Comments on Samantha Matherne's Cassirer (Routledge 2021)

Comments on Samantha Matherne’s Cassirer (Routledge 2021) Sebastian Luft It has been recognized for a while now that Ernst Cassirer was a seminal thinker of the 20th century. The “Cassirer Renaissance,” of which has been spoken, began in German-speaking scholarship around 1990, when Cassirer was first discovered by scholars such as Ernst Wolfgang Orth and the late John Michael Krois, who was one of the first to discover and sift through Cassirer’s Nachlass. It was not until the 2000s, when books, anthologies, and articles began appearing in the English-speaking world. Michael Friedman’s A Parting of the Ways of 2000 on the Davos dispute between Cassirer and Heidegger did much to put Cassirer back on the map. Since the beginning of this rediscovery until now, we have before us two impressive and completed editions of Cassirer’s work (the published works and unpublished papers), edited in meticulous historical-critical fashion, and a book series called “Cassirer-Forschungen.” Many English translations have appeared as of late, most recently the seminal new translation of Cassirer’s magnum opus, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, by Steven Lofts. Moreover, there is the International Ernst Cassirer Society (IECG), under whose auspices we are meeting today; there have been several conferences organized around Cassirer or a part of his oeuvre and his influence. And finally, the list is topped off, at least for the moment, by Samantha Matherne’s (in the following: SM) Cassirer, a volume in the series Routledge Philosophers. While the publication of this book marks a formal end point to the introduction of Cassirer to the international audience, it will become clear (I hope, at the end of this session) that this book is merely the starting point for a new critical engagement with one of the 20th Century’s most prolific, original, and synthetic thinkers. To say it at the outset, SM’s book is an excellent starting point for the English-speaking scholar, who seeks not only to be introduced to Cassirer’s oeuvre, but also to receive some pointers and guiding clues to pursue his philosophical legacy. Given the sheer quantity of Cassirer’s output, SM’s book is mercifully short and comprehensive, while not sacrificing depth for succinctness and sophistication for painting in broad strokes. It is also clear that SM has an excellent overview over Cassirer’s entire oeuvre, both published and unpublished, such that the reader can have faith in her presentation, while not being, at the same time, overwhelmed by sheer amassment of material. For the very impatient reader, the book also offers an exhaustive bibliography (both a general one at the end and a specific one at the end of each chapter, of works not only in English), a detailed index both of names and concepts, and, most helpfully, a glossary of key terms explaining notions that are perhaps overly well known to Kantians or socalled “continental” philosophers, but not to scholars of other areas of specialization. Another positive feature I’d like to emphasize at the outset is the clarity and straight-forwardness of SM’s account of the systematic structure of Cassirer’s work. As all who 2 have read Cassirer know, understanding and clearly being able to reconstruct the structure of his arguments is oftentimes difficult, even obscured. This is not because Cassirer is an unclear or obscure writer; but instead because of his incredible intellectual humility. This humility means, concretely, that Cassirer rarely comes out saying explicitly what he thinks; instead, his account of the theme in question is in most cases clad in a discussion of other scholars and their account of the subject matter. His presentation of other authors is mostly even-handed and approving (even if he disagrees, as e.g. in the case of Heidegger), but also critical, such that it is not always clear what his own position is vis-à-vis those he discusses. This has certainly come as a detriment to the reception of Cassirer’s systematic import to philosophy and has led to his perception as a “mere” historian of philosophy or even “just” an intellectual historian. While Cassirer would vehemently agree that all philosophical discussions have to be contextualized in the framework of existing scholarship and in history—both the history of thought and the historical status quo of a live debate—his own contributions are oftentimes overlooked for these reasons and it is therefore sometimes hard to see the forest for the trees. SM never succumbs to this temptation. In fact, her account is admirably concise and always seeks to bring out the systematic content of Cassirer’s thought. Reading her, thus, is much clearer than the master himself, though her account is at all times charitable and correct. Two more positive features of the book deserve to be noted, although I will not spend more time on them here. For one, SM’s systematic overview