Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture. By Edward Skidelsky

BOOK REVIEWS 239 contrary, it is an abstract formal structure, a ‘‘limit of the world’’ rather than any entity within the world. Yet, a form of personalism may emerge as the outcome of a pragmatist reconstrual of transcendental philosophy: in this case, the transcendental subject, the ‘I,’ ceases to be an abstract formal or metaphysical principle and becomes, or is replaced by, a real human (social) form of life (as in the later Wittgenstein’s case), or a practice, a habit of action, a purposive, practice-embedded way of being in the world (as in the case of the pragmatists). (197–98) I would add that a kind of personalism is already present in the Tractatus, not in the ‘‘I’’ that is an ‘‘abstract formal structure’’ but in the ‘‘happy’’ or ‘‘unhappy man’’ about whom Wittgenstein writes: ‘‘The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.’’ This is not a mere formal structural difference but, as is indicated by Wittgenstein’s interest in James’s Varieties and in those to whom ‘‘the sense of life’’ became ‘‘clear,’’ a difference in lived experience (Wittgenstein 1921, 6.43, 6.521). Pihlström has produced a learned, intelligent, and stimulating philosophical book. One wishes only for a presentation that matches its intellectual coherence. Russell B. Goodman Department of Philosophy MSC 03 2140 University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131 USA rgoodman@unm.edu References Bernstein, Richard. 2002. Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation. Cambridge: Polity Press. James, William. 1987. Writings 1902–10. New York: Library of America. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1921. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge. Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture. By Edward Skidelsky. Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. viii1288. Edward Skidelsky’s Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture is a much-needed critical overview of Cassirer’s life and work from a contemporary Anglophone perspective. Skidelsky’s intellectual biography takes the reader through the entirety of Cassirer’s professional life, from his tutelage under the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, particularly as a student of Hermann Cohen (22–51), through his first r 2010 The Author Journal compilation r 2010 Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 240 BOOK REVIEWS studies of the problem of knowledge and philosophy of science (52–70) to his later concerns with the philosophy of culture more generally (as manifest in his most famous work, the three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms) (71–127), his friendly but critical relationship to the logical positivists (128–59), his wary engagement with the Lebensphilosophie of Bergson, Scheler, and others (160–94), and his famous debate with Heidegger at Davos in 1929 (195–219). The narrative ends with discussion of Cassirer’s politics, focusing on the analyses of totalitarianism and myth in the last book of Cassirer’s career, The Myth of the State (220–37). Skidelsky’s intellectual biography should prove especially helpful to readers interested in the question, What are the strengths and weaknesses of Cassirer’s views for contemporary philosophical projects? As Skidelsky argues in his introduction, Cassirer’s rising status, as exemplified by the recent avalanche of books on his philosophy (both in German and in EnglishFsee, for instance, Friedman 2000 and Rudolf 2003), necessitates now more than ever that a detailed yet critical stance be taken toward his ideas (7–8). Skidelsky effectively weaves such evaluation into his narrative as he considers why, from the vantage point of postwar European and Anglo-American philosophical traditions, Cassirer’s method and system did not win wider appealFin particular, why they lost out to the leaner and less optimistic programs of existentialism and analytic philosophy, respectively. Skidelsky’s Cassirer is a defender of the humanistic ideal of Alexander von Humboldt (that is, human liberation through ‘‘formative education’’ [Bildung], particularly in the arts and sciences) in an age that is fated to move beyond and reject that ideal. According to Skidelsky, Cassirer’s main problem concerned the meaning of science in the modern world, a problem he shared both with early analytic thinkers like Russell and Carnap and with Continental thinkers like Bergson and Heidegger. Like the analytic school (broadly construed, of course), Cassirer wanted to defend science against modern irrationalism, while differing in the character of his defense, which proceeded by way of characterizing science as one cultural achievement among others, epistemically the highest of these, yet historically based in and