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Peter Gordon. Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2010. 426 pages.
The disputation between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer at Davos, Switzerland on March 26, 1929, is of a peculiar kind in the history of ideas. On the one hand, Heidegger and Cassirer were vanguards of German philosophy at the time. Their encounter lends the impression of a titanic clash of ideas, the embodiment of phenomenology versus neo-Kantianism. On the other, eighty years of historical reflection has since expunged the debate's philosophical content. The drama of "The Heidegger Controversy," and the cottage industry of intellectual historical scholarship dedicated to revising its script, penned most forcefully by Richard Wolin, cast the disputation as foreshadowing 1933, the year Heidegger expressed his allegiance to the Third Reich. The drama's endurance might be attributed to the versatility of Cassirer's role. Although Heidegger "won," debates continue to roil the question of just what lost: humanism, modernism, reason, or perhaps liberalism? Caught between the lofty march of ideas and debasing political reductions, the disputation today appears at once too philosophical and not enough.
Peter Gordon's Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos revives the Arbeitsgemeinschaft between Heidegger and Cassirer from these two distortions. Gordon's patient reconstruction of its conceptual stakes and analysis of its social ramifications situates the disputation as a "philosophical event" (215). That is to say it deserves to be understood philosophically and historically. Gordon's thesis is that while the disputation came to bear a socio-political dimension, its philosophical content cannot be reduced to society or politics. Continental Divide pairs the philosophers' personal correspondences with their formal treatises in order to redeem the irreducibly philosophical meaning of the disputation in tractable prose.
The intensive introduction distills the jargon of Heidegger's Being and Time and renders concise Cassirer's prolific three volume series, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. It grounds Gordon's philosophical commentary, which extends from the authors' oeuvres to the central question of their dispute: to which legacy does Kant belong? It is in the fourth chapter that readers find a blow-by-blow account of the two hours Heidegger and Cassirer shared. Here, the centerpiece of the book, Gordon narrates the disputation's distension, as sparring textual interpretations of the first Critique became wider issues of method, ethics, and freedom. The conceptual...