The symbolic form argument

For Cassirer, one central facet of Kant’s epistemic originality was that humans are not just receptors to external stimuli; we also act spontaneously and shape the world. We are epistemic world builders.Footnote ⁴ This forming or shaping process is achieved via symbolic thinking, particularly in language – Wilhelm von Humboldt being a key influence. Symbols, in Cassirer, largely do much of the legwork for Kant’s transcendental idealist method. Symbols are not part of a physical world; they rather dwell in “meanings” (understood functionally), which are distinct from metaphysically orientated notions of “being” or “nature” (understood as substance). For Cassirer, even the most basic physical sensation, we experience embodies a structuring symbolic component (Cassirer Reference Cassirer1970, 39). Cassirer notes here that these elements have often been confused, that is, functional meaning and symbol become erroneously embodied in being and natural substance claims.Footnote ⁵ There is a strong Cohenian influence here in Cassirer’s thinking.

As indicated above, underpinning this use of symbol is essentially a reading of Kant’s transcendental idealism. The sensible immediacy of experience is never for Cassirer grasped in itself; it is always mediated via symbols (Cassirer Reference Cassirer1996, 50). Symbols organise and give form to sensible intuitions and appearances. In this setting, the environment in which humans find themselves, natural or cultural, is not the terminus ad quem or end of the matter; it is rather a point of departure, that is, a terminus a quo. We cannot detach ourselves from the experienced sensible environment, but we are not confined by it. As Cassirer comments, “as little as the mind can ever in reality alienate itself from its basic form, so neither is it on the other hand ever completely bound to this basic form; it is not confined to this as by prison walls” (Cassirer Reference Cassirer1996, 50).

This latter point connects to what, for Cassirer, differentiates humans from other animals. Animals have signals to communicate, humans use symbols, and such symbols embody functional meanings. Signals are incitements prompting a learned reaction; symbols are much more indirect. They generate, as Cassirer puts it, a reflective “pause.” Animals do not have this world of symbolic meanings. The distinction in practice is not quite as tight as this; there is more of a gradual movement from signals to symbols and thought, but nonetheless for Cassirer, it is the symbolic capacity which truly differentiates the human world (Cassirer Reference Cassirer1970, 35). Cassirer’s thoughts, on this latter point, developed ideas from his Hamburg colleague Jacob von Uexküll – a theoretical biologist (see Cassirer Reference Cassirer1970, 24). There is thus a difference between organic reactions and uniquely human responses. In the first case, a direct and immediate reaction is given to an outward stimulus; in the second case, the answer is delayed for a moment. It is interrupted and framed by symbolic form (Cassirer Reference Cassirer1970, 24). The symbolic system is characterised by what Cassirer termed (as indicated) “a pause” in which we shape its significance. One important consequence is that “man constantly converses with himself via symbols, particularly in linguistic forms. He lives in the midst of imaginary emotions, in hopes and fears, in illusions and disillusions, in his fantasies and dreams” (Cassirer Reference Cassirer1996, 28; Cassirer Reference Cassirer1970, 25). Thus, humans are not so much rational animals as animale symbolicum.

Symbolic thought in humans is varied and labile. Furthermore, none of the symbolic structures are reducible to others. There is, therefore, an embedded functional pluralism of forms. Such multifarious forms lay at the heart of the philosophy of symbolic form.Footnote ⁶ It is worth underlining this latter point since there remains an unresolved debate (referred to in the introduction) at the heart of Cassirer scholarship between, on the one hand, the above epistemic avowal of a plurality of mutually irreducible symbolic forms, and, on the other hand, a unifying belief in a teleological or development hierarchy culminating in, what appears to be, the highest symbolic form of modern natural science.Footnote ⁷ This tension will reappear in different shapes within the current discussion.

Overall, Cassirer used the term “symbolic pregnance” to denote the saturation of human perception with symbolic forms. The main generic symbolic forms indicated by Cassirer are myth, religion, language, art, and natural science; the existence of more forms in, for example, history, politics, morality, or technology remains a question in Cassirer scholarship. In the Symbolic Form volumes, he refers to forms as the concrete production of Geist or the Energie des Geistes.Footnote ⁸

It is worth noting here that for Cassirer, philosophy itself is not seen as a symbolic form, it rather establishes, examines, and elucidates the transcendental conditions of symbolic forms and enunciates the different modalities of such forms. Whether Cassirer gave a clear account of the nature of philosophy remains again an open question.Footnote ⁹ Cassirer’s motif here is his creative extension of a transcendental method. The Kantian accent indicates that claims to objectivity in knowing are neither “ontological” nor “factual but… methodological” (Cassirer Reference Cassirer1969, 11). To claim ontological or substance, objectivity is to move back into classical metaphysics. To see such claims as methodological is accordingly to think in terms of a functional objectivity of meaning. The philosophy of symbolic form, as Cassirer put it, thus starts from the “presupposition that, if there is any definition of the nature or ‘essence’ of man, this definition can only be understood as a functional one, not a substantial one. We cannot define man by any inherent principle which constitutes his metaphysical essence” (Cassirer Reference Cassirer1970, 68). Functional objectivity, in this context, is defined via “relations, of operations, and actions” (Cassirer Reference Cassirer and Verene1979, 71).Footnote ¹⁰ Objectivity thus subsists functionally with reference to symbolic forms.

A key question asked here is to what extent does this (above) characterisation of philosophical method in Cassirer – as important as it is – logically give rise to any overt normative moral or political considerations? It is important to underline here the point that the core task of philosophical thinking, in the above context, is about persistently trying to grasp the conditions in which cultural symbols arise, function, and take shape. For Cassirer, this process implies a robust and comprehensive account of the history of ideas. In point, it is difficult to think of any work by Cassirer where ideas are not set within in a wide-ranging historical narrative. Philosophy must, therefore, “attempt to comprehend this existence [of symbolic form] as soon as it becomes present in the special disciplines in their richest abundance” (Cassirer Reference Cassirer and Verene1979, 56). For Cassirer, Kant is the philosopher, par excellence, who shines the strongest light on this understanding of philosophy.Footnote ¹¹ The Kantian method, in Cassirer’s reading, always “wants to lead us back into the depths of our own reason and wants to teach us to know and to grasp its presuppositions and its basic strengths” (Cassirer Reference Cassirer and Verene1979, 54-5).Footnote ¹²

The important point to underline here is that, for Cassirer, if politics and morality are understood in the context of symbolic forms, then they are shaped by historically located cultural forces which need to be painstakingly excavated to understand their diverse presuppositions – almost in terms of a phenomenology of spirit. In itself, this more Hegelian and/or hermeneutically orientated approach – which underpins one important reading of the philosophy of symbolic form – makes it much harder (although not impossible) to invoke overtly prescriptive universalist accounts of ethics or politics. Philosophy is rather focused, in terms of method, on understanding genealogically the development of what is the case rather than what ought to be. The latter argument – entrenched in historical unravelling of symbolic forms – accentuates, once more, the deep tension in Cassirer’s argument, that is, between a plurality of irreducible symbolic forms (as historically revealed), set against a teleological or progressive hierarchy of forms culminating in modernity. This tension impacts on the understanding of both morality and politics.

