Dina Gusejnova

Draft, 29 May 2005

Concepts of culture and technology in Germany, 1916 1933:

Ernst Cassirer and Oswald Spengler1

Between the last years of the Wilhelmine Empire and the demise of the

Weimar Republic, the German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874

1945) and

the German cultural theorist Oswald Spengler (1880

1936) developed distinct

philosophies of culture. Although they occupied different political, social and

academic spheres, the methodologies of both thinkers have important points in

common, and both claim their debts to the same intellectual predecessors (most

importantly, Goethe and Leibniz). Despite this, scholars have been reluctant to

uncover the intellectual debate between Cassirer and Spengler. This is probably

mainly due to the fact that Cassirer was a well-respected academic, while Spengler

was and still is being located in the margin between academia and popular science. At

the same time, both their similarities and their differences offer revealing insights for

their intellectual biographies and for the study of the political thought in this period.2

As this juxtaposition of the two philosophies will show, their political differences can

be rooted in their conceptual differences concerning the relationship of man with

technology and culture.

Raised in a provincial German town, never able to secure an academic position

and largely ignored by the academic world, Spengler was something of an outcast

until the publication of his best-selling Decline of the West in 1918 and Prussianism

and Socialism in 1919. Notwithstanding Spengler's popularity, the German writer

Kurt Tucholsky scornfully dubbed him the Karl May of philosophy , while Walter

Benjamin described him as a trivial bastard [Sauhund] .3 Spengler s political writings

contain a systematic stance against parliamentary and constitutional forms of

government and individual rights. Close to political circles of the German Right, such

as the Juniklub around Moeller van den Bruck, Spengler also admired Mussolini s

authoritarian style of rule.4 In the 1920s, Spengler supported an organisation called

Ogesch that sought to unite the paramilitary organisations in Germany in order to

destabilise the Weimar Republic.5 Spengler also proposed to become the ideological

assistant to Alfred Hugenberg, coordinating the editorial boards of several newspapers

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in support of the chauvinist German National People s Party (DNVP).6 He only

stepped back from direct involvement in the political sphere when, after a meeting

with General von Seeckt (who, since 1920, was Chief of the reduced German army),

the latter did not use Spengler s assistance to oust the German People s Party s (DVP)

chancellor Gustav Stresemann.7 Instead, Seeckt remarked to his wife that he wished

Spengler had declined together with the West. 8

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Cassirer took Spengler s writings

seriously.9 He saw Spengler s style, disclosed in vague terms such as Kulturseele and

Menschentum, as mystical language that was a conceptual part of Spengler s

prophetic apparatus.10 Cassirer contrasted Spengler, the irrationalist in thought and in

language, with his own intellectual identity, that of a thinker who is not free from

political passion (to use the expression with which Cassirer sympathetically

described Theodor Mommsen). Cassirer's own method required him not to let this

passion stream freely , as Spengler did, but to let thought discipline it .11 Donald

Philip Verene has remarked that Cassirer never argues his case' and that it 'always

arises out of what is there in human thought as it has actually developed. 12 As this

essay will demonstrate, Cassirer does, in fact, argue his case. However, it is necessary

to juxtapose his writings directly with those of his opponents.

Cassirer, a keen supporter of the Weimar Republic and member of the German

Democratic Party (DDP), justly considered Spengler as an ideological and intellectual

opponent. Interestingly, Spengler s thought has continued to exert attraction among

twentieth century historians, such as Arnold Toynbee, and conservative political

thinkers, such as the American political theorist and German-Jewish émigré, Hans

Morgenthau. Spengler s theory also influenced Paul Kennedy s interpretation of the

Cold War in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.13 In the late 1930s and 40s,

Cassirer explained his continued engagement with Spengler s somber predictions of

the decline and the inevitable destruction of our civilization as a kind of preparatory

work for the time to come, when it will be the task of philosophy again to take an

'active share in the construction and reconstruction of man s cultural life'.14

Using his argument with an intellectual opponent as a starting-point, the

political dimension of Cassirer's work can be fleshed out very clearly. His political

philosophy is only slowly becoming the subject of research. An editorial project of his

collected writings and unpublished material is currently under way in Germany,

which, together with the limited availability of his writings in English, is part of the

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reason why the recent Cassirer renaissance in Germany has not found a major echo

elsewhere.15 Donald Philip Verene rightly remarked that even Cassirer s more overtly

political writings, such as The Myth of the State, have been neglected.16 Until recently,

Cassirer has been thought of as an apolitical philosopher of culture, unreflective of

contemporary political discourses. Leo Strauss judged that Cassirer s last work was

an inconclusive discussion of the myth of the state , rather than the demonstration of

what he thought a more adequate radical transformation of the philosophy of

symbolic forms into a teaching whose center is moral philosophy. 17 The German

philosopher Hermann Lübbe even suggested (in 1974) that Cassirer was ignorant of

Nazi political tracts, such as Alfred Rosenberg s Myth of the Twentieth Century,

despite the fact that Cassirer critically named one of the chapters in his Myth of the

State after this classic work of Nazi ideology.18

Cassirer s biographers, however, have attested Cassirer s strong political

sensitivity. Thus despite his conceptual and political move away from his German-

Jewish neo-Kantian teacher Hermann Cohen, Cassirer was reluctant to publicly

distance himself from neo-Kantianism, a philosophical strand largely embraced by

Jewish intellectuals.19 For in the 1920s and 30s, a critique of neo-Kantianism was

often confounded with anti-Semitic attacks. Although he never suffered from the

same degree of anti-Semitism as his teacher, Cassirer actively defended Cohen in a

controversy with the anti-semitic Kant scholar Bruno Bauch in 1917, which had left a

profound imprint on his thought.20

The experience of exile and the success of National Socialism in Germany is

another rupture in Cassirer's intellectual biography, as Gerald Hartung demonstrated,

with his focus of research shifting from a philosophy of man s works to a philosophy

of man.21 At the same time, the deeper political underpinnings of his works show a

great deal of continuity, which can be recovered by comparing his systematic

refutations of Spengler in the late 1920s and 30s with his conceptual thought from the

earlier period.22 Cassirer first mentioned Spengler explicitly in 1928, the same year in

which he held a public lecture in defence of the republican constitution at the

University of Hamburg, one of two progressive and democratic universities founded

in 1919.23 This and other public statements in defence of constitutional and republican

government reveal Cassirer as precisely the sort of republican that Jeffrey Herf, for

example, claimed to be absent from Weimar political debates.24 Aby Warburg,

founder of the Warburg Institute and library, where Cassirer worked between 1919

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and 1933, and a friend of Cassirer s, argued that the University of Hamburg should

feel honoured by the fact that Cassirer contributed in its name to an understanding

not only with the rest of Germany, but also between the entire thinking, speaking and

writing world. 25

Cassirer s systematic refutation of Spengler as an enemy of this understanding

is revealing because their philosophies were rooted in a previously shared set of

categories and approaches, originating, in part, in their reception of Goethe.26

Mapping the debate between Cassirer and Spengler from their responses to the First

World War and the foundation of the Weimar Republic to the year 1933, when

Cassirer fled Nazi Germany, this essay seeks to balance a close reading of the texts

with a contextual approach with regard to their sources and to contemporary thinkers.

Spengler s and Cassirer s opposing understanding of man s relationship to technology

and science, addressed in the second part of the essay, will serve as an introduction to

the underpinnings of their philosophies of culture. The debate with Spengler will thus

also be considered from Cassirer s retrospective point of view that is brought forth in

his writings from 1935 until 1945.

I

Their reactions to the First World War and the ensuing foundation of the Weimar

Republic illustrate the differing political positions of the two thinkers most clearly.

Cassirer perceived the First World War as an ideological battle between idealist

Western democracies and their enemies. The proponents of democratic thought

stood for their old ideals, the ideals of the French Revolution but, as Cassirer

argued, these ideals had a long time ago lost their momentum and their original

impulse . As a result, the role of reason as the fundamental power in the organization

of man s political and social life was suddenly annulled and reversed. 27

The experience of the war years, during which he was charged with reading

and analysing French anti-German propaganda, was disturbing for Cassirer.2829 The

dichotomy between German Kultur derived from folk spirit against French

Zivilisation based on the notion of a rationalist state found resurging popularity

prevailed in these years.30 It was in this context that Cassirer decided to write a history

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of German idealism, in which individual positive freedom as self-realisation and the

form of the legitimate state were mutually reinforcing.31

Shocked by the war that he saw as a sign of defeat of reason on all fronts,

Cassirer welcomed the foundation of the Weimar Republic as an event placed in the

best traditions of German and European political thought. For him, the state could

only be the final goal of history', as Hegel understood it, 'provided that it recognises

its highest task in the progressive realisation of freedom. 32 The fact that the

foundation of the Republic coincided with peace was only a further argument in

support of Kant s famous insistence that perpetual peace was only to be attained by

a republican form of government .33 Indeed, contrary to the claims made by

Conservative Revolutionaries and other groupings on the Right, Cassirer argued that

republican government was not alien to German intellectual history, but had been

nourished by its very own powers, the powers of idealist philosophy . 34 He also

included the early Fichte into his genealogy of admirable German thought. At this

time, Fichte's later chauvinistic writings were being claimed by figures such as

Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Siegfried Wagner, who thought of him as an

intellectual founding father of their Fichte society of 1914 .35

In his preface to Freedom and Form, a work published as World War I was

still in progress, Cassirer aligned Fichte together with Lessing, Herder and Goethe,

emphasising that the truly creative figures of German intellectual history have

always, during the heaviest battles they led for the preservation of the independence

of their culture, remained free from the shadows [Dünkel] of complete self-

complacency with this culture.' Fichte especially, Cassirer wrote, 'always emphasised'

that the ideal of the German nation and a German state 'ought not to bring forth some

kind of special folk trait [Volkstümlichkeit], but that it ought to realise the free

citizen .' Commenting on the intellectual climate of his day, Cassirer concluded:

'Likewise, in our own days the educated Germans [die deutsche Bildung] will not

allow the misjudgement and scorn brought forth by their enemies, nor a limited small-

spirited chauvinism to move them away from this original path. 36

In contrast to Cassirer, Spengler s reaction to the Republic was similar to that

of Thomas Mann s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man of 1918. Thomas Mann

famously argued there that the political spirit as a form of democratic enlightenment

and human civilisation is not only physically anti-German [physisch widerdeutsch];

it is necessarily also politically anti-German [politisch deutschfeindlich], wherever it

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holds sway. 37 In the same vein, to put it in the words of Detlef Felken, Spengler

designed an image of history in which not the war, but the republic appears to be the

actual misfortune in German history. 38 He perceived both as strokes of fate and

indicators for the degradation of culture into civilisation that preceded the demise

of occidental culture at large. In sum, Spengler s view on the First World War was

that it should have started sooner rather than later, in 1911 rather than in 1914.39 In

contrast to the dichotomy of Kultur and Zivilisation, Spengler saw the war primarily

as a clash between the German and English, rather than the German and French

spirit.40 Spengler s idiosyncratic chauvinism was based on the notorious distinction

between the Prussian spirit of the order and the English Wiking spirit .41 For him,

Prussia contained the essence of Germanness, and this essence was not tied to

philosophical traditions, but originated in blood .42

Spengler s political goal was an education for the German state and not for a

humanism that is removed from the world .43 War was thus not just the highest form

of being, but also a better educator than the writing of an intellectual. The ideas of

artists and thinkers did not make world history ; this, in Spengler s words, was just

interested chatter of the literati . Rather, it was important who realised them, the

statesman and soldier , for ideas are only made conscious through blood, like drives,

not by abstract deliberation. 44 Incidentally, Spengler s Heraclitian understanding of

war as the continuation of Being on a higher form was an important source of

influence for Carl Schmitt s friend/foe definition of the political, and one that has

been so far ignored.45 For Spengler, Ernst Cassirer represented the sort of literary

chatter that he despised.46 His republican endorsement would have appeared

repulsive to him.

Historically, Spengler argued, the notion of freedom in republican thought

originated from a merely negative conception of freedom that emerged in the city-

states of the Middle Ages. This freedom, brought about with the birth of the city, tore

man away from his chthonic plant-like connection to the soil and its close human

associations.47 Similarly, in his view, the concept of republican government had no

positive content, since it was merely conceivable as a negation of monarchy.48

German tradition commanded that the will of the individual ought to be subjected to

the will of the whole .49 The constitution was an artificial construct with no

applicability to the true being of man, in which literature is set against the knowledge

of man and things, language against race, abstract right against successful tradition. 50

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Weimar constitutionalism was wholly incompatible with the real nature of man rooted

in race and tradition, and the parliamentary system was in essence a civil war,

conducted with the vote and all means of demagogy in speech and writing , and about

to collapse.51

These reactions to some of the key turning points in German history reveal

Cassirer s and Spengler s respective hierarchy of values like a litmus test. Cassirer

continued to endorse Kant s observation that it was 'a precondition of perpetual peace

that in every state, the civil constitution be republican'.52 Spengler abhorred this

thought, as, in his mind, the process of legislation through a parliamentary procedure,

as demanded by the republicans, was nothing but a civil war. For Cassirer, the

primary value was individual freedom, while for Spengler, it was the collective notion

of the Prussian spirit.53

II

Triggered off by the experience of the World War I, the differences between

conceptualisations of the role of technology and science in human existence give a

distilled version of the dichotomy between spirit and life in German philosophical

thought, marking the split between idealism and vitalism (Lebensphilosophie) at

large.54 If, for Cassirer, spirit or intellect (Geist) was a will to form (Wille zur

Gestaltung), for Spengler it was just a feature of the will to domination of the

intellect over the powers of life. Following this mindset, Cassirer understood

technology as the means by which man gives the outside world its determinate form

both physically and intellectually. It was thus just another instance of a variety of

spiritual functions , such as science and religion.55

By contrast, Spengler, endorsing the laws of life over mere intellectualism,

insisted that in the face of inevitable cultural decline, technology was a fate that we

should embrace as a tactics of life .56 More precisely, using the means of Faustian

technology , it was possible 'to melt mankind into a whole', so as to fulfill the law of

destiny at its best.57 Technology was a peculiar feature of Faustian culture and, as

such, also constituted a defining moment of Western civilisation. Technological

progress was the last great achievement of the Faustian soul, which, now transformed

into civilisation, was bound to perish as a result of a coloured revolution (farbige

Revolution), which Spengler projected to be imminent.58 It was then that the

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colonised, technologically inferior peoples would rise up against occidental culture,

bringing an end to the age of technology and thus to the final stage of Faustian

civilisation. In Herf s words, it was a paradox of cultural pessimism that, unlike

Max Weber, Georg Lukács and Georg Simmel, who regarded modern technology as

disenchanted, for Spengler, technology has become ascetic, mystical, esoteric even

more spiritual .59

For Spengler, the endorsement of technological progress was thus an aspect of

man s positive liberty, allowing occidental man to fulfil the essence of his Faustian

soul. Consequently, the fact that man s use of technology implied domination over

nature and other men was a positive notion for him. It was this interpretation of

technology as domination, which Adorno and Horkheimer criticised in their account

of the Odysseus saga.60 In Cassirer s terms, by contrast, technology was initially not

more than an extension of man s intellectual powers.61 However, he also recognised

that technology could imply domination if consciously employed in this way, for

example, by directing other people s thought by means of mass media and other forms

of psychological manipulation.62 Thus modern technology had the potential of

creating a kind of society according to destiny in which not the individual but the

group is the real moral subject . 63 In short, Cassirer s ideal society was composed

of individually responsible individuals, threatened by precisely the form of

technology with which Spengler sought to transform this liberal concoction into a

unified whole.64

In their thinking about the relationship between man and science, Cassirer and

Spengler also differed fundamentally. Applying Goethe s morphology of natural

forms to culture, Spengler tried to establish a scientific method of predicting human

destiny regardless of individual interference.65 He sought to apply new scientific

discoveries to the study of culture, combining the hypothesis of atomic disintegration

with the idea of destiny , the law of Entropy with the Myth of the Twilight of the

Idols. 66 Just as every substance tended to disintegrate into its atomic structure,

Spengler argued, every culture tended to decline into civilisation, and eventually to

perish. Spengler had thus indeed attempted to construct a universal science of history,

but its goal was not greater scientific understanding, but rather prophecy of the future.

For 'it is not open to any culture to choose the way and the attitude of its philosophy;

here for the first time, however, a culture is capable of predicting which path destiny

has chosen for it.'67

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Cassirer violently opposed this direct transfer of scientific ideas into

philosophy. In his work on Einstein s theory of relativity, he warned against

attempting to apply scientific laws to philosophy, and in particular, to ethics. The goal

of philosophy was not to find some hidden law underlying human history. According

to Cassirer, we ought to resist the temptation to see the totality of forms that surround

us here as a final metaphysical unity by explaining it with the simplicity of a simple

cause of the world (Weltgrund) .68 On the contrary, philosophy needed to preserve

the totality of aspects resulting for different observers. For in precisely this totality

the particularity of the viewpoint is not extinbuished but preserved and transcended. 69

Thus Spengler endorsed the uses of technology in order to shape a crowd of

men into a collective whole, and he praised the function of science in its capability of

predicting the future of this collective. His fundamental law of history, destiny, was

defined by reference to scientific laws of entelechy and entropy, while his style of

writing was anti-systematic and his philosophical alignment was closer to the vitalist

strand. For Cassirer, science was only one of several symbolic forms. Just like

technology, it was useful in serving man to understand himself and the process of

history from his own point of view.

III

The different importance assigned to the individual is also one of the

fundamental underpinnings of Spengler s and Cassirer s cultural philosophies. For

Spengler, culture was the outward appearance of the history of mankind

(Menschentum). As such, it consisted of different cultural souls , each of which

constituted embryonic forms of how these cultures would develop. Every particular

culture (Kulturkreis), Spengler argued, had evolved out of an Ursymbol, following its

own laws of development entailed in its respective Ursymbol in accordance with the

Aristotelian principle of entelechy.70 Being merely part of a pre-established all-

encompassing program, the individual could play no substantial part in the

development of culture. Moreover, Spengler argued, with reference to Leibniz, in this

monadic existence, cultures could not influence one another.71

Although Spengler did not align cultural souls with particular nations, his

insistence on the uniqueness of the Prussian and the Faustian spirit in German culture

in writings such as Prussianism and Socialism suggests that even at its most obscure,

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his philosophy of culture conveyed a political argument. Cassirer s conflicting

interpretation of Leibniz idea of monads confirms this interpretation. Commenting on

Leibniz description of monads as windowless substances incapable of mutual

influence, for example, Cassirer always repeatedly emphasised Leibniz insistence

that monads related to each other in a structure of harmony.72 Both Cassirer s

cosmopolitan outlook and Spengler s idiosyncratic Prussian nationalism thus found

their reflection in their selective interpretation of intellectual predecessors.73

A further such predecessor, and one who had himself been influenced by

Leibniz, was Goethe. While both Cassirer and Spengler saw Goethe s notion of the

symbol as key for their theories of culture, they chose to interpret him in very

different ways. As has already been shown, Spengler used Goethe s idea of the

Urpflanze and other Urphänomene for his own theory of the organic growth of

cultures out of an Ursymbol. Thus, for example, the naked body , the cave , and

absolute infinite space constituted the Ursymbols of the ancient, the Arabic and the

Faustian cultural souls, respectively. The latter, in Spengler s words, was best

epitomised by German works of art, such as Wagner s Tristan and Isolde. The nature

of an Ursymbol was left as an undefined space, and its meaning could only be guessed

intuitively by drawing on the different exemplary instances of it that Spengler had

extracted out of the history of human culture with his morphological method.

Cassirer observed that Goethe s demand to let the Urphänomene stand

untouched in their majestic and ungraspable quality , which Spengler accepted, was

of little use to a systematic philosopher.74 Cassirer noticed the tension between

Spengler s scientific pretensions and his tendency to give examples instead of

defining terms such as Ursymbol, and he criticised Spengler s statement that history

ought to be treated poetically.'75 Although Cassirer s own notion of Basisphänomene,

or fundamental phenomena, was indebted to Goethe, he wanted to take it beyond

Goethe and determine the meaning of the term in a more structured and logically

coherent sense. Human nature ought to be perceived in terms of three groups of

phenomena, the phenomenon of man s consciousness of his historical being, the

notion of man s consciousness of his own actions, and the self-perception of man

through the medium of his work.76 In Cassirer s system, Spengler s Ursymbol

constituted an analysis of the third kind of Basisphänomen, a phenomenology of

man s history through man s work, such as an ancient statue or a musical

composition. For Spengler himself, however, cultures are organisms and Ursymbols

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were thus aspects of a cultural physique, rather than the result of creation by

individuals.77

Spengler understood Goethe s symbolic thought as an intuition that could be

emulated and brought him an understanding of the roots of the 'Faustian soul'.

Cassirer, on the contrary, presented Goethe s symbolic eye as a sense of intuition for

events which had a universal political and ethical significance, rather than being part

of a linear chain of destiny.78 Such an event of ethical pregnancy (prägnant-ethische

Bedeutung), as Cassirer called it, was the experience of the cannonade of Valmy

1792, which Goethe experienced as a turning point in world history (Weltenwende).79

It escaped Cassirer s eye that Spengler also picked up on Goethe s term of

Weltenwende, coining his own term of Zeitwende as the type of a historical turning

point . For Spengler, this term signified an event that confirmed the fulfilment of a

collective destiny. In this interpretation, not only the evaluative and interpretative

powers of the witness become utterly unimportant and irrelevant; even the causal

significance of individual historical events is played down, dismissed as irrelevant to

the future course of history.80

Spengler s and Cassirer s studies of the Renaissance reveal the differences

both in their methodologies, and in their system of political values.81 Cassirer studied

individual biographies of artists, thinkers, intellectuals and statesmen of the

Renaissance, and thereby came to understand the period better as an epoch

characterised by its transitory nature between mythical and scientific, religious and

secular thought.82 He also argued that the world of Renaissance ideas did not have

such a direct and permanent effect in Germany as it had in Italy, France and England ,

for even the most famous German Renaissance scholar, Nicholas of Cusa, had found a

wider reception in Italy than in Germany.83

Spengler, by contrast, had more trouble with assessing the nature of the

Renaissance in the context of his system of values: First, it was a period in which

classical antiquity was consciously imitated, and this could potentially make his

argument of the independence of individual cultural souls problematic. Secondly, the

'international' nature of Renaissance humanism, for example, made it seemingly

impossible for Spengler to argue for a supremacy of the Faustian cultural soul;

equally, dismissing such a crucial period as the Renaissance as un-German also was

not easy. Consequently, Spengler reinterpreted the Renaissance as a phenomenon

beginning around the year 1000, which coincided with the birth of the Faustian

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cultural soul. Thus in Spengler's model, the cultural products of this period like the

great Germanic sagas, most of which were the work of an anonymous representative

of the folk, became constitutive both of Renaissance and Faustian culture.84 Cassirer

did not see the Renaissance as the cradle of German culture, even if (by drawing on

the impact of Cusanus' work on the Italian Renaissance), he emphasised that German

thinkers had contributed substantially to the uniqueness of Renaissance culture.

Curiously, Cassirer thought to have discovered a close analogy between

Spengler s own semi-mythical, semi-scientific pattern of thought with some

astrological treatises that [he] had quite recently read whilst studying Renaissance

philosophy.85 Cassirer considered Spengler s work to be an astrology of history

the

work of a diviner .86 The analogy informed Cassirer s early observation that it was a

feature of mythical thought to confuse historical time and destiny .87 This is

certainly applicable to Spengler s conception of history.88 His law of destiny was

derived from an interpretation of the chronological sequel of past events, such as the

decline of the Roman Empire. Although Cassirer s classification of historical events

into transitory and symbolic, as revealed in his discussion of Goethe, also attested a

higher meaning to some historical events over others, this did not imply the possibility

of predicting the future, but rather it included a demand for retaining an ethical lesson

for humanity.

Spengler called his approach a 'morphology' of history. This study of form was

based on the idea that all forms developed out of a deeper essence, the Ursymbol.

Cassirer similarly called his anthropologically orientated study of different symbolic

forms, such as culture or technology, a morphology of the human spirit . This, he

argued, provided him with a clearer and more reliable methodological approach to

the individual cultural sciences. 89 However, (and true to his Kantian background),

Cassirer's study of culture would always remain mediated by the analysis of the

criteria of perception. In Cassirer's view, man can never lay bare the actual and

ultimate roots of being beyond an insight into patterns of thought themselves.90

Consequently, Cassirer's interest tended towards Dilthey s notion of understanding

[Verstehen] as a basis for exploring the circumstances of an historical event or

cultural aspect from the point of view of the historical actors involved by recreating

the spiritual form that was applicable to a particular historical past.91

The success of National Socialism in Germany and, eventually, the outbreak

of World War II, with the profound consequences these events had both on the work

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and on the private lives of intellectuals, threw a very bright spotlight on the political

implications of these philosophical disagreements over the relationship of culture,

technology and national history and the role of the individual therein. In 1944,

Cassirer criticised Spengler s work in the same breath as he attacked Heidegger s

notion of Geworfenheit , or the being thrownness of man, both of which, according

to Cassirer, had turned philosophy into a pliable instrument in the hands of the

political leaders. 92 As far as the intellectual parting of the ways between Cassirer

and Heidegger that had become evident during the famous Davos disputation of 1929

is concerned, even the languages of the two philosophers had developed such strong

idiosyncrasies that Cassirer and Heidegger would not be prepared to reconcile them.

Heidegger explicitly said: I believe that what I call Dasein [existence] is not

translatable into Cassirer s vocabulary. 93 By contrast to the conflict between Cassirer

and Heidegger, Cassirer continued his philosophical debate with Spengler even in his

writings from the 1940s.

Cassirer's earlier preoccupation with Spengler also shows that the

entanglement between their different understandings of culture and their more overt

political differences went far deeper and was more complex than a study of their

political differences alone would suggest. Conversely, the political edge of these

disagreements also reached further than might appear at first sight. For example, in

the 1940s, Cassirer increasingly began to question his own intellectual predecessors,

such as Hegel and even Goethe. In his first notes on Thomas Mann's Lotte in Weimar

(1939), a novel about the fictitious return of the aging love of young Werther to its

also aging author, Cassirer critically remarked, writing in 1940: 'Thomas Mann did

not present us Goethe the "Olympian" His Goethe is rather human- all-too-

human'.94 Five years later, Cassirer (who was himself dubbed the 'Olympian' in his

student years at Marburg, and whose similarity with the 'master' was, according to his

widow Toni, apparently attested by the staff of Goethe's house in Weimar) recalled

his first reaction to Mann's Goethe thus: 'What should be do with this petit bourgeois,

provincial Goethe? In human terms, this work [of Mann's] remained alien to me.'95

But as he read the work later, Cassirer concluded in 1945 that he had come to

understand Mann's intentions to deconstruct the usual hero-worship of Goethe.

Indeed, for Thomas Mann, this partial deconstruction of Goethe (with whom he,

incidentally, enjoyed being compared in stature as a German poet until as late as

14

1949, when he received the two German Goethe prizes in Frankfurt and Weimar)

must have been as difficult a step as it was for Cassirer.

Cassirer's more qualified assessment of his intellectual predecessors was, I

believe, caused not only by the political events of the 1930s and 1940s, but also by his

intellectual conflict with figures like Spengler. When Cassirer argued in restrospect

that Spengler s mythical thinking exerted a great political influence by having

declared that the modern man cannot avert his fate; he has to accept it , his critique

appears like a balance sheet of the political consequences of Spengler s thought from

the early 1920s onwards.96 In doing so, Cassirer placed his argumentation against

Spengler s fatalism within a larger critique of historical determinism in European

thought, such as the notion of modifiable fate epitomised by Hippolyte Taine, who

subjected the individual Being and Doing to a relentless necessity .97 Cassirer also

warned his readers that Hegel s philosophy of the state, which claimed to be an

account of self-realising freedom, in fact turned the individual into a mere

marionette in relation to the all-powerful proceedings of the Idea. 98

In Cassirer s view, the emergence of Nazi ideology was the outcome of a

highly spiritual ideological struggle between idealism and vitalism. By 1935 he

realised that to some, the defeat of rational thought seems to be complete and

irrevocable . Instead of resigning himself, however, he set himself the goal to regain

for the individual being and the individual action an independent meaning and an

independent value which would also be in harmony with supra-individual, supra-

state, supra-national ethical claims .99 Cassirer now referred to a contemporary

German, Albert Schweitzer, as an example for a philosopher who took on a

pedagogical role in the political and ethical education of mankind.100 He came to see

the task of philosophical idealism in expanding rational thought from the spheres

where it still had force, such as the modern sciences, to man s political life.101

Cassirer s part in this defence of idealism consisted to a great extent in his

continued attempts to expose Spengler s theories. As part of this project, his

philosophy of culture reveals a strong political edge, throwing light on the deeper

intellectual conflicts in which the political tensions of Weimar Germany were rooted.

For him the Weimar Republic, which Spengler sought to destabilise, constituted an

(albeit failed) attempt to overcome the spiritually destructive effect of the First World

War.102

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Spengler, however, died in 1936, too early to witness what many called the

fulfilment of his prophecies of the decline of Western civilisation . Cassirer s death

just a month before the end of World War II did not allow him to conceptualise the

renewed attempt to rescue civilisation from its enemies through education. Ironically,

just a day after he died, Cassirer's wish from the mid-1930s to educate humanity

caught the interest of a wider public in a curiously direct way. Following Cassirer's

initial refusal to send his book An Essay on Man (1945) to a German Major and

American prisoner of war, a certain Captain Karl C. Teufel asserted Cassirer on 14

April 1945 about the Major, who was supposed to use Cassirer's book as part of the

camp's educational programme: 'I might also tell you that Major Heyne is not a Nazi,

and insofar as I can determine, is interested in teaching his classes principles which

will benefit international relations. If your book is what I have reason to believe it is,

then it might be considered as one step in the re-education of the German people, a

project which probably merits your favor.'103

As Cassirer died on 13 April 1945, we can only guess what Cassirer's response

to this invitation would have been. The intellectual path leading from Cassirer's

differences with Spengler over the relationship between man and technology or the

uses of morphology in history, to this curious exchange of letters at the end of the

catastrophe of World War II and the Holocaust is to some extent a construct. But as

such it serves to show in what sense Cassirer's engagement with the political

implications of Spengler's philosophy of culture and his qualified distancing from his

own intellectual idols, just like Thomas Mann's view on Goethe from the distant

perspective of aging Lotte's inquisitive eyes, suggests that Cassirer was acutely aware

of the political dimension of his own philosophy and anthropology. While recent

years have seen a renaissance of interest in works by Cassirer, Spengler s works have

generated considerably less academic attention, to the extent of being left out even of

accounts of Cassirer s political thought.104 The tensions between the two thinkers, set

in the context of the contemporary political climate, suggest that we ought to

reconsider the common characterisation of Cassirer as a predominantly apolitical

scholar, and to emphasise that Spengler s work, too, ought to be taken far more

seriously as a contribution to a philosophical and political debate in late Weimar

Germany.

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1 I am grateful to Dr Martin Ruehl for his detailed comments of several drafts of this essay. I would like to express special thanks to Claudia Wedepohl and Dr Dorothea McEwan of the Archive of the Warburg Institute for their welcoming attitude and help, and to the archivists at the Beinecke Library (Yale University). 2 Paetzold, H. (1994) Die Realität der Symbolischen Formen. Ernst Cassirer im Kontext (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft) only has one reference to Oswald Spengler. Alain Pons refers to Spengler but does not pursue the comparison further, in idem, L épistémologie et la philosophie de l histoire de Cassirer , ed. Jean Seidengart (1990) De Marburg à New York (Paris:): 192-3. 3 Felken, D. (1988) Spengler, Konservativer Denker zwischen Kaiserreich und Diktatur (Munich: Beck): 114. 4 Spengler, O. (1924) Neubau des Deutschen Reiches, in Spengler (1934) Politische Schriften (henceforth Spengler, Political Writings) (Munich: Beck): 295-6. See also note from Mussolini: Leggerò molto volentieri le Sue opere... , 24 May 1925, in Oswald Spengler (1963) Briefe 1913-1936,

Anton M. Koktanek ed. (Munich: Beck): 391. By October 1935, Spengler s admiration for Mussolini had subsided as a result of Mussolini s war in Abissinia: Mir scheint, dass Mussolini die ruhige staatsmännische Überlegenheit seiner ersten Jahre verloren hat . Letter to Gerhard von Janson, 27 Oct. 1935, in Spengler (1963): 750. 5 Felken (1988): 137. 6 Felken (1988): 140. 7 Seeckt did maintain connections with paramilitary organisations such as the Black Corps (Schwarze Reichswehr) and informally declared himself prepared to take over dictatorial government in the case of a putsch. According to F. Boterman, Spengler was eventually disappointed in Seeckt s compliance with legal means of anti-republican action. Boterman, F. (2000) Oswald Spengler und sein Untergang des Abendlandes

[1992], trans. by Christoph Strupp (Cologne: SH-Verlag, 2000): 332-334. 8Boterman (2000): 144. 9 Thomas Mann also devoted much more attention to Spengler than the majority of German intellectuals. By contrast to Cassirer, however, the basis for Mann s interest was an initial sympathy for Spengler s political views. For Mann s most detailed comment about Spengler, see his essay Über die Lehre Spenglers (1924) in Mann, Th. (1968) Schriften und Reden zur Literatur, Kunst und Philosophie, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer): 223-29. 10 I make no attempt to translate this mystical language of Spengler into commonplace idiomatic English; such an attempt would take away their special flavour and spoil the whole effect. Ernst Cassirer, The Technique of our Modern Political Myths (1945), in Verene Donald Philip (ed.) (1979), Symbol, Myth and Culture: Essays and lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1933-45 (New Haven: Yale University Press): 242-272 (261). 11 Cassirer (1906) Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit (1832-1932), vol. 1 (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 2nd ed. Hamburg: Meiner (2000): 301. 12 Verene, D.P. (1979): 7. 13 See Farrenkopf, J., (ed.) (1994) Der Fall Spengler (Köln: Böhlau). R.G. Collingwood emphasised the dangerous political potential of Spengler s theory in Collingwood (1927) Oswald Spengler and the Theory of Historical Cycles , Antiquity: A Quarterly Review of Archaeology March (1): 319 21. 14 Cf. Cassirer, E. (1935) The concept of philosophy as a philosophical problem , in Verene (1979): 59. 15 Cassirer s Collected Writings are being published under the editorship of Birgit Recki, while the Nachlass is being edited by John Michael Krois, both by Meiner, Hamburg. Recent German studies of Cassirer s political thought included Waßner, R. (1999) Institution und Symbol: Ernst Cassirers Philosophie und ihre Bedeutung für eine Theorie sozialer und politischer Institutionen (Münster, Hamburg, London: Lit); Lüddecke, D. (2003) Staat- Mythos- Politik: Überlegungen zum politischen Denken bei Ernst Cassirer (Würzburg: Ergon); Rudolph, E. and Orth, H.W. (eds.) (1999) Cassirers Weg zur Philosophie der Politik (Hamburg: Meiner). For recent intellectual biographies, see Lipton, D. (1978) Ernst Cassirer. The Dilemma of a Liberal Intellectual in Germany (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), Paetzold, H. (1997) Von Marburg nach New York. Eine philosophische Biographie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft) and Schwemmer, O. (1997) Ein Philosoph der europäischen Moderne (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag). 16Verene, D.P. (1999) Cassirer s Political Philosophy , Rudolph, E. and Orth H.W. (eds.) Cassirers Weg zur Philosophie der Politik (Hamburg: Meiner). 17Strauss, L. (1947), Review of The Myth of the State, Social Research 14 (1): 125 138. 18 More recently, Lübbe s argument was effectively countered by Fabien Capeillères, who suggested that Cassirer s notion of myth in The Myth of the State consciously criticised Rosenberg s goal of

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creating a new type of man out of a new type of myth of life . Citation from Alfred Rosenberg (1930),

The Myth of the Twentieth Century in Capeillères, F. (1995) Cassirer and Politcal Philosophy , eds. Rudolph, E. and Küppers, B.-O., Kulturkritik nach Ernst Cassirer (Cassirer-Forschungen, Hamburg: Meiner): 137. 19 For a discussion of the association of neo-Kantianism with Jewish scholars, and the Davos disputation in relation to it, see Friedman, Michael (2000) A Parting of the Ways (Chicago, Illinois: Open Court). As Cassirer s friend and student Dimitry Gawronsky asserts, Cassirer told him shortly after WWI that already by 1917, the onesidedness of the Kant-Cohen theory of knowledge became quite clear to him. Gawronsky, D. (1949) Ernst Cassirer: His Life and Work (henceforth Gawronsky, Cassirer), ed. Schilpp, P.A., The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer [The Library of Living Philosophers] (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1949): 3-37 (p.25). Cassirer s wife wrote: When it later became apparent that Ernst s path was leading him away from Cohen, it was very difficult for the old teacher and friend , Cassirer, T. (1981) Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (2nd ed. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg): 93. Despite the personal sympathy, Cassirer was critical of Cohen s patriotism during the First World War. On Cohen s German-Jewish patriotism, see Besslich, B. (2000) Wege in den Kulturkrieg (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft): 334-5; On Cassirer s distance from Cohen on these grounds, see Paetzold, H. (1995) 'Mythos und Moderne , eds. Rudolph, E. and Küppers, B.-O., Kulturkritik nach Ernst Cassirer (Hamburg: Meiner): 160-161. Many Jews set high expectation on the Kriegserlebnis as a force that would unite them with the other Germans. Cf. Mendes Flohr, P. (1998) The Kriegserlebnis and Jewish Consciousness , Jews in the Weimar Republic, eds. Pulzer, P., Paucker, A. and Benz, W., (Journal of the Leo Baeck Institute, London/Tuebingen: Moh/Siebeck) 20 Cassirer became the first Jewish Rector to preside over a German university between 1929 and 1930. The Weimar Republic offered more opportunities for Jews to hold public office or judicial positions. However, the number of those serving in these positions remained low. Thus two Jews served in the German cabinet after 1919: Walther Rathenau as Foreign Minister, who was assassinated in 1922, and Rudolf Hilferding as Minister of Finance. Cf. Pulzer, P. (1998), 'Between Hope and Fear: Jews in the Weimar Republic , Pulzer, P., Paucker, A. and Benz, W. eds., Jews in the Weimar Republic, (Journal of the Leo Baeck Institute, London/Tuebingen 1998): 260, 275. 21 Hartung, G. (2001) Anthropologische Grundlegung der Kulturphilosophie. Zur Entstehungsgeschichte von Ernst Cassirers Essay on Man , Lachmann, H.-J. and Kösser, U., eds. Kulturwissenschaftliche Studien 6 (Leipzig: Passage-Verlag): 2-22. 22 Cassirer criticised Spengler s theory at length in Cassirer (1995) Zur Metaphysik der symbolischen Formen, Krois, J.M. ed. (Nachlass, v.I, Hamburg: Meiner): 102-106, 244-46; Cassirer (1935) The concept of philosophy as a philosophical problem (1935), Cassirer (1936) Critical Idealism as a philosophy of culture , Cassirer (1944) Philosophy and Politics , in Verene (1979); Cf. also Cassirer (1946) The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press). 23 The other progressive University, in Gawronsky s terms, was Frankfurt. Gawronsky (1949): 26. Cassirer s first reference by name is in the preparatory notes for the third volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, dated 1928. Cf. Cassirer (1995) Nachlass, I: 54

113. Cassirer s Philosophy of Symbolic Form appeared in three volumes in 1921, 1925 and 1929 respectively. 24 Cf. Ernst Cassirer (1928), Rede zur Verfassungsfeier am 11. August 1928 (henceforth Republican Constitution), Warburg Institute Archive, III General Correspondence, MS 29.2.9.1. For Herf s argument that Weimar was a republic without republicans , see Herf, Jeffrey (1984) Reactionary Modernism. Technology, culture, and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): p.20. Massimo Ferrari s reference is to Cassirer s speech delivered on 22 June 1930 at Hamburg University that was boycotted by Right wing students. Cassirer's speech entitled Über Wandlungen der Staatsgesinnung und der Staatstheorie in der deutschen Geschichte is discussed in Ferrari, M. (1999) Zur politischen Philosophie im Frühwerk Ernst Cassirers , Rudolph, E. et al. eds., Der Ort der Politik (Hamburg: Meiner): 48. 25 These words were composed as part of a circular intended for the Rector and staff of the university, as a reaction to the offer of a chair made to Cassirer by Frankfurt University. Warburg, A., Warum Hamburg den Philosophen Ernst Cassirer nicht verlieren darf (Draft with corrections from 21 August 1928), London, Archive of the Warburg Institute, WIA III MS 29.2.2.: 1-4. 26 Paul Bishop discovered a similarly fruitful potential in a comparison of the work of Cassirer and CG Jung, who also relied on Goethe s notion of the symbolic and proposed an account which displays striking affinities with the theory of images developed by Ludwig Klages. Strikingly, this comparison has also virtually never been undertaken, woth the exception of a few studies. Bishop, P. (2003) Analytical Psychology and Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Ernst Cassirer and Carl Jung , talk at St

John s College, Cambridge, given on 7th November 2003.

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27 Cassirer, E. (1944), Judaism and the modern political myths , in Verene (1979): 234. 28 Cf. Cassirer, T. (1981). As Barbara Besslich shows, Max Weber similarly criticised the ideological warfare or cultural war , in Weber's Der Sinn der Wertfreiheit der soziologischen und ökonomischen Wissenschaften . See Besslich (2000): 338. 29 He was drafted for Civil Service, and his work consisted of the reading of foreign newspapers. Gawronsky (1949): 23. 30 Cf. Geuss, R. (1996) Kultur, Bildung, Geist History and Theory, 35 (2): 151-164. 31 Cassirer (1916, 2nd ed. 2001) Freiheit und Form (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, Hamburg: Meiner). 32 Cassirer (2001): 343. 33 Cassirer (2001): 25. The reference is to Immanuel Kant (1795) Perpetual Peace. A Philosophical Sketch. It should be noted that Cassirer also emphasised that Kant s notion of a republic was defined by a procedure of law-giving, rather than the outward form of government itself. Cassirer (1928) Republican Constitution: 16. 34 Cassirer (1928): 23. 35 On the Fichte society see Besslich (2000): 8n22. 36 Cassirer (1916, 2001): 393. Interestingly, Aby Warburg expressed a similar thought when he wrote in 1915 that after the war he hoped from our Germany a reinvigoration of the categorical imperative, away from Langbehn and Chamberlain towards Kant and Fichte . Aby Warburg to Werner Weisbach, 3 April 1915, WIA III. 37 Mann, Th. (1918, 1983) Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, De Mendelssohn, P. ed., Gesammelte Werke in Einzelbänden (Frankfurt: Fischer): 32. 38 Felken (1994): 96. 39 Spengler, O. (1918, 3rd ed. 1923) Decline of the West (Vienna, Munich: C.H. Beck), v. I: 63-5. A copy of this edition can also be found in the library of the Warburg Institute, acquired in 1923. 40 However, in many social circles in Germany, including Aby Warburg and his friends, anti-English feelings also predominated over anti-French, largely fuelled by the hatred of English imperialism. Aby Warburg saw WWI as a temporary triumph of the enslavement of the world by England . Warburg, 7 May 1917, WIA, III. A further anglophobic stereotype, and also one famously furthered by Nietzsche, was that English philosophy was superficial. See, for example, Nietzsche s reference to the English psychologists , who have usefulness , forgetting , routine and finally error , all as the basis of a respect for values of which the higher man has hitherto been proud, as though it were a sort of privilege of mankind. Nietzsche, F. (1887, 1994) On the Genealogy of Morality, Ansell-Pearson, K. (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 12. By contrast, Cassirer would argue in 1931 that English intellectual traditions were admirable precisely because they had advanced the notion of individual rights, for example, whilst retaining Francis Bacon s demand for practical, or technical reason, expressed in the words: Activum et contemplativum res eadem sunt et quod in operando utilissimum id in scientia verissimum. (The active and the contemplative are the same thing and what proves most useful in practice is that which is also most true in science.) Cassirer, E. (1931) Deutschland und Westeuropa im Spiegel der Geistesgeschichte Inter-Nationes, Zeitschrift für die kulturellen Beziehungen Deutschlands zum Ausland, 1 (4) (October 1931): 83. 41 Spengler s expressions Ordensgeist and Wikingergeist referred to the tradition of the medieval German Ritterorden. 42 Spengler (1934): VII-VIII. 43 zur Erziehung fuer diesen Staat ... und nicht fuer einen weltfremden Humanismus. Spengler (1934): XI. 44 Spengler, O. (1919), Preußentum und Sozialismus (Munich 1919) in Spengler (1934): 86. 45 Krieg ist die ewige Form höhern menschlichen Daseins, und Staaten sind um des Krieges willen da; sie sind Ausdruck der Bereitschaft zum Kriege. DW, II, 55. See also Spengler s dictum on how to save Germany: In Bereitschaft sein ist alles , in Neue Formen der Weltpolitik (lecture, 1924), (in Oswald Spengler (1934): 157-185 (p.183). McCormick s work on Schmitt only contains two references to Spengler, and both emphasise Schmitt s opposition to Spengler s pessimism. Cf. McCormick, J.P. (1997) Carl Schmitt s Critique of Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 98, 45n41. McCormick criticises Herf for putting Spengler and Schmitt together in a group in a reductionist manner . 46 Spengler s notion of Literatengeschwätz echoes Heidegger s concept of Gerede and Schmitt s scorn for las clasas discutadores. 47 das pflanzenhafte Verbundensein mit dem Lande : DW, II, 439. As Cassirer recognised, Spengler s argument was foreshadowing Heidegger s notion of man s loss of primeval being and immediate relationship with the world. Cassirer (1995) (Nachlass) I: 137.

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48 DW, II, 516. 49 Spengler (1934): 14-15. 50 DW, II, 517. 51 Ibid., p. 519. 52 Cassirer (1928): 16. 53 DW, I, ch.II.2 54 See Cassirer s essay Spirit and Life in Contemporary Philosophy , in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, Schilpp ed. (Library of Living Philosophers, Evanston). 55 Cassirer, E. (1925), Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen (henceforth PSF), (v. II, Mythical Thought, 1925, Engl. transl. New Haven, 1953-57): 216-17. Cassirer is drawing on Ernest Kapp s Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik (Braunschweig 1877), which was influential in describing the use of the hand in combination with upright movement as the first technological advancement of man. 56 Technics is the tactics of life as a whole : Spengler (1931) Man and Technics (Munich: Beck): 7. 57 durch die Mittel faustischer Technik und Erfindung das Gewimmel der Menschheit zu einem Ganzen zu schweißen , DW, II, 24. For a conceptual history of the term Faustian , see Schwerte, H. (1962) Faust und das Faustische. Ein Kapitel deutscher Ideologie (Stuttgart: Klett). 58 For the coloured and I include the Russians in this group Faustian technology is no inner necessity. [it is] only a weapon in the battle against Faustian civilisation Machine technology ends with Faustian man and will one day be shattered and forgotten . Spengler (1931): 87-9. 59 Herf, J. (1994) Paradoxes of Cultural Pessimism. Spengler as a reactionary modernist in eds. Demandt and Farrenkopf eds., Der Fall Spengler (Köln: Böhlau): 106. 60 Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, Th. W. (1947) Dialektik der Aufklärung (Amsterdam: Querido): 71. Moreover, as Martin Jay observed, Horkheimer s Habilitationsschrift, The Origins of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History (1930) directly related the Renaissance view of science and technology to political domination. , Jay, M. (1973) The Dialectical Imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 (Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown): 257. 61 Hence the title of Cassirer s work Freedom and Form. 62 Cassirer s distinction between the different uses to which technology can be put is thus dialectical, similar to the one drawn by the early Marcuse between politicised technology and neutral technics . Cf. Marcuse, H. (1941) Some social implications of modern technology Douglas Kellner (ed.) (1998) Technology, War and Fascism. Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse (London and New York: Routledge), v. 1: pp. 39-67. 63 John Michael Krois quoting from Cassirer (1930) 'Form und Technik , in Krois (1979) Der Begriff des Mythos bei Ernst Cassirer , ed. Poser, H., Philosophie und Mythos (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter), www.uni-essen.de/sesam/natur/aufsatze/krois.html, accessed 4 May 2005. 64 Cf. Cassirer s history of the idea of individual rights, in Cassirer (1928): 1-14. The notion of the importance of the individual is traceable throughout Cassirer s philosophical writings. Cf. Cassirer (1902) Leibniz System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen (Marburg: Elwert), Cassirer (1927) Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner). 65DW, I, 141-3 66 DW, I,XV 67DW, I, 218-19 68 Cassirer, E. (1917, 2001) Zur Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie: erkenntnistheoretische Betrachtungen (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, Hamburg: Felix Meiner): 113. 69 PSF, III, 479. 70 For Spengler s views on entelechy, see DW, I, p.20. 71 Spengler on Leibniz reception of entelechy in comparison with Goethe s notion of form, cf. DW, v. II, p. 36. On the influence of Leibniz, see Boterman (2000): 127. 72 Cassirer, E. (1902, 1998), Leibniz System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen (Hamburg: Meiner): 416 18. 73 As a mathematician, Leibniz holds to ... the principle of thoroughgoing determination and complete predictability of Being as a metaphysician, he starts from the assumption of the free spontaneity of the I that takes all it possesses out of itself, free from external influences . Cassirer, E. (1931) Deutschland und Westeuropa im Spiegel der Geistesgeschichte , Inter-Nationes, Zeitschrift für die

kulturellen Beziehungen Deutschlands zum Ausland, 1 (4), October 1931: 84-5. 74 Cassirer (1995), Nachlass, I, 131. On Cassirer s Goethe reception, see Krois, J.M. (1995) 'Cassirer als Goethe-Interpret , Rudolph, E.et al. eds. (1995): 297-320.

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75DW, I,139. Cassirer, The Technique of Our Modern Political Myths in Verene (1979): 260. Spengler s thesis contained a reference to Dilthey s famous dictum, We explain nature, we understand psychical life . ( Die Natur erklären wir, das Seelenleben verstehen wir. ), in Dilthey, W. (1990) Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie [Gesammelte Schriften], 8th edn. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990), v. V: 144. 76 Cassirer (1995), 'Über Basisphänomene in Nachlass, I, 134-6. 77 DW, I, 141. 78 Cassirer s reference in PSF, III, 134. 79Cassirer (1928) Republican Constitution: 18. It was on the same day that the National Convent abolished French monarchy and established a republic in France, and subsequently, in occupied territories. Aby Warburg had used a similar term, that of symbolic pregnance . 80 Ich sah die Gegenwart den sich nahenden Weltkrieg in einem ganz andern Licht. ... das war der Typus einer historischen Zeitwende, die innerhalb eines großen historischen Organismus von genau abgrenzbarem Umfange einen biographisch seit Jahrhunderten vorbestimmten Platz hatte. DW, I, 65. 81 Cassirer s most important works on the Renaissance are Cassirer (1906) Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, vol. 1 (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer), Cassirer (1927) Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner), Cassirer (1932) Die Platonische Renaissance in England und die Schule von Cambridge (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner), and, with Paul Oskar Kristeller as co-editor, Cassirer (1948) The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). 82 Cassirer (1906), Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, v.1. Cf. Gay, P. (1967) The Social History of Ideas. Ernst Cassirer and After , Wolff, K.H. and Moore, B., eds. The Critical Spirit. Essays in Honour of Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press): 106-121, and Schwemmer, O. (1995), Cassirers Bild der Renaissance in ed. Rudolph, E. et al., Kulturkritik nach Ernst Cassirer: 255-291, (260). 83 Cassirer, E. (1931), Deutschland und Westeuropa im Spiegel der Geistesgeschichte , Inter-Nationes, Zeitschrift für die kulturellen Beziehungen Deutschlands zum Ausland 1(4): 84-85 (84). 84 Spengler argued that there was something profoundly Gothic in this anti-Gothic movement : DW, II, 347. 85 Cassirer (1946), The Myth of the State: 291. 86 Cassirer (1946), MoS: 291. 87 In 1922, Cassirer wrote to the Warburg Institute suggesting to give a talk with the title Zeit und Schicksal im mythischen Denken (Time and Destiny in mythical thought). Cassirer to Gertrud Bing, 29 August 1922, WIA III. Cassirer also wrote on mythical understanding of time at length in 1925, PSF, II, 117. Enno Rudolph claims that Cassirer s criticism of present political debates failed due to the fact that it remained unconnected to his theory of myth, in Rudolph (1995) 'Politische Mythen als Kulturphänomene nach Ernst Cassirer , Rudolph, E. et al. eds., Kulturkritik nach Ernst Cassirer (Hamburg: Meiner): 157. As it will become apparent, however, Cassirer s critique of Spengler is deeply connected with his theory of symbolic forms and with myth. 88 Spengler argued that the understanding of time in physics obviously does not relate to the area of life, of destiny, of animated historical time , a representative phantom for destiny. DW, I, 163-4. Like Cassirer, Aby Warburg also read Spengler s works in the context of astrology and mythical thinking. Cassirer thanked Warburg for having opened his eyes for the general problem of the intellectual structure of astrology . Cassirer to Warburg, 26 June 1921, WIA, III. For Warburg s interest in Spengler, see his list of books requested from his library in Hamburg to be sent to Baden-Baden, where he was working whilst taking the waters, including the remark: Unfortunately, I also need to have Oswald Spengler s Decline of the West , Warburg to the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek, 19 May 1925, WIA III. 89 PSF, I, 69. 90 PSF, III, p. 35. Cassirer also insisted that any attempt simply to transcend the field of form is doomed to failure . Ibid., p. 40. 91 Cassirer (1995), Nachlass, I, 62. 92 Cassirer (1946): 293. 93 Bollnow, O. and Ritter, F. (1929), ' Protocol of the Davos disputation between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger , Davoser Revue. Zeitschrift für Literatur, Wissenschaft, Kunst und Sport. 7 (15 April 1929), reprinted in Heidegger, M. (1973) Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Appendix, 4th ed. Frankfurt: Klostermann): 246-268. 94 Cassirer, 'Thomas Manns Goethe-Bild', draft, February 1940, GEN MSS 98, 914, envelope 198, and 915..

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95 'Was soll uns dieser kleinbürgerliche, provinzielle Goethe? ... menschlich blieb mir das Werk fremd.' Cassirer, 'Thomas Mann-Aufsatz', draft fragment for the Germanic Review, 1945, GEN MSS 98, 913, Envelope 173, p. 4. 96 Cassirer (1944) The Technique of Our Modern Political Myths , in Verene (1979): 262. 97 Ibid., p. 243/44. 98 Ibid., p. 244. 99 Nachlass, I, 244/5, and Cassirer, E., The concept of philosophy as a philosophical problem (1935), Verene (1979): 61. 100 Cf. Cassirer, E. (1935) The concept of philosophy as a philosophical problem , Verene (1979): 49-64 (59). 101Cassirer (1946): 3. 102 Cf. Aby Warburg, 7 May 1917: WWI is not a war of the machine but a war of the idea . WIA, III. 103 Captain Karl C. Teufel to Ernst Cassirer, 14 April 1945. Cassirer Papers, Beinecke archive, GEN MSS 98, Correspondence box 55. 104 As I have indicated, Spengler has been treated at best as a barometer of the changes in Thomas Mann s political allegiance from an unpolitical conservative to a supporter of the Weimar Republic. See Besslich, B. (2002) Faszination des Verfalls: Thomas Mann und Oswald Spengler (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag).