Cassirer’s Cosmopolitan Nationalism
Cassirer’s Cosmopolitan Nationalism
Chapter eight shows how Cassirer’s life and work bore out the political implications of the Warburg circle and, in particular, the substantive connection between Hamburg, the Weimar Republic, and their scholarly humanism. Insofar as Cassirer focused on such classic eighteenth-century German philosophers as Leibniz, Lessing, Goethe, and Kant, thinkers for whom a cosmopolitan outlook was central to their life and work, Cassirer, like the political tradition of the Weimar Republic, was increasingly on the defensive to prove the Germanness of this project. This chapter argues that in both his 1928 speech for the Celebration of the Constitution and his 1929 Davos Debate with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, Cassirer defended his unique brand of intellectual and political “cosmopolitan nationalism,” a delicate balance of loyalty to both a distinct cultural group and wider humanist project. Toni Cassirer’s recollection of the event testifies to the extent to which lives had become symbolic of ideas.
Keywords: humanism, Ernst Cassirer, Heidegger, Leibniz, Lessing, Goethe, Kant, Davos, cosmopolitan nationalism, Toni Cassirer
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