Three arguments

The discussion now turns to three arguments that offer some potential guidance on Cassirer’s political and moral thought. Each argument is shown to be misleading or uncertain with regard to any clear account of political beliefs. The question of their relation to the philosophy of symbolic form argumentation will be raised within each discussion and shown to be affected by the underlying tension referred to earlier. The first argument is the most obvious and focuses on the text – The Myth of the State – which has often been considered to be a more overt normative account of his views on politics. The second argument examines the question of classical German humanism and its implications. The third argument focuses on Cassirer’s use of the natural law and contract tradition in defending the Weimar Republic.

The Myth of the State

Aside from a comparatively small number of articles and lectures, one iconic political work stands out in Cassirer’s oeuvres. This is his posthumously published The Myth of the State. There are standard readings of this text. One prevalent one is that whilst in the USA, in the early 1940s, Cassirer was frequently asked by colleagues to explain what had happened culturally in Germany under National Socialism. Other German emigres such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Voegelin, Arendt, or Reich had already begun to offer their own accounts in the same period. In the few years before he died in 1945, Cassirer worked on the Myth text. For some critics, it is questionable as to whether it was fully finished or polished; Cassirer died a couple of days after the first draft of the MS was written, and he never saw it through to revision or publication.

The gist of the more standard interpretation of the Myth text was, in essence, Cassirer trying to explain both to himself and others what exactly was happening in Germany under National Socialism. A difference of view here concerns whether the text embodied a break in Cassirer’s overall perspective, or whether it was continuous with his earlier work. One key reason for this difference of opinion lies in a tension with regard to the way in which the concept of myth is deployed. This refers back to the point discussed earlier. The core of the tension concerns the idea that there is, on the one hand, a teleological development from myth, via religion, towards modernity, that is, an evolution of human language and expression towards science, enlightenment and a universal morality. In this context, myth was envisaged as a meaningful, but earlier stage in human maturation. Hence, the symbolic realm of modernity is viewed as an augmentation of human understanding. In sum, this interpretation invokes a symbolic hierarchy of forms. This argument also envisages the teleological advance of practical reason and ethics into the modern era. Thus, as Elisabeth Widmer has recently argued, in The Myth of the State, “Cassirer adopts a normatively engaged stance, aiming to critique cultural theories that contributed to the rise of fascism. He does not simply retrospectively analyze cultural progress, but actively condemns theories that paved the way for fascist ideologies.” (Widmer Reference Widmer2024b, 465). Kantian ethics is, therefore, envisaged as the advanced expression of a universal ethical consciousness, superseding earlier ethical beliefs in the hierarchy of forms.

The alternative reading of the text – which initiates the tension – is that Cassirer seems, at points, to posit the approximate equivalent epistemic status of myth, religion, and science as symbolic modes of human understanding. This latter argument lies at the centre of Cassirer’s subsequent reputation for “epistemic pluralism.”Footnote ¹³ One aspect of this latter reading concerns the way we interpret Cassirer’s conspicuous acknowledgment of the potent credibility and irreducibility of myth as a mode of understanding and not simply dismissing it as an intrinsically primitive or earlier mode of thought. Mythic symbols, therefore, exemplified another valid mode of functional meaning. In other words, apart from the fact for Cassirer that there is no given or real metaphysical substance, there is also no obvious symbolic hierarchy leading to modernity; conversely, there are simply paradigmatic historical changes in symbolic observance and usage. Mythical consciousness is simply one of these.

One critic of this latter dimension, Jürgen Habermas, consequently argued that each symbolic form proposes a truth from its own perspective, consequently, “science forfeits its privileged claim to truth.” For Habermas, philosophy in Cassirer had consequently reflexively limited all claims to truth. Such a position, he contends, proved lethal because Cassirer could not theorise his own discursive position (Habermas Reference Habermas1996, 6-7). Even apart from this discursive lethality, this ostensive position in Cassirer is further undercut by the curious interwoven status of myth and rational modernity in The Myth of the State text – particularly in the closing sections of the book.

Yet, even within the frame of “epistemic pluralism,” it is still possible to argue that there is a difference between myth and rational modernity, in that mythical thought is, quite literally, a mode of seeing and perceiving the world. Yet, mythical thought, per se, never senses itself as a “mode of seeing.” The “seeing” of myth’s character is rather a function of modernity and critical rationalism. In effect, critical rationality can be aware of the way symbols function, that is, via systematic functionalisation of all symbolic action. However, as plausible as this counter-argument is it still invokes, in a slightly different format, an assumption of a “symbolic hierarchy,” that is raising once again the first reading of the paradoxical tension; in this latter account, rationality and modernity claim a pre-eminence over, for example, myth as a form of understanding.

The above apparent tension over myth was unwittingly and puzzlingly highlighted in Cassirer’s recognition, by the later 1930s that mythical thought had returned reinvigorated in the midst of European modernity.Footnote ¹⁴ For example, he comments in the Myth text, “Perhaps the most important and alarming feature… of modern political thought is the appearance of a new power: the power of mythical thought,” and further, “the preponderance of mythical thought over rational thought in some of our political systems.” Such novel mythical thinking in fact seemed to be gaining the upper hand in Germany in the 1930s. Rational thought, in this context, was now being (in Cassirer’s words) “deranged” by myth, although he also says that in modern myth, we have incongruously a rational manipulation of the irrational – an ominous blending of modern rationality with myth – vis-à-vis National Socialism (see Cassirer Reference Cassirer1969, 3). This incongruous blending of rationality with irrationality both undermines the idea of a symbolic progressive and/or teleological hierarchy, as well as the argument for the ostensible irreducibility of forms, exemplified in epistemic pluralism.