arising continuously out of these others. Along with the Continental tradition (broadly construed), on the other hand, Cassirer resolutely denied that culture, myth, religion, and the arts were eliminable (from the standpoint of the analysis of knowledge, reality, experience or culture) or entirely reducible to the terms of the scientific world picture, and he argued for the legitimacy of these ‘‘symbolic forms’’ both in their own claims to epistemic import and as topics of philosophical reflection and study. But Cassirer differed from Continentals like Heidegger in refusing to treat modern science as essentially destructive, alienating, or problematically artificial, and actively defended the preservation and development of science and the scientific worldview against such condemnations. This vision, ambitiously synoptic, suggests a form of mediation between analytic and Continental r 2010 The Author Journal compilation r 2010 Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd BOOK REVIEWS 241 perspectives, which has obviously been part of the motivation for the recent Cassirer ‘‘renaissance.’’ Skidelsky expresses doubt, however, that the sort of reconciliation that Cassirer envisioned was ever really possible. For one thing, the breadth of Cassirer’s project and the details of anthropology, mathematical science, and world literature that Cassirer gathers to make a case of the sort required come at the cost of empirically rich but conceptually superficial attempts at integration. As Skidelsky puts it, ‘‘Cassirer’s thought is inductive, not deductive in its method. Setting out from the variety of human culture, it attempts to comprehend it as an organic whole’’ (5–6). But this method leads to the suspicion that ‘‘the whole thing [that is, Cassirer’s ‘philosophy of symbolic forms’] is no longer obviously philosophy at all’’ (5). Furthermore, the question of whether the Humboldtian tradition that Cassirer hopes to ‘‘save’’ is really worth saving appears never to have struck him in a deep way, as it undoubtedly did thinkers like Heidegger and Wittgenstein. The project is dubious not only for philosophical reasons (it is, as noted above, either impossible or philosophically shallow, which is perhaps why ‘‘most twentieth-century philosophy, analytic and continental, has sought a standpoint beyond the variety of culture’’ [6]) but for political ones as well (it rests on ‘‘a conception of culture itself as an essentially liberating force’’ [6], a conception that is today ‘‘broken beyond repair’’ [197], due to twentieth-century fascism’s alleged status as the tragic end point of European high culture). Skidelsky also makes the case that Cassirer’s idealism and his attraction to high culture (particularly fine art and natural science) led him, throughout most if not all of his career, to neglect pressing political and emotional realities. Cassirer’s tendency to overlook tragedy in human life and history is exemplified in Skidelsky’s interpretation of a ‘‘not altogether successful’’ review of Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimer, written late in Cassirer’s career, in which (Skidelsky argues) Cassirer entirely misses the point of Mann’s text. In Mann’s story, the woman that inspired the female protagonist of Goethe’s Werther travels to see the old poet and is greeted favorably, but with an absurd pomp and chivalry coupled with a strange disinterest in coming to know her as the person that she really is. The plot is clearly an accusation against Goethe (and, by extension, classical German artistic and intellectual life generally) for being so attached to a symbolic sublimation of human affairs that the very substance of things fails to be experienced or appreciated (88–89). In his review, however, Cassirer describes the female protagonist’s response as follows: ‘‘She grasps and submits to the necessity that here prevails. She departs from Goethe in deep sadness; but this sadness no longer contains anything of personal bitterness’’ (88). This move to reconciliation, made before the tension at issue has adequately been analyzed and understood, and in some sense despite the persistence of that tension, is symptomatic of a general flaw in Cassirer’s strategy. Skidelsky concludes: ‘‘Cassirer in a sense had to miss the point of Lotte in Weimar. Correctly r 2010 The Author Journal compilation r 2010 Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 242 BOOK REVIEWS interpreted, the novella threatens the very basis of his philosophy’’ (88). (A similar point, with regard to the Lotte in Weimer review, had earlier been made in Hamlin 2004.) Other episodes recounted in Skidelsky’s book include (a) the common influence of Mach’s ‘‘sensationalism’’ and instrumentalist philosophy of science on the otherwise radically different philosophical traditions of positivism, Lebensphilosophie