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ON ESOTERICISM: Heidegger and/or Cassirer at Davos

Author: GEOFFREY WAITE
Date: Oct. 1998
From: Political Theory(Vol. 26, Issue 5)
Publisher: Sage Publications, Inc.
Document Type: Critical essay
Length: 23,048 words

Full Text:
There was a famous discussion between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer in Davos which revealed the lostness and emptiness of this
remarkable representative of established academic philosophy to everyone who had eyes. Cassirer had been a pupil of Hermann
Cohen, the founder of the neo-Kantian school. Cohen had elaborated a system of philosophy whose center was ethics. Cassirer had
transformed Cohen's system into a new system of philosophy in which ethics had completely disappeared. It had been silently
dropped: he had not faced the problem. Heidegger had faced the problem. He declared that ethics is impossible, and his whole being
was permeated by the awareness that this fact opens up an abyss.... Only a great thinker could help us in our plight. But here is the
great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger. The only question of importance, of course, is the question whether
Heidegger's teaching is true or not. But the very question is deceptive because it is silent about the question of competence--of who
is competent to judge.

--Strauss(1)

Heidegger conceals nothing. He does not lie. He says what he really thinks.

--Janicaud(2)

It is important for us to understand, above all, the true intentions of our author, to illuminate what he thinks really needs to be said,
and to surmise what is most critical for him.

--Levinas(3)

Only once or twice in my thirty to thirty-five years of teaching have I ever spoken about what really matters to me.

--Heidegger(4)

For a long time I have not said what I believed, nor do I ever believe what I say, and if indeed I do happen to tell the truth I hide it
among so many lies that it is hard to find.

--Machiavelli(5)

The `doctrine' of a thinker is what is unsaid in his saying, to which man is exposed so that he might expend himself for it.

--Heidegger(6)

But for those on the outside everything is in parables; so that they may see but not perceive, and hearing, they may hear but not
understand; lest they should mm, and their sins be forgiven them.

--Mark 4:12(7)

"Now do you recognize that I am a philosopher?" ... "I would have, had you remained silent."

--Boethius(8)

The same goes for Heidegger: It is necessary to know how to listen to the silences of philosophers. These are always eloquent.
--Althusser(9)

THE SCENARIO OF INTRIGUE

These nine epigraphs stage an intriguing scenario as the scenario of intrigue: a decisive victory (over academic philosophy) by a
postethical human subject that never (quite) says what it really means to say, never uses all its weapons, and yet, at exactly the
same time, concealing (almost) nothing, informs its interlocutors with the deception they desire to receive as truth, by saying aloud
precisely what it really thinks in an (almost) undetectable way--in eloquent silence. Which entails our own ethical silence, although
rarely so eloquent as within and between these epigraphs. Extending in Western thought at least to Plato and to the Jewish-Christian
Bible, this constitutive paradox can be named but never fully grasped: the double rhetoric, parabolic speech, sigetics (the rhetoric of
silence), and the noble, holy, or prudent lie. I call it the `paradox and paranoia'--the paradoxa and paranous--of exo/esotericism.
`Beside' and `beyond' but also `within' the so-called history of consciousness as its determining absence, exo/esotericism renders
radically problematic our ability to grasp that long history, assuming (as we mostly do) that this history consists of exoteric statements
alone, that philosophers necessarily mean what they say, and that when they do not this is due only to the structural interference of
the unconscious. As a form of lying, as the manipulation of other subjects' consciousness by surreptitious means, every form of
exo/esotericism nonetheless points--more or less tacitly--to its systemically and systematically unstated premise, its elusive surplus:
truth. But what, then, is truth?

"Veritas norma sui, & falsi est," Spinoza says, articulating the constitutive tautology of all secular thought: "[T]ruth is the standard of
itself, and of the false."(10) "Truth," Kant says, is "a principle of cognition, indeed, the essential and inseparable condition of all its
perfection"; by contrast, "[W]hat makes error possible ... is illusion, in accordance with which the merely subjective is confused in
judgment with the objective."(11) Such illusion, for post-Enlightenment Marxism, is a root definition of ideology, by means of which
particular interests are presented--consciously or unconsciously--in concealed form as if they were universally binding.(12) Exactly
like Spinozist truth, Althusser notes, "[T]he world of ideology is its own principle of intelligibility."(13) But this argument entails that
everything is irradicably ideological, both epistemologically and politically. In presecular terms, ideology is God; in secular terms, we
have arrived at the paradox and paranoia that the only truth is that ideology is troth.(14) As Althusser further argued, coherent and
frank Marxism must admit that it "cannot conceive that even a communist society could ever do without ideology, be it in ethics, art or
`world outlook.'"(15) "Ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time ... is nothing but outside (for science and reality)."(16)
Yet, it now appears that truth itself--impossibly--has been rendered relative; and the maximum that either science or Marxism then
could ever know is to know ideology, and to struggle accordingly--one ideology pitted against another, one `science' and `reality'
pitted against another. In the still tautological but now slyly bellicose terms of Heidegger's political ontology in 1936, "Truth happens
only in the way that it instaurates itself in the dispute and scope which are opened up by it."(17) To be sure, in Lacan's terms, "The
mirage of truth, from which only lies can be expected (this is what, in polite language, we call `resistance'), has no other term than the
satisfaction that marks the end of analysis."(18) Analysis, nevertheless, is also said to be interminable, an interminable struggle with
no cure--save for the only ethic of "not ceding to one's desire": whatever that desire may be, wherever it may lead us and the
world.(19)

What, then, are the epistemological and political stakes here--inescapably inside `truth and lie in the extramoral sense'?
Epistemologically, we are precariously close to a Nietzschean definition of nihilism insofar as, after the alleged `death of God,'
nihilism "is the state in which a being has the need to call itself continually into question, to raise continually the question of the
grounds of its existence, without anything being able to count as such grounds."(20) In political terms, and concomitantly, we also are
precariously close to the self-definition of philosophically coherent fascism. Mussolini and other fascist philosophers publicly averred
that ungrounded relativism is fascism's only ground, the conceptual precondition for the realization of Nietzschean Rangordnung or
order of rank (translated into Italian as gerarchia: hierarchy). The sole thing that can decide--ultimately--between competing
ideologies is raw power. For fascism, however, entailed is not any simple, immediate suppression of "equality" (l'ugualianza)--for that
can be stupidly counterproductive.(21) Fascism's argument, rather, is that order of rank "corrects.... natural inequalities" on behalf of
the powerful who are equal only inter pares, who know that the truth is ungrounded and decisionistically arbitrary, and who are willing
to use any means necessary--including controlled dosages of free debate--to maintain this truth and their own power.(22) Poised to
take state power in 1922, Mussolini boldly announced in his programmatic article "Relativismo e Fascismo" ("Relativism and
Fascism") (1921) that "the philosophy of force" (la filosofia della forza)--on which Fascism is conceptually and institutionally grounded
in explicit contrast to German national socialist (racist) essentialism--is nothing but relativist.(23) For his primary authorities, Mussolini
drew on Nietzsche himself and on Hans Vaihinger, the leading neo-Kantian Nietzschean and his "philosophy of the as-if." We know
that relativism and fascism are ungrounded systems but we decide to act as if they were grounded, so that this very ungroundedness
in effect becomes our ground. "In truth, we are relativists par excellence," Mussolini proclaimed, and "the moment relativism linked up
with Nietzsche, and with his Will to Power, was when Italian Fascism became, as it still is, the most magnificent creation of an
individual and a national Will to Power."(24) Mussolini also argued that Marxist socialism simply cannot grasp the fact that there are
no eternal verities: God is dead, all is permitted; only the strong decide what truth is; and if and when fascism itself is eventually
crushed by a superior force, as history teaches us happens to all concepts and political movements sooner or later, then so be it.
Logically rigorous fascist socialism was thus an explicit and publicly announced cynical, decisionistic, historicistic, and relativist
solution, via Nietzschean nihilism, of a profound epistemological and political aporia that extends throughout history and has
swallowed up the Left. Fascism, like capitalism (whose power fascism chooses to harness by channeling it into corporatism) is
prepared to employ either exotericism or esotericism whenever the situation demands: exotericism when it feels unchallenged (as is
exemplified by Mussolini in the 1920s), and exo/esotericism the rest of the time, be it conjoined with consent (hegemony) or with
coercion. By contrast, all liberal apologists for capitalism and most Marxists, feeling equally secure in their Enlightenment tradition,
naively think that everything is basically exoteric and that it is both necessary and sufficient to expose or critique ideology for it to be
overcome. In this way, it is possible to grasp and combat effectively neither exo/esotericism nor fascism and capitalism.

The implications of the Nietzschean definition of nihilism are particularly all encompassing and omnipotent in our `postideological,'
pluralist, cynical, historicist, and relativist age (institutionally incorporated as deconstruction, new historicism, and cultural studies),
where it is widely believed that Marxism and communism, and thus the major historical opposition to the status quo, have been
definitively defeated conceptually and politically. What Nietzsche called nihilism is today global capitalism, and his "last men" have
turned out to be those not of `actually existing socialism' but of actually existing capitalism. Whether understood as an economic,
social, cultural, ideological, logical, or discursive system, it is the radically ungrounded capitalist system that has demonstrated the
supreme capacity--the greatest in human history--to "call itself continually into question, to raise continually the question of the
grounds of its existence, without anything being able to count as such grounds." Specifically, capitalism calls itself continually into
question by its own self-produced crises in all forms--maintaining and perpetuating itself through them. Capitalism is radically
ungrounded, exactly like fascism, but in this cynical relativism lies its very strength and truth. The myth of capitalism appears to be
invincible, renewing its strength from all opponents as long as it touches only ungrounded ground--in contrast to the mythical
Antaeus. To date, no Hercules has been able to defeat capitalism as he did Antaeus: by holding him in the air to strangle him. For
capitalism would have to be pushed onto the ground, but there seems to be no ground on which to stand to accomplish this feat. As
Marx put it in Capital, "[T]he true limit [or barrier: die wahre Schranke] of capitalist production is capital itself."(25) Disastrously read
by evolutionary Marxists `diachronically' to guarantee capitalism's inevitable demise, Marx's thesis can also be read `synchronically'
to the contrary; namely, "that it is this very immanent limit, this `internal contradiction,' which drives capitalism into permanent
development."(26) I think the only, albeit preliminary, way out of this aporia (i.e., the antinomy between absolute optimism and
absolute pessimism with regard to the possibility of destroying capitalism) is implied in the basic Althusserian thesis that Marx's
Capital demonstrates "that the time of economic production is a specific time (differing according to the mode of production), but also
that, as a specific time, it is a complex and nonlinear time--a time of times, a complex time that cannot be read in the continuity of the
time of life or clocks, but has to be constructed out of the peculiar structure of production. The time of the capitalist economic
production that Marx analyzed must be constructed in its concept."(27) And so must also be constructed in its concept the time of any
alternative mode of production for it to exist in the first place. In other words (and I will discuss Marxist constructivism presently), it is
obviously possible to read the future of capitalism (or fascism) either optimistically or pessimistically, or both, but it is also possible to
construct at least a concept of economic, political, and discursive opposition to it. The exigent question today remains, however, how
any oppositional system of thought, let alone action, can be grounded at a time when there is a common consensus (often appealing
to Nietzsche) that nothing can be grounded after the `death of God.' Yet, this God is not in fact dead but (the) unconscious.(28) And if
capitalism is today at once God, the unconscious, and the truth (i.e., the standard of itself and of any opposition to itself), then, to be
grounded, any alternative or oppositional system must begin with this truth. Here, we return to the problem of exo/esotericism
inasmuch as it controls when and how truth and lies ever become public in whatever may remain today of the res publica.

If the central problem of political theory today is to produce effective opposition to capitalism, and if the only reason to study the past
is to find alternatives to the present, then the overall function of exo/esotericism is to obstruct both tasks. But this obstruction is not
primarily accomplished by prohibiting the possibility of opposition and alternatives. Capitalism itself encourages crises and
challengers, even produces them itself, to ensure that it remains dynamic. Generally, overt prohibitions are counterproductive insofar
as they are easily identifiable and contestable as such. Therefore, I argue, the most effective way of keeping complex systems in
power lies neither in prohibition nor even in producing hegemonic consent through "the diffusion of ideology (through the presentation
and inculcation of culture),"(29) but rather in rendering radical alternatives to appear logically impossible in the first place, in our case
in rendering capitalism (the) unconscious--exactly like God, ideology, and absolute truth. Such is the general function of
exo/esotericism in secular modernity.

For the tradition of thought linking Spinoza, Kant, Marx, and Freud (even Nietzsche, albeit, arguably, to radically opposed political
ends), truth remains the absolute criterion of falsity, illusion, and ideology. However, unlike that aspect of this tradition which
eventually leads to postlinguistic philosophical psychoanalysis (Lacan)--where "[t]ruth hollows its way into the real thanks to the
dimension of speech. There is neither true nor false prior to speech"(30)--Marxism has generally distinguished itself from this
development, as well as from the Nietzschean exo/esotericism that leads to Heidegger and to Leo Strauss, by remaining prelinguistic.
Concomitantly, most Marxism (and the remainder of the `Left') has distinguished itself by its studied disinterest in, or simple
ignorance of, the ancient tradition of exo/esotericism (first openly codified by Machiavelli) wherein falsity, illusion, and ideology are
produced and manipulated by some subjects consciously so as to be incorporated by others unconsciously.(31) The epistemological
and political costs to Marxism of this disinterest and ignorance have been enormous, almost irredeemable; and this failure demands
rectification. At the same time, Marxism has remained largely prepsychoanalytic. As Althusser put it, "Marx was unable to go beyond
a theory of social individuality or historical forms of individuality. There is nothing in Marx that anticipates Freud's discovery; there is
nothing in Marx that can ground a theory of the psyche."(32) I would add that this applies more to almost all `Marxism' than to Marx
himself, but in any case this lacuna, too, has contributed to making it well-nigh impossible for Marxism even to read the great
exo/esoteric tradition--let alone effectively combating capitalism philosophically or politically. In my terms, it cannot even read the
psyche that is prepared to manipulate other psyches unconsciously by means of eloquent silence.

Truth does properly remain the precondition of any conceptually coherent and politically effective Marxist alternative to capitalism, just
as it does of the philosophy of psychoanalysis in Lacan's voice: "Truth is based only on the fact that speech, even when it consists of
lies, appeals to it and gives rise to it."(33) But while it is impossible to articulate the whole truth, "[P]recisely because of this
impossibility, truth aspires to the real."(34) And this aspiration is what exo/esotericism, today in its `late' or `postmodernist' capitalist
mode, best understands and most successfully exploits. If exploitation remains a Marxist concern, Marxists must turn to truth. This
means they must turn to the unconscious and to lies, and hence to the problematic of exo/esotericism. And this means that they must
grasp not only the position of all opponents but also the debates between them when they embody--consciously or unconsciously--
the problematic of exo/esoteric manipulation.

In the remainder of this essay, therefore, I turn to one debate that has proven to be especially symptomatic both of the way capitalist
hegemony works and of Marxism's inability to settle accounts with it and with exo/esotericism, and hence to mount cogent and
effective opposition to either. This was the public confrontation in 1929 between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer in Davos, Switzerland.
I argue that this seminal event, widely thought to end with the triumph of the former over the latter, means more than the triumph of
the ideological `Right' over the `Left.' For it also means that Heideggerian exo/esotericism triumphs over Cassirerian exotericism. To
date, no Marxist or communist voice has been raised to protest what this alleged `debate' conceals or to offer an alternative account.

What we call `Davos' is actually the transcript of the second of four annual events, beginning in 1928 and terminating in 1931 as the
geopolitical situation in Europe and the world dramatically worsened.(35) The mandate of the colloquium series was to promote what
its organizers called "understanding and cooperation between peoples [or nations: Volker], especially the French and German"--
referring to all the still-festering traumas of World War I, desperately trying to staunch new ones looming in the darkening future.
Other speakers besides Heidegger and Cassirer were given their chance to speak during the international colloquium held from
March 16 to April 6, 1929, under the umbrella theme of "man and generation," although most of those present thought that the
absolute watershed of philosophical history was occurring before their eyes: Cassirer incorporating the old philosophical regime,
Heidegger the new. And so the other participants struggled as best they could to take the measure of this radical epistemological
break. In addition to all his scholarly academic writings, Cassirer had just recently, in the autumn of 1928, gone on public political
record at the University of Hamburg (where he was soon to be the first Jew in history to become rector of a German university) by
defending the Weimar constitution--widely despised across the ideological spectrum--with what he claimed to be the authentically
German heritage, exemplified by Goethean Weimar.(36) In addition to mostly understated allusions to "the Jewish question," other
signs of the times were evident at Davos: the students organized a workshop on "Marxism," another was held on "The Current but
Difficult Problem of War Propaganda and National Incitement." A few months later, Heidegger delivered his inaugural lecture at
Freiburg--"What Is Metaphysics?"--in which he decisively and affirmatively linked the question of radical, authentic thinking to anxiety
in the face of being and nothingness.(37) Cassirer was most widely known at the time for his philosophy of symbolic forms and
myths.