Aside from the essentially descriptive and explanatory features of the Myth text, in terms of a general history of political thought, another important question arises here. Was Cassirer actually presenting the reader with any clear normative set of political beliefs, which might be related to his neo-Kantianism, as some have indeed argued (see Widmer Reference Widmer2024b)? One can undoubtedly sense intellectual and moral discomfort with certain ideas and events, but surely nothing approaching a clearly articulated and systematic normative argument. This absence was something that Leo Strauss – notably a profound admirer of Cohen – also pointed out forcibly in his critical review of Cassirer’s text (Strauss Reference Strauss1947, 127-8). We thus have from one perspective – in Cassirer’s Myth text – a somewhat loosely configured history of Western political ideas, which underpin certain conceptions of the state and politics, some of which, for example, Gobineau, Carlyle, and Spengler, later in the text, appear to underwrite the backdrop to National Socialism.

Thus, in spite of the historical and cognitive utility of the book as a study of certain political thinkers, does this tell us directly anything definite about Cassirer’s neo-Kantian moral or political understanding? Even if we accepted the idea of an underlying Kantian-inspired moral critique of National Socialism, as argued for example by Widmer (Reference Widmer2024b), it would still be hard to pin down such a sophisticated ethics in the text. My conclusion, therefore, is that the Myth text does not provide us with any such worked-out moral or political understanding. Cassirer’s sophisticated neo-Kantian philosophy of symbolic form thus appears, from one perspective, disjointed, or minimally, in tension with any overt normative consideration of politics.Footnote ¹⁵ At most, the Myth text provides a prolonged expository account of the historical development of certain political forms and their idiosyncratic manifestations. This is precisely the point made by some Cassirer scholars, namely, it is a mistake to think of Cassirer as a normatively grounded political philosopher.Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, unless prepared to engage in speculative interpretation of the Myth text, all one is actually left with, aside from the final perplexing sections of the book, is a series of genealogical and historical reflections on political ideas since the ancient Greeks.

Classical German humanism

A second argument focuses on classical German humanism; this can be condensed into one term, Bildung, something which forms a complex backdrop to Cassirer’s work. Bildung is a wide-ranging concept with strong literary, poetic, and artistic connotations, which also relates closely to the work of Cassirer’s cultural hero Goethe (see Cassirer Reference Cassirer1963). Schiller, Lessing, Herder, Hegel, and Humboldt likewise all facilitated the wider dissemination of this idea, particularly in relation to the development of the human and historical sciences (Humboldt Reference Humboldt1969). Hence, Bildung also formed a part of the groundwork for the opulent tradition of Geisteswissenschaften. It was in all essentials the conceptual medium in which the cultural sciences flourished in German literature, philosophy, and historical scholarship. For Herder, for example, it connoted the progressive growth of human capacities and abilities through culture. As Hans-Georg Gadamer remarked, “more than anyone,” it was Herder who developed the “new ideal of ‘cultivating the human’ (Bildung zum Menschen) and thus prepared the ground for the growth of the historical sciences in the nineteenth century. The concept of self-formation, education, or cultivation (Bildung), which became supremely important at the time, was perhaps the greatest idea of the eighteenth century, and it is this concept which is the atmosphere breathed by the human sciences of the nineteenth century” (Gadamer Reference Gadamer2004, 8). Kultur and Bildung thus formed an interlaced inheritance. It is this classic humanism, integral with Bildung that constitutes the general philosophic medium within which Cassirer develops his philosophy of historically evolving symbolic forms.

The nature of Bildung in both Cassirer and German thought is beyond the scope of this essay. However, it is important to underline certain facets of it within Cassirer’s work (see Cassirer Reference Cassirer1966, 22-4). Thus, the character of philosophy itself for Cassirer and the associated understanding of history exemplify aspects of Bildung, that is, denoting a development of culture. It is even feasible to characterise the whole sequence of Cassirer’s symbolic forms, from myth and religion to modern rationality and science, as a gradual historical Bildung. The important point to underline here is that the key task of philosophical thinking is then about persistently trying to grasp the historical conditions within which such cultural symbols arise and take shape within myths, religious systems, and the like. In itself, this is not an overtly normative enterprise per se. It is, conversely, rather more of a hermeneutic process attentive to the historical disclosure of cultural symbolic forms. Such a position is consistent, for example, with an epistemic pluralism of forms.

There are, however, aspects of this latter process, which have potential normative attributes. Cassirer, for example, argued that the “pause” (discussed earlier), whereby the human subject gains a subtle distance, prior to giving symbolic form or shape to experience, also entails a certain understanding of freedom – although again Cassirer’s never systematically developed this view. Accordingly, we are free in the sense that we can become self-aware that we are in a process of symbolic formation.Footnote ¹⁷ This argument is linked to one aspect of Kantian practical reason. Despite equating practical reason with a conception of freedom, such freedom does not connect straightforwardly with morality, particularly from the epistemic pluralist perspective. Thus, the Kantian direct equation of morality with freedom is not so obviously articulated in Cassirer’s symbolic work. As one scholar puts it, freedom in Cassirer basically results from a “greater lucidity” concerning our cultural location (see Pollok Reference Pollok and Truwant2021, 24). Henceforth, each act of symbolic forming is made within a “normative space” (see Gregory Reference Gregory, Filieri and Pollok2021, 168). This space remains an accessible “possibility,” that is, an openness without any necessary normative content. Hence, the argument on freedom or self-liberation focuses on our self-awareness of our symbolic capacities. Hence, we can liberate ourselves from certain symbols via fresh symbolic action.

Cassirer’s argument here likewise embodies his rejection of Heidegger’s existential philosophy. The central feature of this latter philosophy, for Cassirer, is that humans are “thrown” (Geworfenheit) existentially into the inevitabilities of finitude, anxiety, history, temporality, and ultimately death. All such Heideggerian existential assertions, for Cassirer, are conversely adjustable via our rational symbolic capacity, and we are indeed fundamentally free to do this. Hence “existence,” per se, can only be grasped in symbolic terms, implying then a “normative space.” Thus, Heidegger’s finitude, for Cassirer, does not imply any finality or closure; moreover, the infinite is not constrained by finitude.Footnote ¹⁸ Freedom, in this latter argument, is an open-ended task, neither a metaphysical state of being nor a morally directed concept (see Gregory Reference Gregory, Filieri and Pollok2021 175, Matherne Reference Matherne2021, 38-9). Cassirer summarised the gist of this argument in the final paragraph of his Essay on Man, “Human culture taken as a whole may be described as the process of man’s progressive self-liberation. Language, art, religion, science, are various phases of this process. In all of them, man discovers and proves a new power – the power to build up a world of his own, an ‘ideal’ world” (Cassirer Reference Cassirer1970, 228). One of these ideal worlds could be a moral world.