concludes with Cassirer’s ethical and moral thought, both in the form of the topic of right (Recht) as a separate Symbolic Form of its own (in his study on the Swedish legal philosopher Axel Hägerström, the book with that title written in his time in Sweden), as well as in his critique of fascist ideologies in his last work, The Myth of the State, written in his time in the United States. While the latter is rather well known, it is especially his systematic account of right in conjunction with the ethical consciousness correlating it, that is rather unknown, especially (but not limited) to English-language readers (the book is not translated). It is clear that the philosophy of culture laid down in the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms has an ethical outlook in general, since the pursuit of culture and humans’ engagement and collaboration within it all contribute to a “progress in the consciousness of freedom,” as I shall discuss below. Yet, Cassirer also sees right as a symbolic form of its own (in this, following a Marburg staple of special importance to his teacher Hermann Cohen). In this symbolic form, the highest practical ideality is achieved as striving for universal moral-ethical laws, just as the highest theoretical ideality is achieved in mathematics and modern natural science. To spend an entire chapter on Cassirer’s moral thought is especially welcome, because, as SM admits, this aspect of his thought has not only been overlooked, but his overall position has oftentimes been identified as an exercise in theoretical philosophy alone. “This perception of Cassirer is one that not only followed him throughout his career, but also colors his reception still today, as his philosophy is often characterized as the theoretical work of an erudite thinker for whom practical issues, like morality and politics, never play a central role. …. Though this reading 3 of Cassirer is not uncommon, it fails to do justice to the ethical and political dimensions of his philosophy of culture.” (190) Secondly, the last chapter is devoted to his legacy in various areas of philosophical and scientific pursuits, such as philosophy of natural and social science, intellectual history, philosophy of language, aesthetics and art history, and critical theory, attesting to the fact that Cassirer is indeed not a figure of the past history of philosophy but with influence on many of his “children” and “grandchildren” scattered throughout the world who have carried on his legacy. As so many figures in Cassirer’s generation who were in some way tangled up with the political and military turmoil of World-War II (not to mention the fate of being Jewish), being cut off in many cases from the intellectual unfoldings and lines of influence, was an accident of political and historical events. This holds for Cassirer as well and in special measure. And it is up to us to take up the discussion again! Not recounting the content and sequence of SM’s account of Cassirer’s thought, I will concentrate here on the following two topics or problem areas that I find most pertinent and head-scratching. Let me be very clear at the outset that I take issue, for the most part, not with SM’s presentation, but with issues concerning die Sache selbst, problems and claims made and discussed by Cassirer himself. The questions I wish to raise here, thus, are questions as much to Cassirer as to SM. Not expecting her to be Cassirer’s “mouthpiece,” I hope my reflections can lead to a philosophical discussion furthering these issues themselves, keeping in mind the Marburg maxim that all givens (Gegebenes) in thought are tasks (Aufgaben) for further thinking. Thus, in the spirit of Cassirer and his Marburg teachers themselves, I hope to further weave the tapestry of thought and philosophy itself, knowing full well that this activity will (and should!) never come to an end. 1. The issue of spirit (and its history) C motivates his project (the philosophy of culture) from the outset by saying that the critique of reason becomes the critique of culture. At the same time, the individual subject is replaced by spirit. Spirit is the agent of culture. But what exactly is the nature of this spirit? The Hegelian overtones are unmistakable and undenied by C. But C’s relation to Hegel is a difficult one. While he remains a Marburg Neo-Kantian in important ways, as SM clearly shows in chapter II, he makes moves towards Hegel in equally important ways (a move, by the way, also made by other Neo-Kantians, such as Windelband, albeit differently). At the same time, C is also very critical of certain aspects of Hegel, which directly inform his System of Symbolic Forms and the relation of these forms to each other (to be discussed below). Briefly, C is critical of Hegel’s ordering of the manifestations of spirit in Hegel’s way, such that the path of spirit ends up by necessity in absolute spirit. In other words, C is skeptical of Hegel’s notion of the necessary