Throughout the 1920s, philosophical discussions of myth in Europe were shadowed by several more explicitly political interventions:
Mussolini's public declaration, in October 1922, that the fascists had created their own myth--that of the nation; and Carl Schmitt's
subsequent open embrace of Mussolini's decisionistic myth making as being superior to all other available forms of political thought
and action, in tandem with Schmitt's philosophically grounded rejection of the Weimar constitution and parliament, including its
commitment to discussion, debate, and dialogue--all of which serve only endlessly to defer hard decisions about exceptional
circumstances.(38) Secularization, in particular Enlightenment, lent itself by structural necessity to this radically ungrounded auto ex
nihilo act of decisionistic self-legitimation.(39) Months after Cassirer's defense of the Weimar Republic, after Heidegger had had his
say at Davos, a new word--the word--was passed around. Heidegger had defeated Cassirer decisively, and what Goethe had said
about Napoleon and geopolitics in the previous epoch was finally taking place in philosophy: "From here and now on, a new epoch of
world history begins, and you can say that you were present."(40) Precisely such possibilities of radical geopolitical break, or renewal,
`postmoderns' by definition cannot grasp. Thanks, I argue, to Heidegger's willed `victory,' Cassirer's unwilled `defeat'--both of which
postmoderns have inherited and embodied, knowingly or not.

Generally speaking and with few exceptions, accounts of the Davos debate break down--now as then--along self-consciously
ideological lines: the Cassirerian tends to be conciliatory and attempts to strike a balance, the Straussian to be more aggressively
charged, the Heideggerian aloof.(41) This difference is explainable as the effect of different conclusions reached from a common
premise: in the final analysis, all three sides assume that Heidegger really won the confrontation; or at least they assume that this is
the common perception of the outcome, and hence sociologically, if not also philosophically, simply the case. So it appears that
Cassirerians have to adapt a strategy of reconciliation, whereas Heideggerians are free to go on to other tasks. As for Straussians,
they have their own brief against Heidegger (and Cassirer) in a situation of minority against the Heideggerian (and Cassirerian)
majority, fighting over the same turf, their overall mood bellicose (such are the wages of ressentiment).(42) At the end of the day,
however, Heideggerians and Straussians differ mainly about how to use exo/esoteric language prudently so as to ensure an
identically elitist vision of the perceived necessity for Nietzschean order or rank (i.e., the socioeconomic division of mental from
manual labor) to allow philosophy to exist. By contrast, Cassirerians do not worry about exo/esotericism at all, and so--in spite and
because of some squeamish `ethical' reservations about capitalism common to liberal humanism--they end up affirming unwittingly
the same intellectual and economic divisions of labor that Straussians and Heideggerians affirm consciously. In short, I am arguing
that the Davos `debate' was never a debate in two primary regards. First, as Heidegger was aware but Cassirer was not, they held
radically incompatible `ethical' assumptions about the nature and proper use of philosophical language, and authentic debate can
never occur, for Heidegger, at the merely thematic and exoteric level. Second, both men shared the same basic class interest, and
had no reason to debate this fact, no matter how much their respective political ideologies may appear as different or even opposed.

In any case, it remains a serious but common misperception that one could or can simply `choose' at Davos: between `Cassirer or
Heidegger' and between them only, ignoring the possibility of a thus logically excluded middle term. Moreover, this dual delusion is
far too partial in both senses of the term and to date has existed asymmetrically, as a one-way street. Whereas Heidegger and
Heideggerians (and, for different reasons, Straussians) have always assumed that they definitively won the debate, excluding
Cassirer from serious philosophy, Cassirer himself, unlike most Cassirerians, was less confident about the truth of his own position at
Davos, trying--unrequited--to continue his Davos `dialogue' with Heidegger in published and unpublished form to the bitter end. To be
sure, merely by reconstructing yet another version of what happened--or even, as I say, what did not happen--between Cassirer and
Heidegger at Davos, I myself risk contributing to the consensus myth that one's only `choice' (then or today) is `Cassirer and/or
Heidegger' (both `and' and `or' being duplicitous little words, inclusive and exclusive). Nonetheless, refocus on the `choice' between
Cassirer and Heidegger makes sense heuristically if significant aspects of their debate remain occluded from view.

With regard only to exo/esotericism (i.e., leaving shared class interest momentarily to one side), Davos was a debate only in the
guise of an open dialogue (between Cassirer and Heidegger) helplessly confronting a secret monologue (Heidegger's). This part of
my claim is not fully original with me--noted as it was at Davos by those most familiar with Heidegger, especially by Strauss. Rather, it
is the specific structures and consequences of this nondebate that have yet to be identified and analyzed. If unsettling obscurities
remain to be excavated and exorcised from this foundational event in the history of consciousness, then this task is important not
least if "Davos was an early form of our contemporary conference and symposium format"(43)--and for "symposium," read also
essay.
This essay was originally conceived for the occasion of the first systematic attempt in North America (the international Cassirer
conference in New Haven, 1996) to use a critical reconstruction and appropriation of Cassirer's published and unpublished oeuvre to
provide--building on his "philosophy of symbolic forms" and "comprehensive philosophy of culture"--a critical counterpoint to the
hegemony of cultural studies in the human and social sciences, including the history of science. Alternatively put, the perceived task
of the occasion was to provide cultural studies, and multicultural pluralism, with a conceptually rigorous, hermeneutically rich
philosophical base that these predominantly empirical studies demonstrably lack. The strong thesis would be that Cassirer has
created the only rigorous and coherent theory available to the project of providing a more or less critical philosophical grounding for
cultural studies--a project I argue is doomed from the start.(44)

Today, Cassirer is being widely touted by liberal and conservative humanists alike--a celebration symptomatic of an unacknowledged
consensus--not merely for having engaged in a significant dialogue with something called "the postmodern thinking of pluralism" long
before the fact, but also for having already surpassed it, on the grounds that Cassirerian "multiplicity" and "diversity" not ensue from
the "weakness and skepticism" that is then imputed to postmodernism but stand instead for "a plurality of world-relations that must
today take the place of the one-dimensionality of traditional rationalism."(45) Be such claims (or pious wishes) as they may,
Heidegger, too, is commonly understood also to have opposed "one-dimensional rationalism," as well as "weakness and skepticism";
but in his case this was hardly on behalf of pluralistic diversity. Who, then, has finally won the Davos debate? Should cultural studies
in fact appeal to Cassirer (or Heidegger) for help in its broad ignorance of philosophy? Before asking, we need to know more what the
real stakes and forms of the original debate were, and whether it was a debate at all. There can be no doubt that Cassirer can be
resuscitated in purportedly `avant-garde' disciplines, including those following Bakhtin, Foucault, and Panofsky--all of whom were
very positively influenced by Cassirer. Nor has his influence been negligible on the more `traditional' disciplines of literary criticism
and aesthetics. I am thinking here not only, say, of the work of Susanne Langer and Philip Wheelwright,(46) but also of the remark of
Paul de Man in 1964: "Cassirer has curtailed the somewhat fantastic subjectivism that surrounded many American concerns with
myth and symbol."(47) I affirm the need to read philosophy in the academy today at a time when the current hegemony of cultural
studies, particularly its antitheoretical animus in which "philosophies," at best badly studied, "serve as an ideological substitute for the
theoretical foundations that the human sciences lack."(48) But not just any style of philosophy will help us in our non- and
antiphilosophical plight. Before resuscitating Cassirer's corpse (or any other, including a fortiori Heidegger's), before incorporating any
corpus of work in our own corps, we should know as much as possible about what and whom we are resuscitating, who did the killing
at Davos, and how.

One of the most basic definitions of philosophy, as put by Althusser in one of his moods, is simply to draw lines of demarcation.(49)
And we will see that Heidegger, at the end of his Davos encounter with Cassirer, seems to say the same thing. Drawing one such
line, I claim that Marxism and communism are exactly like Platonism, Jewish-Christian theology, nihilism, fascism, and capitalism
insofar as all are logically constructivist and decisionistic; that is, they all share the aporia that they are ultimately grounded on no
logic save for tautology. But Marxism and communism can also be different from those other positions in three related respects: in
terms of discursive practice they are in principle exoteric; in terms of socioeconomic and ethical aim they are in principle egalitarian;
and in terms of epistemology they maintain in principle an open, heuristic, and asymptotic relation to the truth.(50) In this last regard,
Marxism and communism relate to the philosophical tradition (encompassing Spinoza, Kant, Marx, Lenin, Wittgenstein, Lacan, and
Althusser) that continually aspires to point (`scientifically,' if you will) toward the truth. In this way, they are not logically decisionistic
and constructivist, safeguarding as they do a certain surplus--truth--vis-a-vis the tradition against which they are in mortal combat.
And, as Althusser cautions, "IT]he conflictuality of Marxist theory is constitutive of its scientificity, its objectivity"(51)--in other terms, its
ethical performativity of the truth. However broad my claim, I will inscribe `Davos' with a hitherto unremarked line of demarcation--the
hitherto obscure interference of exo/esotericism in the debate--in order that we might better understand the relationship (or lack
thereof) between Heidegger and Cassirer and what really went wrong (or right) at Davos. In any case, to draw a clear line is sooner
my intent than it is to defend either Heidegger or Cassirer from their devotees (borrowing Adorno's quip about Bach); after all, in this
case, it is the devotees who need defending.

A break with hegemonic systems (including fake debates disguised as genuine; monologues as dialogues) might appear to come, in
Althusserian terms, "not from within but from without.... This idea, or rather this concept of an absolute (theoretical) exteriority is the
enabling condition of a theoretical understanding of interiority itself."(52) On one hand, this position seems blatantly to contradict
Althusser's (properly Leninist) position, which I elaborated earlier, to the effect that any system alternative or oppositional to
capitalism can be grounded only on capitalism as Spinozian truth.(53) Besides, in the Lacanian sense which Althusser there adapts,
the real (le reel) is not exterior to anything but rather `extimate' (intimately exterior)(54)--which is certainly no guarantee of anything
`alternative' or `oppositional,' although it must remain their minimal precondition. Nonetheless, qua purely heuristic device, a certain
hypothesis of exteriority can be productively applied to the foundational event that was `Davos,' if it was only a fake debate; because
then a provisional third position exterior to it, at least, is demanded. For Althusser (as for Lacan, this `extimate' position is `science'
and `the real,' and also in his case (but not Lacan's) `class struggle' as the ultimate political `line of demarcation.' For my purposes
here, my tertium quid or "concept of an absolute (theoretical) exteriority" is the concept of exo/esotericism; and it entails substantial
reservations about both Cassirer and Heidegger (and Strauss). What my argument will leave unspecified, however, is what a radically
different philosophy or ethics beyond exo/esotericism might look like, if it is even possible. My own (neocommunist) methodological
and ideological position should emerge more clearly as we proceed, but it is generally mote germane to the task at hand to
understate my third position `outside' the Davos debate, even as I remain `extimately' within it--not in the guise of false objectivity, but
on behalf of promoting real debates that point toward the exteriority prerequisite to grasp the interiority of long misunderstood and
fake debates.

Symptomatically, the apposite analogy with which to describe `Davos' is open to dispute. Does it recall to us "the important
disputationes during the Middle Ages, when the best minds of the time struggled with one another," as one Heideggerian acolyte now
tells us; or rather a boxing match that has suddenly materialized from a radio broadcast into living reality, as was remarked by a
young man in the audience?(55) Or, as another participant, the philosopher Kurt Riezler, quipped at the time, was `Davos' the
uncanny coming to life of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain (1924)?(56) Think of it: Cassirer embodying Settembrini, the liberal
humanist son of the Enlightenment, and Heidegger the Jesuitical nihilist, Naptha. But now we are ahead of the argument.

FIRST PRELUDE TO DAVOS: A QUESTION OF STYLE

By shifting the axis not of philosophy, necessarily, but of one way to read philosophy, from what might be called `content' to `style'
(thus making explicit a parallel move made by Heidegger against the history of metaphysics tacitly, in addition to all his explicit
arguments), I supplement the disquieting reminiscence of Cassirer's most important doctoral student, Leo Strauss (who wrote his
dissertation on Spinoza under him), about the post-ethical Heidegger by arguing that the truly silent question is not merely whether
Heidegger's own "teaching is true or not," nor even whether we are "competent to judge" it in terms of any imagined `content.' The
question, rather, is whether what Heidegger himself implies is his own "unsaid" teaching is designed sigetically to be exo/esoteric,
whether it is intended--in its very surface visibility that Spinoza and Althusser call "the opacity of the immediate"(57)--to be
incorporated slightly, stealthily, silently beneath our capacity ever to perceive and judge it rationally. This, I argue, is indeed the
implication that Heidegger quietly drew for his own rhetorical use in his public lecture at Davos, "Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft und
die Aufgabe einer Grundlegung der Metaphysik" (Kant's critique of pure reason and the task of a grounding of metaphysics). This is
his reading of Kant's First Critique to the effect "daB der Ansatz der Vernunft zerstort ist"--which means, for Heidegger, not only that
the beginnings, base, or approach of reason have been definitively destroyed by Kant, but also that the latter, along with Cassirer,
"shrinks back" or even "draws back in terror" (zuruckschreckt) before the radical consequences.(58) When specifying what he thinks
these radical consequences are, Heidegger does not include the implications for language in general, and for his own rhetoric of
persuasion in specific. It also would have made neither logical nor pragmatic sense, in his (and our) postlogical world, were
Heidegger to have drawn these consequences publicly, if he wished to make effective use of them, as he doubtless did. This, then, is
the lesson Cassirer overheard when debating Heidegger at Davos, as other members of the audience (especially Strauss) definitely
did not.

Today a strong move is underway in the academy for ecumenical `cultural-philosophical' reconciliation, arguing (as do I, albeit for
very different reasons) against a simple `choice' between Cassirer and Heidegger. On this view, the latter's far superior grasp of the
question of ontology can and should be supplemented by Cassirer's richer hoard of cultural references and ostensibly more nuanced
critique of the mathematical natural sciences. Yet in fact Heidegger's grasp of the sciences (especially physics and mathematics) was
considerably deeper than many today assume, and surpassed Cassirer's in important respects. One of the surprising things about
Heidegger's stunning 1929-30 lecture course, "The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics," which gives an indication of his
pedagogical approach at the time of Davos, is the length and depth to which he went to link his reflections on the topic to
experimental biology and zoology, including the possibility of an "ontology of life."(59) But the most surprising thing about these
lectures--beyond even his remarkable analysis of boredom and solitude as the constitutive "fundamental moods" (or attunements:
Grundstimmungen) of modernity alongside the anxiety (Angst) analyzed in Being and Time--is Heidegger's pattern of indirect
allusions to the problem of exo/esotericism, that is, to silences, moods, cunning, and concealments of all kinds, as when he tells his
students that his own lectures "could indeed be a mere deception--who can know?"(60) Just so. This remark alludes to his `question
of style.'

The manifest theme of Heidegger's 1929-30 course is the continuing (nearly irreversible) swerve of modern metaphysics away from
its ancient claim to be the "first philosophy" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), due to a mode of questioning (beings)
that it can only falsely assume to be radical (regarding Being), and culminating in its current state as merely one academic discipline
inter alia inter pares. This Heidegger derisively calls a discipline limited to mere "content."(61) Here begins his open assault on the
bogus metaphysical desire to attain "the formal level of an absolute science."(62) It is in this sense that the hegemony of modern
metaphysics and science entails the victory of "content" over more radically and authentically "questioning." What Heidegger's
definition of "content" here again leaves silent, however, is the stylistic and rhetorical consequence his position must have for the
articulation of radical questioning insofar as it relates to what he calls "the authority" of "silent persuasion."(63) Although sometimes
appearing critical about his own authority in the pedagogical situation, what matters more than any stated valorization is not only that
he thus hints at his awareness of the ancient tradition of silent persuasion, but also that he is logically required to make use of it to
recruit the new philosophical lifeblood inasmuch as authentic questioning per definitionem can never transpire at the level of
"content." At Davos, the most attentive listeners, and not only Strauss, intuited that it was Heidegger's style that helped carry the day
over Cassirer's "content."(64) They may even have intuited that, in a sense, in exo/esotericism (exoteric) style is (esoteric) content,
although Heideggerians and Straussians are rarely so frank about this ancient problem.

