rhetoric’s ghost at davos: reading cassirer in the ... · keywords: cassirer, heidegger, davos,...

Thomas A. Discenna

Rhetorica, Vol. XXXII, Issue 3, pp. 245–266, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 1533-8541. ©2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re-served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce articlecontent through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website,at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2014.32.3.245.

Rhetoric’s ghost at Davos:Reading Cassirer in the rhetorical tradition

Abstract: This essay takes up a discussion concerning the 1929 de-

bate between the philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger

by reading it as an instatiation of an ongoing dilemma within the

field of rhetoric. I argue that the Davos meeting may be produc-

tively read through the lens of rhetorical theory and that such a

reading can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of this

event. The essay concludes by making a case for Cassirer’s phi-

losophy of symbolic forms as a normative ground for a rhetorical

theory whose central purpose is to construct a decent, cultured,

cosmopolitan, critical humanism.

Keywords: Cassirer, Heidegger, Davos, Rhetorical Theory, Critical

Humanism

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face isturned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain ofevents, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling

wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angelwould like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has beensmashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise; it has got caught inhis wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his backis turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. Thisstorm is what we call progress.1

Theoreticians of rhetoric are, it would seem, inordinately fondof identifying wrong turns. The twentieth century revaluation of

1W. Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn. ed. H. Arendt. (New York: Schocken,1968), 257–258.

R H E T O R I C A246

rhetoric has highlighted instances where the western intellectualtradition has hurtled heedlessly down some road with disastrousconsequences. Inevitably, such wrong turns prove catastrophic, notonly for the discipline of rhetoric but for the societies that are leftwith the aftermath of an intellectual tradition that denigrates anynumber of concepts organized under the sign of rhetoric: inven-tion, imagination, emotion. Typically these wrong turns take theform of a narrative wherein some voice speaking for an ascendantconceptualization of philosophy is heeded while a, not always con-temporaneous voice, speaking on behalf of rhetoric is marginalizedor ignored. Chaim Perelman for instance, chides Ramus for having“tossed aside the Aristotelian distinction between analytical and di-alectical judgments”.2 Stephen Toulmin cites Montaigne as the voiceof rhetoric marginalized by Descartes.3 Likewise, Grassi also arguesthat Descartes is responsible for relegating rhetoric to the margins inspite of Vico’s Cassandra-like pleas.4 It is in this tradition of rhetoricalscholarship that this essay belongs. For however often such momentsof conflict are posited, it is only very rarely that history offers discretemoments when competing claims concerning the proper spheres ofphilosophy and rhetoric are articulated in direct confrontation.

One such moment, I argue, occurred in 1929 in Davos, Switzer-land, when two of the most important figures in contemporary Ger-man philosophy, Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer, met for a de-bate. The Davos disputation has become “among the most frequentlycited conversations in the history of modern European thought”.5

The ostensible topic of the debate concerned “the autonomy ofphilosophy”6 yet, from the beginning, the debate took on a signif-icance that transcended this narrow question:

The debate between Heidegger and Cassirer also meant a great dealto us in human terms . . . on the one hand, this short dark-brown man,

2C. Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric, (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press,1982), 3.

3S. Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1990).

4E. Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition, (Carbondale: SouthernIllinois University Press, 2001).

5Peter Eli Gordon, “Continental Divide: Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heideggerat Davos, 1929—An Allegory of Intellectual History,” Modern Intellectual History 1,2(2004): 222.

6G. Motzkin, “The Ideal of Reason and the Task of Philosophy: Cassirer andHeidegger at Davos,” in Dominic Kaegi and Enno, ed., Rudolph Cassirer-Heidegger:70 Jahre Davoser Debatte. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2002), 26–35 (p. 27).

Rhetoric’s ghost at Davos 247

this fine skier and sportsman with his energetic unflinching mien, thisrough and distant, at times downright rude, person who, in impressiveseclusion and with deep moral seriousness, lives for and serves theproblems he has posed for himself—and on the other hand that manwith his white hair, not only outwardly but also inwardly an Olympian,with his serene features, his kindly courtesy, his vitality and elasticityand, last but not least, his aristocratic elegance.7

Owing in part to this symbolic importance, the Davos debate hasbeen read by scholars for what it has to say about neo-Kantianism,8

the conflict between analytical and continental philosophy,9 legaltheory,10 philosophical anthropology,11 technology,12 and, almost in-evitably, politics.13

In this essay I continue the discussion about Davos by reading itis an instantiation of the ongoing conversation between philosophyand rhetoric. Such a reading is motivated by two primary concerns.The first is to contribute to the ongoing project of rehabilitating thereputation of Cassirer. According to Lofts, “the name of Cassirer isseldom, if ever, mentioned in lectures on, or introductions to thehistory of philosophy.”14 The same neglect is present in the fieldof rhetorical theory where Cassirer, in spite of his groundbreaking

7R. Safransky, Martin Heidegger, (Boston: Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPress, 1996), 184.

8Paul Crowe, “Between Termini: Heidegger, Cassirer, and the two terms ofTranscendental Method,” Philosophy Today 47.5 (2003): 100–106; Gordon, “ContinentalDivide,” 219–248; Frank Schalow, “Thinking at Cross Purposes with Kant: Reason,Finitude and Truth in the Cassirer-Heidegger Debate,” Kant-Studien 87 (1996): 198–217.

9Peter Friedman, “Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger: The Davos Disputation andTwentieth Century Philosophy,” European Journal of Philosophy 10 (2002): 263–274. P.Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, (Chicago: Open CourtPress, 2000).

10Deniz Coskun,“Cassirer in Davos. An Intermezzo on Magic Mountain (1929).”Law and Critique 17 (2006): 1–26.

11Vida Pavesich,“Hans Bluemenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology: After Hei-degger and Cassirer,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 46 (2008): 421–448.