teleology 4 of spirit culminating in absolute spirit (as abandoning freedom); but he does retain the thesis of a teleological development in a qualified way. But this aside, C is also skeptical about any so-called “metaphysical” readings of Hegel’s notion of spirit. According to such a metaphysical reading, spirit is something like a quasi-religious or even a-religious entity either resembling or replacing God and putting the human being in its place (and there are plenty of explicitly religious readings of Hegel as well, according to which wants to place God’s will at the center of the development of human culture). But that just makes the question more pressing: what exactly does C mean with spirit? It is, unfortunately, one other central term in his work that he fails to define explicitly. So this is an eminent matter of interpretation. Now in so doing, SM characterizes spirit as following: “In keeping with the general Neo-Kantian rejection of speculative metaphysics, C does not understand spirit as an absolute metaphysical substance. He, instead, conceives of ‘spirit’ as a kind a priori, intersubjective shared structure and activity, which is grounded in humanity.” (28) And later: spirit is “an a priori, intersubjectively shared structure and activity, which unites human beings, qua human beings, together” (120). Since SM does not provide passages in C to support this, I take this to be her paraphrase or explication of C’s notion of spirit. I am not saying this to quibble with her paraphrase, but to problematize it. Spirit, thus, is subjects-as-intersubjective agents, thus subjectivity in the plural, which manifests itself in different cultural forms—the symbolic forms—and unfolds in history. An author C seeks out for clarification is here, as SM argues, Dilthey: This is how SM fits Dilthey into the picture: “Also critical of, what he [D] sees as, Hegel’s metaphysical appeal to absolute spirit, Dilthey argues that all of our social and cultural activities should be understood as part of ‘objective spirit’, which he glosses in terms of the collective, historical unfolding effort of human beings to build a shared cultural world.” (123) Yet, while the rejection of absolute in favor of objective spirit, as the term of art for the sum total of the symbolic forms, is certainly correct (cf. also Kreis’ book, which takes this claim as its premise), one should also not overlook Dilthey’s rejection of the idea of an ahistorical “transcendental subject,” e.g. in his famous phrase that “in the veins of the knowing subject flows no real blood,” a passage that deserves to be quoted in full (from the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, of 1883, a work C evidentially knew): “In the veins of the knowing subject, constructed by Locke, Hume and Kant, flows no real blood, but the diluted sap of reason as mere function of thought. My historical and psychological work concerning the entire human being led me to take this human being, 5 in the manifold of its powers, this willing, feeling, imagining creature, as the basis also to explain cognition.”1 Indeed, for Dilthey, the subject should be understood as an individual, historically situated being, which, however, essentially lives in a shared space of meaning, culture as objective spirit. So pointing out this influence stemming from Dilthey is certainly helpful to point us into the right direction. But this reminder makes things more complicated, for, apart from the individual subject, what exactly is spirit if it is not a metaphysical substance or a transcendental structure? To Dilthey, it is certainly not a transcendental structure, and as historically embedded, Dilthey would presumably also reject the notion of the a priori to characterize it. What I am trying to get at is: Is C’s notion of spirit, if it is not these things, naturalized? Is it compatible, in other words, with a contemporary reading of Hegel as proposed by someone like Brandom? “Naturalizing” classical philosophers has become a new favorite fashion, it seems. Here is how Brandom reads Hegel: “Hegel’s conception of Geist is what he makes of Kant’s revolutionary insight into the fundamentally normative character of discursive intentionality. This is the idea that what distinguishes judgments and intentional doings from the performances of merely natural creatures is that they are things their subjects are in a distinctive sense responsible for, as exercises of their authority. … Hegel synthesizes Kant’s normative understanding of mindedness with his reading of Enlightenment traditions of thought to yield a naturalized social-practice account of norms.” (Heroism and Magnanimity, p. 11, emphasis mine) What makes this account naturalized, I take it, is that it carries with itself two commitments, a methodological and an ontological one. The methodological commitment is that an account of the normative status of spirit cannot itself be normative, but descriptive (“natural” as opposed to loaded with presuppositions). The ontological commitment is that spirit is not something altogether different from the natural creatures that we are, but is an extension of it. We are not “merely natural” creatures, but natural nonetheless with the capacity of performing activities such as judgments and intentional doings that are normative, since we are responsible for them. Doing this renders us sapient in addition to sentient. Spirit’s activities thus become, as McDowell has called it, following Aristotle, second nature, emanating out of first nature. And McDowell contrasts this “good” sense of naturalism with a “bald,” reductive naturalism of the sort of modern positivistic science. Of course the problem is then to explain how the one emanates from out of the other, whether we need to a story along the lines of Brandom (in MIE) or McDowell (Aristotelian), but we can leave this problem aside here. „In den Adern des erkennenden Subjekts, das Locke, Hume und Kant konstruieren, rinnt nicht wirkliches Blut, sondern der verdünnte Saft von Vernunft als bloßer Denktätigkeit. Mich führte aber historische wie psychologische Beschäftigung mit dem ganzen Menschen dahin, diesen, in der Mannigfaltigkeit seiner Kräfte, dies wollend und fühlend vorstellende Wesen auch der Erklärung der Erkenntnis […] zugrunde zu legen.“ 1 6 Now back to C. This little foray into a Neo-Hegelian position was meant to sharpen C’s position in comparing it with the former. I would like to show that C is clearly aware of this issue and indeed occupies an interesting position. The question I want to raise is, could C’s position be considered along these lines? C, as we know, rejects substantialist accounts of, say, nature and culture and any metaphysical dualisms stemming therefrom, in favor or a functionalist account. The human being is defined by the functions it performs (as animal symbolicum), not which substance(s) it is made of. For the present context, it is worth pointing out that C has registered the evolutionary theory stemming from Darwin with approval (citation needed2), acknowledging a fundamentally natural basis to our existence. Yet at the same time, C insists on the (equally) fundamental difference between beasts and us by saying that as human beings “we break through the circle of natural existence and step outside of it in principle … . It appears as the basic trait of all human existence that the human being is not simply absorbed in the plenty of external impressions, but that it tames this plenty, by impregnating a certain form onto it, which at bottom stems from itself, from the thinking, feeling, willing subject.”3 Beasts, in other words, are only capable of receiving form (at least some, thinking of, for instance, pets), not of “taming and creating” it. Human creatures break through the circle of nature, expanding it, but at the same time are still part of it. An interpreter (the first translator of the book containing this passage) calls Cassirer’s position for this reason “a fresh and perfectly consistent ‘idealistic naturalism’” (Howe, quoted in Luft 2019, p. 482). It is a naturalism precisely because it rejects any metaphysically loaded dualism. Why is it idealistic? Because the capacity to impregnate the world with form from our “thinking, feeling, willing” existence stems fundamentally from our freedom as autonomous agents, such that spirit itself is nothing other than the exercise of freedom itself (within nature, thereby becoming culture). And it is precisely this understanding of freedom that Cassirer sees lacking in Hegel. Hegel’s notion of freedom remains “metaphysical,” such that he cannot account for the freedom of the individual. This is consistent with Hegel’s metaphor of the “Schädelstätte des absoluten Geistes” which is the altar upon which individual subjects falter. Of Hegel’s notion of freedom, C says: “Hegel’s philosophy purports to be a philosophy of freedom. And yet the idea of freedom in metaphysical idealism, as it underpins the Hegelian system, has carried out this process of liberation only for the infinite, the absolute subject, not for the finite subject. Earlier in Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften. Cf. also his positive discussion of what he sees otherwise as “the restricted circle of Darwin’s biological framing” (PsF I, 126). 3 “dass wir […] den Kreis des natürlichen Daseins durchbrechen und prinzipiell aus ihm heraustreten … . Als der Grundzug allen menschlichen Daseins erscheint es, dass der Mensch in der Fülle der äußeren Eindrücke nicht einfach aufgeht, sondern dass er diese Fülle bändigt, indem er ihr eine bestimmte Form aufprägt, die letzten Endes aus ihm selbst, aus dem denkenden, fühlenden, wollenden Subjekt herstammt. (LdK, 149) 2 7 Thus here, too, the individual becomes, vis-à-vis the omnipotence of the self-moving idea, a mere marionette.”4 Hegel’s notion of freedom, thus, according to C (not arguing if this reading is fair), renders the freedom of the individual impossible. What makes the individual subject free, thus, is the capacity to partake freely in culture as objective spirit, thereby gaining, for the human species as a whole, a consciousness of the progress of freedom, an idea that C emphatically underwrites as the overall process of culture. To summarize this point, the questions I want to raise are: 1. What exactly does spirit mean for C, after what has just been said? 2. Can one say that C’s notion of spirit is naturalized in the sense explicated? 