By Corey McCall
The reflections on method that I’m sharing here grew out of a paper that I presented at this year’s Central Division Meeting in February. I was part of a book session on Symbolic Forms for a New Humanity, a 2012 book by Drucilla Cornell and Keith Michael Panfilio in which they try to recover Ernst Cassirer’s work for a new generation as part of a broader project of putting Cassirer to work for this project of “a new humanity.” While my contribution focused on the role that political myths play in both Cassirer’s work and in Symbolic Forms for a New Humanity, here I want to develop some methodological thoughts that I used to frame my discussion of the book.
I claimed that we could best understand what the authors were doing in the book if we thought of their text in terms of philosophical salvage work, and I briefly contrasted this with a genealogical approach that seeks to reconstruct the significant events of Cassirer’s life and connect them with his work. This salvaging project takes up a thinker’s work in order to make connections with other philosophers and other concepts in order to open up new possibilities for thinking. Unlike a genealogical approach that employs the past to write a history of the present, salvage work looks toward the future.
Do we still need Cassirer today? And if so, why? These questions lie at the heart of Symbolic Forms for a New Humanity. Philosophers have long seen Cassirer as a footnote, a philosopher for a world that disappeared once Hitler came to power and replaced the promise of a German Enlightenment project with a German nightmare of destruction. Last of a literary and philosophical line extending back to figures such as Kant, Mendelssohn, Goethe, Schiller, and Hegel, Cassirer work stands as a melancholy reminder of, in Stefan Zweig’s phrase, “the world of yesterday.” In his reconstruction of the famous debate between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer in 1929, intellectual historian Peter E. Gordon relates in his book Continental Divide that this was the consensus among the intellectuals and students gathered to witness the event. In some ways, Cassirer’s reputation never recovered.
This is a shame, for Cassirer’s work is desperately needed now. Or at least this is the convincing case that Cornell and Panfilio make in their fascinating philosophical salvage work, which differs in important ways from other recent reminders of Cassirer’s legacy. Peter Gordon’s fascinating book Continental Divide: Cassirer, Heidegger, Davos (2010) follows the earlier work by philosopher of science Michael Friedman to trace the fault lines between contemporary Analytic and Continental philosophical traditions back to this fateful meeting between Cassirer and Heidegger in order to show what was lost when this figure of Enlightenment humanism was forgotten. That is, Gordon and Friedman are engaged in genealogical projects that prompt us to retrace our steps to determine how we got here, how contemporary philosophy became what it is, and how various possibilities for what philosophy might have become were foreclosed as a result. These are both valuable works of reconstruction, Gordon’s in intellectual history and Friedman’s in the history of twentieth century philosophy.
Symbolic Forms for a New Humanity does not engage in this work of genealogical reconstruction, though at times it may appear to be engaged in a similar task. Though the difference might appear subtle, what I’ve called this salvage work allows Cassirer’s work to resurface so that it can be reconsidered by a new generation. And this task is necessary because our situation bears remarkable similarities to the conditions that consigned Cassirer’s work to intellectual oblivion the first time. Cornell and Panfilio are urging Cassirer on us today because we desperately need his thought to guide us through these dark times.
Like genealogical projects, salvage work searches for the connections between a thinker and her time. Unlike genealogy, which focuses its critical gaze upon the various factors that led up to the present, salvage work focuses both on the thought and the unthought in a thinker’s work. Like genealogy, it discovers connections, but in addition it seeks to make new connections. It means thinking for the future as much as one thinks for the present. To take but one salient example among many from Symbolic Forms for a New Humanity, there is no evidence that Steve Biko ever read Cassirer’s writings, but by making the connections between them we can better see how the work of both men can continue to do critical work today and, hopefully, tomorrow. Genealogical work focuses on the present and asks how it became constituted in the specific ways that it did (and how it might have been otherwise), while salvage work looks from the past, through the present, and toward the future. In his final published essay “What is Enlightenment?” (1984) Michel Foucault claimed that Kant’s question about the nature of Enlightenment concerned the difference that today makes from yesterday, and this question oriented Kant’s entire project. Instead of asking what difference today makes with respect to yesterday, Cornell and Panfilio’s book asks the question “How can we work to make tomorrow different from today, and how do Cassirer’s writings further that aim?”
To be fair, the distinction I am drawing here between genealogy and salvage work may be little more than a matter of emphasis rather than an absolute difference. In his book Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (2012), Colin Koopman aptly characterizes Foucault’s various genealogical projects as critical attempts to problematize a concept or practice in order to make it explicit so that it could be rendered otherwise. “In Foucault’s hands, genealogy was part of a local critique of some of our moral practices, the effect of which was to problematize these practices in ways that opened them up for future transformation” (93). Clearly, neither approach would seek to determine the future, but they seek to open up possibilities differently. Foucault’s local critiques make explicit what had been merely implicit or incompletely seen. For example, his main task in Discipline and Punish is to show how various disciplinary techniques function to regulate bodies in various institutional contexts such as the prison and the school: he seeks to make these disciplinary technologies explicit through his critique. Cornell and Panfilio draw connections that were never realized by either Cassirer or Biko so that we might open up possibilities for thinking and acting anew.
Corey McCall is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Elmira College in Upstate New York. He works on issues in ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy and literature. He is the co-editor of Melville Among the Philosophers (Lexington, 2017) and the forthcoming edited volume Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience of Literature (Routledge, 2018).