Since at least Plato, "[T]he quarrel between philosophy and poetry is in the first instance political and moral."(65) This thesis is crucial
but insufficient. What is new since Plato is not exclusively a philosophical and/or poetic problematic, for this has remained remarkably
constant, although increasingly less visible as it becomes dispersed throughout mass and junk culture. What is really new is
capitalism on one hand, and on the other the radically diminished awareness of the ethical role of exo/esotericism in maintaining the
discourses of philosophy and political economy alike, including with regard to ethics. It is "capital which creates the foundation for a
general human morality," Kautsky noted in 1906, "but it only creates the foundation by treading this morality continually under its
feet."(66) And it is the forms of exo/esotericism collaborating with this destruction that would have to be identified and destroyed if the
full socioeconomic preconditions for an alternative, oppositional ethics will ever be produced.(67) Sit venia verbo, the exo/esoteric
problematic logically--and also epistemologically, aesthetically, politically, and ethically--precedes any imaginable `content' of
philosophy or poetry. Here, `firstness' is also to be understood, in properly Heideggerian terms, neither ontologically nor ontically but
as their exo/ esoteric fusion in political ontology. Herein lies the underlying `silent' problem of ethics at Davos. Pace the public
remarks of Heidegger and Strauss, but as they knew full well, the basic post-Nietzschean question is not whether ethical grounding is
impossible or possible but rather how to speak, and to whom to speak, in either eventuality. At stake with exo/esotericism is the
ethical problem of trust qua question of style: Who can trust us? Whom do we trust?

SECOND PRELUDE TO DAVOS: ON SOURCES, MYTHIC AND SYMBOLIC

Part of Cassirer's point in working out a comprehensive philosophy--although never quite ethics--of culture was indeed to appropriate
critically all the mathematical and natural sciences, as well as the social and human sciences. This is also to say--with a nod to
cultural studies--that Cassirer's work (nourished by the incomparable resources of Aby Warburg's library in Hamburg) was eminently
interdisciplinary by inception and cross-cultural by implication. And for this very reason his project can be criticized by a cogent
philosophical argument duly suspicious of the ideological traps of interdisciplinarity.(68) Be this as it may, there is general agreement
today that it is inaccurate to reduce Cassirer's sources, as was often done in the past, to a neo-Kantian problematic. Although I would
add that one of the most important aspects of neo-Kantianism--Vaihinger's Nietzschean reformulation of the Platonic noble lie in
terms of the "philosophy of as-if" and "doctrine of conscious illusion"--seems to have eluded Cassirer's conceptual net.(69) As
important for Cassirer as Kant undeniably is, however, other sources are equally influential. The proper names are familiar: Dilthey,
Hegel, Herder, Humboldt, Leibniz, Plato, Rousseau, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, and not least Vico's seminal definition of man as
animal symbolicum. Cassirer's notion of symbolic form is also indebted to the physical sciences, including Heinrich Hertz's concept of
notation in mechanics. But wherever one seeks the articulation of the human and the natural sciences, especially in the German
tradition, sooner or later the figure lying nearest the source is Goethe.

The most fitting, albeit characteristically ironic, epitaph for Cassirer's oeuvre may have been found by de Man, writing in 1957 that
one of Cassirer's theses about Goethe serves as "a definition of the entire history of ideas"--namely, that Goethe "rejects history
when history is imposed on him as mere matter [Stoff]; but he reclaims it as a necessary way finally to understand form in itself and
its own creativity."(70) In a sense, Cassirer's concept of symbolic form does indeed live and die on Goethe's most expansive
definition: "Everything that happens is symbol, by representing itself entirely, it points to what remains. It seems to me that in this
observation lies the highest degree of arrogance and the highest degree of modesty."(71) But, far more important, Cassirer's notion
would also live and die on another Goethean definition, one playing little if any role in Cassirer's worldview: "Symbolism [or the
symbolic function: die Symbolik] transforms the appearance into idea, the idea into an image, and in such a way that the idea always
remains eternally efficacious and unattainable, and, even though spoken in all languages, nonetheless would remain
unspeakable."(72) Note that this second Goethean definition of symbol and symbolism is premised not on Hegelian expressivist
causality, such as Cassirer's definition of symbolic form seems to require (e.g., in his often repeated but undertheorized claim that
mythical consciousness "finds expression" as symbolic form), but rather as a mode of structural causality, as Althusser would argue;
namely, that any structure "is immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, that the whole existence of the structure
consists of its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its
effects."(73) (To use Spinoza's own concept, the cause `indwells' its effects as causa immanens.(74)) But I do not want to
overemphasize the fact that Cassirer's appropriation of Goethe overlooks the problematic of structural causality. After all, it would be
left to us to give theoretical precision to the notoriously opaque relation, in all Cassirer's work, between (transhistorical) symbolic form
and (historical) cultural form.(75) In other terms, if Cassirer used the concept of structural causality without mentioning it, there is not
necessarily any disgrace in that. Emphatically to be stressed, however, is that Cassirer never seems to have appreciated the fact that
Goethe's enigmatic definition of the symbolic entailed the affirmation of its quintessentially esoteric dimension: something unsaid
remains "eternally efficacious and unattainable" even as it is spoken in any natural language. Goethe's version of exo/esotericism
sheds disruptive light on his relationship to both the Enlightenment and the anti-Enlightenment Romantics.(76) Worse, it threatens to
shred into dysfunctional bits Cassirer's purportedly Goethean project of a philosophy of symbolic forms and of culture that (ostensibly
in opposition to Heidegger's public embrace of the "errant path of thinking") would be open de jure et facto to logical scrutiny and
public debate (Habermasian "communicative action") by using a language that is in principle shared by all disputants. Cassirer and
his followers simply cannot ground an exoteric theory of symbolic form on Goethe's profoundly esoteric definition of the symbolic.

Put differently, if Cassirer (consciously or unconsciously) `silently' withheld his full insight about his sources, including Goethe, so as
to conceal his own inability to ground his entire project, and hence also to conceal his lack of an ethics, or if for him this concealment
was for any reason necessary for conceptual and social cohesion against opposing forces (including fascist irrationalism), then we
confront a quite serious irony both for him and for any cultural studies that would ground itself on him, inasmuch as it has always
already given up even asking the question of intentionality. For if Cassirer was silent about the esoteric dimension of his key sources,
he himself would have been accepting and even using--consciously or not--the Heideggerian double rhetoric and its antecedents. If
Rosen is right, this problem is not merely neo-Kantian (as in Nietzsche and Vaihinger) but properly Kantian as well.(77) And deeper
still it is Platonic, as Cassirer never understood.(78) Cassirer was a marvelous reader (or, if you prefer, paraphraser) of the vast
Western philosophical and cultural heritage (hence, his interest for cultural studies)--but only on its exoteric plane. He simply did not
grasp exo/esotericism and, thus, had no weapons with which to debate Heidegger on his own turf. What is more, Cassirer was thus
ripe to become an unwitting member of the Nietzschean-Heideggerian corps/e.(79)

Like Heidegger, Nietzsche was a Platonist with regard to the double rhetoric and noble lie to secure social cohesion.(80) But
Heidegger was also Nietzschean in the sense of Nietzsche's famous position that Kant's formulation of the root epistemological
question of Pure Reason--"How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?"--was the exoteric version of the esoteric political question:
"Why is belief in synthetic judgments a priori necessary?"(81) The consequences of overlooking this neo-Kantian moment in
Nietzsche are severe--and this in two basic directions. On one hand, in terms of the history of consciousness, even Cassirer (since
much of what is at stake at Davos and thereafter is his exceptionality as public debater with "the only great thinker in our time") may
be folded into the tradition duped not merely philosophically by the Platonic noble lie and the doctrine of conscious illusion but also
politically. Which is to say a dupe of Machiavellianism, Jesuitism, and the cynical reason described by Sloterdijk;(82) a dupe of the
anthropological and psychoanalytic structure je-sais-bien-mais-quand-meme (I know [that it is not the case], but [I believe it]
nonetheless) as described by Mannoni and Zirek;(83) and, not least, a dupe of what Lenin excoriated as the "accursed period of
Aesopian language, literary bondage, slavish speech, and ideological serfdom."(84) On the other hand, any current ability to use
Cassirer to ground a coherent philosophy of culture on the basis of a theory of symbolic forms--to counter the constitutive relativism
and merely academic `politics' of cultural studies--would be similarly compromised. And what about Cassirer's other major sources?
Was his insight there as limited, dubious, or naive?

What, beyond Goethe, are the essential sources for grasping Cassirerian symbol and myth? According to Heidegger's extensive
review (in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung of 1928) of Cassirer's Mythical Thought (the second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms, 1925), the decisive influence on Cassirer's notion of symbol, and hence myth, was Schelling.(85) Heidegger also used this
review to expand his own discussion of myth in Being and Time, as well as to set the table for his intervention in Davos a few months
later.(86) Heidegger begins with a comparatively neutral, even appreciative, paraphrase of Cassirer's argument--a paraphrase never
contested either by Cassirer or by Heidegger's students.(87) "The intention of the investigation," Heidegger writes of Cassirer's
magnum opus, "is to pursue the disclosure of `myth' as a unique possibility of human Dasein which has its own kind of truth. By
posing the question in this manner, Cassirer explicitly takes over the view of Schelling that `everything in mythology is to be
understood as myth expresses it, not as if something else were thought or something else were said' (Einleitung in die Philosophie
der Mythologie)."(88) What is here wholly unclarified, tacit, and therefore crucial in Heidegger's allusion to Schelling are both the
implication that myth is exoteric and the deep structure of exo/esotericism to which Heidegger refers in passing. Any definition of
`myth' aside, at the level of `content,' Heidegger's allusion to Schelling retains the category of esotericism in the phrase "as if
something else were thought or something else were said." Opened up is the possibility, at least, that this "something" exists only
insofar as it is the logical and linguistic precondition of the exoteric definition. What might this surplus "something else" be? How
might its "as-if" function for Heidegger performatively?

Now, a specter haunts everything Schelling said--a specter created by himself. Schelling wrote in 1795 that "[i]t is a crime against
humanity to conceal fundamental principles that are communicable to a general public." But Schelling (as a typical bourgeois
revolutionary fearing reigns of terror from all directions) immediately appended a crucial esoteric rider that was audible to Heidegger
as it was not to Cassirer. Schelling continued: "But Nature itself has set limits on this communicability; it has preserved a philosophy
for the worthy that by its own agency becomes esoteric because it can not be learned, not mechanically echoed, not resimulated, and
also not repeated by secret enemies and spies--a symbol for the covenant of free spirits [ein Symbol fur den Bund freier Geister], by
means of which they all recognize one another and yet which, known only to themselves, will be an eternal enigma to the others."(89)
In short: on the Schellingian and Cassirerian view, if myth and symbol are exoteric, then philosophy, on the Schellingian and
Heideggerian view, is esoteric at its most radical conceptual, social, and rhetorical root. In effect, I argue, Heidegger sides decisively
with Schelling against Cassirer, and thus radically undermines the very source of Cassirer's merely exoteric concept of symbolic form
and myth.

In his 1928 review of Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Heidegger also paraphrases what he calls "a basic feature of the
mythic object-consciousness"; namely, "the absence of a clear delineation between dreaming and waking experiences, between the
imagined and the perceived, between the original and the copy, between the word (signification) and the thing, between wished-for
and actual possession, between living and dead."(90) This conceptual and terminological muddle might sound to some of us like a
precocious defense of a postmodern, poststructuralist sensibility, or, alternatively, a critical analysis of just this sensibility qua myth.
And we should recall Levi-Strauss's seminal structuralist definition of the general social function of myth as a "logical mode capable of
overcoming a contradiction"--which is, Levi-Strauss adds parenthetically, "(an impossible achievement, if, as it happens, the
contradiction is real)."(91) But here the properly Heideggerian complexity--the shift from the content and locution to the illocution and
perlocution--is that this problematic must also entail, beyond all Heidegger's paraphrased Cassirerian binaries, a deeper binary. It is
the exoteric-esoteric way of reading, thinking, and speaking as Heidegger did, and Cassirer did not--but, worse, that Cassirer also
could not even perceive when encountering it in his primary sources and interlocutors.

It is because of this hermeneutic naivete that Heidegger could not consider Cassirer a worthy conversationalist at Davos on the
Kantian Kampfplatz der Metaphysik (battleground of metaphysics)--not least because of Cassirer's perceived incompetence to teach
the really hard philosophical, ethical, and political lessons to the next generation, his commitment to GREEK TEXT NOT
REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] being insufficiently attuned to esoteric awareness and prudence. In private, Heidegger and Jaspers had
concurred as early as 1925 that Cassirer was perhaps "instructive" but fundamentally "boring"--although instructive and boring people
were handy to have around now and then.(92) And for this pedagogic and pragmatic reason, Heidegger needed to debate him
publicly in order to recruit for himself the younger generation of global philosophical talent (in addition to Germany and France, also
represented at Davos were Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and perhaps Japan). Ultimately, however, the philosophical
(logographic) task from Plato to Nietzsche and Heidegger and beyond, as Strauss writes of Machiavelli, is how to be a "captain
without an army," and under modern conditions that means to recruit an army "only by means of books."(93)

Heidegger's 1928 review of Cassirer's book on symbolic forms includes a seemingly innocuous remark about the historical (and
historicizing) dimension of Cassirer's argument. Heidegger writes: "The variations of the different feelings for time and the
corresponding indications of conceptions of time account for `one of the profoundest differences in the character of individual
religions.' Cassirer shows ... the main features of the typical views of time among the Hebrews, Persians, Indians, Chinese and
Egyptians as well as in Greek philosophy."(94) There is a Nietzschean subtext here, and Nietzsche is basically terra incognita, when
not anathema, to Cassirer. As Heidegger would have known from reading Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (1886), one of the few
places Nietzsche identifies the problem of esotericism by name, at the very core of great philosophy (i.e., philosophy not found in
"books for all the world which are always foul-smelling books, the smell of small people clinging to them") lies the fact that the
exoteric-esoteric distinction has been the founding principle of every society grounded on "order of rank"--and the one entails the
other. This, Nietzsche continues, has been well known to all philosophers globally, giving as examples: "Indians as well as Greeks,
Persians, and Muslims, in short, wherever one believed an order of rank, not in equality and equal rights."(95) Typically, Nietzsche
kept silent the specific consequences for his own rhetorical practice, preferring to produce and use, not mention, them. By leaving to
readers the task of comparing Cassirer's remark to Nietzsche's, Heidegger offered certain cognoscenti a tacit but effective critique of
Cassirer's ignorance of esotericism, without further exposing the great transhistorical and sociohistorical principle to public scrutiny.

Heideggerian "courage" and "resoluteness" (philosophically legitimated already in Being and Time) entail an irreversible decision for
exo/esotericism--including, in his later "turn," after World War II, their supplemental replacement by "releasement" (Gelassenheit),
which, however hardly, means a turn away from exo/esotericism. All of Heidegger's utterances are contingent on this prior decision--
which may appear courageous, modestly withdrawn, or whatever else the situation demands. As we have seen, at Davos,
Heidegger's key rhetorical trope in this regard had been that Kant, followed by Cassirer, "shrinks back" or "draws back in terror" in the
face of his own discovery that he had unwittingly destroyed the foundation of reason.(96) Under the banner sapere aude! Kant's only
partial and timorous ontological turn had also undermined all previous and future attempts to provide a foundation ethics, along with
Geist and [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], as well as Vernunft.(97) By homology, for Heidegger as for Strauss,
Cassirer is likely impaled on a version of a dynamic antinomy, in one Kantian sense, in which pure reason fails because two views of
the same phenomenon are mutually exclusive and incompatible, and yet each is internally coherent logically and true.(98) On one
hand, Cassirer can "not face" an alleged fact; that is, the impossibility of founding an ethics. On the other hand, Cassirer still requires
an ethics, indeed a presupposed one, but cannot develop it because it is sensu stricto impossible to do so. Pace Strauss, however,
Cassirer does not entirely "drop" ethics out of his philosophy of symbolic forms or of culture.99 In his own mind, he develops a
provisional ethics (particularly in the years 1935-41), and nothing has prevented Cassirerians from elaborating it further.(100) But the
far more interesting problem, from the Heideggerian perspective, is what it might mean, as Strauss also says, if Cassirer dropped an
ultimately impossible project silently. For Cassirer did not grasp eloquent silence--unlike Heidegger.