12H. Ruin, “Technology as Destiny in Cassirer and Heidegger—Continuing theDavos Debate.” in Hoel, ed. Form and Technology: Reading Ernst Cassirer from the Present.Available at: http://heidegger.an-archos.com/archive/technology-as-destiny-in-cassirer-and-heidegger-continuing-the-davos-debate.

13L. Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerean Existentialism.” in T. Pangle,ed., The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the thought of LeoStraus, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Geoffrey Waite, “On Esotericism:Heidegger and/or Cassirer at Davos,” Political Theory 26 (1998): 603–651.

14S.G. Lofts, Ernst Cassirer: A “Repetition” of Modernity, (Albany, NY: State Uni-versity of New York Press, 2000), 1.


insights on symbols and their use, is nearly absent from the liter-ature. Recently, however, there has been some effort to reevaluateCassirer. As Verene argues, “it is only within the last decade thatCassirer’s original philosophy has begun to receive systematic schol-arly attention.”15 Moreover, this reassessment has come not only fromwithin philosophy but has been interdisciplinary though it has not,thus far, included any substantial contribution from rhetorical the-orists. This study offers a corrective to this neglect, arguing that notonly can Cassirer’s work be productively appropriated as a theoryof rhetoric but also that such an appropriation provides importantinsights on Cassirer’s work.

The second motivation for reading Davos as a debate betweenphilosophy and rhetoric is to raise concerns regarding recent efforts toread Heidegger into the rhetorical tradition. As Hyde argues, “Com-munication and rhetorical scholars have appropriated Heidegger’swork in order to extend the ontological reach of their research.”16 Suchefforts are understandable as Heidegger, in marked contrast to Cas-sirer, is widely regarded as perhaps the most important philosopherof the twentieth century. Indeed, “any fair assessment of Heidegger’scontribution must recognize that it changed the shape of twentieth-century philosophy.”17 However, as the Davos disputation makesclear, such efforts are fraught with peril for a theory of rhetoric thatwould seek not only an ontological ground but also a normativeone. In other words, the debate at Davos makes clear the pitfalls inSmith’s claim that: “Heidegger’s work and his readings of Aristotleprovide rhetoricians with ways to theorize the being of everydaynessas rhetoric’s condition of possibility.”18

In the following pages, I offer an analysis of the Davos debate,which, by reading it through the lens of the ongoing conversationbetween philosophy and rhetoric, accounts for what most scholarshave described as its failure to produce the sharp confrontation ex-pected. For instance, Habermas contends: “The opposition between

15D. P. Verene, “Introduction: The Development of Cassirer’s Philosophy,” inThora Ilin Bayer. Cassirer’s Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: A Philosophical Commentary,(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 1–37 (p. 6).

16M. J. Hyde, “Searching for Perfection: Martin Heidegger (with some help fromKenneth Burke) on Language, Truth, and the Practice of Rhetoric.” in Pat ArnesonPerspectives on Philosophy of Communication, (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UniversityPress, 2007), 21–44 (p. 34).

17D. Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, (New York: Routledge, 2000), 193.18Daniel L. Smith, “Intensifying Phronesis: Heidegger, Aristotle, and Rhetorical

Culture,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 36 (2003): 79.


the decent, cultured spirit of cosmopolitan humanism, and that fatalrhetoric set on throwing man back onto the ‘hardness of his fate,’ wasreflected only in a contrast of gestures and mentalities.”19 Implicit inthis analysis, I argue that the issues delineated in the Davos debatehighlight the difficulties in appropriating Heidegger’s metaphysi-cal claims for constructing a normative theory of rhetoric. Finally, Iconclude by making the case for Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolicforms as both a metaphysical and normative ground for a rhetoricaltheory whose central purpose is to construct a decent, cultured, andcritical humanism.

The Enigma of Davos20

The Davos disputation is both among the most significant eventsin Western intellectual history and the most enigmatic. Ostensibly,the discussion concerned the possibility of grounding an autonomousphilosophy in Kantian metaphysics.21 Cassirer, the senior figure, wasan established scholar of Kant, having published an authoritativeintellectual biography and “served as general editor of a definitiveeleven-volume edition of the complete works of Kant.”22 Heidegger,in contrast, had published his groundbreaking work, Being and Timeonly two years before the meeting at Davos. More recently, he hadcompleted an analysis of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason arguing “thatKant’s central problem was not at all that of scientific knowledge, butrather the problem of the metaphysical comprehension of being.”23

19J. Habermas, The Liberating Power of Symbols: Philosophical Essays. trans. PeterDrews. (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2001), 23.

20There are three English language translations of the Davos Disputation. Theearliest, Carl H. Hamburg, “A Cassirer-Heidegger Seminar” appeared in 1964 inPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research. The most widely available appears asan appendix in Richard Taft’s translation of Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem ofMetaphysics. A third translation is available in Nino Langiulli’s The ExistentialistTradition: Selected Writings as “A Discussion between Ernst Cassirer and MartinHeidegger” and translated by Francis Slade. Differences between these three trans-lations are minor and all three are based on the same German source material, the“Arbitsgemeinschaft Cassirer-Heidegger” by Joachim Ritter and O. F. Bollnow. In theinterests of clarity I have, in the essay presented here, chosen to quote Cassirer’spassages in the debate from the Slade translation and Heidegger’s from the versionby Taft.

21Friedman, “The Davos Disputation;” Motzkin, “The Ideal of Reason.”22Coskun, “Intermezzo,” 11.23Ibid., 12.


Heidegger’s novel interpretation of Kant was at odds with the pre-vailing orthodoxy of neo-Kantianism of which Cassirer was a leadingfigure.

Neo-Kantianism remains the primary lens through which theDavos debate has been understood over the years.24 According tothese analyses, Cassirer is the defender of neo-Kantian dogma againstHeidegger’s usurpation of that tradition. The symbolic importanceof the debate is thus muted and its cultural, political, and otherintellectual implications pushed to the background. Moreover, allof these analyses are dependent upon a narrow understanding ofCassirer’s work. “In textbooks and discussions of twentieth-centuryphilosophy, his philosophy is commonly typed as neo-Kantian.”25

Indeed, the relationship between Cassirer’s original contributionsto philosophy, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, to neo-Kantianismremains contested. For instance, Coskun argues that “Cassirer didnot intend his philosophy of symbolic forms to be a new philosophy;rather it was for him a new way to approach philosophy. Withthis approach, Cassirer sought to initiate a transformation of Kant’sCritique of Reason into a Critique of Culture.”26 Thus, Cassirer’srole, as representative of neo-Kantianism, was to defend the traditionagainst Heidegger’s attempt to appropriate it for his own analyticsof dasein.

However, while Cassirer was certainly a leading light amongneo-Kantians, the reduction of his philosophical project to an exten-sion of that tradition fails to take into consideration the originalityof The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Unlike neo-Kantianism:

The basic principle of culture is no longer identified with reason, in itstheoretical and ethical guises, but with the more inclusive notion of thesymbol. This makes a crucial difference. The concept of symbolism, un-like that of reason, embraces all dimensions of human existence. The sen-suous, emotive facets of life are no longer pathological in Kant’s sense;they have their own possibilities of expression, their own distinctivesymbolic forms.27

24Crowe, “Between termini;” Gordon, “Continental Divide;” Dennis A. Lynch,“Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger: The Davos Debate.” Kant-Studien 81 (1990):360–370; Motzkin, “Ideal of Reason;” Schalow, “Cross Purposes.”

25Verene, “Development,” 11.26Coskun, “Intermezzo,” 1.27E. Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture, (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2008), 100–101.


The simple categorizing of Cassirer as neo-Kantian fundamen-tally misunderstands this philosophical project and thus limits un-derstanding of Cassirer’s work and, consequently of the Davos de-bate. According to Verene, the issue of Cassirer’s relationship toneo-Kantianism was on display at Davos, “Cassirer sees that Hei-degger, by bringing up neo-Kantianism, is attempting to reducehis philosophy of symbolic forms to its origin, to create the im-pression that it is just a narrow form of Kantianism. Cassirer bris-tles at this implication. . .”28 Indeed, while there is little doubt asto the debt that Cassirer’s work owes to neo-Kantianism, it cannotbe reduced to this origin. According to Lofts, “in the final analy-sis, of course, Cassirer’s thought is neither neo-Kantian nor neo-Hegelian, but rather a synthesis of a number of diverse intellec-tual sources.”29 Yet, in spite of this multiplicity of intellectual influ-ences, it is neo-Kantianism that dominates understanding of Cassirerand Davos.

Thus, the enigma that is the Davos debate can largely be tracedto this misunderstanding of Cassirer’s work. The consequence ofthis narrow reading of Cassirer created “the systematic reason whythe controversy in Davos did not touch on the real crux of the dis-pute. The conflict between Cassirer and Heidegger, which extendedinto the political domain, was not played out.”30 Both Cassirer andHeidegger recognized this failure in their concluding comments atDavos. As Cassirer indicates, “It is, however, to stress this oppositionrepeatedly. We are at a point where little is to be gained throughpurely logical arguments.”31 Or, as Heidegger would have it, “do notorient yourselves to the variety of positions of philosophizing humanbeings, and do not occupy yourselves with Cassirer and Heidegger.”32

The failure of the Davos debate to generate sharp distinctions has ledscholars such as Friedman to insert other voices, for instance Carnap,into the discussion.33 While this allows him to read the debate as aninstantiation of the conflict between Continental and Analytic phi-losophy, it effectively erases Cassirer from the discussion, as his work

28Verene, “Development,” 12.29Lofts, Repetition of Modernity, 2030Habermas, Liberating Power, 23.31Francis Slade, “A Discussion between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger.

in Nino Langiulli, ed., The Existentialist Tradition: Selected Writings. (Garden City, NY:Anchor Books, 1971), 201.

32M. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. 5th Ed., enlarged. trans.Richard Taft. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 207.

33Friedman, A Parting of the Ways; “Davos.”


does not fit neatly into either category. Similarly, in order to sharpenthe political implications of the debate, Waite gives greater promi-nence to Leo Strauss than his status as a student might otherwisewarrant.34

In what follows, I analyze the Davos debate as part of the on-going conversation between philosophy and rhetoric. In many waysthis reading is far from obvious as Cassirer himself certainly neverconsidered himself a rhetorician or rhetorical theorist. Indeed, owinglargely to the early twentieth century’s neglect of the field of rhetoric,Cassirer never treated the subject in a systematic way. However, “inorder to do justice to a thinker, according to Cassirer following Kant, itis necessary to understand him better than he understood himself.”35

Thus, it is my argument that with the Philosophy of Symbolic FormsCassirer had begun a transformation of his intellectual project thatbegan to treat questions more traditionally of concern to rhetoricaltheorists. This is especially so as regards to his work on the natureof symbols and their use in human community. Moreover, Cassirerprovides a model of “decent, cultured spirit of cosmopolitan hu-manism” that rhetorical theorists would be advised to emulate.36

Finally, this reading has the advantage of sharpening some of thedistinctions that have typically been found wanting in analyses ofDavos.

The Two Termini of the Davos Debate

The Davos debate was preceded by a series of individual lecturespresented by Heidegger and Cassirer. These discussions turned onthe topic of philosophical anthropology during which both philoso-phers made oblique references to the work of the other.37 During theactual confrontation, the discussion turned to the meaning of neo-Kantianism with both philosophers trading interpretations. In thecourse of this discussion, Cassirer introduced the notions of terminusa quo and terminus ad quem as they relate to Kant’s Schematism.38

Heidegger seized upon this distinction to characterize the differencebetween the projects of the two philosophers:

34Waite, “Esotericism.”35Lofts, Repetition of Modernity, 5.36Habermas, Liberating Power, 23.37Pavesich, “Philosophical Anthropology;” Skidelsky, Last Philosopher.38Heidegger, Kant, 195.


In the first lecture, Cassirer used the expressions terminus a quoand terminus ad quem. One could say that for Cassirer the terminusad quem is the whole of a philosophy of culture in the sense of an elu-cidation of the wholeness of the forms of the shaping consciousness.For Cassirer, the terminus a quo is utterly problematical. My positionis the reverse: the terminus a quo is my central problematic.39

Some scholars have identified these two termini as constitutingthe real differences between Heidegger and Cassirer (Crowe; Waite).40

As Pos argued, “Heidegger persisted in the terminus a quo, in thesituation at the point of departure, which for him is the dominatingfactor in all philosophizing. Cassirer [on the other hand] aimed at theterminus ad quem, at liberation through spiritual form, in science,practical activity, and art.”41 Crowe, moreover, contends that the twotermini constitute failings for both philosophers. Heidegger’s focuson the analysis of Dasein’s fundamental ground of existence lefthim blind to the terminus ad quem while Cassirer himself left theterminus a quo of his own philosophical project severely under-theorized.42 In short, while Heidegger is correct in his assessmentof Cassirer’s neglect of the terminus a quo, it is equally the casethat Heidegger fails to consider the terminus ad quem of his ownthought. Thus, in order to grasp the implications of the Davos debatefor rhetoric, it is necessary to take up the two termini of Heideggerand Cassirer.

The terminus a quo of Heidegger and Cassirer

There can be little question but that the main thrust of Heideg-ger’s work is an analysis of the terminus a quo, the starting pointof existence. Indeed, this is one of the primary attractions of Heideg-ger’s work for scholars of rhetoric. For instance, Smith argues, “onecan say that Aristotle’s (implicit) insight into the fundamental-nessof productive action with logos (techne kai logismos) is an invitationto examine practices and the worlds in which they operate as thedynamic ‘ground’ of human life (and thus of rhetorical cultures). InBeing and Time, Heidegger takes up this invitation.”43 Indeed, this was

39Heidegger, Kant, 202.40Crowe, “Between Termini;” Waite, “Esotericism.”41H.J. Pos, “Recollections of Ernst Cassirer,” in P.A. Schilp, ed., The Philosophy

of Ernst Cassirer. (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Press, 1949), 67.42Crowe, “Between Termini.”43Smith, “Intensifying Phronesis,” 87.


the novelty of his interpretation of Kant on display at Davos. Heideg-ger argues that the Critique of Reason, which had been interpreted bygenerations of neo-Kantians as a work on epistemology, was actuallyintended as “a general ontology, which exists prior to an Ontologyof Nature as object of Natural Science and prior to an Ontology ofNature as object of Psychology.”44

However, it is precisely this analysis that ought to give one pausewhen adopting Heidegger’s thought for the work of rhetorical the-ory. In Heidegger’s work the search for a fundamental ground leadsalways in the same direction. As he puts it at Davos, in regards tohis interpretation of Kant: “In attempting to lay the ground for Meta-physics, Kant was pressed in a way that makes the proper foundationinto an abyss.”45 Or, as he elaborates later in the debate: “The ques-tion concerning the essence of human beings only makes sense and isonly justifiable insofar as it derives its motivation from philosophy’scentral problematic itself, which leads man back beyond himself andinto the totality of beings in order to make manifest to him there,with all his freedom, the nothingness of his Dasein.”46 Heideggerclaims that, “this nothingness is not the occasion for pessimism andmelancholy;”47 it is, instead, the occasion for the characteristic moodof angst, which “arises from being-in-the-world as thrown being-toward-death.”48

Heidegger argues that confronting this “abyss,” this “nothing-ness,” is the only true task of a philosophy worthy of its name:“philosophy has the task of throwing man back, so to speak, intothe hardness of his fate.”49 This fate is Dasein’s confrontation withits own finitude; its being “thrown” into a world, a time, an ex-istence. In Hyde’s terms this abyss is described as “the ‘annihi-lating’ nature of Being itself, the way in which Being holds it-self back and slips away from our grasp, refusing to be knowncompletely.”50 In angst, arising from being-thrown-toward-death, Da-sein faces its own finitude, which “confronts Dasein with the horrorof an emptiness that can never be filled up ontically with either

44Heidegger, Kant, 196.45Heidegger, Kant, 202.46Heidegger, Kant, 204.47Heidegger, Kant, 204.48M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh, (Albany: State University of

New York Press, 1996). 316.49Heidegger, Kant, 204.50Hyde, “Searching,” 27.


the exigencies of suffering or the distractions of entertainment.”51

Consequently, Strauss argued that Heidegger had “declared thatethics is impossible, and his whole being was permeated by theawareness that this fact opens up an abyss.”52 In essence, this isthe ground upon which rhetorical theorists influenced by Heideg-ger seek to plant their conceptions of human life and rhetoricalcultures.

In contrast, while Cassirer leaves the terminus a quo under-theorized, there is in his work an account of the starting point ofhuman existence. Moreover, it is a starting point that highlights theconstitutive power of language as it is used in a community andculture. Indeed, he concludes his remarks at Davos with an appeal tothis constitutive power:

And then, I ask, where now lies the common center in our opposi-tion? We do not need to look for this. For we have this center, and wehave it indeed because there is one common objective human worldin which, although the differences of individuals are in no way can-celled, a bridge is built from individual to individual. That I find againand again in the primal phenomenon of language. Everyone speaks hisown language, and yet we understand each other through the mediumof language. There is something such as the language, something suchas a unity over and above the endlessly different ways of speaking.Therein lies the decisive point for me. And therefore I start from theobjectivity of the symbolic Form because here the “inconceivable isachieved.” That is what I should like to call the world of objectivespirit. There is no other way from one existence [Dasein] to anotherexistence [Dasein] than through this world of Form. If it did not exist,then I would not know how such a thing as common understandingcould be.53

This plea for the primacy of language as the medium and ground forhuman life not only stands in sharp opposition to Heidegger’s notionof an abyss but is also, as I shall argue later, a more hopeful accountof being-with-others upon which to construct a theory of rhetoric.

Unfortunately, it is also a plea that Cassirer was unable to artic-ulate as the center of his philosophical project at Davos or elsewhere.Cassirer remained committed to a hierarchical account of symbolic

51G.Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics, (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 2000), 155.

52Strauss, “Heideggerean Existentialism,” 28.53Slade, “A Discussion,” 201–202. Emphasis in original.


forms which placed science at the pinnacle of human achievementwhile maintaining the autonomy of the myriad other symbolic forms.This commitment constitutes a refusal to recognize “the heuristic pri-ority which the transcendental analysis of language and of the lin-guistically constituted lifeworld does in fact enjoy in his researchesinto systematic priority. He would have had to give language and thelifeworld a central position in the construction of symbolic forms.”54

For Cassirer, language remained only one among a myriad of sym-bolic forms including history, science, art, myth and religion. Due tothis refusal he could not “overcome his epistemologically constrictedvision, and resolve the conflict between the perspectivism of equipri-mordial worlds, on the one hand, and the emancipatory power ofsymbolic shaping, on the other.”55

As in his concluding remarks at Davos, Cassirer’s work is repletewith references to the “emancipatory power of symbolic shaping”through language. Cassirer posits a notion of language tied inextri-cably to myth: “It is evident that myth and language play similarroles in the evolution of thought from momentary experience to en-during conceptions, from sense impression to formulation, and thattheir respective functions are mutually conditioned.”56 For instance,Cassirer describes the human confrontation with existence in verydifferent terms than Heidegger:

Every impression that man receives, every wish that stirs him, everyhope that lures him, every danger that threatens him can effect him thusreligiously. . . . Just let spontaneous feeling invest the object before him,or his own personal condition, or some display of power that surpriseshim, with an air of holiness, and the momentary god has been experiencedand created.57

Momentary deities are created out of humanities’ confrontationwith the vicissitudes of existence. However, in the case of Cassirer’stelling this confrontation is not with an “annihilating” or “abyssal”existence but a definite, material, objective, reality which gives rise tothe naming power of language. “As soon as the spark has jumpedacross, as soon as the tension and emotion of the moment has foundits discharge in the word or the mythical image, a sort of turning

54Habermas, Liberating Power, 22.55Ibid, 23.56E. Cassirer, Language and Myth. trans. Suzanne Langer, (New York: Dover

Publications, 1946), 43.57Ibid, 8.


point has occurred in human mentality: the inner excitement whichwas a mere subjective state has vanished, and has been resolved intothe objective form of myth or speech.”58

In order to understand Cassirer’s understanding of both mythand language it is necessary to examine the process that gives rise toboth. “And this common center really seems to be demonstrable; forno matter how widely the contents of myth and language may differ,yet the same form of mental conception is operative in both. It is theform which one may denote as metaphorical thinking; the nature andmeaning of metaphor is what we must start with if we want to find, onthe one hand, the unity of the verbal and the mythical worlds and, onthe other, their difference.”59 In describing the genesis of language asmetaphoric Cassirer goes beyond dominant conceptualizations thatregard metaphors as the mere substitution of the part for the whole.Instead, Cassirer regards metaphor as a process of concentration. Inthis process of concentration the part does not merely stand for thewhole but the whole becomes manifest in the part. In the mythicimagination, which gives rise to language, the whole and the part areindistinguishable:

The similarity of the aspect fixed by the word causes all other hetero-geneity among the perceptions in question to become more and ob-scured, and finally to vanish all together. Here again, a part usurps theplace of the whole- indeed, it becomes and is the whole. By virtue of the‘equivalence’ principle, entities which appear entirely diverse in directperception or from the standpoint of logical classification may be treatedas similar in language, so that every statement made about one of themmay be transferred to the other.60

Thus, we come to the distinction that truly characterizes the na-ture of the gulf between Heidegger and Cassirer. As Cassirer arguedat Davos: “the productive imagination is of central significance. Ihave been led to this through my work on the symbolic. The imagi-nation is the relation of all thinking to intuition, synthesis speciosa.”61

The question concerns not whether philosophy (and, by extension,rhetoricians seeking an ontological base for their work) ought tobe concerned with the fate of human existence as it confronts the“abyss” of existence itself or whether human existence may salve

58Ibid, 36.59Cassirer, Language and Myth, 84.60Ibid, 95.61Slade, “A Discussion,” 193.


the anxiety of its confrontation with existence through the works ofculture. Instead, the question concerns whether the terminus a quo ofhuman existence may be described as Heideggerean anxiety createdby thrownness into an existence marked as “annihilating,” “abyssal,”and “empty.” Or, in contrast, if the terminus a quo may, more prop-erly, be seen as a confrontation which consciousness responds towith the power of metaphorical thinking. The implications of eitherof these characterizations have distinct consequences for a theoryof rhetoric that would use either Heidegger or Cassirer as an onto-logical ground. Indeed, Cassirer suggests as much at the end of theDavos debate when he quotes from Goethe: “’What one chooses for aphilosophy depends upon what sort of human being one is.’”62

Thus, the terminus a quo is certainly left under-theorized in Cas-sirer’s work. Though as I have argued above, there is some consider-ation in his thought for the starting point of human existence. It canbe deduced from Cassirer’s work on myth and its close relationshipto language. “Language and myth are near of kin. In the early stagesof human culture their relation is so close and their cooperation soobvious that is almost impossible to separate the one from the other.They are two different shoots from one and the same root.”63 It is,however, certainly not the painstaking, meticulous analysis of Hei-degger. In spite of this, it nonetheless does offer rhetorical theoristssome ontological ground for their work. Moreover, it is an ontologicalbase that has the advantage to rhetorical theorists of foregroundinglanguage, and, its relationship to human community. As we shall seein the next section, the characterization of the terminus a quo hasimplications for the resulting analysis of the terminus ad quem.

The terminus ad quem:

Laziness or Liberation through Culture?

There is little question but that, like Cassirer’s neglect of the ter-minus a quo, the terminus ad quem is under-theorized in Heidegger’swork. Heidegger concedes this point at Davos:

In the entirety of my philosophical efforts, I left completely undecidedthe traditional shape and division of the philosophical disciplines, be-cause I believe that the orientation to these is the greatest misfortunein the sense that we can no longer come back to the inner problematic of

62Slade, “A Discussion,” 193.63E. Cassirer, An Essay on Man, (New Have: Yale University Press, 1944), 109.


philosophy. To an equal degree, neither Plato nor Aristotle could haveknown such a division of philosophy.64

As Crowe argues in regard to Heidegger’s characterization of theterminus ad quem, “we can further raise the question whether Hei-degger is capable of giving any account of the multiplicity of formsof life, the multiplicity of subjective determinations that correspondsto the multiplicity of symbolic forms.”65 In fact, so constricted andpessimistic are Heidegger’s views on human culture and communitythat theorists utilizing his work face an uphill battle: constructing ananalysis of community and culture, including rhetorical cultures, thatcontinually resists any such effort. Again, we need only turn to theDavos debate where Heidegger argues that the task of philosophyis “throwing man, in a manner of speaking, out of the lazy aspect of aman who merely uses the works of the spirit, back into the hardnessof his fate.”66

The distinction drawn here is between “the lazy aspect of aman who merely uses the works of the spirit” and authentic hu-man life. “Dasein is the authentic basic occurrence in which theexisting of man, and with it every problematic of existence itself,becomes essential.”67 Or, as he puts it in Being and Time: “We arelooking for an authentic potentiality-of-being of Da-sein that is at-tested by Da-sein in its existentiell possibility.”68 Indeed, Bewes callsHeidegger “the figure whose principal works manifest a preoccu-pation with the idea of authenticity unparalleled, perhaps, by anymajor thinker of the century.”69 It is Heidegger’s positing of this dis-tinction between authentic human existence and what he refers toas “das man” or “the they, which supplies the answer to the whoof everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Da-sein has al-ways already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another.”70

In Smith’s estimation:

At this point it would be quite easy to cite a number of passages fromBeing and Time that would paint phronetic ethos and its goal of authenticcare as, at best, a dubious but ultimately benign disdain for public life;or, at worst, a retrograde essentialism with troubling implications for

64Heidegger, Kant, 203.65Crowe, “Between Termini,” 103.66Heidegger, Kant, 203.67Ibid, 203.68Heidegger, Being, 247.69T. Bewes, Cynicism and Postmodernity, (New York: Verso, 1997), 148.70Heidegger, Being, 120.


communal life (implications whose directions and social consequencestend toward fascism). Perhaps it is both; perhaps neither.71

Perhaps. However, it is questionable, to say the least, that Heideg-ger’s perspective on public life is neither benignly disdainful nor“troubling” with fascistic implications. Indeed, even Heidegger’sapologists, and others who would salvage his work from its en-gagement with National Socialism, are more circumspect regardingits potential in this direction. Thus, Dallmayr seeks to identify an“other” Heidegger: “The point of the presentation is not to vindi-cate or exculpate his involvement prematurely but only to drawmore attention to the broader context of the story, thereby encour-aging my more nuanced assessment.”72 Similarly, Captuo argues for“another Heidegger, a Heidegger against Heidegger, a Heideggerwho represents all that Heidegger fought against.”73 Even Hydeargues, regarding Heidegger’s thinking on the call of conscience:“Heidegger’s lifelong devotion to this matter, however, spawnsits own forgetfulness; for he continually fails to clarify how thecall can make its way to our ears via the pain and suffering ofothers.”74

Thus, we are left with the possibility of a “phronetic ethos and itsgoal of authentic care” representing “at best, a dubious but ultimatelybenign disdain for public life; or, at worst, a retrograde essentialismwith troubling implications for communal life.”75 Neither possibilityis particularly encouraging for scholars of rhetoric and no amount ofcoupling Heidegger’s thought to thinkers such as Aristotle, Levinasor Burke is likely to salvage it since at heart it relies on a conceptu-alization of public, social, communal life that is, at best, jaundicedif not overtly hostile.76 In juxtaposing an authentic state of “Being-with-others” with “one’s being only a conformist or ‘they-self.’”77

Heideggerean rhetorical theorists reach for an ever-vanishing hori-zon: “a fetishization of authenticity. . .” that “is symptomatic of aretreat from truth, while masquerading as a pilgrimage in pursuit of

71Smith, “Intensifying Phronesis,” 92–93.72F. Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 8.73J. D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1993), 214.74M. J. Hyde, The Call of Conscience: Heidegger and Levinas, Rhetoric and the Euthana-

sia Debate, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 9.75Smith, “Intensifying Phronesis,” 93.76Smith; Hyde, Call; “Searching.”77Hyde, Call, 57.


it.”78 Indeed, the notion of authenticity is, I would argue antitheticalto the proper functioning of rhetoric. Rhetoric must, of necessity, begrounded in, engaged with and implicated in public life, the “they-self” from which Heidegger and his followers would extricate it.Rhetorical theorists borrowing from Heidegger have “invested sub-stantially in an extremely abstract value—authenticity—that cannotby its very nature appear in the public realm, since by doing so it loseswhat is specific to it.”79 Rhetoric cannot be other than public, wrappedup in the business of what it means to be human which stands in di-rect opposition to authenticity, especially in its Heideggerean instan-tiation. As Bewes argues: “Absolute authenticity necessitates one’sown extinction; only in death does one accede to the immaculate. Thebusiness of humanity, and thus of art, is precisely one of compromise,‘inauthenticity’ and fabrication.”80 To this I would only add that thebusiness of rhetoric is also that of compromise, inauthenticity andfabrication.

Thus, Heidegger’s meager conceptualization of the terminus adquem, specifically in its characterization of public life, offers rhetori-cal theorists little more than a self-defeating standard, authenticity,on which to base their work. This is particularly the case as it appliesto phronesis. “Phronesis is the mode of rationality proper to the polit-ical realm because it is concerned with human, as opposed to divinegood—things about which deliberation is possible.”81 Deliberationabout the human good is the proper sphere of rhetorical theory andin inserting authenticity as a lodestar for such work Heideggereanrhetorical theorists apply what amounts to a theological standard tothe altogether human work of rhetoric. As Adorno argues, “Of coursein Heidegger, as in all those who followed his language, a diminishedtheological resonance can be heard to this day.”82 It is this diminishedtheological resonance that can still be heard in every evocation ofauthenticity in rhetorical theory and with it comes a denigration ofpublic, communal life that is antithetical to the work of rhetoric.

In contrast, we find no such denigration of the communal inCassirer’s work. As Safranksy characterizes Cassirer’s philosophicalproject: “He pleads for the task of creating meaning through culture,

78Bewes, Cynicism, 156.79Ibid, 10.80Ibid, 59.81Bewes, Cyncism, 212.82T. W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, Trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic

Will. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 5.


for the work that, with its inner necessity and endurance, triumphsover the contingency and evanescence of human existence.”83 AsCassirer argues at Davos concerning “the path to infinitude:”84 “Butthis fulfillment of finitude exactly constitutes infinitude. Goethe: ‘Ifyou want to step into infinitude, just go in all directions into thefinite.’ As finitude is fulfilled, i.e., as it goes in all directions, it stepsout into infinitude.”85 In fact, Cassirer’s work on the terminus adquem is a veritable celebration of culture and of the social:

For everything that man creates, and that comes from his own hands, stillsurrounds him as an incomprehensible mystery. When he considers hisworks, he is very far from suspecting himself as their creator. They standfar above him; they are not only far beyond that which the individual isable to achieve but also beyond everything that the species is able toachieve.86

This is especially true as it relates to his work on language. Languagemust certainly be counted central for any theory of rhetoric. Lan-guage, which for Cassirer is counted merely as one of the symbolicforms, takes on its role as the primary, though unseen, symbolic sys-tem that humans use to cope with the wonder and anxiety of theirlives in the world:

Indeed, it is the Word, it is language, that really reveals to man that worldwhich is closer to him than any world of natural objects and toucheshis weal and woe more directly than physical nature. For it is languagethat makes his existence in a community possible; and only in society,in relation to a “Thee,” can his subjectivity assert itself as a “me.”87

It is at this point that Cassirer’s work becomes most amenablefor constructing a theory of rhetoric. As Bayer argues, Cassirer’swork offers “a view of humanity as a whole, thereby allowing forforesight and preparation for future events and needs. Such normscan give direction to individuals and cultures”.88 This is precisely thepossibility that recognizing Cassirer’s work as a theory of rhetoricalso offers to contemporary theorists. Having posited the notion of

83Safransky, Martin Heidegger, 188.84Heidegger, Kant, 200.85Slade, “A Discussion,” 198.86E. Cassirer, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, trans. S.G. Lofts. (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2000), 3.87Cassirer, Language and Myth, 61.88Thora Ilin Bayer, “Cassirer’s Normative Philosophy.” Journal of Value Inquiry

27 (1993): 431.


symbols as the mechanism through which humans interact with theworld around them he turned his attention to other forms of the“cultural sciences” and began to describe the relationship betweensymbols and such diverse human undertakings as myth, religion,art, and science. In all of this work he focused on the primacyof the symbol for understanding a variety of human behaviors.For instance, Cassirer saw science, which had long dominated theintellectual world, inserting its method(s) into the broad terrainof intellectual activity, as one among many fields where humansemployed symbols to constitute reality. While he maintained a biasin favor of science as being the most advanced of the “culturalsciences” he nonetheless placed it within a range of human activityincluding history, art, religion, art and language. Myth, science, artand language, are not different in kind, all used systems of symbolsto achieve their ends, but in degree, with science, the prime examplebeing mathematics, employing perhaps the most abstract of suchsystems.

Moreover, recognizing the central role that language-in-com-munity plays in the philosophy of symbolic forms grounds Cassirer’swork “with a moral-practical content” that is otherwise present onlyimplicitly.89 In other words, grounding The Philosophy of SymbolicForms as a theory of rhetoric focused on the practical use of languagein society provides an explicit normative content that is renderedonly implicit in Cassirer’s work. According to Habermas:

Cassirer obviously believed that the philosophy of symbolic forms assuch had a moral-practical content, which rendered the working out ofan independent ethics superfluous. But this philosophy only offers sucha content when it is no longer viewed as theory of knowledge applicableto the whole of culture, and is seen as a theory of the civilizing process.This process has also to be understood humanistically, as a movementtowards increasing civility.90

Such an understanding of Cassirer’s work is, I argue, nearerto Hyde’s goal for rhetoric’s “’physicianship’ as it helps to promotereasoned judgment and civic virtue and thereby lends itself to the taskof enriching the moral character of a people’s communal existence.”91

Finally, with this understanding of Cassirer’s work we take a steptoward a more expansive understanding of The Philosophy of Symbolic

89Habermas, Liberating Power, 24.90Ibid, 24.91Hyde, Call, 13.


Forms, an understanding that finds its resonance in Cassirer himself:“to make explicit that which remains implicit.”92

Conclusion

In this essay I have argued that a reading of the Davos debate be-tween the philosophers Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer couldbe fruitfully viewed through an understanding of the latter in therhetorical tradition. In essence, what I have proposed is a readingof Cassirer in the rhetorical tradition that could counter Heidegger’sconception of philosophy, a conception that holds that it is philos-ophy’s task to confront human existence again and again with itsown sense of being thrown into the world and the concomitant anxi-ety of that experience. If we take Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolicforms, with language taking primacy among them, as the humanattempt to assuage the anxiety of our confrontation with existencethen an answer to Heidegger’s challenge can be formulated. Insteadof throwing human existence back to face the abyss, we can insteadfocus on all the works of culture, speech and rhetoric foremost amongthem, as efforts to come to terms with that very emptiness.

In short, if we understand The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as anascent theory of rhetoric we can more adequately account for thepriority that language and its use in human community played inCassirer’s work. This reading offers at least two advantages: Firstit offers rhetorical theorists a multi-faceted, nearly encyclopedic ac-count of human culture that can be mined for insights into a vari-ety of phenomenon of current interest to rhetorical scholars. Second,grounding Cassirer’s work in its unacknowledged center of languageand its use in community makes possible responses to the challengeposed by Heidegger in the Davos debate, a response for which Cas-sirer searched to the end.93 An unnamed student at Davos posed thefollowing question that seems to summarize the conflicting projectsof Heidegger and Cassirer: “To what extent does philosophy have asits task to be allowed to become free from anxiety? Or does it nothave as its task to surrender man, even radically, to anxiety?”94 In re-sponse, Cassirer is able to “answer only with a kind of confession” as

92Lofts, Repetition, 5.93J.M. Krois, “Cassirer’s Unpublished Critique of Heidegger,” Philosophy and

Rhetoric 16.3 (1983): 147–163.94Heidegger, Kant, 200.


he failed to acknowledge the centrality of language and communityin his work.95

As the opening epigraph to this essay suggests, Davos scholar-ship shares with rhetorical theory a wish to identify wrong turns: tofix things, to repair that which has been broken. The Davos debateis particularly poignant in this regard. The fates of these two thinkersseem to parallel the fate of their nation. Following the Davos debate,Heidegger went on to a troubling relationship with the Nazi regimewhile Cassirer was forced into exile. The desire to repair that damage,of which Davos is symbolic, is perhaps irresistible. Skidelsky, for in-stance, attributes the desire to rehabilitate the reputation of Cassirerto the changing zeitgeist of the late twentieth-century. “Liberal pro-gressivism is back in fashion, and Cassirer offers a more appealingversion of it than American neoconservatism. With his emphasis onthe spontaneous processes of culture and plurality of symbolic forms,he has become old Europe’s answer to Francis Fukuyama.”96 At thesame time, he remains dubious of such efforts:

Cassirer’s liberalism was all of a piece; it was at once political, cultural,and philosophical. Such unity of vision is impossible for us. Our politicalprinciples find no support in our cultural tastes, religious beliefs, ormetaphysical insights. We pay tribute to Cassirer, but Heidegger remainsthe secret master of our thoughts.97

However, I believe that it is possible for rhetorical theorists to re-create such a unity of vision and that Cassirer’s work offers aninvaluable resource to assist in the effort.

In essence what I have argued for is a reconceptualized relation-ship between philosophy and rhetoric. I would argue that Heideggerand his followers may have the hardness of fate and with it the searchfor authenticity. It seems doubtful to me that the task of throwing hu-mans back to anxiety is likely to be anything more than a marginalpursuit. Life itself offers more than enough opportunity for anxietythat the need for philosophy seems at best, superfluous. If this is thetask of philosophy, then rhetoricians should content themselves withleaving it to philosophers. Instead, rhetoricians should look to theways that humans salve the fears and anxieties of existence throughsymbolic action. This pursuit seems endlessly productive as Cassirerhimself recognized late in his career. His final work, and the only one

95Slade, “A Discussion,” 202.96Skidelsky, Last Philosopher, 7–8.97Skidelsky, Last Philosopher, 219.


to explicitly treat the question of ethics, is The Myth of the State inwhich he concludes with the following:

In Babylonian mythology we find a legend that describes the creation ofthe world. We are told that Marduk, the highest god, before he couldbegin his work had to fight a dreadful combat. He had to vanquish theserpent Tiamat and the other dragons of darkness. He slew Tiamat andbound the dragons. Out of the limbs of the monster Tiamat he formedthe world and gave to it its shape and its order. He made heaven andearth, the constellations and planets, and fixed their movements. Hisfinal work was the creation of man. In this way the cosmic order arosefrom primeval chaos, and it will be preserved for all times.98

If, as Cassirer has forcefully argued throughout his work, mythand language arise out of the same impulse and function in roughlyanalogous ways, then this myth demonstrates the deeply conflictednature of the relationship between philosophy and the anxiety ofhuman existence. In this myth the god creates the universe out ofchaos. However, as the very stuff of the universe is created out ofchaos and darkness it threatens at all times to return to that chaos. Asa metaphor for language, humans have created this symbol systemof the chaos of our passions, emotions and confrontation with theabyss of existence and it is the role of symbols to order that chaosand tame the anxieties of the human psyche. The world itself offersenough anxieties with which we can be confronted on a daily basis. Itis the role of symbol using and human communication to make thoseconfrontations a little easier to bear. They will not be eliminated andthus we do not need Heidegger, or his followers, to throw us backtoward them again and again.

98E. Cassirer, The Myth of the State, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), 297.

rhetoric’s ghost at davos: reading cassirer in the ... · keywords: cassirer, heidegger, davos,...

Documents