3. If no, what does he mean; if yes, what makes his position original vis-à-vis the other ones on offer? 4. Specifically, what about the notion of normativity, which seems central to Brandom or Brandom’s Hegel? Is it a matter of all symbolic forms or perhaps only some? 5. Do any of these theorists—C, Brandom, McDowell—have a convincing story to tell how the normative arises from the natural, or how culture emerges from nature? I would like to end this section with a seeming side issue but one that is systematically important. Whatever spirit may be, it is both Hegel’s as well as C’s claim that it manifests itself, plays itself out, in and over the course of history. Culture necessarily occurs in history. History is the “true” element of culture, and this is why history is so important in order to be “historically-minded” in all of our pursuits, (1) to understand the past, (2) thereby understanding ourselves in the now, and (3) also projecting ourselves and our plans and ideals into the future. It is for this reason that for C “history” is a symbolic form (cf. 172-176). But it is important to point out that history the way Cassirer means it here is the work of the historiographer, not history as “element”; thus, history as Geschichtswissenschaft, not as res gestae. History as the “element” of the past life (ours, humankind) is not itself a symbolic form but the “space” in which they and spirit unfold. These two things need to be kept apart but run somewhat together in SM’s account. But what makes historiography interesting as a symbolic form C unfortunately spends very little time on is that as a retrospective activity of understanding the past, and spirit unfolding in it, it helps us understand ourselves as who we are. So the work of this retrospective reconstruction of our past is not just the work of some highbrowed scholars, but crucial for all human beings. History, indeed, provides us with, as SM puts it, a “Hegels Philosophie will eine Philosophie der Freiheit sein. Und doch hat die Frei-heitsidee des metaphysischen Idealismus, wie sie dem Hegelschen System zugrunde liegt, den Befreiungsprozess nur für das unendliche, nur für das absolute Subjekt, nicht aber für das endliche Subjekt vollzogen. […] So wird auch hier, gegenüber der Allmacht der sich selbst bewegenden Idee, der einzelne zur bloßen Marionette.“ (ebd., S. 146f.) 4 8 “’self-knowledge’, that is, knowledge of human beings via the past” (p. 173). This is both an objectification of the past as well as giving it a distinctly human shape (and not a series of contingent accidents), which is why C also calls it an “objective anthropomorphism” (quoted on p. 173). And it is this understanding of the past as a form of unfolding self-knowledge as increasing consciousness of freedom that allows us to see teleology in history. However, this “objective anthropomorphism” is not to mean that there is one correct, “objective” way to represent the past. Instead, this reconstruction of the past (in this sense of past res gestae) requires “imaginative originality,” as C stresses (cf. p. 174), which is a sign of the good judgment on the part of the historian, to focus on what was important and crucial in the past and what was merely contingent and irrelevant. Windelband’s famously distinguishes between something that is trivially historical versus being an historical fact (his example of Goethe getting a key made on a certain day based on an extant locksmith’s bill, cf. Präludien, p. 398). And this good judgment about the past, then, is also necessarily a matter of dispute and interpretation and alternative narratives. But what motivates these are, of course, concerns of the present, and it is only these concerns of the present, which motivate any interpretation of the past, but do so for the sake of the future, such that moving forward, our understanding of ourselves in the future will be enlarged and enriched by new narratives, motivated by new concerns of the present. Thus, for instance the 1619 project, in giving the American identity a new lens to look at its past, achieves two things. For one, it does not (and should not) replace other narratives of the United States. The impressive story of the gradual unfolding of the American democracy out of its status as a part of the British Empire becomes thereby, not devalued, but supplemented by a reminder of the slavery of its past, putting things into a new perspective adding to the old one. In other words, the 1619 narrative would be wrongly understood if it were to be taken as the “true” objective account of the past; instead, it adds something to the picture of the American past which was previously unseen; “objectivity” thus becomes enhanced and greater, more complex. Secondly, adding this narrative of the American past, will be able to help America move forward towards creating a better future, where more freedom will become dispersed over ideally all Americans of all identities, and thereby by extension to other peoples, if this ideal proves to be inspiring. This brings me to the next point, the issue of the teleology of culture. 2. The relation of the SF (the “teleology thesis” vs. the “irreducibility thesis”) For the problem of how to conceive of the relation of symbolic forms amongst each other, let me lay out the issue and the inherent tension in two possible accounts, each of which C gives and which, stated thusly, present a clear incompatibility in his account. Some interpreters have pointed out that this comes to an irresolvable incoherence in C’s philosophy of the symbolic (Friedman). Others have attempted to defend these two 9 accounts as only seemingly incompatible, but have made different suggestions about how to do make them compatible. SM belongs to the latter group of interpreters. I will first present the dilemma as seen by some readers. I will then present the solution to it, as presented in SM’s account. It will bring me back to the issue of teleology and a possibly defensible account that evades the idea of incompatibility, but also opens (or reopens) the door to a critique of Cassirer that cannot easily be dismissed. So when it comes to the symbolic sorms, their internal functioning and mutual relationship (“externally”) and, finally, their overall purpose and direction, C makes two fundamentally different claims. On the one hand, the symbolic forms are sui generis a priori functions of spirit in its process of world-making. That they are sui generis means that they may not be reducible to one another in judging their respective merit and respective functions, that they, taken together (“das Ganze ist das Wahre”), complement each other in giving us access to reality. They are, as Cassirer also says using Goethe’s optical metaphor, refractions of reality. SM calls this the irreducibility thesis. On the other hand, they also seek to expand our cultural existence in helping the human being as well as the human species on the path of a increasing progress of the consciousness of freedom, as C cites Hegel in the passages where he makes this claim. Thus, culture, on C’s view, is not some perpetuating working like a constant stirring of soup in a pot, keeping it at the same temperature, but clearly has a teleological structure. SM calls this the teleology thesis. And if one judges or compares symbolic forms with one another, one has to conclude that not all symbolic forms are created equal. The most blatant sign of this is C’s thesis that the form of myth is a form of passivity, where the human being living in its state is the most unfree and unaware of any freedom, whereas other forms, especially mathematics and science, clearly advance the theoretical realm of human freedom in freeing us from the earthly, so to speak, in reaching levels of ideality, where complete freedom is reached. On this view, the progress consists in a progressive freeing from the real and concrete. Considered side by side, both claims are incompatible, the one insisting on the mutually equal nature of symbolic forms, the other considering some symbolic forms “higher” or “freer” and hence more “dignified” than others. Or to use Hegel’s metaphor, occasionally used by C, if a form like myth is the lowest and science the highest rung on the ladder of spirit, they cannot be seen as equal in contributing to the progress of the consciousness of freedom. To put the problem differently, if forms such as science or language or art are superior in this respect to myth or religion, then it could seem that C has a rather “elitist” view of cultural activity after all, such that culture, instead of being seen as the sum total of human activities descriptively, does get sorted normatively in privileging theoretical (“armchair”) activities or high culture, as historically and geographically located in the West in Modernity. It would make C, against all intents and purposes to give an a priori account of culture, a Eurocentric after all. SM’s strategy to solve this incompatibility is to make a distinction within the notion of teleology. Teleology is at work internal to each symbolic form and across symbolic forms 10 taken as a whole. On the one hand, C argues for a teleology within each symbolic form from a mimetic, analogical to a symbolic phase. On the other, there is a teleology within culture as such in reaching an ideal phase of pure signification, which can only be reached theoretically by mathematics and science and