Turning to `Davos' proper, we must keep in mind that the ultimate stakes in any debate for Heidegger (and for all those for whom he
is "the only great thinker in our time") must depend not on any openly discussible `content' but on the effective use of exo/esoteric
`silence'--its capacity to persuade and dissuade beneath consciousness and logic.

DAVOS: ELOQUENCE AND SILENCE

At Davos, Heidegger and Cassirer gave their independent lectures (one mornings, the other afternoons), culminating in the much-
awaited weekend confrontation. Heidegger's student Otto Friedrich Bollnow remarked an essential point, apparently without knowing
what it meant: Cassirer attempted to integrate discussion of Heidegger into each one of his talks, beginning by saying that basically
they were in agreement in spite of some quibbles; whereas Heidegger, ostensibly using the occasion to develop his new
interpretation of Kant, never once mentioned Cassirer and his ideas until the weekend debate made this studied lack of reciprocity
formally unavoidable.(101)

The publicly debated topic at Davos remains well known: how exactly to define neo-Kantianism; the relations of finitude to infinity,
time to temporality, history to historicity; and the precise meaning of Kant's "Copernican revolution." As Heidegger seminally
formulated the latter issue, "[T]he Dialectic is ontology," and hence "the problem of appearance [Schein] in the Transcendental Logic,
which for Kant is only negative in the form in which it first appears there, is [actually] a positive problem."(102) And whereas Schein is
positive, freedom is figured as negative. Finally, then, there is the entailed ethical problem, for Kant and his legacy, of freedom and
free will in their relation to reason, to understanding, to imagination, and to intuition. In short, can ethical freedom be grounded at all,
and if so, in which faculty, by what means, and to what effect?

Now, as Kant is commonly understood, Pure Reason seeks unity. (Like the Lacan's le reel, Spinoza's Deus sive Natura, and that to
which Wittgenstein rigorously can only point.) This unity is at once greater than the understanding (Verstand, a term defined by Kant
only in terms of its discursive and logical deployment), and yet it must be expressed in understanding's terms; which means that
understanding's grasp of unity, hence of reason, is always insufficient for reason.(103) The requisite mediating functions, for Kant, of
imagination (the common root of sensibility and understanding) and intuition (knowledge in immediate relation to empirical objects)--
as each bears on the problem of both symbolic representation and freedom, hence also ethics--was formulated by Cassirer at Davos
as follows, setting the stage for the debate with Heidegger:

The power of imagination is the connection of all thought to the intuition. Kant calls the power of imagination synthesis
speciosa. Synthesis is the basic power [Grundkraft] of pure thinking. For Kant, however, it [pure thinking] does not
depend simply on synthesis, but depends instead primarily upon the synthesis which serves the species. But this problem
of the species leads us into the core of the concept of image, the concept of symbol. If we keep the whole of Kant's work
in view, severe problems surface. One of these is the problem of freedom. For me, that was always really Kant's main
problem. How is freedom possible? Kant says that this question does not allow being conceived in this way. We conceive
only of the inconceivability of freedom.(104)

As glossed by Heidegger in rebuttal, "Cassirer wants to show that finitude becomes transcendent in the ethical writings"; whereas the
proper question is only "How is the inner structure of Dasein itself, is it finite or infinite?"(105) Heidegger quickly answered his own
question, provisionally remaining silent about the ethical implications, or lack thereof:

As a finite creature, the human being [der Mensch] has a certain infinitude in the ontological. But the human being is
never infinite and absolute in the creating the being itself [des Seienden selbst]; rather, it is infinite in the sense
of the understanding of Being [des Seins]. But, as Kant says, provided that the ontological understanding of Being is
only possible with the inner experience of beings, this infinitude of the ontological is bound essentially to ontic
experience so that one must say the reverse: this infinitude which breaks out in the power of imagination is precisely
the most strongest argument for finitude, for ontology is an index of finitude.(106)

In this sense, ontology can be ontic and historical. And ontology is normally understood (at least constatively, as opposed to
performatively) to be concerned not with the `ought' but only with the `is,' whereas the ontic per definitionem is closed to Being and
open only to beings--hence potentially to the problem of ethics and other cultural concerns. For Heidegger, in Cassirer "the terminus
ad quem is the whole of a philosophy of culture in the sense of an elucidation of the wholeness of the forms of a shaping
consciousness"(107)--whereas the terminus a quo is ontologically obscure or even nonexistent. Led by his thesis about Kant's
Copernican turn as being only timorous and partial, Heidegger asserts with regard to Cassirer that "[m]y position is the reverse. The
terminus a quo is my central problematic," which "occurs not in a Philosophy of Culture, but rather in the question: [GREEK TEXT
NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], or rather: what in general is called Being?"(108) (Which Kant might have said is the index of
finitude, understanding, and the ontic--although this is not Heidegger's Kant.)

It would be a mistake, however, to think (in `Cartesian' fashion) that what is here being contested by Cassirer and Heidegger is a
binary opposition, division of labor, or choice between two rational systems: with the one focusing on ontological origins, the other on
ontic effects. Nor (pace an otherwise salutary remark by Peter Gay at the Yale Cassirer conference) was `politics' in any obvious
sense at stake, either. Rather, as Cassirer himself worried, Heidegger was using or appropriating Kantian reason to undermine not
merely Kantian reason, but reason tout court. Like Nietzsche, he was seeking appropriately postrational--that is, sub- and surrational-
-modes of speaking and writing, and any constated `political' stand he might take is subtended by the problem of how it can be
performatively transmitted and received.(109) Although Heidegger's decision for exo/esotericism can be viewed as an authentically
politico-ontological act, on his own definition, by the same token no specific "content" of this act can be publicly expressed. For, as
Heidegger had said a year later (in 1930), the "`doctrine' of a thinker is what is unsaid in his saying, to which man is exposed so that
he might expend himself for it."(110) To repeat, not `content' but `style'--the eloquence of silence--is ultimately operative.

Once in the Davos debate, Cassirer himself begins to approach this problem by addressing the problem of language. Interesting in
this regard is the "philological comment," the only outside intervention recorded in the transcript, which the Dutch philosopher Henrik
Pos directed to the two disputants: "Both speak a completely different language. For us, it is a matter of extracting something
common from these two languages."(111) But Pos, symptomatically, meant only the possible (Cassirerian) task of translating two
somewhat different sets of philosophical terminology, rather than the impossible (Heideggerian) task of translating an intentionally
exo/esoteric language exoterically. In other words, Pos sided with Cassirer. Before analyzing this crucial moment for Cassirer in the
debate, however, we will attend to the context in which it occurred.

Heidegger had said bluntly that not any mere anthropology (read also: cultural studies) was under dispute, but nothing less than
"philosophy's central problematic itself, which leads man back beyond himself and into the totality of beings in order to make manifest
to him, with all his freedom, the nothingness of his Dasein." He continued:

This nothingness is not the occasion for pessimism and melancholy. Instead, it is the occasion for understanding that
authentic activity takes place only where there is opposition and that philosophy has the task of throwing man back, so
to speak [or to a certain extent: gewissermaBen], into the hardness of his fate [die Harte seines Schicksals] from the
shallowness of a man who merely uses [or lives off] the work of the spirit [der bloB die Werke des Geistes benutzt].(112)

To paraphrase the later Levinas, "The Da of Dasein is already an ethical problem."(113) And what a problem! The Davos audience
must have gasped silently, if not aloud. For it was clear to "everyone who had eyes" that Cassirer--his person, institution, and
tradition--was suddenly being accused of inauthentic, cowardly, opportunistic parasitism. The rule of academic decorum had been
irrevocably broken: in Nietzschean fashion the ad hominem had invaded philosophical disputation.(114)

A quasi-class distinction between the two debaters was visible and palpable: on the one side of the podium there was the fifty-five-
year-old haute-bourgeois, cosmopolitan, eloquent, conciliatory, immaculately dressed, white-haired, and momentarily ill-disposed
Cassirer. On the other side stood a forty-year-old, swarthy, hale and hearty provincial Swabian citing impeccable Greek. This overall
impression was to be recalled by all present as a mechanically reiterated trope or mantra. Cassirer, it was said, looked like
"reincarnated Goethe," whereas Heidegger was perceived as the reincarnation of nobody known, wearing what his Marburg students
had dubbed his "existential suit," the "costume of his own invention"--part forester, part peasant.(115) As he had made clear before
the debate, Heidegger had come to Davos not least for the superb skiing. Now, such anecdotes are not as incidental or exclusively
ad hominem as they may appear. Bourdieu has shown that they are an intimate part of the habitus that informs the "philosophical
field" (le champ philosophique) generally, including battles such as `Davos.'(116) And, as defined superbly by Kant, "[A]n
argumentum ad hominero is an argument that obviously is not true for everyone, but still serves to reduce someone to silence."(117)

By way of response to Heidegger's veiled personal attack, Cassirer contests Heidegger's Nietzschean (indeed Schmittian) imputation
to philosophy of opposition and struggle unto death. But in the end, Cassirer can offer only a rather pious and desperate observation
under the circumstances, given the evident paradigm shift of the audience toward Heidegger and the latter's use of ad hominem
argumentation. At this axial moment in the debate--the moment given to summarizing remarks--Cassirer replies to Heidegger's
reference to "the hardness of fate" and "the shallowness of a man who merely uses the work of the spirit": "We are maintaining a
position where little is to be accomplished through arguments that are purely logical."(118)

Extremely interesting here--and this is one of my main points--is that with this remark Cassirer unwittingly confirms Heidegger's basic
thesis about Kant's First Critique, nominally under dispute: that Kant had "drawn back in terror" before the logical consequences of
his own critique of reason. These consequences Heidegger understands not merely as devastating for the problem of grounding any
ethics, but also as legitimating, indeed necessitating, a mode of philosophical argumentation that is inherently postrational and
postlogical, hence exo/esoteric. According to Heidegger's 1929 book Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, a fundamental
philosophical problem lies in the general failure of Kant and his tradition radically to confront their own premises and conclusions.
Specifically, "The Critique of Pure Reason ... threatens the supremacy of reason and the understanding. `Logic' is deprived of its
preeminence in metaphysics, which was built up from ancient times. Its idea has become questionable [Ihre Idee wird fraglich: i.e.,
not authentically fragwurdig]."(119) And this point is hammered home in the precis of Heidegger's public lecture at Davos, "Kants
Kritik der reinen Vernunft und die Aufgabe einer Grundlegung der Metaphysik," a lecture Cassirer cannot himself attend, since he has
fallen momentarily ill, but the gist of which Heidegger conveys to him in Cassirer's hotel room--interpreted as a humane gesture by all
present.(120) By his plaintive admission that their debate had reached the point where "little is to be accomplished through
arguments that are purely logical," Cassirer unwittingly incorporates Heidegger's core position on Kant, the very bone of contention at
Davos, in spite and because of the fact that Cassirer could not rebut, nor even grasp, it conceptually. In other words, Heideggerian
exo/esotericism was working, claiming its first important victim.

Heidegger's overall politico-ontological style of argumentation has been neatly summarized by Bourdieu (wedding Debordian
detournement to a Marxist critique of political economy):

Philosophical strategy is inseparably a political strategy at the heart of the philosophical field: to uncover the
metaphysics at the foundation of the Kantian critique of all metaphysics is to divert for the profit [c'est detourner au
profit] of "essential thinking" (das wesentliche Denken)--which perceives in Reason, "glorified centuries," "the most
relentless adversary of thought"--the capital of philosophical authority held by the Kantian tradition. It is this
masterful strategy that allows the nco-Kantians to be combated, but in the name of Kantianism, and thus accumulates both
the profits gained from attacking Kantianism and those gained from claiming Kantian authority. This is not a small thing
on a field where all legitimacy emanates from Kant.(121)

And the implications of this Heideggerian strategy are certainly no small thing today as cultural studies struggles--impossibly--to
appropriate Kant and neo-Kantianism to ground itself. Bourdieu is simply wrong, however, when he goes on to suggest that Cassirer,
"one of the prime targets" of this strategy, "was not deceived by it," and that the real power of Heidegger's rhetoric can be explained
in cognitively graspable terms.(122) To the precise contrary, Cassirer unwittingly incorporates as his own the same exo/esoteric
Heideggerian phrases and concepts that he persists in disputing only exoterically and rationally.

With this unconscious incorporation, the Davos debate was effectively and definitively terminated--"for everyone who had eyes." It
nominally droned on, of course, for all those who did not--most notably Cassirer himself. And so it is that Cassirer adds: "Hence we
have been condemned here to a relativity. 'What one chooses for a philosophy depends on what sort of being one is.' But we may not
persevere in this relativity, which would be central for empirical men."(123) This "may not" is what seems today so pious, so incredibly
fragile and naive, so finally incapable of grounding anything--except as an arbitrary, decisionistic, relativistic thrownness and project
unto death. Precisely Heidegger's exo/esoteric turf.

Heidegger's earlier response in the debate to Cassirer's explicit charge of relativism--reminiscent of Dilthey's main charge against
Nietzsche--had been this:

On the grounds of the finitude of the Being-in-truth of human beings, there exists at the same time a Being-in-untruth.
Untruth belongs to the inmost core of the structure of Dasein. And I believe here to have found for the first time that
upon which Kant's metaphysical "appearance" [or "illusion": "Schein"] is metaphysically grounded. Now to Cassirer's
question concerning universally valid eternal truths. If I say: truth is relative to Dasein, this is no ontic assertion
of the sort in which I say: the true is always only what the individual human being thinks. Rather, this statement is a
metaphysical one: in general, truth can only be as truth, and as truth it only has a sense in general if Dasein
exists.(124)

Just here is where Cassirer overhears the consequence for language and rhetoric--the exo/esoteric manipulation of "metaphysical
illusion"--which is entailed by Heidegger's radical positioning of untruth as well as truth as an authentic modality of Dasein.(125) And
it is also at this point in the debate that Cassirer attempts to address the problem of language.

Desperately seeking exoteric dialogue where there simply was none for Heidegger per definitionem, Cassirer persists in attempting to
differentiate his position from Heidegger's in terms of content, before attempting to turn to the problem of style:

Like mine, his position cannot be anthropocentric, and if it does not want to be such, then I ask, where the common core
of our disagreement lies. That it cannot be empirical is clear. We must search again for the common center, precisely in
this disagreement. And I say, we do not need to search. For we have this center and, what is more, this is because there
is a common, objective human world in which the differences between individuals have in no way been superseded, but with
the stipulation that the bridge here from individual to individual has now been knocked down. This occurs repeatedly for
me in the primal phenomenon of language. Each of us speaks his own language, and it is unthinkable that the language of
one of us is carried over into the language of the other. And yet, we understand ourselves through the medium of
language. Hence, there is something like the language. And hence there is something like a unity which is higher than the
infinitude of the various ways of speaking. Therein lies what is for me the decisive point. And it is for that reason
that I start from the objectivity of the symbolic form, because here "the inconceivable has been done" [Well bier "das
Unbegreifliche getan" ist]. (126)

Now, Cassirer is likely aware that Heidegger loathed Goethe--notwithstanding his appropriation from Faust of Care (Sorge) in Being
and Time as a fundamental attunement of Dasein.(127) Here, near debate's end, Cassirer's main line of defense against Heidegger
is reduced to citing as shibboleth from his own humanist tradition. But Faust's culminating coda is different: "das Unbeschreibliche
hier ist getan" (the indescribable here has been done).(128) Which Cassirer, appealing to "the objectivity of symbolic form,"
transforms into "the inconceivable has been done." Symptomatically, he thus displaces the linguistic (the indescribable) by the
epistemological (the inconceivable)--at the expense of language. It is simply impossible to combat Heidegger on this ground insofar
as in his exo/esotericism what cannot, and should not, be described exoterically can still be maintained esoterically. In short, there is
never any radical `linguistic turn' in Cassirer, as there certainly is in Heidegger, and any cultural studies that would ground itself on
Cassirer and symbolic form should realize that it is grounding itself on quicksand. Cassirer here also makes the fundamental mistake,
helpless against Heidegger, to assume a priori that there is one--exoteric--language, and that at Davos he is debating an opponent
who, like any rational man, speaks (or at the very least presupposes the existence of) that same language.(129) Cassirer's exoteric
"die Sprache" (the language) should never be confused with the later Heidegger's exo/esoteric "die Sprache spricht" (language
speaks), or with the Lacanian ca parle. Cassirer, whose inability ever to take adequate account of Freudian psychoanalysis is well
known, generally deluded himself that there is no difference between speaking esoterically and speaking exoterically--trapped as he
was in an opening gambit of which he had never studied or even dreamt.

The last word, the checkmate, of the Davos transcript is Heidegger's. He turns away from Cassirer to look into the eyes of an
audience already won over to him, whether it knew it or not.

Take one thing away with you from our debate: do not orient yourselves to the variety of positions of philosophizing
human being, and do not occupy yourselves with Cassirer and Heidegger. Rather, the point is that you have come far enough
to have felt that we are on the way toward once again getting down to business with the central question of metaphysics.
And on top of that, I would like to point out to you that, in small measure, what you have seen here is the difference
among philosophizing human beings in the unity of the problematic, which on a large scale expresses something completely
different, and that it is precisely this freeing of itself from the difference of positions and standpoints which is
essential in the debate with the history of philosophy; [it is essential to see] precisely how the differentiation of
standpoints is the root of philosophical work.(130)

In fine, ignore both Cassirer and Heidegger--but agree only with Heidegger. Some of the audience still wants the debate to continue
the next day, as does Cassirer himself, although no continuation has been scheduled. Only Heidegger declines. For him and his own,
the debate has definitively terminated for the simple reason that no open debate ever began in the first place, could ever occur. In the
event, the exo/esoteric "differentiation of standpoints" had been definitively accomplished: hier war getan. Such is Heidegger's way of
`drawing lines of demarcation.'

That was 1929: the first global catastrophe for not yet omnipotent Capital; the accelerating drift of Europe and the world toward
fascism, national socialism, belligerent imperialism (and Stalinism)--against which the Briand-Stresemann accords, not to mention
debates among international philosophers, were among the many hapless casualties. The death of the powerful foreign minister of
the Weimar Republic, Gustav Stresemann, half a year after Davos (October 1929), was more than a symbolic event. It coincided
exactly "with the changing economic conjuncture and the conclusion of reparations negotiations."(131) Almost immediately, the
bourgeois parties shifted to oppose the older political coalitions and one important political result--the rollback of organized labor's
economic gains--opened up a new field of political opportunities for all parties, most lethally the extreme Right. This turn of events
played directly into the hands of the NSDAP. For one of its great strengths up to the seizure of power--when it was required to begin
making policy itself, and thus threatened to cease being "The Movement" (as Heidegger and other Nazis preferred to call themselves)
and to become yet another loathed political party, which eventually necessitated Hitler's 1934 purge of Rohm's S.A.--was the
propagation of "a very dexterous and clever mixture of conservative capitalist and populist anticapitalist positions,"(132) which were
attractive to an economically disparate cross-section of Germany, including the bloc of urban petty bourgeoisie and peasantry. This
otherwise heterogeneous constituency had been "short-changed in all the Weimar coalitions or blocs since 1924 and had been
reaggregated politically by the Nazi Party."(133) And it was with this political conjuncture and draconian solution that Heidegger most
identified,(134) with Cassirer (and especially those more helpless and/or farther to the Left) paying the piper.

Now, my claim is not that Heidegger had yet fully honed his exo/esoteric technique at Davos, but that his forensic success against
Cassirer there emboldened him to continue to seek ways to speak, write, and influence without ever being fully `heard' or `read.'
Heidegger's own attitude in entering the debate in Davos appears to have been appropriately ambivalent, according to his important
(but incompletely available) correspondence with his student, the philosopher Elisabeth Blochmann. On one hand, he wrote her on 14
April 1929 that he had gone to Davos a few weeks earlier aware of the "danger" that "the entire thing would become merely
sensational," and that he had not wanted to be "pushed into the center" of attention. On the other hand, he wrote in the same letter
that "Cassirer was extremely noble in the discussion and almost too friendly [verbindlich]. Thus I found too little opposition, which
prevented giving the problems the necessary acuity of formulation"(135)--a remark that would likely come as a surprise to all present,
and only makes sense in terms of perfecting his practice of exo/esotericism. If Heidegger had not been really "in the center of
attention," it is only in the sense that his "unsaid" doctrine per definitionem can never be centrally identified in exoteric terms. His
hesitation to Blochmann does mean, however, that he was not yet fully certain about his ability to use exo/esotericism effectively, at
least not extempore. In a letter to Jaspers on 25 May 1929, Heidegger summed up his experience in Davos in these terms: "with all
the unpleasantness unbefitting my style, in Davos I nonetheless experienced directly and powerfully that it still makes sense to be
there [in Davos habe ich doch unmittelbar und stark erfahren, daB es noch einen Sinn hat, da zu sein]; and so one has to take into
account the fact that one will come into idle chatter [es in Kauf nehmen, daB man ins Gerede kommt]."(136) This apparently offhand
use of the phrase da zu sein is in fact extraordinarily important. It precisely articulates ontology to the political, in the sense of taking a
resolute stand about Being by being existentially engaged in combat, putting one's body on the line--at the necessary risk of
participating in idle chatter and entering into the quotidian gossip of the majority. Since, for Heidegger, `even' Gerede can conceal
and reveal an authentic comportment of Dasein to Sein, it can also be employed to exo/esoteric effect.(137)

Given his own commitment to exo/esotericism, however, Heidegger also could not have really disagreed with anything Cassirer might
say, that is, not in terms of "content" and not if it proves useful for dissemination in appropriate conceptual or social conjunctures.
Nonetheless, on this particular occasion--on the Kampfplatz der Metaphysik circa 1929 in the battle being waged over the next
generation of select philosophers--Heidegger had to dispute Cassirer in a certain way. But, after having staked out the grounds on
which recruitment could be carried out with reasonable hope of success, Cassirer was no longer as particularly interesting for
Heidegger. Which is why Heidegger refused to continue the debate at Davos, and yet also felt perfectly comfortable months later
when he invited Cassirer to speak at his own Freiburg (Cassirer chose to lecture on Rousseau, of all things). On the royal road to
philosophy, noblesse oblige, particularly when the major opponents have been corps/ed and when, after Davos, `the rumor of the
hidden king' (Hannah Arendt) of philosophy was a rumor no longer.(138) Sooner a public secret, if not noble lie. Liberal humanism,
Enlightenment, and their `publicity' are most useful, now and then, to maintain social cohesion when the Holderlinian gods have
departed, the Nietzschean night of the soul is dark. And when political ontology stands poised--imperceptibly--to smash liberal
humanism and Enlightenment from without and from within whenever the time is ripe and whenever it sees fit.

Alternatively posed as questions: Is Heideggerian political ontology a structural component of humanism and Enlightenment,
developing within them immanently but, as Cassirer might argue, as such in principle susceptible to exoteric critique and self-critique?
Or is instead political ontology an externally imposed, radical other, that always eludes detection even as it is being incorporated
through esoteric means, as Heidegger would affirm? Or, as I am suggesting in this essay, is there a third alternative that can
comprehend and combat both possibilities?

IDLE TALK, VIOLENT TALK

Today's hallmark of postmodernity in general and of cultural studies specifically is that academic discussions have lost their passion
as well as their precision--rendering it ever more difficult to appreciate the precision and passion of earlier philosophical disputes. Yet,
real precision and passion for Heidegger occur only at the exo/esoteric level. At Davos, any public dispute--whether there is a
Copernican turn in Kant's First Critique, whether the nature of that turn is from the ontic to the ontological, and whether this turn can
be grounded in an existing ethics or has consequences for a possible ethics--is all mere exoteric squabbling for Heidegger. All
Cassirer's arguments, and mutatis mutandis those of liberal humanism generally, can only be Gerede.

Again, this is not to say that Gerede is somehow avoidable or even undesirable, as Being and Time had gone to impressive lengths
to show; indeed, it can and must be used exo/esoterically, politico-ontologically. However, this is to say that we ignore at our own risk
the covert as well as overt violence that has profoundly informed the history of consciousness in all its so-called conversations. This
violence includes the ancient Greek [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN
ASCII], later adapted by Nietzsche; Kant's Kampfplatz der Metaphysik; the Schmittian ideal that "it belongs only to human beings to
make war, not only to kill but to die, for a high cause and ultimately for the highest cause, which is their faith";(139) Heidegger's hair-
raising teaching to his students in 1929-30 that the very mission of authentic thinking is to make us "again call out to him who is able
to drive terror into our Dasein"(140)--in short to the Fuhrerprinzip; and, not least, the Althusserian thesis that philosophy is "class
struggle in the specific element of theory."(141) This violence in mind, we can confirm another of Strauss's brutal judgments: Cassirer
at Davos shows that he only "represented the established academic position. He was a distinguished professor of philosophy but he
was no philosopher. He was erudite but he had no passion. He was a clear writer but his clarity and placidity were not equaled by his
sensitivity to the problems."(142) Which problems, exactly? In a word, the exo/esoteric problematic that is always already designed to
crush--when it cannot exploit and manipulate--"clear writing," "clarity and placidity."

So it was that the limits of Cassirer's only partially grasped Goethean and Schellingian "symbolic form" and "myth" returned with a
vengeance when, at the end of his life, he attempted to face the "myth of the twentieth century"--German national socialism--but with
inadequate weapons and with what Strauss called "weak-kneed eclecticism."(143) Which is to say with a [GREEK TEXT NOT
REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or philosophy that has always already unknowingly conceded the field to poetry or [GREEK TEXT NOT
REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. Any distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric (and hence crucial differentia specifica among the
various totalitarian myths of the State, notably between Italian fascist relativism and German national socialist essentialism) is
effectively obliterated in Cassirer's posthumously published The Myth of the State (1946)--his last will and testament in terms of
applying his theory of myth to the most pressing current events. Cassirer was thus simply incapable of providing an effective analytic
and theoretical weapon both retroactively against national socialism in 1946 and proleptically for his followers' use in combat today
against neo-Nazism--let alone against the neofascist relativism that is transnational capitalism. Heidegger's victory over Cassirer at
Davos had `predicted,' as it were, that the philosophy of symbolic forms and its capacity to analyze fascism are politically inadequate,
in addition to serving ontologically as yet another apologist for the age-old concealment of the question of Being. When Cassirer
concluded The Myth of the State (and his life work) by admitting that "it is beyond the power of philosophy to destroy the political
myths," because "a myth is in a sense invulnerable ... impervious to rational arguments," and hence "cannot be refuted by syllogisms,
"(144) he was still confirming one of Heidegger's basic arguments, was still unwilling or incapable of taking the next step and asking
how myth might then work so supremely well as illocutionary act and perlocutionary effect. For his part, Heidegger's exo/esoteric
intervention in the Third Reich was capable of not just producing at that time what he notoriously called "the inner truth and greatness
of the Movement" (i.e., national socialism)(145) but later reproducing his brand of fascism to live to fight another day exo/esoterically
long after it had succumbed politically--as is the inevitable fate of any ontic phenomenon during the long march of the transhistory of
Being.

As helpless as virtually any isolated individual or philosopher is in the face of historical disaster, in The Myth of the State Cassirer
could add only one qualification to his admission that "it is not in the power of philosophy to destroy the political myths": "But
philosophy can do us another important service. It can make us understand the adversary better. In order to fight the enemy you must
know him.... We should see the adversary face to face in order to know how to combat him."(146) The uncanny problem, however, is
that this enemy may be us. And it is us, if grasping the exo/esoteric dimension of modern myth is indeed impossible, "impervious to
rational arguments," and without our ability fully to know how the enemy debates, thinks, writes. One thing is certain. In 1929 Davos,
Ernst Cassirer had met his enemy face to face--absolutely clueless about how to combat him effectively. And today this is the
Cassirerian ball that is in `our' court, including the conceptually foundationless court of cultural studies.

CABARET AFTER DAVOS

But in one important respect Heidegger did not simply `win' the Davos debate whereas Cassirer simply `lost' it. In terms of class
struggle (not to be conflated with political ideology), Cassirer and Heidegger always say the same thing--albeit the one exoterically,
the other exo/esoterically. In this sense, they both won the real debate, the one `extimate' to all academic philosophical disputes: the
debate on behalf of capitalist interests.

At the very end of the Davos event, a slapstick cabaret was organized with the inevitable caricature of the main participants.(147)
Cabaret--like the carnivalesque generally--is an established institution to legitimate dominant systems by critiquing them only within
carefully policed limits. One of Heidegger's assistants, the aforementioned Otto Friedrich Bollnow, played the `victorious' Heidegger--
repeating over and over again: "interpretari heiBt eine Sache auf den Kopf stellen" (interpretari means turning a thing on its head). To
which the figure playing Cassirer repeatedly retorted, "Ich bin versohnlich gestimmt" (I'm in a conciliatory mood)--shaking flour out of
the wig he was wearing, in mimicry of Cassirer's flowing white hair. But then flour continued to pour out of holes in his pockets--a
more cruel allusion to Cassirer's now perceptible intellectual poverty and abject `defeat.' Playing the role of Cassirer was the twenty-
three-year-old Emmanuel Levinas.

Was this the same man who would later, as he said, "never forgive" Heidegger for associating with national socialism, who swore an
oath during World War II never to return to Germany, but also who would continue to aver that the early Heidegger had written "one
of the most beautiful books in the history of philosophy"?(148) With this question, we find ourselves stuck still today in an uncanny
aporia of the history of consciousness: Who among us dares to be Cassirer, who Heidegger, who Bollnow, who Levinas? How
separate are they from one another, and--if our subject positions are distributed equally or unequally between them internally--is there
no external alternative? Is the upshot of our own slapstick cabaret called the History of Consciousness that we are all only
impersonating some past philosopher or philosophy, all footnotes to Plato--or to Heidegger? Given the elusive existence of their
exo/esotericism, can we ever know whom we are ventriloquizing? Can we ever speak not merely in our own voice, but in an
alternative, oppositional voice? Is life just a cabaret?

Even remaining within this anecdote and metaphor, however, there is at least weak hope. As Althusser once remarked: "With
philosophers you know what to expect: at some point they will fall flat on their faces. Behind this mischievous or malevolent hope
there is a genuine reality: ever since Thales and Plato, philosophy and philosophers have been "falling into wells." Slapstick. But that
is not all!(149) But the intractable problem is that we do not always know what to expect with philosophers, let alone exo/esoteric
ones. And do they eventually fall flat on their faces? Finally, what is this "not all" that exceeds them?

Near the outset of this essay, I said that I hoped to avoid contributing to the myth that at Davos Cassirer and Heidegger represented
the only two major possible choices for the next generations of philosophers--with Heidegger's camp carrying the day, at least for a
long time and the time being. An alternative, oppositional position might have been present at Davos. Canonical myth to the contrary,
it may not be true necessarily that everyone witnessing the great event thought that Heidegger had triumphed, and not merely
because a tiny minority stubbornly insisted on giving the laurel to Cassirer. But were there any real dissenters to the dominant
consensus? Among the audience were several young self-described Marxists: including Alfred Sohn-Rethel, later the leading
Frankfurt School economist, and Herbert Marcuse, although the latter was already swimming fast toward Heidegger's undertow.(150)
The record shows that they were all silent. But then vulgar Marxists--here defined as all those unaware of, and hence victims of,
exo/esotericism--are always reduced to silence. And justly so.

I conclude. Whatever will be the `final' outcome of the encounter between Cassirer and Heidegger (i.e., their mutual victory disguised
as a `debate' `won' by Heidegger), and whether any academic discipline could ever find its philosophical base or ethics in Cassirer
and/or Heidegger, the present essay has attempted to rectify the evident vulgar Marxist silence--not only at Davos. My argument
hardly amounts to a philosophy or an ethics that constitutes an effective opponent of capitalism, fascism, Stalinism, and
exo/esotericism. But, drawing one line of demarcation, this may be one exoteric start.

NOTES

(1.) Leo Strauss, "An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to
the Thought of Leo Strauss, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 28.

(2.) Dominique Janicaud, The Shadow of That Thought: Heidegger and the Question of Politics, trans. Michael Gendre (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1996), 60.

(3.) Emmanuel Levinas, "Martin Heidegger and Ontology," Diacritics 26, no. 1 (1996): 11.

(4.) Martin Heidegger, "Zurcher Seminar," in Seminare, Gesamtausgabe, ed. Curd Ochwadt (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1986),
I/15:426. I will cite this edition as GA, followed by section, volume, and page numbers.

(5.) Niccolo Machiavelli to Francesco Guicciardini, May 17, 1521, in The Prince: A New Translation, Backgrounds, Interpretations,
Peripherica, ed. and trans. Robert M. Adams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 135.

(6.) Heidegger, "Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit," in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1967), 109 (emphasis added).

(7.) Compare also Isaiah 6:9-10. The passage from Mark is the core exhibit in Frank Kermode's The Genesis of Secrecy: On the
Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

(8.) Boethius, Philosophiae consolationis, II, 74-77.

(9.) Louis Althusser, "Du cote de la philosophic," in Edition posthume d'oeuvres de Louis Althusser, vol. 5, Ecrits philosophiques et
politiques, Tome II, ed. Francois Matheron (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1995), 259.

(10.) Benedict de Spinoza, Spinoza opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1925), 2:124; The Ethics, in The Collected
Works of Spinoza, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 1:479 (pt. II, prop. XLIII, schol.).

(11.) Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic, ed. and trans. J. Michael Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 557, 561.

(12.) For the standard account of this and other (often contradictory) definitions of ideology, see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A
Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 153-57.

(13.) Althusser, "`On the Young Marx': Theoretical Questions," in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Vintage, 1970), 57.

(14.) On the way the prudent discourse peculiar to sacred thought was eventually replaced by another discourse informed by its own
problematic relation to reality and intersubjectivity, see Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd
(New York: Zone, 1996). In Stalinist humanism, Marx replaces God in the presecular definition, truth in the Spinozist and Kantian,
and ideology in the Althusserian. For Stalinism, "The teaching of Marx is omnipotent because it is true" (Rede Erich Honeckers auf
der Internationalen Wissenschaftlichen Konferenz des Zentralkomitees der SED: "Karl Marx und unsere Zeitalter--Kampf um Frieden
und sozialen Fortschritt" [Dresden: Verlag Zeit im Bild, 1983], 11).

(15.) Althusser, "Marx and Humanism," in For Marx, 232.

(16.) Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 175.

(17.) Heidegger, "Der Urprung des Kunstwerkes," in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1980), 47.

(18.) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 1964, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), viii.

(19.) See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans.
Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 311-25.

(20.) Tracy B. Strong, "Nietzsche's Political Misappropriation," in The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Bernd Magnus and
Kathleen M. Higgens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 123.

(21.) This is something grasped not only by fascism but by Nazism. As the master of propaganda, Goebbels, memorably put it in
March 1933, the strong state does not need overt propaganda, which indeed is a sign of weakness: "The best propaganda is not that
which is always openly revealing itself; the best propaganda is that which as it were works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life
without the public having any knowledge at all of the propagandistic initiative" (cited in Julian Petley, Capital and Culture: German
Cinema 1933-45 [London: BFI, 1979], 101).

(22.) See Benito Mussolini and Alfredo de Marsico, as cited in Amerigo Montemaggiore, Dizionario della dottrina fascista (Turin: G. B.
Paravia & Co., 1934), 369, 371 (from the entry "Gerarchia").

(23.) See Mussolini, "Relativismo e Fascismo", in Opera omnia, ed. Edoardo Susmel and Duilio Susmel (Florence: La Fireze,
1951-63), 17:267-69.

(24.) Ibid., 269.

(25.) Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York:
International, 1967), 3:250 (translation modified); Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Okonomie, ed. Friedrich Engels (Berlin: Dietz,
1978), 3:260.

(26.) Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 52.

(27.) Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, 2nd ed., trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1970), 101.

(28.) See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, 59.

(29.) Althusser, "Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists," in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of
the Scientists & Other Essays, ed. Gregory Elliott, trans. Ben Brewster et al. (London: Verso, 1990), 93.

(30.) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book h Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-54, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton,
1988), 228.

(31.) Antonio Gramsci's profound grasp and appropriation of Machiavelli in the 1930s is of course the great Marxist exception in this
regard (see Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith [New
York: International, 1971], 125-205), but there is no theory of the unconscious in Gramsci. And fascist prison turned him into the
greatest leftist practitioner of exo/esotericism. Althusser, too, practiced a form of exo/esotericism ("aleatory materialism") to critique
Stalinist humanism, inevitablism, and totalitarianism--although mainly from within them. This is becoming evident with the publication
of his opus postumus (e.g., see Sur la philosophie, ed. Olivier Corpet [Paris: Gallimard, 1994], esp. 34-44).

(32.) Althusser, "The Thilisi Affair, 1976-1984," in Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, ed. Olivier Corpet and Francois
Matheron, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 118 (emphasis eliminated).

(33.) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, 133. This follows Lacan's analytic caveat about the relation of the unconscious to
conscious knowledge: "All I can do is tell the math. No, that isn't so--I have missed it. There is no math that, in passing through
awareness, does not lie. But one runs after it all the same" (p. vii). Although Lacan focused on lies in relation to the unconscious
much more than on the possibility of their exo/esoteric manipulation, and although Althusser largely followed suit, elements of
Althusserian theory are just now being used to critique this perceived lacuna in the Lacanian system, as well as in Marxism generally.
See Robert Pfaller, Althusser: Dos Schweigen im Text; Epistemologie, Psychoanalyse und Moninalismus in Louis Althussers Theorie
der Lekture (Munich: Fink, 1997), esp. 74-157; and "Negation and Its Reliabilities: An Empty Subject for Ideology?" in Cogito and the
Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Zizek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 225-46.

(34.) Lacan, Television (Paris: du Seuil, 1973), 83.

(35.) The Davos transcript has been published as "Davoser Disputation zwischen Ernst Cassirer und Martin Heidegger," in
Heidegger, Kant und dos Problem der Metaphysik, 4th rev. ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1973), 246-68. It has been partially
and badly translated as "A Discussion between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger," trans. Francis Slade, The Existentialist
Tradition: Selected Writings, ed. Nino Languilli (Garden City, NY: Doubleday/ Anchor, 1971), 192-203; and more fully and precisely
as "Davos Disputation between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger," in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 171-85. (This translation of the book supersedes the one in 1962 by James S.
Churchill.)

(36.) See Ernst Cassirer, Die Idee der republikanischen Verfassung: Rede zur Verfassungsfeier am 11. August 1928 (Hamburg:
Friederichsen, 1929). Jorgen Habermas has argued that Cassirer's "unclarified" relationship to Judaism was responsible for
Heidegger's "questionable victory" at Davos insofar as the latter was able to articulate contemporary avant-garde existentialism with
the claim to return to the deepest origins of "Occidental" thought. To this potent mixture, the Enlightenment humanist Cassirer could
find no antidote because the Enlightenment, on Habermas's account, had only partially freed Jews and Jewish thought from the
ghetto, but at the expense of "the depth of its own tradition, the Cabala," which alone could have met ancient Greek thought, as
exemplified by Heidegger, in terms of profundity ("Der deutsche Idealismus und die judischen Philosophen," in Philosophisch-
politische Profile, 3rd ed. [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981], 53-54). In other terms, Habermas implies that Cassirer failed in not
being authentically or sufficiently Jewish, whereas Heidegger was victorious in being what? Authentically and sufficiently Greek? In
any case, historicizing `explanations' can grasp nothing of transhistorical exo/esotericism.

(37.) See Heidegger, "Was Ist Metaphysik?" in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1967), 1-19.

(38.) See Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 2nd ed., trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985),
76. The great rival myth that Schmitt had in mind was of course Sorel's "myth of the general strike." See Mark Neocleous, "Friend or
Enemy? Reading Schmitt Politically," Radical Philosophy 79 (September-October, 1996): 13-23. Supplementing Neocleous's
argument, I'd say that the paradoxical complexities of Schmitt's relationship to fascism and national socialism, in tandem with his
generally positive influence on our own contemporary Left, are due to his commitment to the double rhetoric of exo/esotericism.

(39.) See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985),
89-102.

(40.) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as cited in Otto Friedrich Bollnow, "Gesprache in Davos," in Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger, ed.
Gunther Neske (Pfullingen: Neske, 1977), 28. The reference is to Goethe's Die Compagne in Frankreich, published in 1822 but
dating back to his experiences at the siege of Mainz in 1792-93. It was also Goethe's habit to use aesthetic categories to describe
Napoleon. Goethe told an acquaintance that "Napoleon directed the world according to about the same basic principles as he
[Goethe] did the theater" (J. D. Falk, 14 October 1808; Goethe, Artemis-Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gesprache [Zurich:
Artemis, 1944 ff], 22:512).

(41.) The Straussian view remains informed by Leo Strauss's eyewitness accounts, to which I refer. (Strauss's academic career was
launched by letters of recommendation from the unlikely pair of Cassirer and Carl Schmitt--yet another story there.) The main
Heideggerian eyewitness is Bollnow, "Gesprache in Davos." The Cassirerian eyewitness is Henrik J. Pos, "Recollections of Ernst
Cassirer," trans. Robert W. Bretall, The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp (Evanston, IL: The Library of Living
Philosophers, 1949), 61-72. As we will see, Pos directed a remark to Cassirer and Heidegger during their debate, which is the only
intervention from the audience recorded in the available transcript.

(42.) Strauss's only extended analysis of Heidegger is "An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," yet we are warned by Alan
Udoff that "[t]he relationship of Strauss to Heidegger is not at all adequately suggested by the rifles of his works or their indices--
Natural Right and History being an outstanding example" ("On Leo Strauss: An Introductory Account," in Leo Strauss's Thought:
Toward a Critical Engagement [Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1991], 27).

(43.) Karlfried Grunder, "Cassirer und Heidegger in Davos 1929," in Uber Ernst Cassirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, ed.
Hans-Jurg Braun et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 290-302. Grunder's essay provides basic anecdotal information about
the Davos event and its prehistory, as does Heinz Paetzold, Ernst Cassirer--Von Marburg nach New York: Eine philosophische
Biographie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995), 86-105 ("Die Davoser Disputation zwischen Ernst Cassirer und
Martin Heidegger 1929").

(44.) To be sure, cultural studies may not need a philosophical base; or, more precisely, as a form of historicism, it can and does not
perceive such a need (on this issue avant la lettre, see Leo Strauss, "What Is Political Philosophy?" in What Is Political Philosophy?
and Other Studies [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], esp. 20-27). Today, this problem is debated, more or less directly,
within cultural and postcolonial studies perhaps most intensely in the journal Cultural Critique (specifically, vol. 33, spring 1996; see
especially Mario Moussa and Ron Scapp, "The Practical Theorizing of Michel Foucault: Politics and Counter-Discourse," 87-112). I
know of no specific analytic yield supposedly indebted to Cassirer's methodology that could not have been arrived at from another
route; and it is symptomatic that none of the contributions to the 1996 Cassirer conference at Yale attempted to apply Cassirerian
concepts to specific problems. This holds true as well of the major anthologies on his work that are now appearing in Germany,
including Uber Ernst Cassirers Philosophic der symbolischen Formen; and Kulturkritik nach Ernst Cassirer, ed. Enno Rudolph and
Bernd-Otto Kuppers (Hamburg: Meiner, 1995; Cassirer-Forschungen, vol. 1), both of which contain more or less insightful articles
about Cassirer and his relationship to other thinkers, but neither of which really attempts to use Cassirer himself. But this reluctance
or even incapacity would make sense if the Cassirerian symbolic form is indeed a conceptual night in which all cows are black.
Certainly, Cassirer was never able to define and critique his own most basic concept--symbolic form--in the terms he used in 1907 to
depict one of Spinoza's own basic concepts--substance. As paraphrased by Negri, "This concept of substance, Cassirer continues, is
indeterminate, and when one tries to grasp its content, it appears at times as `existence,' at times as a `totality' of the particular
determinations, `ordering of the singular beings'; finally, the positivity of the concept of substance seems to reside in the
mathematical dependence that the things establish, once and for all, among themselves" (Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The
Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991], 78; citing
Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, vol. 2 [Hildesheim: Olms, 1973], 107-112).
Finally, does cultural studies have reason to be concerned about exo/esotericism? No more and no less than any other discipline or
would-be discipline.

(45.) Paetzold, Ernst Cassirer, 104.

(46.) See Susanne K. Langer, "On Cassirer's Theory of Language and Myth," in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, 379-400; and
Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954). For two important, very different critiques of
the fascination of North American literary criticism in the 1950s with the Cassirerian concepts of symbol and myth, see Paul de Man's
early `deconstructionist' position in "The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism," in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism, 2nd rev. ed., introduction by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), esp. 242-44;
and the `orthodox' Marxist position of Ursula Brumm, "Der neue Symbolismus in Amerika," Neue deutsche Hefte 5 (1958-59); along
with the later elaboration of her argument by one of East Germany's leading literary theorists, Robert Weimann, in his Structure and
Society in Literary History: Studies in the History and Theory of Historical Criticism, rev. ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1984), 131-45.

(47.) De Man, "Spacecritics: J. Hillis Miller and Joseph Frank", in Critical Writings 1953-1978, ed. Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 108.

(48.) Althusser, "Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists," 91.

(49.) Ibid., esp. 83, 88.

(50.) By repeating the rider "in principle," my intent is not to beg the question but rather to acknowledge that Marxism and
communism have not always lived up to these principles.

(51.) Althusser, "The Tbilisi Affair," 110.

(52.) Althusser, letter to Lacan, 4 December 1963, "Correspondence with Jacques Lacan 1963-1969," in Writings on Psychoanalysis,
157.

(53.) The contradiction I identify here is constitutive of Althusser's entire oeuvre. Its cause is overdetermined, including by his manic
psychopathology, but can also be explained (although not explained away) by the fact that all the writings Althusser published are
exo/esoteric. In brief, the comparatively esoteric Althusser is more cogent than the comparatively exoteric.

(54.) See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, 139. On Lacan's neologism `extimite' (which combines ex-terieur with in-timite),
see Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society, ed. Mark Bracher et al. (New York: New York University Press,
1994), especially the contribution of Jacques-Alain Miller.

(55.) For the first analogy, see Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger 1929-1976, trans. Parvis
Emad and Kenneth Maly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 13; the second is Ludwig Englert's, as cited by Grunder,
"Cassirer und Heidegger in Davos 1929," 299.

(56.) See Kurt Riezler's report on Davos (siding with Heidegger) in the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, 30 March 1929; also cited in Rudiger
Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland: Heidegger und seine Zeit (Munich: Hanser, 1994), 220-21. According to Safranski,
Heidegger had read Mann's novel in the summer of 1924 together with his lover, the philosopher Hannah Arendt.

(57.) See Warren Montag, "Spinoza and Althusser against Hermeneutics: Interpretation or Intervention," in The Althusserian Legacy,
ed. E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1993), 51-58.

(58.) Heidegger, "Davoser Vortrage: Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft und die Aufgabe einer Grundlegung der Metaphysik," in Kant
und das Problem der Metaphysik, 245. This precis has been translated as "Davos Lectures: Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and the
Task of a Laying of the Ground for Metaphysics," in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 169-71.

(59.) See Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt--Endlichkeit--Einsamkeit, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm yon Herrmann
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983); GA, II/29/30; The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans.
William McNeill and Nicolas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), esp. chs. 3-4.

(60.) Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 12.

(61.) Ibid., 39-40.

(62.) Ibid., 55.

(63.) Ibid., 13. On silence as a constitutive feature of Heidegger's thinking--although the author is unaware of the problem of
exo/esotericism and its rhetorical implications for Heidegger--see Berel Lang, Heidegger's Silence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1996).

(64.) Compare, for example, Bollnow, "Gesprache in Davos."

(65.) Stanley Rosen, The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry: Studies in Ancient Thought (New York: Routledge, 1988), 13.

(66.) Karl Kautsky, Ethics and the Materialistic Conception of History, 4th rev. ed., trans. J. R. Askew (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, n.d.),
160. As noted by Steven Lukes, Kautsky is one of very few Marxists to address the problem of ethics in any depth. And he did so
within a problematic basically established by the Marburg neo-Kantians, including Cohen, Natorp, Lange, Stammler, Staudinger, and
Vorlander--all of whom attempted "to supplement Marx with Kant, whose practical philosophy, they thought, could provide the ethical
justification for the pursuit of the socialist goal" (Lukes, Marxism and Morality [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985], 15). On this topic, see
Timothy R. Keck, "Kant and Socialism: The Marburg School in Wilhelmian Germany" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1975);
and Klaus Christian Kohnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus: Die deutsche Universitatsphilosophie zwischen
Idealismus und Positivismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986). As Lukes also points out, other Marxists who were influenced
also by Kant (including the Austro-Marxism of Adler, Bauer, and Mach) did not share Kautsky's need for ethical grounding, and still
others attempted to mediate the two positions. I would add that by his neglect of ethics, Cassirer was indirectly opposing this `ethical'
moment in socialism. At least he was neglecting ethics compared to Marburg neo-Kantians--most notably Cassirer's teacher,
Hermann Cohen. As Pierre Bourdieu has put it, Cohen had "proposed a Socialist interpretation of Kant, in which the categorical
imperative enjoining us to treat the other person [le personne d'autrui] as ends, not means, is interpreted as the moral program of the
future" (L'ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger, 2nd rev. ed. [Paris: Minuit, 1988], 55-56). Heidegger's rejection of the validity of
even the question of ethics was in this context a more direct attack on at least this socialism. Heidegger here followed Nietzsche (who
had learned much of what he knew of Kantianism and socialism from Friedrich Albert Lange's History of Materialism). All this is not to
deny that many think they have found an ethics in Heidegger (as others have found one in Cassirer); or, to be more precise, they
have invented one for Heidegger by reading him only exoterically (e.g., the articles by John D. Caputo and Jean Grondin in Reading
Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought, ed. Theodore Kisiel and John yon Buren [Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1994]).

(67.) As for the existential prerequisites, they may be found in Trotsky's depiction of Lenin (or, if one prefers, Lenin as ego ideal): "the
`amoralism' of Lenin, that is, his rejection of supra-class morals, did not hinder him from remaining faithful to one and the same ideal
throughout his life; from devoting his whole being to the cause of the oppressed; from displaying the highest conscientiousness in the
sphere of ideas and the highest fearlessness in the sphere of action; from maintaining an attitude untainted by the least superiority to
an `ordinary' worker, to a defenseless woman, to a child. Does it not seem that `amoralism' in given a case is only a pseudonym for
higher human morality?" (Leon Trotsky, "Their Morals and Ours," in Their Morals and Ours: Marxist versus Liberal Views on Morality;
Four Essays by Leon Trotsky, John Dewey, and George Novack, 4th ed. [New York: Pathfinder, 1969], 34). "As for us," Trotsky wrote
in 1920, "we were never concerned with the Kantian--priestly and vegetarian--Quaker prattle about `sacredness of human life.' We
were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the
social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron" (Terrorism and Communism [Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1961], 82). On this occasion, Trotsky neglected to add: but not by blood and iron alone.

(68.) For a cogent attack against the ideology of interdisciplinarity, see Althusser, "Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the
Scientists," esp. 85-100.

(69.) See Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of "As-If," 2nd ed., trans. C. K. Ogden (New York: Harper & Row, 1935). Vaihinger's
position was developed independently of, but finds its great philosophical precedent in, Jeremy Bentham's posthumously published
"Theory of Fictions" (Bentham's Theory of Fictions, ed. C. K. Ogden [Paterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1959]).

(70.) Cassirer, Goethe und die geschichtliche Welt: Drei Aufsatze (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1932), 26, as cited in de Man, "Thematic
Criticism and the Theme of Faust," trans. Dan Latimer, in Critical Writings, 80. Readers of the first paragraph of Nietzsche's Untimely
Meditation on "The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" will recognize a key source of this view of Goethe. Prior to Davos,
Cassirer had of course written extensively about Goethe (as both scientist and man of letters), including Freiheit und Form: Studien
zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1916), ch. 4; Idee und Gestalt: Funf Aufsatze (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer,
1921), chs. 1, 2; and "Goethe und Platon," Sokrates 48 no. 1 (1922), reprinted in Goethe und die geschichtliche Welt, ch. 3. In
English, see his Rousseau Kant Goethe: Two Essays, trans. James Gutmann et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945),
esp. 61-98.

(71.) Goethe, letter to K. E. Schubarth, 12 January 1818, in Artemis-Gedenkausgabe, 21:286.

(72.) Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen (Nr. 1113), in Artemis-Gedenkausgabe, 9:639.

(73.) Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 193.

(74.) Spinoza, The Ethics, 1:428 (pt. I, prop. XVIII); Spinoza opera, 2:62. "Deus est omnium rerum causa immanens, non veto
transiens."

(75.) This returns us to the irony behind de Man's affirmation of Cassirer's paradigm shift of European and North American literary
criticism "from the history of themes" (Stoffgeschichte) "to the history of ideas" (Geistesgeschichte), by which the demand for a
`history of images' is elided and obviated ("Thematic Criticism and the Theme of Faust," 80). De Man took a refreshingly candid
neoformalist stand with regard both to the history of ideas and to presuppositions about the idea of history, and was entirely justified
in his imputation to Cassirer of "a certain theory of history" that "is shown to bring order and coherence in the apparently erratic
development of literature"--but this means, for de Man, an illicit order and coherence in its actually erratic development ("Modern
Poetics in France and Germany," in Critical Writings, 157). In other words, Cassirer simply presupposed the existence of a
philosophy of history commensurate with his philosophy of symbolic forms, thus rendering their precise epistemological status
basically undecidable. Are these forms ahistorical or transhistorical relational structures, not to say archetypes? Or are they merely
concatenations of empirical observations without conceptual grounding?

(76.) Contrast Cassirer's view of Goethe's relation to Enlightenment and Romanticism as presented in both Rousseau Kant Goethe:
Two Essays and The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1951), esp. 360.

(77.) See Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), ch. 1: "Transcendental Ambiguity: The
Rhetoric of the Enlightenment," which includes a close analysis of an often overlooked section of Kant's First Critique: "The Discipline
of Pure Reason with Respect to Its Polemical Use" (B 766-97). Also compare Vaihinger's related view of Kant's argument (based
particularly on the opus postumus) to formulate "the philosophy of as-if."

(78.) Cassirer's writings on Plato, and on Greek philosophy generally, confirm Strauss's remark that, after Schleiermacher's dismissal
of the thesis that Plato was an esoteric writer, German philosophy began to lose its contact with the exo/esoteric problematic, which
thus effectively ended with Lessing. For Schleiermacher "failed to see the crucial question," introducing as he did "that style of
Platonic studies in which classical scholarship is still engaged" (Strauss, "Exoteric Teaching," in The Rebirth of Classical Political
Rationalism, 67-69). And compare, indeed, Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher, "General Introduction," in Introductions to the
Dialogues of Plato, trans. William Dobson (London: John William Parker, 1836), esp. 5-19. Whereas Schleiermacher had to at least
take the question seriously, Cassirer did not. In addition to Cassirer's "Goethe und Platon," see in this regard his Die Philosophie der
Griechen yon den Anfangen bis Platon (Berlin: Ullstein, 1925), esp. pt. 2, ch. 3: "Platon."

(79.) On this term, see Geoffrey Waite, Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture of
Everyday Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), esp. 51-58.

(80.) For another view of this Nietzschean problematic, see Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's "Zarathustra"
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). But this is not how Rosen views Heidegger in The Question of Being: A Reversal of
Heidegger (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

(81.) Nietzsche, "Jenseits yon Gut und Bose: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft," in Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Werke, ed.
Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1967 ff), 6/2:19 (pt. I, aphorism 11). I will cite this
edition as KGW, followed by section, volume, and page numbers.

(82.) See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
Sloterdijk distinguishes "cynicism," a form of modern "enlightened false consciousness," from the premodern (Diogenes) and also
postmodern mode of liberatory, carnivalesque belly laughter that he calls "kynicism." Here, Nietzsche and Heidegger are axial points
for Sloterdijk's own explicitly left-Nietzschean and left-Heideggerian brand of kynicism, which, I would argue, wholly misses what
Nietzsche and Heidegger themselves were about exo/esoterically.

(83.) See Octave Mannoni, Clefs pour l'imaginaire (Paris: du Seuil, 1968), 14-32; and Zizek's many appropriations of Mannoni's work,
including in For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 245-53.

(84.) V. I. Lenin, "Party Organization and Party Literature," in Collected Works, various trans. (Moscow: Progress, 1972), 10:44.

(85.) See Heidegger, "Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. 2. Ted: Das mythische Denken," Deutsche
Literaturzeitung 21 (1928): 1000-1012; "Review of Ernst Cassirer's Mythical Thought," in The Piety of Thinking, ed. and trans. James
G. Hart and John C. Maralso (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 32-45.

(86.) Jacques Taminiaux has pointed to the great importance of Heidegger's review for the development of a crucial aspect his
thinking: the thematization of the attribution to primitive Dasein of an understanding of Being--a thematization more extensive and
precise than the presentation in Being and Time ("The Husserlian Heritage in Heidegger's Notion of the Self," trans. Francois
Renaud, in Reading Heidegger from the Start, 282). For discussion of Heidegger's own views on myth and symbol, see 281-84.

(87.) See Bollnow, "Gesprache in Davos."

(88.) Heidegger, "Ernst Cassirer," 1000.

(89.) Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, "Philosophische Briefe uber Dogmatismus und Kriticismus," in Samtliche Werke, ed. Karl
Friedrich August Schelling (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta'scher Verlag, 1856), 1/1:341 (emphasis added). Symptomatically, the problematic of
exo/esotericism in Schelling is one of the only significant issues in his work not touched on by Heidegger in his 1936 lecture course
on Schelling's concept of freedom (Heidegger, Schelling, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809), ed. Hildegard Feick
[Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1988]; GA, 2/42; Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh [Athens:
Ohio University Press 1985]). To be precise, Heidegger does allude to this problematic of silence here: once. But he does so
obliquely and by way of Nietzsche, whom Heidegger tells his charges in his "Introductory Remarks" is "The only essential thinker after
Schelling" (Schelling's Treatise, 3). Heidegger then mysteriously adds: "During the time of his greatest productivity and his deepest
solitude, Nietzsche wrote the following verses in a dedication copy of his book Dawn of Day (1881): `Whoever one day has much to
proclaim / Is silent about much/ Whoever must one day kindle the lightning / Must be for a long time--cloud (1883)'" (pp. 3-4).

(90.) Heidegger, "Review of Ernst Cassirer's Mythical Thought," 33. As Heidegger further argues, this problematic is neo-Kantian
insofar as Cassirer's "analysis of the mythic form of thought begins with a general description of the way in which objects stand over
against mythic consciousness. The object-consciousness of mathematical physics as understood by the Kantian interpretation of
Hermann Cohen serves as a guide to the characterization: There is an active forming of a passively given `chaos of sensation' into a
`cosmos.'"

(91.) Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books,
1963), 229.

(92.) Karl Jaspers to Heidegger, 21 June 1925, Martin Heidegger/Karl Jaspers: Briefwechsel 1920-1963 (Munich: Piper, 1992), 50.

(93.) Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 154.

(94.) Heidegger, "Review of Ernst Cassirer's Mythical Thought," 36.

(95.) Nietzsche, Jenseits yon Gut und Bose; KGW, 6/2:44-45 (pt. II, aphorism 30).

(96.) "Drawing back in terror" is also a central term in Heidegger's pedagogical repertoire, particularly around 1929, as when he
warned students to whom he was introducing metaphysics that they might do precisely this, "when faced with the peculiar effort in
grasping metaphysics directly" (The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 4).

(97.) Heidegger, "Davoser Vortrage," 245; "Davos Lectures," 171.

(98.) See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 405-568; B 432-596.

(99.) Of course, even the most cursory look at Cassirer's more popular late works (e.g., the 1944 Essay on Man and the 1946 The
Myth of the State) gives the impression that they are chock full of ethical concerns, and this leads to observations such as that of the
theologian Paul Tillich about Davos; namely, that it was "the conflict between one who, like Cassirer, came from Kantian moral
philosophy with rational criteria for thinking and acting, and one who, like Heidegger, defended himself on the notion that there are no
such criteria" ("Heidegger and Jaspers," in Heidegger and Jaspers, ed. Alan M. Olson [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994],
17). But the claim of Heideggerians and Straussians is rather different; namely, that Cassirer could not ground his ethical concerns,
which may well be a legitimate complaint. Appealing to arguments by Jacques Rivelaygue and Alexis Philonenko, Luc Ferry suggests
laconically that "one of the principle issues in the quarrel between Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos" was about an impassable aporia
between ethics and epistemology that was inscribed already deep within Kant himself: "[I]t is very hard to reconcile the idea of
freedom (of intelligible and noumenal causality) with Kant's theory of meaning which requires that a concept be temporalized
(schematized) to have meaning. It is then so hard to see how freedom and causality are reconciled in a particular case (the historical
event) that one cannot imagine setting forth the various interpretations proposed by the commentators of Kant" (Ferry, Political
Philosophy, vol. 2, The System of Philosophies of History, trans. Franklin Philip [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992],
148-49).

(100.) See, for example, Paetzold, Ernst Cassirer, 157-90 ("Cassirers Jahre in Goteborg/Schweden [1935-1941] und die Wende der
Kulturphilosophie zur Ethik").

(101.) Bollnow, "Gesprache in Davos," 27.

(102.) "Davoser Disputation," 247 (Heidegger); "A Discussion," 193; and "Davos Disputation," 172. Gadamer has suggested that
"[a]fter his encounter with Cassirer in Davos and, more important, following his growing insight into the inappropriateness of this
transcendental self-interpretation for his own thinking, Heidegger began to interpret Kant's philosophy as being more entangled in the
history of the forgetfulness of Being, as shown by his later works on Kant" (Hans-Georg Gadamer, "The History of Philosophy," in
Heidegger's Ways, trans. John W. Stanley [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994], 162).

(103.) See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 486; B 514.

(104.) "Davoser Disputation," 248 (Cassirer); "A Discussion," 193; "Davos Disputation," 172-73.

(105.) Ibid., 252 (Heidegger); "A Discussion," 195; "Davos Disputation," 175.

(106.) Idem.

(107.) Ibid., 260 (Heidegger); "A Discussion," 199; "Davos Disputation," 180.

(108.) Idem. For a concise depiction of the changing complexity of Heidegger's position on culture, see Jeffrey Andrew Barash,
"Heidegger's Ontological `Destruction' of Western Intellectual Traditions," in Reading Heidegger from the Start, 111-21. Noting
Heidegger's apparent dismissal of the term `culture' in his Davos response to Cassirer, Barash rightly argues that "[t]his deliberate
neglect of a philosophical concept whose significance Heidegger himself had underscored in his early Freiburg courses by no means
indicates a suspension of Heidegger's critical thrust in this direction but rather a broadening of its focus" (p. 115)--a thrust, however,
that was as radically new as it was shrouded in obscurity.

(109.) This basic point is missed by most extended recent attempts to reopen the question of Heidegger's relation to Kant: Daniel O.
Dahlstrom, "Heideggers Kant-Kommentar, 1925-1936," Philosophisches Jahrbuch (1989): 343-66; and "Heidegger's Kant-Courses at
Marburg," in Reading Heidegger from the Start, 293-308; Frank Schalow, The Renewal of the Heidegger-Kant Dialogue: Action,
Thought, and Responsibility (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); and (building on the work of Pierre Aubenque)
Christopher Macann, "Heidegger's Kant Interpretation," in Critical Heidegger, ed. Christopher Macann (London: Routledge, 1996),
97-120. This is true also of the great earlier treatment of the Kant-Heidegger nexus: Jules Vuillemin, L'heritage kantien et la revolution
copernicienne (Paris: P.U.F., 1954), 210-96. See further Pierre Aubenque, "Le debat de 1929 entre Cassirer et Heidegger," in Ernst
Cassirer: De Marburg a New York; L'itineraire philosophique, ed. Jean Seidendgart (Paris: du Cerf, 1990). Aubenque is also right to
highlight the "violent" tone of the Davos discussions--not only clearly on Heidegger's side but also, although more understated, on
Cassirer's (see esp. pp. 87, 92).

(110.) See Heidegger, "Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit," 109.

(111.) "Davoser Disputation," 259 (Pos); "Davos Disputation," 180.

(112.) "Davoser Disputation," 263 (Heidegger); "A Discussion," 201; "Davos Disputation," 182. Heidegger repeated such terms, again
with veiled reference to Cassirer, in his contemporaneous lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 11. On the
import for Heidegger at the time of the Davos debate of the term Harte, including its fascoid resonance already then, see Winfried
Franzen, "Die Sehnsucht nach Harte und Schwere: Uber ein zum NS-Engagement disponierendes Motiv in Heideggers Vorlesung
`Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik' von 1929/30," in Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie, ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert and
Otto Poggeler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 78-92. Heidegger's riposte to Cassirer is also disturbing to several French
readers, particularly his verb benutzen, in which they hear "exploit" (exploiter) or even "draw utilitarian profit from" (tirer des oeuvres
de l'esprit un profit utilitaire), which is Henri Decleve's translation. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe cites Decleve's translation along with
Alain David's "Levinas en France" (1986), an unpublished essay that "interprets this statement as an anti-Semitic topos, corroborating
in this regard the famous (and disputed) testimony of Madame Cassirer" (La fiction du politique: Heidegger, l'art et la politique
[Breteuil-sur-Iton: Christian Bourgois, 1987], 25). Lacoue-Labarthe adds, "[I]f anyone is surprised by Heidegger's `revolutionary
radicalism' in 1933 ... then let him re-read the minutes of the 1929 Davos colloquium" (pp. 36-37). For Toni Cassirer's remarks about
`Davos' and Heidegger's then allegedly well-known anti-Semitism, see her Aus meinem Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (New York:
privately published, 1950), 165. All this seems to me both right and altogether too simple. Heidegger's anti-Semitism, as serious as
this problem is in existential terms, is a red herring in terms of grasping his thinking and writing, in which all conceivable prejudices
(including adherence to racialist or racist political movements) are contingent epiphenomena vis-a-vis the prior decision (in the strong
Schmittian sense of legal decisionism) to employ exo/esotericism. And it is this decision that `debates' about `Heidegger, art and
politics,' `Heidegger and Nazism,' `Heidegger and anti-Semitism,' and `Heidegger and the Holocaust' effectively occlude from view. If
Heidegger was racist, he was not essentially racist, at least not in his own terms.

(113.) Levinas, "Apropos of Buber: Some Notes," in Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1994), 48.

(114.) In the recollection years later by his student and acolyte Bollnow, Heidegger's "sharp" tone of voice "bordered on the impolite"
("Gesprache in Davos," 28). In using Bollnow's recollections of Davos, which were commissioned for a final Festschrift for Heidegger,
my intention is not to imply that they should be taken at face value. Rather, I want to recreate some of the atmosphere, indeed pathos
and bathos, of that occasion in order to deconstruct it from within, `extimately,' partially in its own terms. For his part, Bollnow's main
agenda, in telling his version of Davos, was that Heidegger was never really a Nazi. As often happens with Heideggerians, Bollnow's
eulogy is really an apologia. Bollnow adds that he, a basically shy man embarrassed to be in proximity to greatness, saw Heidegger
really only twice after Davos (up to that point, he had attended Heidegger's seminars, had devoured Being and Time when it came
out in 1927, and had been personally invited by Heidegger to come to Davos): once in 1936, when Heidegger apparently told Bollnow
that" `one must go into the catacombs,' "and once in 1974, near the end of Heidegger's life, when he told Bollnow that one of his last
greatest pleasures was that he had been discovered in Japan ("Gesprache in Davos," 28-29). In the intervening years, however,
Bollnow had joined Heidegger, Gadamer, and many other German professors (on 12 November 1933) in signing the open letter
"Allegiance to Adolf Hitler"; and, like them, became one of the more prominent Nazi-affiliated university professors (lecturing
extensively on Nietzsche during the Third Reich). See Martha Zapata Galindo, Triumph des Willens zur Macht: Zur Nietzsche-
Rezeption im NS-Staat (Hamburg: Argument, 1995), 99, 212-13; and George Leaman, Heidegger im Kontext: Gesamtuberblick zum
N-S Engagement der Universitatsphilosophen, trans. Rainer Alisch and Thomas Laugstien (Hamburg: Argument, 1993), 32-33,
40-41.

(115.) Bollnow, "Gesprache in Davos," 26.

(116.) See Bourdieu, L'ontologie politique, ch. 2: "Le champ philosophique et l'espace des possibles."

(117.) Kant, Lectures on Logic, 241.

(118.) "Davoser Disputation," 264 (Cassirer); "A Discussion," 201; "Davos Disputation," 182.

(119.) Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 236; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 166. Generally, Heidegger is
rigorously indifferent to whether statements are true or false, what matters only is whether they are `worthy of question.'

(120.) For the precis, see Heidegger, "Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft," 245; "Davos Lectures," 170-71.

(121.) Bourdieu, L'ontologie politique, 71.

(122.) See ibid., 76-77.

(123.) "Davoser Disputation," 264 (Cassirer); "A Discussion," 201; "Davos Disputation," 183.
(124.) Ibid., 253 (Heidegger); "A Discussion," 196; "Davos Disputation," 176.

(125.) Cassirer persisted in this overhearing. Thus, in his 1931 review of Heidegger's Kant book, he lists several binary oppositions
that he thinks inform the First Critique, where they had been held apart, whereas Heidegger conflates them: "sensible and intelligible
world," "experience and idea," "phenomenon and noumenon," and so on. But Cassirer does not push on to see the deeper
implication of two types of language, exoteric and esoteric, which are concomitantly also to be held apart or conflated. Hence, he
admits that he is baffled by a "strangely paradoxical aspect" of Heidegger's entire work, something he cannot quite put a finger on.
Finally, Cassirer feels the need to emphasize that, in his review, "[N]othing was further in my mind than any kind of personal polemic"
(Cassirer, "Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik: Bemerkungen zu Martin Heideggers Kant-Interpretation," Kant-Studien 36, nos.
1-2 [1931]: 9, 18, 25). Indeed, the real polemic does lie elsewhere--concealed and revealed between the lines of Heidegger's
language.

(126.) "Davoser Disputation," 264-65 (Cassirer); "A Discussion," 201; "Davos Disputation," 183.

(127.) See Taminiaux, "The Husserlian Heritage," 283-84. But I disagree with Taminiaux's otherwise lucid discussion on one crucial
point; namely, when he relates Heidegger's notions of Care and symbolism by suggesting that "the symbol is not here the trace of a
lost treasure or of an enigma that could be make one wonder. Symbol does not lead to thinking anything unusual. It can at the most
illustrate, by confirming it, that which fundamental ontology claims to be able to see by itself" (p. 284). This is at best an unwitting
depiction of the exoteric half of Heidegger's relation to myth and symbol.

(128.) It has been suggested that Cassirer's habit of citing Goethe to Heidegger conceals his lack of an effective counterargument,
his frustration that his philosophy of culture "cannot reach the question of Being, because he accepts uncritically the traditional
demarcations of philosophy, including those ratified by Kant. The foundation Cassirer believes he possesses is `the idealism from
which I have never wavered.' This position is more than a philosophical doctrine, as Cassirer's use of Goethe in his responses to
Heidegger shows. Heidegger's antagonism is directed against the cultural ensemble in and for which this use of Goethe sufficed to
address fundamental issues" (James F. Ward, Heidegger's Political Thinking [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995],
60-61]). However, I would add that, aside from Cassirer's several detailed analyses of Goethe in essays devoted specifically to him,
Cassirer in other writings and lectures tended--as he did at Davos--to hold up Goethe as an unquestioned shibboleth to ward off
demons. This is roughly analogous to the way Heidegger cited Holderlin in passing when he was not dealing with him in depth. If
Cassirer embodied Settembrini plus Goethe, then mirabile dictu Heidegger embodied Holderlin plus Naptha.

(129.) According to Gadamer, a deep problem with Cassirer's work lies in his limited concept of language, all the many appearances
to the contrary: "Even when Ernst Cassirer included the phenomenon of language in the topic of the neo-Kantian idealism, he did so
methodically with the methodical idea of objectification" ("The Marburg Theology," in Heidegger's Ways, 30). This is not to deny, in
the words of Susanne [anger, that Cassirer's "knowledge of linguistics on which he bases vol. I of his Philosophie der symbolischen
Formen is almost staggering" ("On Cassirer's Theory of Language," 399). But it is a radically different kind of `linguistics' that is at
work for both Heidegger and Gadamer, committed as they are to (fascoid) exo/esotericism. On Gadamer in this regard, see Teresa
Orozco, Platonische Gewalt: Gadamers politische Hermeneutik der NS-Zeit (Hamburg: Argument, 1995).

(130.) "Davoser Disputation," 268 (Heidegger); "A Discussion," 203; "Davos Disputation," 185.

(131.) David Abraham, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis, 2nd ed. (New York: Holmes & Meier,
1986), 309. I am aware of the problematic status of this book (particularly in the first edition) but believe that its basic thesis is correct.

(132.) Ibid., 310.

(133.) Ibid., 314.

(134.) Heidegger's "inward turn" with regard to the Nazi Party seems to have come only after--indeed because of--the 1934 Rohm
purge. This has been confirmed not only in the notoriously erratic work of Victor Farias (Heidegger und der National Sozialismus, 2nd
ed., with a foreword by Jurgen Habermas [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1989]), but also by the impeccable work of Hugo Ott, Martin
Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1988), 275-76, 304-305. Ott also shows that Heidegger
remained committed, from within the Party, to the positions taken by Goring (see pp. 146-66).

(135.) Martin Heidegger/Elisabeth Blochmann: Briefwechsel 1918-1969, ed. Joachim W. Storck (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche
Schillergesellschaft, 1989), 30.

(136.) Martin Heidegger/Karl Jaspers: Briefwechsel, 123.

(137.) For this reason, Levinas's paraphrase of Heidegger's position on Gerede is misleading, remaining as it does on the exoteric
surface of the problem: "In Heidegger, for whom the `language that speaks' is not subject to the hazards of human speech--for whom
it is language that speaks in human speech (die Sprache spricht)--it is the revelation of being that coincides with that speaking.
Hence the language of everyday life can only be a fallen language; it becomes Gerede, its own `object' and its own goal, conforming
to what they say, what they do, what they read, motivated by a vain curiosity, comfortable with ambiguity. It has fallen from the
ontological status of language, and appears to have no other subject than the anonymous `they,' once it loses the horizon of the
being of beings, the field of truth" ("Everyday Language and Rhetoric without Eloquence," in Outside the Subject, 141). Levinas
comes somewhat closer to the properly Heideggerian problematic of exo/esotericism with his remarks in Totalite et infini (1961) on
"rhetoric and injustice" when he argues that "[n]ot every discourse is a relation with exteriority"--if by that Levinas were to mean that
not every discourse is to be understood only exoterically (Totality and Infinio,: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis
[Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969], 70). Much is at stake for Levinas on this point, since he grounds his own ethics on the
principle that "The other qua other is the Other" (L'Autre en tant qu'autre est Autrui)--l'Autrui being Levinas's term for "you qua
personal other" in relation to l'autre, "the impersonal other." As he elaborates, "Equality among persons means nothing of itself; it has
an economic meaning and presupposes money, and already rests on justice--which, when well-ordered, begins with the Other.
Justice is the recognition of his privilege qua Other and his mastery, is access to the Other outside of rhetoric, which is ruse, emprise,
and exploitation. And in this sense justice coincides with the overcoming of rhetoric" (p. 72). This argument was, in effect, Levinas's
riposte to the total impasse in ethics reached between Cassirer and Heidegger at Davos insofar as their problematic was neo-Kantian
in inspiration, if not indeed Platonic. In Levinas's own formulation, "Hermann Cohen (in this a Platonist) maintained that one can love
only ideas; but the notion of an Idea is in the last analysis tantamount to the transmutation of the other into the Other" (p. 71).
However, for a critique of Cohen's grasp of Platonism--and of the unresolved contradiction in his thinking between freedom and faith--
see Strauss, Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors, trans. Eve Adler
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), esp. 26-27, 46-51, 129-33. Finally, for an effective critique of Levinas's overly
clear distinction between l'Autrui and l'autre and his concomitant theological commitment to the existence of an Absolute Other
identified with God, see Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978), 79-153.

(138.) This is the point of departure of John van Buren's meticulous book, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

(139.) Joseph Cropsey, foreword to Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. J. Harvey Lomax
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), ix. 140. Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik; GA, II/29/30:255.

(141.) Etienne Balibar, "Althusser's Object," Social Text 39 (Summer 1994): 157.

(142.) Strauss, "Kurt Riezler, 1882-1955," in What Is Political Philosophy? 246. Note the context of this remark: "Riezler delivered his
speech on Gebundenheit und Freiheit des gegenwartigen Zeitalters in Davos before the same audience which immediately before
had listened to a debate between Heidegger and Cassirer. Riezler took the side of Heidegger without any hesitation. There was no
alternative. Mere sensitivity to greatness would have dictated Riezler's choice. Cassirer represented the established academic
position, He was a distinguished professor of philosophy but he was no philosopher. He was erudite but he had no passion. He was a
clear writer but his clarity and placidity were not equaled by his sensitivity to the problems. Having been a disciple of Hermann Cohen
he had transformed Cohen's philosophic system, the very center of which was ethics, into a philosophy of symbolic forms in which
ethics had disappeared. Heidegger on the other hand explicitly denies the possibility of ethics because he feels that there is a
revolting disproportion between the idea of ethics and those phenomena which ethics pretended to articulate" (p. 246). Interesting
here the use of a characteristically Straussian trope of exo/esotericism. Cassirer is faulted for having eliminated something (ethics)
which Heidegger had shown is simply impossible. So the most Cassirer can be faulted for is a lack of courage in facing this fact, not
in eliminating something that is impossible anyway. Exoterically translated: by not facing up to impossibility of ethical grounding
(which Heidegger did face up to), Cassirer eliminates ethics from his philosophy for the wrong reasons, not because it is impossible
(as only Heidegger fully realized) but rather because Cassirer was not courageous enough to face up to its impossibility, and so
ignored not ethics per se but rather its impossibility. But the real clue in Strauss's remark is the phrase, "He was a clear writer but his
clarity and placidity were not equaled by his sensitivity to the problems"--that is, his failure was in the clarity of his (logographic)
writing, whatever its content--and lack thereof--might have been. In other words, between the lines, Strauss follows Heidegger to
recommend to students less a "content" of philosophy than a style of speaking and writing philosophy: between the lines. "The
problems" to which Strauss alludes are intentionally unspecified--involving as they do the How, but not the What, of what is silently
meant. Strauss's rhetorical strategy here follows the properly Platonic dictum, for him, that "One cannot separate the understanding
of Plato's teaching from the understanding of the form in which it is presented. One must pay as much attention to the How as to the
What" (The City and Man [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977], 52).

(143.) Strauss, "An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," 34.

(144.) Cassirer, The Myth of the State (Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Anchor, 1946), 373.

(145.) On Heidegger's manipulation of this remark after he wrote it in the Third Reich, see Otto Poggeler, "Heideggers politisches
Selbstverstandnis," in Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie, esp. 38-39.

(146.) Cassirer, The Myth of the State, 373.

(147.) See Grunder, "Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos 1929."

(148.) Levinas, "Bewunderung und Enttauschung," in Antwort: Martin Heidegger im Gesprach, ed. Gunther Neske and Emil Kettering
(Pfullingen: Neske, 1988), 163. Levinas places Being and Time in the select company of Plato's Phaedrus, Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason, Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, and Bergson's Time and Freedom.

(149.) Althusser, "Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists," 76.

(150.) In 1928, Marcuse, then a basically uncritical advocate of Heidegger, had written in an article in a new Berlin philosophical
journal that had devoted its first issue to discussion of Being and Time. Marcuse attempted to bring Heidegger into contact with
Marxism, so as to work out a "phenomenology of historical materialism" (see Herbert Marcuse, "Beitrage zu einer Phanomenologie
des historischen Materialismus," Philosophische Hefte 1 [1928]: 45-68). The article immediately caught the bemused eyes of
Heidegger and Jaspers (see Jaspers to Heidegger, 8 July 1928, Heidegger/Jaspers: Briefwechsel, 102).
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is a revised version of a paper read at the conference Philosophy of Culture and Symbolic Forms: New
Perspectives on Ernst Cassirer, Yale University, 4-6 October 1996. I thank its organizer Cyrus Hamlin for inviting my participation and
Karsten Harries for his commentator's critique.

Geoffrey Waite is associate professor of German studies and comparative literature at Cornell University, where he teaches
philosophy, political theory, and visual culture. He is the author of Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the
Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Duke University Press, 1996).

WAITE, GEOFFREY

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1998 Sage Publications, Inc.

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