The Davos Debate, Science, and the Violence of Interpretation: Panofsky, Heidegger, and Cassirer on the Politics of History

Abstract

In 1939, six years after his initial exile from Nazi Germany, and three years into a stay in Sweden that was to end in 1941 with a final move to America, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer wrote a full-length study of the Swedish political and legal theorist Axel Hagerstrom. That Cassirer, one of the leading German philosophers of his day, would at the age sixty-eight not only learn Swedish, but also apply his knowledge to a full-length study of a leading Swedish legal philosopher was entirely typical of his stay not only in Sweden, but of his previous exile in England and his final stay in America. More than almost any other émigré figure, Cassirer displayed a remarkable ability to blend with his adopted countries. Yet in the introduction to this book, Cassirer explains that this ability was not based on his intellectual proximity to his adopted countries. Rather, he emphasizes his extreme distance from them. He begins his book by situating his own position with the following quotation from Voltaire’s Letters from England. “A Frenchmen who arrives in London,” Voltaire writes, “finds things very different in philosophy as in everything else. He has left the world full; he finds it empty. In Paris they see the universe as composed of vortices of subtle matter, in London they see nothing of the kind. For us, it is the pressure of the moon which causes the tides of the sea, for the English, it is the sea, that gravitates against the moon […]. The very essence of things has totally changed. A common understanding exists neither over the definition of the soul nor of matter.”¹