and the Marburg neo-Kantianism from which Cassirer hailed (9–21); (b) Cassirer’s formative lifelong personal and professional relationship with the sometimes mentally unstable theorist of myth Aby Warburg (74–75, 89–99); (c) Cassirer’s sympathetic correspondence with members of the Vienna Circle, especially Schlick and Reichenbach (128–37), including Cassirer’s agreement, in a letter of 1931, to sign Reichenbach’s petition for further chairs in ‘‘scientific philosophy,’’ coupled with Cassirer’s characteristically broad-minded suggestion that ‘‘precisely if you are counting on support from representatives of philosophy . . . then in my opinion you must definitely avoid the appearance of . . . some kind of ‘competition’ with philosophy geared to the humanities and intellectual history’’ (128–29); (d) the influence of antiSemite and radical critic of technology Ludwig Klages on the Weimer-era Lebensphilosophie with which Cassirer battled (174–80); and (e) unpublished material from the original manuscript of the Myth of the State (that is, prior to Charles Hendel’s editing, which was conducted only after Cassirer’s unexpected death), particularly a passage in which Cassirer describes the transition from the Weimer Republic to the Nazi state as a ‘‘witches’ sabbath’’ when ‘‘Germany renounced all those ideas that had been the forming powers of her culture’’ (231), thus connecting this interpretation of Nazism to his larger philosophy of culture. For all his admiration of Cassirer, Skidelsky implies that the most important lesson to be learned from him is a critical oneFnamely, that Cassirer’s grand philosophical project of cultural integration and mediation came only at significant cost. The conceptual costs included a project unmanageably broad, inductive, optimistic, and conciliatory. The social and material costs included a focus on cultural and symbolic aspects of reality that were relatively tangential to fully understanding and combating concrete political forces such as fascism. For all their insufficiencies, Cassirer’s main twentieth-century rivals at least accepted a crucial fact that Cassirer never did: namely, as Skidelsky puts it, that ‘‘not all good things can be had at once . . . we must sometimes sacrifice the lesser to save the greater’’ (6). Yet philosophy does sometimes expand humanity’s powers of integration, and Cassirer, like Hegel and Aristotle before him, certainly provided powerful resources along these lines. The most promising contemporary continuation of Cassirer’s legacy likely lies, in line with Skidelsky’s pertinent critical reading, in translating this extraordinary dream of total cultural mastery, unification, mediation, and flourishing into something better forged for the pace and contours of the contemporary world, updating it in its style and selection of pertinent facts. That would mean, r 2010 The Author Journal compilation r 2010 Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd BOOK REVIEWS 243 we can imagine, a philosophy more global in scope (that is, even less focused on an almost exclusively Western cultural canon); more ruthlessly critical in its establishment of principles, and sparer in their articulation; more politically engaged, materially (natural-scientifically) grounded, and individually and collectively practicable (and thus a better competitor with existential traditionsFthat is, more fully able to justify the existential import of ‘‘Spirit’’ [Geist] for ‘‘Life’’ for which Cassirer himself famously argued [Cassirer 1949], thus spelling out how a Life conducted in expansive transaction with Spirit can actually proceed, inspire, impassion, and fulfill). In this way, one imagines, some future philosopher of culture might accommodate Skidelsky’s critical concerns, while not veering from the core of Cassirer’s philosophical vision. Phillip Honenberger Temple University Department of Philosophy 1114 W. Berks Street Philadelphia, PA 19146 USA jwph2@temple.edu References Cassirer, Ernst. 1949. ‘‘‘Spirit’ and ‘Life’ in Contemporary Philosophy.’’ In The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, edited by Paul Arthur Schlipp, 857–80. LaSalle: Open Court. Friedman, Michael. 2000. A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger. LaSalle: Open Court. Rudolf, Enno. 2003. Ernst Cassirer im Context: Kulturphilosophie zwischen Metaphysik und Historismus. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Hamlin, Cyrus. 2004. ‘‘Goethe as Model for Cultural Values: Ernst Cassirer’s Essay on Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar.’’ In Symbolic Forms and Cultural Studies: Ernst Cassirer’s Theory of Culture, edited by Cyrus Hamlin and John Michael Krois, 185–99. New Haven: Yale University Press. r 2010 The Author Journal compilation r 2010 Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd