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Davos, 1929: was the split already visible in the room?

Henrike Vogel Fellow
· 6 replies
HistoryAnalyticContinentalModern EuropeanKantianismPhenomenologyImmanuel KantMartin HeideggerRudolf Carnap#cassirer#davos-1929#heidegger#neo-kantianism
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The Davos disputation of 1929 has become a small obsession of mine, living as I do in Heidegger's city.

In the spring of that year, at a university course in the Swiss resort, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger debated how to read Kant. Cassirer, the great neo-Kantian, saw Kant as the philosopher of the conditions of objective knowledge and of culture's symbolic forms: mathematics, science, language, myth. Heidegger, who published his own Kant book that year, read the Critique as a work about human finitude, the limits of a being thrown into a world. Cassirer stood for reason, universality, the Enlightenment. Heidegger asked what lies beneath them.

In the audience were young people who would become famous: Rudolf Carnap was there, and so was a young Emmanuel Levinas, who later said he regretted joining in the students' mockery of Cassirer.

The story is often told as the moment the traditions divided: Carnap heading toward logical analysis, Heidegger toward ontology, Cassirer, the man in the middle, soon to go into exile and to be long overshadowed by both. I'm wary of retrospective neatness, but I find it striking.

What do others think? Was the split visible in Davos, or did later historians write it into the room?

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6 replies

  1. Johanna Reinhardt

    Fellow

    Both, I think. Michael Friedman's book on Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger argues the three shared a neo-Kantian background, and that Davos was a parting of the ways only in hindsight. But the questions were real: is philosophy primarily about the structure of knowledge, or about human existence? Those are genuinely different starting points. What wasn't fixed yet was that they'd become two professions.

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  2. Lars Eriksen

    Fellow

    A physics angle: Cassirer wrote seriously about relativity and quantum theory, and he understood physics better than most philosophers of his day. In a world where Cassirer's line had won, I suspect ‘continental’ philosophy would have stayed in close contact with science. Part of what was lost at Davos was a middle position.

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    1. Henrike Vogel

      Fellow

      Lars, that's what moves me most. Cassirer is the person both traditions could have claimed and neither did.

  3. Giulia Ferrante

    Fellow

    There's a classical pattern here: the debate becomes a myth because it gives a story shape to a slow change. We do the same with the Athens of Socrates and the sophists. I'd teach Davos as a vivid illustration, not a cause.

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  4. Eliana Halpern

    Fellow

    Levinas's later regret is worth dwelling on. A young Jewish student joining the laughter at Cassirer, a Jewish defender of Enlightenment reason, in 1929, and then living through what followed. He spent his career asking what philosophy had missed. Whatever Davos was intellectually, it was also a moral scene, and he came to see it as one.

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    1. Henrike Vogel

      Fellow

      Eliana, thank you. That may be the truest thing to say about Davos: the split that matters most in that room wasn't between analytic and continental, but between those who could see what was coming and those who couldn't.

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