Paul Oskar Kristeller, Ernst Cassirer, and the “Humanistic Turn” in the American Emigration

Abstract

History bears the marks of the life of those who write it. This truism also applies to the scholarship of the historian of Renaissance philosophy Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905–1999). Moreover, in his scholarly works Kristeller responded, albeit indirectly, to what since Nietzsche became a basic ingredient of the Weltanschauung and the academic discourses of the German educated middle class: the perception of a Sinnkrise. By this I mean the widespread apprehension of the crisis of the self, meaning, and culture. While the notion of an all-pervasive crisis resulted in the first instance from Germany’s rapid industrialization and the experience of World War I and their corollaries, modern technology, mass society and social leveling, the history of the 1930s and 1940s could not but exacerbate it for émigré humanists like Kristeller, not least because they were victimized by a movement that enlisted many of their erstwhile colleagues and almost all of their own students, who convicted them of guilt for the crisis, and who triumphantly proclaimed that their expulsion marked the end of the crisis.

I owe many of the ideas for this article to the collaboration with Gerald Härtung on our common project Weltoffener Humanismus. Philosophie, Philologie und Geschichte in der deutschjüdischen Emigration. Thanks must also go to Oliver Zimmer and Warren Boutcher for their comments, as well as to David Kettler and two anonymous readers for their suggestions.