ERNST CASSIRER’S ESSENTIAL CRITIQUE OF

HEIDEGGER AND VERFALLENHEIT

Dustin Peone

Abstract: In the past decade and a half, there has been a renewed inter-
est in the philosophical disagreements between Martin Heidegger and
Ernst Cassirer. Entirely overlooked is the fourth volume of Cassirer’s
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, unpublished in the author’s lifetime, in
which he asserts that Heidegger’s concept of Verfallenheit is the critical
point at which their philosophies diverge. This paper re-examines the
disagreements between Heidegger and Cassirer, in light of this crucial
text. Two questions are considered: (1) What is Cassirer’s criticism of
Verfallenheit? (2) In what sense is this matter the essential point of
departure between their respective philosophies? I argue that, for Cas-
sirer, the problem with the concept of Verfallenheit is that it undermines
the possibility of transpersonal meaning and reduces cultural projects
to inauthenticity.

In the past decade and a half, two prominent books appeared, focusing on the
philosophical disagreements between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer.1
Much of the discussion centers on the famous public disputation between
Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos in 1929.2 At this meeting, and later in Cas-
sirer’s The Myth of the State (1946), Heidegger’s notion of Geworfenheit
(thrownness) is the primary point of contention. Cassirer views Geworfenheit
as a problematic assertion of the powerlessness of man.
Overlooked in current discussion are the comments on Heidegger dis-
covered posthumously among the papers of Cassirer, intended as part of
a projected fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. In the
preface of its third volume, Cassirer writes: “The critical work with which
I originally intended to conclude this volume will be reserved for a future
publication which I hope soon to bring out under the title Life and the Hu-
man Spirit—toward a Critique of Present-Day Philosophy.”3 This project was
never completed, but Cassirer left behind a 1928 manuscript entitled “Geist
und Leben,” much of which concerns the philosophy of Heidegger from the
era of Sein und Zeit. This manuscript, together with other papers intended
for the promised fourth volume, has been translated and published by Donald
Phillip Verene and John Michael Krois as The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,
Vol. 4: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms.4

© 2013. Idealistic Studies, Volume 42, Issues 2 & 3. ISSN 0046-8541. pp. 119–130
DOI: 10.5840/idstudies2012422&310
120 IDEALISTIC STUDIES

In this volume, Cassirer offers his most extensive written critique of the
philosophy of Heidegger. However, the central passages that Cassirer inds
most problematic are those in which Heidegger articulates his notion of
Verfallenheit (fallenness), not Geworfenheit. Cassirer writes: “Everything
‘general,’ all giving in to the general is for Heidegger a ‘fall’—a disregard-
ing of ‘authentic’ dasein—a giving in to the inauthenticity of the ‘they’ [das
‘Man’]. Here, essentially, is where there is a parting of the ways between
his path and ours.”5
For Heidegger’s philosophy, neither Geworfenheit nor Verfallenheit is
privileged over the other; both are constitutive parts of the very being of Da-
sein. In Being and Time, Heidegger writes: “Dasein’s Being is care [Sorge].
It comprises in itself facticity (thrownness), existence (projection), and
falling [Verfallen].”6 This formulation shows the centrality of Verfallenheit
to Heidegger’s philosophy of being; for him, Dasein is no more determined
by its thrownness—its particular where and as-what—than by its absorp-
tion into das Man. It is therefore surprising that no comprehensive account
has yet been given of this second point of departure and Cassirer’s critique,
especially given his assertion that this, not Geworfenheit, is where the “es-
sential” parting of ways occurs.7
I wish to consider two questions: What is Cassirer’s criticism of Verfallen-
heit? And in what sense is this matter the essential point of departure between
their respective philosophies? I shall begin by turning to Being and Time, to
give a brief account of Heidegger’s notion of fallenness, before turning to
the unnoticed critique of Cassirer.

