The Debate Before Davos

Some notes about the intellectual relationship between Heidegger and Cassirer before their famous encounter in Davos.

As I was browsing Substack, I came upon a post (you may see my comment there as well) that reminded me of a - I think - little known prequel to the famous encounter between Heidegger and Cassirer in Davos. Let me explain.

A while ago I was pouring over Heidegger’s lectures in Marburg in the period just before he published Being and Time. Some remarks he made about Cassirer caught my attention, as they seemed to anticipate familiar themes in Being and Time, and their original orientation seemed to stem from reading Cassirer. I looked at his correspondence at the time, and indeed, jackpot - a historical connection! But as these things usually go, I quickly discovered other people have already written about the subject, so instead of writing a whole article, let me just quickly share with you their work.

Traditionally, the encounter in Davos between Heidegger and Cassirer has been likened to the one depicted in The Magic Mountain between the dark Jesuit, who opposes the Enlightenment, and the warm, universalist Italian – it’s probably clear to you who was compared to whom. However, a lesser-known fact, which has only come to light in recent years (Leib 2018, Barash 2012, 2022), is that this debate has a much longer history than previously thought.

In 1923, Cassirer invited Heidegger to lecture in Marburg on the foundations of phenomenology. Relations between the Marburg neo-Kantian school (founded by Hermann Cohen) and the phenomenologists were competitive but remarkably collegial. The Marburg school was unique among the neo-Kantians for applying their philosophy to the humanities, a field phenomenologists had only begun to explore. Husserl and Scheler, for example, had been venturing into these areas for about a decade. However, none were as radical as Heidegger, who had already envisioned a central role for history in phenomenology, far more than mathematics or logic had under Husserl.

Heidegger’s correspondence from that time indicates he thoroughly enjoyed his visit. He explicitly mentions the honor Cassirer paid him by attending his lectures. Collegial respect, however, is one thing, and substantive matters are another. In 1924, when Cassirer published the second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, which dealt extensively with mythical thinking, Heidegger wrote to Karl Löwith that, overall, it was not a great work, though the entirety of Cassirer’s project was important. But what he didn’t tell Löwith is perhaps more telling.

In 1925, Heidegger gave a lecture in Marburg titled The History of the Concept of Time, in which he sharply criticized Heinrich Rickert (of the Baden School of neo-Kantianism) and his critique of phenomenology. The Marburg school, however, was only mentioned briefly, with Heidegger essentially dismissing their entire project. But he specifically critiqued Cassirer’s work at length.

Why? To understand this, we need to grasp the programmatic position Heidegger held when he critiqued Cassirer. Heidegger did so in the context of presenting the phenomenology of the “sign.” For those unfamiliar with Cassirer’s work, this would have raised no questions. However, those who had read Cassirer’s book would recognize that his conception of the sign/entity dichotomy underpins his thinking on myth. For Cassirer, this dichotomy explains the forms of mythical thinking, which, he argues, are incapable of abstraction. Mythical thinking, according to Cassirer, lacks the capacity for abstract relations, though he expands on how symbolic thought gives meaning to the world.

Heidegger’s lecture on signs, meanwhile, built on earlier work by Husserl. Signs contain both indicative and expressive elements, according to Heidegger, but he takes it a step further. He connects signs to his broader project of how humans find meaning in the world. In German, the term Sinn captures both logical sense and meaning in a more existential, worth-while sense. For Heidegger, signs function as temporal indicators: following certain signs in the world leads not to a different “place,” as with road signs, but to a certain existence in time. The clearer we grasp the signs, the more meaningful the world becomes.

While this development is significant in Being and Time (1927), one can’t help but notice that Heidegger’s project – the critical role of signs in imbuing the world with meaning – appears in Cassirer’s work, which Heidegger harshly criticized in his letters to Löwith.

It’s also worth noting that Heidegger explicitly addresses the category of relation, which is central to Cassirer’s work, as manifest through signs in the world. In Heidegger’s view, signs authentically express the most general category of relation. For anyone familiar with both thinkers, it’s clear that in Marburg, Heidegger began his most significant critique of Cassirer’s work, a critique deeply indebted to its subject. In Being and Time, Heidegger dedicates a lengthy footnote to criticizing the notion that his ontological analysis could be applied to mythical thinking – a critique he anticipated from Cassirer (and which indeed came) and from Husserl (though much later, due to collegial reasons).

The Davos debate, by contrast, focused on Kant’s philosophy rather than any of these topics. Why? Because Heidegger feared that a direct confrontation would turn the whole affair into a circus. After the debate, he regretted the format, believing that it “was too polite to bring out the real disagreements.” He probably forgot that he himself had set the terms. Nonetheless, shortly after the debate, Cassirer gave a short lecture on the theological foundations of Heidegger’s thought, later developing it into a critique of the Reich’s politics. In other words, at Davos, the real debate never even began – and the deeper issues were left unresolved.

For those interested in more details, I recommend reading the articles I referenced earlier. Barash focuses more on the theological-aesthetic debate, while Leib delves into the controversies surrounding the issue of “the sign.” Leib’s main weakness is a lack of historical awareness of the concrete contexts, both within phenomenology and in Marburg, while Barash tends to be philosophically speculative (but fascinating) and much more historically grounded. As for me, I’m just offering some gossip here.