Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Heidegger and Cassirer

Over at phil.aule-browser.com/truth.htm I have a series of links to Curl versions of an eText: Heidegger's "On the Essence of Truth" in John Sallis' English translation (the Curl RTE browser plugin is required to view these pages as an eBook.)

A more interesting version might juxtapose the Heidegger of 1929-1945 with Ernst Cassirer.

It is clear from the Freiburg Inaugural lecture through the lectures of 1930 and 1932 which comprise the 1943 "The Essence of Truth" that Husserl is not the target.  Heidegger had effectively disposed of Jaspers of Heidelberg in his 1927 "Sein und Zeit" and may have imagined that he would dispose of Einstein in a second volume.  The remaining target was Cassirer in Hamburg.

Cassirer's 1923 first volume of his "Philosophy of Symbolic Forms" opens with the concept of "being".  That volume closes with what may be a clue to the Heidegger opus: "wisan".  What we have here is not just a Heidegger pun on "Wesen" but a clue to Heidegger's language and philological idiosyncracies: only in emerging in the opening that is the historic "facing" (in my interpretation, the Warrior out of concealment, onto the field of battle or the lover emerging from her dissimulations in clothing, manner, attitude) that in victory or defeat we become known as what we were (the destined great nation, the destined lover, geworfen, geschicht.)

Another clue is in the Cassirer quote from Plato's "Sophist" on "koinon ton genos" when placed in contrast to "koinon genos" in Section 6 of the Heidegger essay with its emphasis on sophistry.

That Husserl is simply side-stepped should be clear from the 1943 publication blithely ignoring the Landgrebe edition of "Erfahrung u. Urteil" in Heidegger's short-schrift of any distinction of Satz and Urteil and his outrageous justoposition of Satz/Logos and later stated equivalence of "Aussage" and "Urteil".

Heidegger pun's should never be ignored any more than those of the wittier farceur, Sartre (Cassirer was known for his wit and prodigious memory.)  When Heidegger choses to speak of "Umweg" in connection with his "Frage" we cannot ignore "Umfrage" and the more obvious "Abstimmung" and "Einstimmung".

Heidegger's erudtion in history of philosphy far outstripped that of Husserl and in the late 1920's and early 1930's he had listened to enough of Jaspers on his visits to Heidelberg to know where he stood.  But in his years in Marburg, Cassirer had still been the legend (when Heidegger became Rector of Freiburg, Cassirer was still Rector of the new Hamburg University.)  In terms of background in mathematics and science, Heidegger had only his brief exposure after he left dogmatic Catholicism (his later pronouncements on electromagnetic wave propagation on German television are trully laughable when you consider Cassirer's own books on science and specifically on relativity (on an equal footing with Russell and Reichenbach.)

Of course the critical confrontation with Cassirer comes later, at Davos, but tools for annotating philosphical texts could help to illuminate what would otherwise remain obscure.

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