As indicated, therefore, one implication of this evolving Bildung argument is a potential appeal to morality. There are, however, problems here not least that Cassirer never developed a full systematic account of ethics. Furthermore, as already argued, there is a tension in Cassirer’s symbolic argument that remains unresolved. Thus, on one count, some critics have suggested that Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic form has no place for any explicitly normative account of ethics; if anything the approach to ethics is always genealogical and hermeneutical (see Kuhn Reference Kuhn1945, Blanshard Reference Blanshard1945 or Strauss Reference Strauss1947). Ethical consciousness, in this context, it seen to mutate historically. Ethical modification is concomitant with symbolic cultural change. Furthermore, Cassirer clearly denies that there is any metaphysical or substantive dimension to ethics as such. Ethics fulfils a cultural function. In myth, for example, there is no overt place for ethical deliberation as such. Right conduct is simply encased within the immediate presence of the symbolic mythic framework (see Cassirer Reference Cassirer1955b, 235). In religious symbolism, ethics is wholly entwined with the acceptance of, or conscious submission to, theological or metaphysical symbols of God(s) or spirit(s). In modernity, Cassirer sees, minimally, the possibility of a more unified rational grasp of ethics, although still understood as a symbolic cultural function. In sum there is an historically or anthropologically relativistic grain to Cassirer’s understanding of morality as part of a Bildung of cultures and symbolic forms. Ethics cannot be understood apart from the intrinsically human symbolic ability, namely, the ability to create distinct moral worlds at different moments of history. Some critics have consequently found Cassirer’s views here challenging in terms of their potential moral contingency, epistemic pluralism, and scepticism concerning claims to moral universalism.

Nevertheless, another dimension of the implicit tension (discussed earlier) developed in the later 1930s. Thus, in 1935 – shortly after escaping Germany – in giving his inaugural professorial address at Göteborg University in Sweden, Cassirer focused uncharacteristically on the question of ethics, in the context of reflecting upon the work of the Swedish philosopher Axel Hägerström (see Cassirer Reference Cassirer and Recki2005). He clearly begins to develop a more overt teleological conception of ethics which utilises a Kantian-orientated idea of practical reason. There are (as argued) glimmerings of this perspective in the idea of a “symbolic hierarchy” of forms. Reason thus develops, more or less consistently, through different forms culminating ultimately in modernity and universalism.Footnote ¹⁹ This “self-renewing work” of reason is envisaged as rooted in a conception of an evolving teleological understanding.

Consequently, by the 1940s, Cassirer is arguing that this developmental understanding of reason culminates in a form of universal moral order. This argument is largely a richer rearticulation of the symbolic hierarchy argument, expressed via the medium of a universalistic ethics. This is not a religious or metaphysical conception but is conversely a secular expression of the telos of practical reason itself. Natural law, in this setting, establishes a functional objectivity – neither a substantive nor metaphysical objectivity – which emerges out of rational language usage (see Krois Reference Krois1987, 156-7). Such moral norms are then seen as universally valid via the apparent canons of practical reasoning. The universal human capacity for practical reasoning is seen to lay a continuous active responsibility upon humanity. This latter argument builds upon Kant’s conception of reason, morality, and freedom blended within an overarching universal “empire of ends.” Cassirer came to believe, certainly by the 1940s, and following the lead in this case of Albert Schweitzer, that philosophy as a discipline of reason now had a universal moral duty to humanity to highlight and articulate this cosmopolitan task (see Cassirer Reference Cassirer and Verene1979, 59). Cassirer came to believe that philosophy overall, in the academy, had become far too cloistered, inward-looking, and precious about its academic status and had neglected its moral and educative duty to humanity.Footnote ²⁰

As mentioned earlier, Elisabeth Widmer, using Cassirer’s work on Hägerström, has argued that we should in fact, combine Cassirer’s symbolic functional focus on the diversity of contingent historical facts with his a priori Kantian universalism. Hence, she argues that Cassirer’s ethical position can be efficaciously described as “contingent universalism.” Contingent universalism argues that “ethical deliberation involves an evaluative a priori universality”; however, such a priori universality “relies on a historically informed concept relative to changing standards of truth.” Ethical objectivity thus comprises both “an a priori universality, enabling objective ethical evaluations of developments and belief systems, and culturally relative moral truth standards, underscoring the teleological development of various conceptualizations of universality over time.” (Widmer Reference Widmer2024b, 457). As powerful and attractive as this argument is, I am still not convinced that it does justice to the depth of the epistemic tensions within Cassirer’s overall argumentation.

Essentially, therefore, ethics, in Cassirer’s work, can be viewed in two different modes, a duality which embodies the same underlying tension of the symbolic form argument. The first is the genealogical and historical format with its attendant contingency anxieties. This reflects one reading of the hermeneutic dynamic of the symbolic form argument. The arguments of epistemic pluralism and the epistemic equivalence of symbolic forms can also be comfortably embedded here. The alternative, more Kantian inflection, envisions an evolving symbolic hierarchy and a slow inexorable teleological advancement towards reason, science, enlightenment, and moral universalism. In sum, the Bildung argument contains a number of possible renderings of the symbolic form argument and consequent understandings of both freedom and morality.

Finally, despite being an immensely productive and rich idea, Bildung is almost too productive. Thus, as to how much precise guidance it provides for grasping Cassirer’s political or moral views remains unclear. At a more general level, its invocation in relation to freedom, ethics, and politics might even be described as philosophically promiscuous. Early Bildung ideas tied in closely with the aesthetic, cultural, and emotive development of the individual, as in the Bildungsromans literary tradition of Goethe, amongst later writers. In Humboldt, Bildung connects with a more aesthetically orientated and somewhat unexpected libertarian individualism. In Herder, it subsists within an initially innocuous but nascent cultural nationalism. In Hegel, the pivotal Bildung would be that of Absolute Spirit, which entails the metaphysical annulment of the singular human individual. One might even characterise Marx’s conception of both history, freedom, and the eventual maturity of humanity in communism as a materialistically orientated Bildung. Thus, exactly how useful it is for understanding Cassirer’s precise political or moral perspective remains a moot point.