practically by legality/right. So globally speaking, the highest form of freedom is located in the phase of pure signification found only in the latter. In her words: “Though C thinks that each of the symbolic forms is capable of this sort of internal development, he claims that when we look at progress across the symbolic forms it becomes clear that there are limits to how far some of them advance our consciousness of freedom. On his view, the symbolic forms that parallel the functions of expression and presentation remain tethered to the sensuous world and, as a result, they can only promote a consciousness of freedom that is bound to the sensuous world. Thus even in the symbolic phase of these forms, C argues that we cannot achieve insight into our freedom as something that has an ideal source in spirit. By contrast, he argues that given the ideal orientation of the symbolic forms that parallel the function of pure signification, they are able to promote a recognition of our freedom as something that has an ideal spiritual origin. It is thus in the symbolic phases of these forms that C thinks we should look for the most teleologically advanced stage of our practical and theoretical consciousness of freedom.” (145) This solution is elegant, but is it convincing? I think it solves the problem within the seeming tension within C’s account. But I also think it leaves us with a problem that critics such as Heidegger and others have leveled at C’s philosophy of culture, which comes down to the old critique of C being an elitist and a defender of Western high culture after all. In tethering culture and its development or progress to the issue of freedom and its potential increase, C invites this sort of critique, which holds, instead, that the “high culture” is something that alienates us rather than brings us in touch with our own authentic existence and that of our “people.” Of course, the nationalistic and potentially chauvinistic overtones of this sort of claim are obvious, as we see in Heidegger’s all too ready embrace of national socialism only six years after distinguishing authentic from inauthentic existence. And it is in Heidegger’s characterization of “inauthentic existence” that we get examples of high culture and its inherent “idle talk” and bourgeois indifference and bored curiosity that clearly have C’s account as their target. I cannot solve nor dissolve this issue here easily, but it is, I think, an important one that all defenders of culture and of C have to face and respond to. In summary, SM has given us a systematic, synthetic and harmonious presentation of Cassirer’s oeuvre in its totality. It is systematic and synthetic, because it reconstructs Cassirer’s thought in a systematic way, leaving away the “dross” of his many learned forays into the various scientific disciplines dealing with the different regions of culture. It is harmonious, perhaps at times too harmonious, because her presentation strives to smooth over some conflicting statements and conflicting interpretations that might have 11 been given a more prominent place in her account. After all, the bathos of culture is in itself difficult, messy, at times discordant and chaotic, just like human life is. Why should its account be more harmonious than culture itself? However, for the sake of an introduction to Cassirer’s impressive oeuvre, which has caused him to be called the “last Leibniz” of Western philosophy, SM has done an admirable job, and we can all be grateful to her efforts. And here’s to hoping that this work will have an impact on the reception not just of Cassirer’s own work, but the philosophy of culture inspired by Cassirer. To conclude with a bit of a “downer” in conjunction with the last point, one should bear in mind that Cassirer, the eternal optimist, paints a very happy picture of culture and our place in it. Besides the fragile and precarious existence of culture on a larger scale, which we see threatened by biological facts such as viruses, as well by political facts, such as military confrontations, there is also the fragility of individual existence within culture, as it is expressed by the protagonist of Houellebecq’s latest novel, Anéantir, where this protagonist Paul muses: “Perhaps in the end the world was right after all, perhaps there is no place for them [Paul and his wife Prudence] in a reality which they had only passed through with fearful incomprehension. But they had been lucky, very lucky. For most humans, traversing through it is from beginning to end a lonely affair.” (pp. 615 f.) Perhaps there is a fundamental loneliness in the midst of our cultural existence, of our existence as individuals who may or may not feel at home in the world. Participating and partaking in culture, thus, is ultimately a personal decision and thus, once again, ultimately a question of one’s own autonomy. Here, too, it is at bottom an issue of freedom, the ultimate element of culture, and the freedom to reject it.