literary art and myth would appropriately begin for Cassirer with their common opposition to the subject/object distinction characteristic of science. But art differs from myth in its acceptance of the polarity even as it opposes it. Art is conscious of its making something. Myth is not. Here Cassirer needs a distinction that opposes difference and indifference to identity, which includes while at the same time is contrary to both of the others; in other words a true Blakean contrariety with its own logic or (we might say) anti-logic. Cassirer never quite gets this far, and his theory of art remains ambiguous, but provocative.

Cassirer's position, particularly vis d vis religion has been strongly opposed by modem phenomenology, sometimes unfairly. The complaint arises out of the difference between a neo-Kantian and a hermeneutic perspective. One of the earliest phenomenological critics of Cassirer was Heidegger himself. This phenomenological criticism is, of course, implicit in Heidegger's Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, and I shall return to their opposition when I tell my concluding story.

Briefly, Cassirer treats religion as a symbolic form that arises in a sophisticated way from mythical thinking. It is never entirely removed from its source, but it is different, too, by virtue of the way it constitutes its knowledge about the signs it employs. For religion, signs are "means of expression which, though reveal a determinate meaning, must necessarily remain inadequate to it, which 'point' to this meaning but never wholly exhaust it." Religious signs are thus allegorical, a term which is not opposed to symbol, as in so much romantic usage, but lies within it, as a mode of symbolic. It appears that Cassirer, like Walter Benjamin and others, thinks of the romantic and theological symbols as immediately falling from their miraculous power of containing their signified and referents (as in the Eucharist) to the arbitrary relations of allegory. Mysticism, in Cassirer's view, goes farther to reject even the religious allegorical sign as completely inadequate. In religion, the world itself is a world of signs like Baudelaire's dictionary of nature. There is always a something else from which the sign borrows its authority. Cassirer's point is that the process of allegoresis allows religion to remain in the particular while yet not being confined strictly to it, and religion depends on the tension between a hidden reality and a sensuous image standing for it.

It is fair to say, I think, that the contemporary phenomenologists' attitude toward Cassirer, arising in part from his treatment of religion, is fundamentally still that of Fritz Kaufmann's essay of the late forties: "Cassirer's philosophy," he remarks, "suffers from too much light," that is, too much humanism. Where, Kaufmann asks, is love and hatred, fear and trembling, shame and repentance, guilt and sin? The objection is principally against Cassirer's neo-Kantian holding to the unknowability of the ding an sich and his apparent reduction of religion simply to another example of human creativity—yet another symbolic form. For the phenomenologist, creativity is not all. It needs to be opposed and finally, I think, triumphed over by recognition of some greater reality that is not symbolically determinable. Cassirer, it is claimed, ignores the spiritual poverty of man, his ultimate need for divine mercy, his radical inability to "express certain experiences in an adequate way as well as his unique capacity for going into hiding by the very means of communication." It is true that Cassirer does not dwell much on this last matter, though he recognizes it; and on the need for divine mercy I do not think he dwells at all. He certainly was in dread much of his life of what man was making. But his early work on the philosophy of science turned him toward the power of the Kantian constitutive understanding to make and the possibility of its making well. When he came to art this positivity remained characteristic of his approach. Art he sees as a positive making rather than a constant prelude to a negative theology.

In this sense, Cassirer's Apollonian attitude seems a deliberate contrary or reprobate approach to what he saw around him and in the dark future he feared. He seems to have believed that God expresses Himself in and through man rather than dispensing punishment or mercy from some position in the sky or hiding there. This Apollonian nature Hendrik J. Pos describes in his essay "Recollections of Ernst Cassirer," which contains the story I borrow to conclude these remarks. In 1929, Cassirer and Heidegger appeared at a symposium at Davos University on the subject of Kant. Cassirer, of course, had written extensively on and edited Kant. Heidegger's book on Kant would be reviewed by Cassirer in Kant-Studien two years later. Their differences in approaching Kant were fundamental. Heidegger's view was that the central problem in Kant was that of the "metaphysical comprehension of being"; Kant's philosophy was one of finitude with no access to divinity. Pos remarks:

Heidegger persisted in the terminus a quo, in the situation at the point of departure, which for him is the dominating factor in all philosophizing. Cassirer aimed at the terminus ad quem, at liberation through the spiritual form, in science, practical activity, and art.

The two views did not meet. About Pos' sensitive recollection one can perhaps say that "terminus" is not quite the right word since for Cassirer the task is endless. If in taking his position Heidegger had not much to say about or in behalf of science, Cassirer in his way tended to diminish religion in its usual sense, locating God in the human spirit and fictionalizing the relation between man and an external deity. In this matter Heidegger and Cassirer seemed to be continuing the nineteenth-century wars of religion and science. With respect to art they clashed in a somewhat different way. Art for Heidegger, it seems to me, is subordinate to religion. For Cassirer it is an independent form, part of cultural making, completely secular, containing possibilities for a secular culture. If Cassirer had carried out the dialectic of symbolic forms at which he hints at the end of An Essay on Man, we would have found art and religion contrary in a positive Blakean sense.

In Davos in 1929 the debate went on for some time, with Cassirer admitting that metaphysical expressions are not lacking in Kant's text; but Heidegger refused to grant that the Critique of Pure Reason was aimed at the grounding of scientific knowledge of nature. Pos describes Cassirer as representing in this debate the "best in the universalistic traditions of German culture," Apollonian, the master of exposition, as he had so often shown in his writings. Pos describes Heidegger as sending forth "feelings of loneliness, of oppression, and of frustration, such as one has in anxious dreams, but now present in a clear and wakeful mind." Heidegger had the ear of Germany's academic youth. The soil for the reception of his philosophy had been prepared. When the discussion ended, Cassirer offered his hand to Heidegger, who refused it.

The man who offered his hand was forced under Nazüsm to resign his professorship at Hamburg in 1933 and to emigrate to Sweden, coming finally to the United States where he taught first at Yale, then at Columbia, until his death in exile on April 13, 1945.

Heidegger's connection with or tolerance of or by the Nazi regime has been much debated, and I have no opinion about it or its relation to his thought. Let me say only two things. First, there is something to be pondered on in the offer of that hand and its refusal, and it is not just the anti-Semitism there, though there is an irony, for Vico and, I think, Edward Said would regard Cassirer as what Vico called a "Gentile," that is to say, "secular" philosopher. Cassirer, hounded from Germany, speaks consistently of human cultural possibility, and he builds his ethic on this stance. Heidegger speaks often enough of darkness and loss, and he finds his ethic by negativity in the nothingness there. Cassirer speaks of the future of language, Heidegger of a past from which we and language fell. Second, in that moment of the proffered hand, Cassirer did in my view triumph over Heidegger, though whether there will be another triumph in the future I do not know. In any case, my aim has been not to engineer a second triumph for Cassirer, but to think him and to see both Cassirer and Heidegger—concord and discord—a pair never emptied out of time.