Contract, rights, and the Weimar Republic

The third argument takes up the theme of natural law and rights and is a more focused articulation of the symbolic hierarchy perspective. Thus, in responding to Weimar critics who viewed liberal and democratic constitutionalism as an alien import, Cassirer analyses the origin of these purportedly “alien” ideas showing them, in effect, to be wholly native to German moral and political traditions (see Cassirer Reference Cassirer1969, 168). Such a tradition, he argues can be traced back to Leibniz, Wolff and most importantly Kant. It was thus no coincidence for Cassirer that the publications of Kant’s first and second Critiques (in 1781 and 1788, respectively), were followed by the August 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. For Cassirer, such events and ideas can be “connected to each other through their inner meaning, through the order of ideas” (Cassirer Reference Cassirer2018, 4). Bringing together a number of German-related literary and philosophical sources and placing a heavy emphasis on Georg Jellinek’s juristic constitutionalist work, Cassirer argues that such thoughts can clearly be found within the German philosophical, political, and legal traditions (Cassirer Reference Cassirer and Verene1979, 221-2). He looks back, for example, to Leibniz’s belief in the inalienable rights of man (Cassirer Reference Cassirer2018, 7-8; see also Cassirer Reference Cassirer1951, ch.VI). Similar intellectual motifs are identified with Christian Wolff. In a broad perspective, Cassirer argues that ideas, such as the inalienable rights of man, appear virtually simultaneously in French, American, British, and German political and legal traditions. This constitutes, in large measure, what was referred to in the previous section as the emergent teleology of practical reason. For Cassirer, all those who partook at the time “were convinced that these principles are in a sense as old as the world. The knowledge of the indefeasible rights of man was regarded as a ‘common notion’” (Cassirer Reference Cassirer and Verene1979, 221, Cassirer Reference Cassirer1969, 79). It might almost be considered an Axial moment of sorts. He calls this, for example, “a remarkable migration and transformation of ideas” (Cassirer Reference Cassirer2018, 11). Furthermore, it is humanity as a whole that is both the functional originator and beneficiary of such ideas, moving beyond any idea of national borders.

For Cassirer, such ideas did take on slightly different shapes in different political settings. In Kant, they focused on a rationalist commitment to a republican constitution and a unique version of cosmopolitanism. Cassirer likewise describes contractualism as part of a process of rational demythologisation (Cassirer Reference Cassirer1969, 306). Kant, for Cassirer, thus moves the whole debate on contract and rights into a largely demythologised realm. Hence, underlying the melee of empirical-historical detail of the American and French revolutions, Cassirer claims that Kant identified a core of significant ideas, which embodied the evolving moral tendencies of practical reason within humanity (Cassirer Reference Cassirer2018, 15). Cassirer quotes Kant from Der Streit der Fakultäten (1789) suggesting that the French Revolution “uncovered a mechanism and capacity in human nature that strives for betterment” (see Cassirer Reference Cassirer2018, 16). Cassirer notes that such sentences “present the purest, clearest of that kind of symbolic observation that characterize the… philosophical idealist Kant.” Cassirer concludes with the observation that “the idea of a republican constitution…is in no way a foreigner, less to say an external invader in German intellectual history, but that it in fact grew from its own soil and was nourished… through the strength of idealist philosophy” (see Cassirer Reference Cassirer2018, 16). This, he argued, is not just an abstract philosophical conclusion, it also provides an intellectual ballast and moral support for the political structures of the Weimar Republic. Thus, the philosophy of symbolic form seemingly provided for Cassirer an optimistic imprimatur to the Weimar Republic, its liberal constitutionalist arrangements and its basic values (see Coskun Reference Coskun2007, 153).

How accurate is Cassirer’s reading of German thought and practice in terms of this contract argument? Weimar-based constitutionalist liberalism was, in fact, quite contrary to Cassirer’s reading (as outlined above) and quite unlike its European counterparts. It was predominantly an idiosyncratic state-based liberalism and markedly different to both Britain and the USA (Leonard Reference Leonard, Freeden, Fernández-Sebastián and Leonard2019, 82-3). In effect, in this argument, politics entailed the state. The idea of a minimal or limited state understanding of the political – often associated with certain classic readings of liberalism – did not really figure much at all in mainstream nineteenth century German political or legal thought. The state entailed a centralised powerful executive, embedded for many jurists within monarchy. Despite any constitutionalist trimmings, the reality of state power was embodied in a centralised Kaiserreich, until of course, its abrupt collapse in 1918. Neither democratic parliamentary oversight nor constitutionalist liberal beliefs significantly affected this centralised power dynamic.Footnote ²¹ Policy, in this context, was largely directed and legitimated via this central executive power, particularly with regard to Bismarck.Footnote ²² Parliament was thus far less effective in terms of real political power, certainly up to 1918. Hence, the parliamentary system of England, for example, was frequently regarded with either contempt or mistrust by many German jurists as potentially undermining the necessary centralised state power of the Kaiserreich.Footnote ²³

The same general theme underpinned the German Rechtstaat tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The rule of law, in this setting, was seen as created and maintained by the state itself, the state understood as a centralised executive power providing the necessary cohesion for civil society. Law was accordingly always an emanation from the state, something inherently inimical to the natural law and natural rights tradition. If there was to be a limitation on the state – as Cassirer’s favoured jurist Georg Jellinek argued – it had to be self-instituted by the state itself, that is, via auto-limitation (see Koskenniemi Reference Koskenniemi2004, 204-6, also Jellinek Reference Jellinek1901). The state, in Jellinek’s argument, was even envisaged as Kantian fictive person controlling its own inclinations via reasoned auto-limitation. Rights were necessarily part of this auto-limitation thesis. Rights against a state, for Jellinek, could therefore only be those legitimised by the state. This state-centrism percolated into other important juristic concepts. Sovereignty was again largely embodied in the state executive and the authority and capacity to make decisions. Even for a more liberal-inclined theorist, such as Jellinek, sovereignty entailed the state’s own capacity for self-limitation. Thus, any right-based limitation on sovereignty had to be self-defined via sovereignty.Footnote ²⁴ Hence, the sovereignty of the state, for many German jurists, stood above or outside political parties and ideological factions. Consequently, neither democracy nor parliament impinged on the real authority, power and sovereignty of the state. In fact, the distrust for Parliaments, liberalism, and democracy, which plagued German politics up to and beyond the Weimar period, had its roots in this very same juristic state tradition.

Consequently, Cassirer’s idiosyncratic appeal to the wider European (in fact, cosmopolitan) natural rights, natural law, and contract tradition looks totally out of kilter with actual German political and legal thought of his time, certainly up to 1945. Thus, Cassirer, in his Hamburg address on the Weimar constitution, illicitly metamorphosed the complexities of German history into a buoyant, largely imaginary, history of German philosophy, culminating in Kant. However, the Weimar Republic, contrary to Cassirer, was more of a transient hiatus in an otherwise continuous juristic tradition. Rights and laws, in this German context, had to be formulated, instituted and maintained within the frame of the legal science of the state.Footnote ²⁵ Hence, Cassirer’s defence of Weimar, via the contract and natural law tradition, looks noticeably alien to the German historical, legal, and political landscape of the time.Footnote ²⁶

One further related question, concerning Cassirer’s commitment to contractualism and natural rights, needs to be briefly considered. Were contractualism and natural rights necessarily linked to the wider European liberal tradition, and further did such contractualism provide any insight into Cassirer’s political beliefs? If there were such a link to liberalism what would this have meant in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany? Liberalism in Germany during this period embodied divergent perspectives. As a political movement, in the German states of the time, liberalism dates approximately from the 1830s and it took a number of ideological shapes. This was particularly the case after the 1848 European revolutions (Leonard Reference Leonard, Freeden, Fernández-Sebastián and Leonard2019, 90). However, subsequently the massive traumas of German nation-state-building in the 1860s and 1870s, Bismarck’s subtle but forceful authoritarian stance, accelerated industrial expansion, the convoluted intense debates over German imperial enlargement, the rise of extreme Völkisch nationalism, the later challenge of war in 1914, defeat, Versailles, and then the formation of the Weimar Republic in 1918, did not exactly settle liberal beliefs. These diverse social ruptures produced different liberal factions.

Two significant liberal factions were national liberalism and a progressive liberalism (Leonard Reference Leonard, Freeden, Fernández-Sebastián and Leonard2019, 83). The latter was the precursor of the Deutsche Demokratia Partei that Cassirer (from hearsay evidence) may well have supported in the Weimar period. The national liberal faction was much more deeply grounded in what, at the time, was referred to as a Manchester liberalism (Manchesterliberalismus), a more trenchant laissez-faire form of liberal political economy, which was oddly far more inclined to work with Bismarck’s authoritarianism. It was likewise deeply uncomfortable with any social reform policies (the social question), other than those fostered by Bismarck for strategic motives, namely, to sideline the SPD, trades unions, and social reform movements. However, German liberalism, between 1870 and 1914, remained in large measure squeezed between, on the one hand, the Marxist-orientated SPD (which incongruously had embraced representational democracy much more systemically than liberalism), and, on the other hand, the largely anti-democratic, conservative, nationalist, authoritarian, militaristically inclined forces of the Prussian Junkerdom, combined with the owners of heavy industry. This scenario has consequently led some commentators to remark on the deep endemic weakness of German liberalism at the time, comparative to other European societies, or more generally, what one German historian refers to as the virtual “absence of a strong tradition of liberal political thought” (see Vorländer Reference Vorländer and Meadowcroft1996, 102). The liberalism that existed in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany was thus embedded in a broadly illiberal politics (see Sheehan Reference Sheehan1978).

Finally, one domain which is propitious for understanding something of Cassirer’s thought in the 1920s is the ideological compound of social liberalism (or liberal socialism), something that was present in France, Italy, and Britain in the same period up to 1914 (see Freeden Reference Freeden1978; Vincent and Plant Reference Vincent and Plant1984; Simhony and Weinstein Reference Simhony and Weinstein2001). In Germany, it glimmered somewhat forlornly during the early years of the Weimar Republic amongst a grouping of progressive liberals. However, it is also worth noting that this form of social liberalism was atypical and opposed by others within German national liberalism (see Leonard Reference Leonard, Freeden, Fernández-Sebastián and Leonard2019, 88). The social liberal compound also has some potential affinities with the way social democracy developed in Germany in the post-1945 era.

Social liberalism, very roughly stated, is the adjustment of more classical liberal motifs with themes drawn from democratic socialism.Footnote ²⁷ The term social liberal might also be a useful compound to speak of, for example, Hermann Cohen or even Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein’s own revisionism was, for example, given ideological heft via his direct contact in London with the British Fabian socialists and Edwardian social liberals in the late 1890s. Furthermore, as Widmer has noted, some of Marburg writers, such as Lange, began their own careers as progressive liberals (Widmer Reference Widmer2024a, 120). Furthermore, Cohen may well have been sympathetic to a progressive social liberalism.Footnote ²⁸ My general conclusion here would, therefore, be that if there is a glimmer of an ideological dimension to Cassirer’s neo-Kantian political thought, the most likely candidate is the compound of social liberalism, although its political impact was minimal.

Left-Kantianism

The discussion now turns briefly to the idea of left-Kantianism. However, before investigating this issue, the term Kantianism itself needs a very brief explication: was there for Cassirer, or is there, even today, a consistent or clear set of philosophical beliefs constituting Kantianism? In a late retrospective essay, Cassirer had his own explicit answer to this question, remarking that the “back to Kant” movement largely coincided with his student years in Berlin. Yet, he continues, the movement nonetheless contained “the germs of radical dissension.” Cassirer continues “Nearly all the philosophical schools referred to Kant and appealed to his authority, but there was never a clear and unambiguous way of interpreting his fundamental doctrines. There was an empiristic view of the Kantian system side by side with a rationalistic view; there was a metaphysical conception by side with a strict phenomenalism, nay a strict scepticism; there was ‘realistic’ explanation in contradistinction seemed to another that seemed to lead to mere ‘subjective idealism’. It was extremely difficult to find one’s bearing in this mass of opposite interpretations” (Cassirer Reference Cassirer1943, 221; see also Cassirer Reference Cassirer2006). This is not dissimilar to today – plus ça change. Finally, it was unexpectedly the lectures of the maverick sociological theorist, Georg Simmel, which pointed Cassirer towards Kant and indeed Cohen’s work. Although Cohen himself, as Cassirer noted, was hardly conventionally Kantian (Cassirer Reference Cassirer1943, 225-6). Yet again, what is conventional Kantianism?

A closely related issue concerns the political complexion of neo-Kantianism in Germany. In the more recent Anglo-American setting, certainly since the 1970s, neo-Kantianism has been commonly associated – seemingly unproblematically – with some form of liberalism. Yet Kant’s relation to liberalism remains at best ambiguous. Liberalism was not a political stance in Europe until minimally the early 1800s (in fact post-1812) and not in Germany till the post-1830s period.Footnote ²⁹ Kant’s own overt commitment was ideally to a form of republicanism and although this is a separate debate, republicanism itself has been, and still is in many quarters, explicitly hostile to both liberalism and indeed socialism. Furthermore, there were clearly German neo-Kantians with what might loosely be described as conservative, nationalist, or rightward ideological leanings, such as Hermann von Helmholtz, Bona Meyer, Wilhelm Windelband, Alois Riehl or, more palpably, Bruno Bauch. Bauch, up to 1916, was a central neo-Kantian figure and editor of the premier journal Kant Studien. Both Cohen and Cassirer had come into open dispute with him over his antisemitism, although Bauch was certainly not alone here amongst neo-Kantians. Post-1933 Bauch, still claiming to be a Kantian, openly supported the National Socialists, and it was no surprise that he signed the Hitler loyalty oath for the German professoriate. In these conservative-orientated neo-Kantians, there was no sympathy whatsoever for liberalism, democracy, or socialism in any shape. This loose grouping of neo-Kantians rather exhibited a deeply traditionalist and nationalist demeanour that fitted quite comfortably in the context of the time, far more so than constitutionalist liberalism or democratic socialism.

Finally, in basic biographical terms, what do we actually know of Cassirer’s own political beliefs? Unlike Lange, Cohen, Natorp or Vörlander, there are no systematic books or articles from Cassirer declaring any precise normative political commitments such that we could attach the label “Left-Kantian.” The evidence here unfortunately is sketchy. Yet, several commentators, almost en passant, refer to Cassirer as liberal, particularly in relation to his expressed sympathy for the contract and natural rights tradition (Gordon Reference Gordon2010, 306).Footnote ³⁰ This view echoes a slightly older text, by David Lipton, entitled Ernst Cassirer: The Dilemma of a Liberal Intellectual in Germany 1914-1933. As indicated earlier, there is some sparce evidence to the effect that in the 1920s, Cassirer supported the progressive liberal Deutsche Demokratia Partei, which might loosely be described as a left-liberal or social liberal party in the early Weimar Republic. This party was, however, in serious electoral decline by the 1928 election.Footnote ³¹

Turning finally to the concept of the “left” in Germany. To speak of a body of ideas as “left” – as in left-Kantianism – implies some degree of ideological clarity as to what the term “left” denotes in actual political practice. It is not enough to simply outline a philosophical idea and say it is left (or socialist) unless there is some broader ideological and historical context underpinning the claim. As in Cassirer’s arguments on contractualism and natural rights, philosophical arguments cannot simply be morphed into ideological or political realities. The ideological concept “left” in fact opens a veritable pandora’s box. If we just focus on the Marburg grouping of Cohen, Lange, Natorp and Stammler, even here, as has been emphasised, there was no single coherent socialist or left belief system present in this group, more a loose agglomeration of concerns (Widmer Reference Widmer2024a, 22). Widmer also records that Marburg’s concern with “ethical socialism” was atypical at the time in Germany (Widmer Reference Widmer2024a, 6). Finally, regarding Cassirer, there is unequivocal written evidence of his critical views on socialism, with the important proviso that socialism here denoted Marxism (see Cassirer Reference Cassirer and Verene1979, 236). Socialism, at the time, was, however, a multi-voiced creature in nineteenth century Germany, as elsewhere, and dealing with the complex range of materials goes way beyond this present context. Thus, some very brief observations will have to suffice.

Initially, after the founding of Ferdinand Lassalle’s German Worker’s Association [ADAV] (1863), the more prevalent aspect of German socialism was Marxism, in various formats, particularly after the formation of the Social Democratic Workers Party in 1869 and reinforced in the Gotha Programme of 1875 (see Miller and Potthoff Reference Miller and Potthoff1986, 18ff).Footnote ³² The latter party became the Social Democratic Party of Germany [SPD] at Erfurt in 1891. Marxism, at Erfurt, became the overt theoretical foundation, particularly via the theoretical work of Karl Kautsky (the so-called Pope of Marxism) and, at this early point, Eduard Bernstein, that is, before his later advocacy of Revisionist socialism. Other forms of socialism persisted, such as Cooperative, Christian socialism and ethical socialism, but Marxism gained, for a time, a preeminence, certainly up to the 1930s. Thus, when Cassirer retrospectively criticised early twentieth century socialism in Germany, his primary target was always Marxism and its doctrine of economic determinism (Cassirer Reference Cassirer and Verene1979, 236ff). Hence, in speaking of the problems of Weimar politics, Cassirer noted that many of the key Weimar political actors on the left (presumably in the SPD and KPD) were Marxist-orientated socialists who remained, he claims, not only unaware of the power of political myth, but also who spoke largely in terms of empirically-orientated economic claims – a critique which echoes Cohen’s own earlier judgement of Marxism (Widmer Reference Widmer2024a, 123). Hence, Cassirer suggests that socialists were “convinced that economy is the mainspring of political life and the solution of all social problems. Following this theory they missed the real pointed issue… Undoubtedly economic conditions had a share in the development and rapid growth of the National Socialist movement. But the deepest and most influential causes are not to be sought in the economic crisis which Germany had to endure. They belong to another field which in a sense was inaccessible to the socialistic leaders” (Cassirer Reference Cassirer and Verene1979, 236).

Of course, both Marx and Engels had their own quite clear views on both Kant and ethics. Kant is described in the German Ideology (Reference Marx and Engels1970) as a hapless spokesman for the “impotence, depression and wretchedness” of the German bourgeoisie and their petty interests (Marx and Engels Reference Marx and Engels1970, 97-9). Kantian moral ideas, as such, tell us very little about historical political practice. Communism essentially abolishes religion and morality. As Marx and Engels commented “Law, morality, religion, are… so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.” (Marx and Engels Reference Marx and Engels1967, 92). Moral theorising as conducted by neo-Kantians is, therefore, always illusory, constituted largely by an ideological inability to see its own material class basis (Marx and Engels Reference Marx and Engels1968, 182-3). Such critical doctrines later became orthodox and dominated much of the theoretical output of the Second International up to 1914. Even Karl Kautsky’s more balanced Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History (Reference Kautsky1906), which arose during the revisionist debates, was prepared to discuss ethics; nonetheless, he still adopts views of Kant largely in line with Marx and Engels negative judgements. Marx, in general, found the whole moral scenario of socialism irksome. He considered the moral ideas of fellow socialists repellent, pouring scorn on Saint Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, Owenites, and Christian Socialists, amongst others.

There were notable later exceptions to the above argument that raised significant questions about the whole philosophical character of materialism and/or historical materialism in relation to Kantian thought. The sophisticated Austro-Kantian Marxists are an excellent case in point.Footnote ³³ Theorists such as Karl Renner, Otto Bauer, and Max Adler, amongst others, provided an alternative perspective on this whole question. Exactly how much impact they made on the German SPD is difficult to ascertain. Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism, whose work on evolutionary socialism contained the thin appendix “Kant not Cant,” was much better known in SPD circles in Germany and his rather vaguely articulated sympathy for Kant was vilified by mainstream Marxist theorising of the SPD, with the likes of Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, August Bebel, and Wilhelm Liebknecht (see Miller and Potthoff Reference Miller and Potthoff1986, 50ff).

Despite this orthodoxy, German Marxism was still a very different creature to Russian Marxism, particularly post-1917. Even those Marxists, such as Luxemburg and Liebknecht, who split, on ideological grounds as well as disagreements over the 1914-18 war, from the SPD to form initially the Spartacus League and then the Communist Party of Germany, still retained an underlying acceptance of a constitutional state, democratic parties, majority decision-making, the right to strike, and basic rights to freedom of the individual, freedom of expression and respect for human dignity. Thus, Marxism in Germany, despite its overt commitment to economistic materialism and the theory of catastrophic capitalist collapse, largely still implied a socialist society as one without exploitation and oppression that would emerge after the socialisation of the means of production, a position which again still largely concurs with aspects of the Marburg view, but notably without any overt ethical undergirding.Footnote ³⁴ In this sense, in summary, one can see clearly here why Cassirer would not have wanted to be viewed as a “left” or “socialist,” a label that would have made little sense for him as largely symptomatic of variants of Marxism (Cassirer Reference Cassirer and Verene1979, 236ff).

Spiritual apathy and the non-political

There is one final reservation concerning the category of left-Kantianism in Germany, which needs to be canvassed. Thus, one offshoot of the singular character of the late nineteenth century German statist tradition (mentioned earlier) concerns the curious standing of both citizens and indeed academics. At one level, the argument is quite simple. If politics is indelibly linked to the legal science of the state, as embodied in the central executive authority, then the status of other social entities was, by definition, ambiguous. At most, the citizen was a legal servant or subject of the state. As one commentator has noted, it was not by accident that the citizen in Germany was seen as a “Staatsbürger” (Vorländer Reference Vorländer and Meadowcroft1996, 104). Furthermore, there was a widespread sense that the métier of the educated intelligentsia in Germany (in universities and elsewhere) was to pursue the spiritual cultivation (Bildung) of their minds and keep distant from politics, unless directly involved in the activity of the state. Consequently, the realm of culture and the realm of politics were kept separate. In the words of Peter Gay, this German social, cultural, and political schizophrenia consequently “elevated apathy into a superior form of existence” (Gay Reference Gay2001, 72; see also Stern Reference Stern1960).Footnote ³⁵ This scenario also fed into a much broader discourse, focusing on a cultural disdain for the English, American, and French interest in a degraded liberal-democratic politics and consequent lack of culture, as set against the profound spiritual cultural superiority of Germany. The 1914 war was thus perceived by many in Germany as a spiritual war of culture as much as anything else. In fact, a number of the Marburg neo-Kantian grouping, including Natorp and Cohen (although not Cassirer), fell in with this general sense of a German cultural imperial mission to the world in 1914. This exaltation of German culture was closely linked to a virtual Archimedean point of German political critique, reaching its zenith during Weimar. This was an overall disdain for rationalising liberal democratic thought, particularly as it appeared in the USA, England, and France. For Weimar writers such as Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, and Moeller van den Bruck, the term “liberal” almost became a term of overall scorn. In essence, to be liberal (in any sense of the term) was to be “un-German” (see Stern Reference Stern1974, xiv-xxv). Hence, Cassirer’s attempt to sketch a common European-wide liberal task underpinning Weimar, dating back to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, in the words of one commentator, “went completely against the political and intellectual spirit of the times in Germany” (Krois Reference Krois1987, 164). The question is how aware of this was Cassirer?

This cultured apolitical stance also had a curious effect on the academic and teaching community in Germany. The separation between the realm of mind (or culture) and the realm of politics also finds an odd echo in Cassirer’s distinction, when following Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, he separates out two realms of philosophy, namely, the scholastic (or Schulbegriff), which isolates itself in the apolitical technical problems of professional academic philosophical debate – which Cassirer admits was deeply attractive to him – as distinct from the an activist “worldview” (Weltbegriff or conceptus cosmicus) idea of philosophy, which had an educative moral duty to humanity (Cassirer Reference Cassirer and Verene1979, 58-60, Kant A838/B866).

As has been noted, the apolitical stance did, in point, affect the whole nineteenth century neo-Kantian movement. As Peter Gordon summarises this ethos, “the rise of the neo-Kantianism movement was closely correlated with the rise of an academic bourgeoisie that tried to eschew ideological partisanship in favour of a strictly ‘professional’ ethos. Notwithstanding Hermann Cohen’s particular support for German socialist principles, neo-Kantianism in general remained largely nonpolitical in character; indeed, it became the very paradigm of an ostensibly German ‘unpolitical’ scholarship.” Gordon continues that “the neo-Kantians dedication to intellectual practice as an end in itself and their pronounced resistance to political or ‘worldview’ advocacy itself grew into a self-conscious and passionately defended programme. By the end of the World War I, it had hardened into a doctrine of political stoicism, articulated, for example, by Max Weber… in his celebrated 1919 address, ‘Science as a Vocation’. The Weberian distinction between fact and value, with its bitter rejection of scholarship as value promotion, was only one example of the principled hostility to ‘worldview’ philosophy that typified the movement as a whole.” (Gordon Reference Gordon2010, 58). To some extent, the apolitical expectation of the German professoriate is still rooted in their official status as civil servants (Staatsbürger), with the expectation of a duty to the state as a legal requirement.Footnote ³⁶

This non or apolitical attitude can be found candidly glorified in Thomas Mann’s volume Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (Reference Mann2021). There are many ripe, indeed overripe, passages in this garrulous rambling text, making it almost unrecognisable to any admirer of Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain.Footnote ³⁷ Mann does, however, provide examples, in spades, of this very same cultural nonpolitical stance, accompanied by a pervading sense of lofty spiritual apathy towards politics and a ritual contempt for the English and French (see Mann Reference Mann2021). Many notable German academics of the time, such as Gadamer, highly approved of Mann’s book.Footnote ³⁸ Thus, Karl Löwith – incongruously a German Jewish philosophy student of Heidegger who as a Jew had been forced out of German academic life – reported in his autobiography that “The struggle of the political parties could not interest me, as both those of the Left and those of the Right were fighting about things that were of no concern to me and therefore acted only as an irritant in my development. Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man … gave me a kind of justification for this attitude” (Löwith Reference Löwith1994, 18). This apathetic view of politics was ubiquitous across German academe at the time and the neo-Kantians, such as Cassirer, were not exempt from its subtle if widespread impact on political understanding.