Heidegger and Verfallenheit

The concept of Verfallenheit, while present in sections 25–27 of Being
and Time, is most fully articulated in §38, titled Falling and Thrownness.
Heidegger writes: “Idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity characterize the way
in which, in an everyday manner, Dasein is its ‘there’—the disclosedness
of Being-in-the-world. As deinite existential characteristics, these are not
present-at-hand in Dasein, but help to make up its Being. In these, and in the
way they are interconnected in their Being, there is revealed a basic kind of
Being which belongs to everydayness; we call this the ‘falling’ of Dasein.”8
For Heidegger, the everyday form in which Dasein is disclosed is inauthen-
tic. Its absorption into das Man alienates it from all genuine concern for its
world and its fellow human beings; at the same time, it is also uprooted from
“authentic” self-understanding. The individual Dasein, the “I,” is absorbed
into or subsumed by the “they,” the others. The “they” determines the judg-
ments and standards on which the “I” bases its choices, and the roles and
categories to which the “I” conforms, including even the possibility of having
any particular mood.9 Thus the average condition of Dasein is inauthentic-
ity; it exists not alone, but in terms of the “they.” “Idle talk,” “curiosity,”
 CASSIRER’S CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGER 121

and “ambiguity” are the tools by which this absorption is accomplished,

constituting the average mode of being-with-others. Further, Heidegger
writes that, “Falling Being-in-the-world, which tempts itself, is at the same
time tranquilizing.”10 This tranquilization is achieved through “hustle” and
activity, through constant occupation, through diversion: a drive toward the
novel that works to further alienate oneself from authentic Being. In a word,
the individual is never autonomous from its public, or from public opinion.
Another passage of Heidegger’s must be taken into account. He writes:
“[Verfallen] does not express any negative evaluation, but is used to signify
that Dasein is proximally and for the most part alongside the ‘world’ of its
concern. This ‘absorption in’ has mostly the character of Being-lost in the
publicness of the ‘they.’ Dasein has, in the irst instance, fallen away from
itself as an authentic potentiality for Being its Self, and has fallen into the
‘World.’ ‘Fallenness’ into the ‘world’ means an absorption in Being-with-one-
another, in so far as the latter is guided by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity.”11
First, it is clear from this passage that for Heidegger, the “I” is always set off
from the “they” and the world as a whole, meaning that any talk of a truly
transpersonal state is cut off; he places Dasein “alongside” the world, not
naturally in the world. This will be one focal point at which Cassirer will
want to press. A second issue arises from this articulation. Heidegger asserts
that the notion Verfallen “does not express any negative evaluation”—in other
words, it is not meant to imply that a better state has been vacated, or that
Dasein has in any way become degraded. This is understandable insofar as we
take the “falling” to be merely factical. However, it is linguistically suspect;
in German, the ver- preix always suggests a deterioration. The word Fallen
was available to Heidegger without this baggage; the word Verfallen has the
sense of a lapse rather than a mere descent. I will argue later that Verfallen
ought to be understood, despite Heidegger’s claim, as a pejorative, a fall
of Dasein, from a natural and genuine experience, to this absorption of all
experience into averageness and everydayness.12
Heidegger goes on to say: “Neither must we take the fallenness of Dasein
as a ‘fall’ from a purer and higher ‘primal status.’ Not only do we lack any
experience of this ontically, but ontologically we lack any possibilities or
clues for Interpreting it.”13 With this warning in mind, we see why Heidegger
would back away from speaking pejoratively of “fallenness”; with no means
of access to a condition from which one has fallen, it is irresponsible to place
a valuation on the fall. But this is an explanation for why Heidegger ought to
avoid the ver- preix and does not explain why he embraces it. Also, it leads
to a question of directive: from whence does Heidegger derive the notion of
“inauthenticity” at all, if he is merely giving an account of what appears on
the stage of Dasein when the curtain is pulled back?
Another dificulty arises. Heidegger asserts that “because Dasein is es-
sentially falling, its state of Being is such that it is in ‘untruth.’”14 What is
122 IDEALISTIC STUDIES

“untruth”? Heidegger here insists that untruth does not mean falsehood.
Untruth may or may not be true, but the faculty for determining this is miss-
ing. Since Dasein forgets Being when it is absorbed into the praxagora15
of the world, and allows Being to be hidden, it exists without any adequate
milestone for discerning the “truth” of any matter, the result being that Dasein
can no longer validly determine what is or is not truly disclosed in genuine
understanding.16 Dasein’s absorption into the world fosters a paradigm of
understanding in which ontological self-understanding is impossible, as there
is no apparatus for such an inquiry. The claim, again, is that this is meant only
in a factical sense, not as a condemnation. No one is “at fault” for fallenness;
fallenness simply is, and there is no means of avoidance.17 There is a salient
element of fatalism which is unavoidable in this articulation. What, as Cas-
sirer asks, is the project that remains for Dasein?
Heidegger nonetheless believes that there is a hope for Dasein to discover
something of its absent authenticity. He writes: “Anticipation reveals to Das-
ein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility
of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being
itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death—a freedom which
has been released from the Illusions of the ‘they,’ and which is factical, cer-
tain of itself, and anxious.” This allows for “the ontological possibility of an
existentiell Being-towards-death which is authentic.”18 For Heidegger, much
of the absorption of the “I” into das Man, the subsumption of Dasein into
public averageness, comes about due to anxiety (Angst) over death; Dasein
seeks diversion and tranquilizing distraction, which cement its inauthentic
Being-in-the-world. Embracing this “freedom towards death” frees Dasein
from this absorption and allows it to see itself in its “authenticity,” as a i-
nite being. It turns the mind away from the “illusion” of eternal truths. But
frees it toward what? It has sometimes been taken by commentators that this
freedom sets the stage for a Pindaric project of free self-creation,19 but this
cannot be the full story. Dasein’s authentic self-understanding can only be
achieved by fully cognizing death as its limit, and proliferating Angst; any
project of creation that turns away from death is a movement back into the
state of Verfallenheit. Again, any worldly task taken up after embracing Hei-
degger’s account of Dasein as Being-toward-death is not a movement toward
the authentic Dasein; it is return to Being-in-the-world and an undertaking
made possible only by one’s retreat into das Man.

Cassirer’s Critique
In the “Geist und Leben” manuscript, Cassirer’s critique can be divided into
two distinct topics: (1) The problem of transpersonal meaning, and (2) The
problem of death. The former bears more directly on Verfallenheit, the latter
on Heidegger’s project in general. Common to both topics is the assertion
 CASSIRER’S CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGER 123

that Heidegger is primarily drawing his directive from the sphere of religion.
I will take up the claim of Heidegger’s religiosity irst.
Cassirer speaks at different moments of Heidegger as having either a
“religious purpose” or a “religious attitude.”20 There is little doubt that Hei-
degger, as a seminary alumnus, was aware that his rhetoric of fallenness was
of a piece with that of Genesis 3. Also, whether Heidegger knew it or not,
Maimonides, in Chapter I.2 of the Guide for the Perplexed, gives an exegesis
of the Biblical fall of man that shares a great number of family resemblances
with Heidegger’s account of Verfallenheit. But what does Cassirer mean by
“religion” when he uses the term? For him, religion is one of the myriad
symbolic forms that exist in the world, though not one of the three major
forms taken up in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. In An Essay on Man,
he writes: “There is no radical difference . . . between mythical and religious
thought. Both of them originate in the same fundamental phenomena of human
life. In the development of human culture we cannot ix a point where myth
ends and religion begins. In the whole course of its history religion remains
indissolubly connected and penetrated with mythical elements.”21 This is to
say that the symbolic form of religion is permeated with the mythical. The
function of mythical consciousness is the expressive function (Ausdrucksfunk-
tion), and its unit is the image. It is characterized by its own unique logic, not
of the same plane as class logic, and to some extent it is perception itself as
a mode of thought. There is a characteristic absence of ixity to the world;
each perception expresses itself as unique and dissociated from all others.22
However, Cassirer also names something present to religious consciousness
lacking in myth: a sense of dependence, a sense of stable powers greater
than those of mankind.23
Both marks of religion are relevant to Cassirer’s critique of Heidegger.
Heidegger’s Dasein does seem to be grounded in myth, in the expressive
function: death alone is the to ontos on, and it expresses itself, in an ever
luid manner, as malignant or benign. But coupled with this, particularly in
his analytic of Verfallenheit, is a sense of dependence that, on a certain view,
is absolute. Dasein is utterly at the mercy of the God—that is to say, at the
mercy of either das Man and fallenness or temporality and mortality. On the
one hand, it can never escape its own radical subjectivity, since it is always
over and against the world, which can only ever express itself and never
communicate in an interpersonal way. On the other hand, there is the sense
that, as Cassirer says, “The feelings, the thoughts, the acts of man did not
proceed from himself; they were imposed upon him by an external force.”24
I take it that this double-edged account is what Cassirer means to give of
Verfallenheit: it leaves Dasein both confronted with a mythically expressed
world and powerless against the governing forces of that world. There can
be no movement toward any goal from this anxious posture.25
To return to the two topics of Cassirer’s critique, I shall irst take up the
124 IDEALISTIC STUDIES

problem of transpersonal meaning. He writes, “The ontological cannot be

separated from the ontic nor the individual from the ‘general’ in the way
Heidegger tries to—rather, the one is only from within the other. We under-
stand the general not as the mere they, but as ‘objective spirit and objective
culture.’”26 In Cassirer’s view, the individual is not over and against the world
of das Man and buffeted by its inluence, but rather solidly grounded within
a culture of meaning. “Everydayness” or “averageness” is not the exhaus-
tive style of Being-with-others. Rather, the individual has a role in actively,
symbolically creating his or her own world, a world of others, a world of
shared, overlapping meanings. This engenders an “impersonal” world, “in
the form of transpersonal meaning.”27 Space and language, though not named
by Cassirer at this point of his critique, are such areas of transpersonal mean-
ing.28 For Cassirer, Dasein is authentically located within a general “they,”
not limited to a subjective world of personal fate.
Cassirer reads Heidegger’s account as forwarding the claim that Dasein
exhausts all possibility of meaning, and that everything outside of Dasein
must therefore be understood as “unmeaning.”29 This claim presumably draws
upon Heidegger’s idea of Dasein as falling into an “untruth” wherein it no
longer possesses the faculty to determine the truth genuinely disclosed by
any external entity. All meaning, it would follow, must be seated in Dasein,
and any appeal to the notion of “objective truth” or “objective meaning”
would be spurious—not necessarily false, but without any mechanism for
determining its truth forthcoming. In Cassirer’s own analysis of the world,
he is able to give an account of the loci of objective meaning; he names the
signiicative function (science) as one example of access to objectivity in
the Metaphysics, while in the Davos disputation he speciies language as a
bridge between individuals.30 The symbolic forms offer the preconditions
for objective meaning.
Finally, Cassirer raises the problematic character of the term Verfallenheit.
He writes: “For Heidegger, ‘dasein,’ as individual particular being, is always
primordial. Everything else is a ‘degeneration,’ a falling [Verfallen] away
from dasein. ‘Ininite time’ for Heidegger is a mere iction. He understands
this as the ‘endlessness’ whose subject is the ‘they,’ hence in a sense of bad
ininity—accordingly as mere inauthentic time.”31 Cassirer reads the preix
ver- as signifying a degenerate form of falling. For Heidegger, surely, ev-
erything thought by Dasein not pointing at its own mortality is inauthentic,
conditioned by the praxagora of das Man. Since ininitude is not the being
of Dasein, it too is a degenerate, untrue idea. Cassirer here uses Hegel’s term,
“bad ininity” [Schlecht-Unendliche], the idea of an ininity that goes on and
on interminably.32 For Heidegger, the only genuine time is inite, individual,
and toward a personal death. “They” alone are ininite; it is their everyday
form. For Cassirer, ininite time is a positive meaning shared by humanity
as a whole, of which “I” am a member; it is a meaning given symbolically,
 CASSIRER’S CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGER 125

valuable in that it “changes the subject of temporality”:33 that is, it allows

one to project, to engage in a work on culture that will have a reality distinct
from its agents, and outlive these agents.
Cassirer’s second point of critique concerns the Heideggerian ixation
on death. Cassirer here turns to Heidegger’s assertion that eternal truths are
only possible if Dasein itself is shown to be eternal;34 in lieu of this, the only
task Heidegger can legitimately call for is the unconcealing of death as the
ever-present limit of Dasein. Life is “dissolved” in this formulation to Angst
and Sorge. Cassirer sees in this an unproductive kind of nihilism (though he
does not use the word). He writes, “This religious attitude toward death . . . is
not the only one possible.”35 It is religious, as we have already seen, in that it
relies on a mythical worldview and submits to forces beyond its control; the
alternative posture toward death that Cassirer has in mind is that of Spinoza
and the Stoics: ataraxia as a way of life. The apprehension of death renders
it a “mere” fact that can then be accepted and overcome. Cassirer turns to
the amor fati, linking himself with a strange bedfellow in Nietzsche.36 The
problem is not that Heidegger recognizes the fundamental existential potency
of Angst, but that he takes its realization to be the telos of the life of Dasein.
Whether Cassirer’s paean (nota bene: it is not an argument) in favor of the
amor fati is convincing is beside the point. What is meaningful for our pur-
poses is that, for Cassirer, the Heideggerian stance cripples the performative
capacities of Dasein and subsumes everything human into itself. Death sets
the parameters of life, where life should set parameters for death.

Heidegger and the Absence of Transpersonal Meaning

The dispute now hinges on the problem of transpersonal meaning. For
Heidegger, Dasein’s style of being-with-others (Mitsein) is exhausted by
averageness. However, if we believe Heidegger’s own assertion, then his
idea of Verfallenheit does not express a negative evaluation. If we take it as
simply factical—and to do so, we must suspend our judgment as to whether
“inauthentic” is a pejorative term—then what can we say about Mitsein?
Averageness or everydayness, as the absorption of Dasein into das Man,
conditions the capacity of the individual Dasein to perceive and cognize
the world at all. It would seem that insofar as the individual abides in his or
her fallen state, there is no chance of anything but group meaning. Personal
meaning is impossible in this state. Insofar as “falling” is not a falling-from-
anything, but is simply the condition in which Dasein primordially inds itself,
then all meaning in life is derived from the community of which one is a part.
However, “group meaning” is distinct from “transpersonal meaning.” What
is absent in Heidegger’s account is Dasein’s capacity to inluence this mean-
ing. If Dasein is fallen into an already given world of meaning, an already
given culture, the idea of the product of this culture inluencing the given is
absurd. One is cut off from any dialectical building of culture. If Dasein is
126 IDEALISTIC STUDIES

able to achieve “authenticity,” this is a movement into strictly personal mean-

ing; Being-toward-death is always that of the individual, not the group. So, to
the extent that one is able to transcend one’s fallen condition, the movement
is not toward transpersonal eficacy, but toward the personal. If Heidegger
truly means to say that “inauthentic Being-in-the-world” is factical and not
evaluative, then insofar as it is inauthentic, it may well partake of the realm
of Cassirer’s symbolic forms; it may have access to myth, language, art,
science, and so on as distinct spheres of common meaning. It may be able
to engage in the building of culture and transpersonal meaning “inauthenti-
cally”; that is, das Man may convince it of its capacity to do so. However,
the attainment of authentic recognition of Being-toward-death is also an
attainment of recognition that this transpersonal meaning is chimerical, that
there is only a personal world.
If Heidegger’s own rhetoric did not force us to admit that authentic be-
ing is, in fact, tied up with his evaluation of the proper task of Verfallenheit,
then we could argue that this view, which is characterized by the embrace of
Angst, might only be one more mode of viewing the world, a mode akin to
religion and myth, that Cassirer could possibly work into his system: anxiety
as a mode of consciousness. Instead, this fully personal mode of experience,
devoid of eternal truths, demands authority over all others for Heidegger.
Angst is always personal, always belongs to this Dasein alone. The absence
of a truly transpersonal sphere is bound up with this condition of being. Why
have I insisted that we must reject the neutral reading? At Davos, Heidegger
says, “The highest form of the existence of Dasein is only allowed to lead
back to very few glimpses of Dasein’s duration between living and death. [It
is] so accidental that man exists only in very few glimpses of the pinnacle of
his own possibility, but otherwise moves in the midst of his beings.”37 Man
exists only in brief glimpses; his inauthenticity is not even a form of existence.
The grasp of initude is the “pinnacle” of Dasein. This rhetoric does not allow
us to embrace the assertion in Being and Time that Verfallenheit is a neutral,
non-negative state. In direct confrontation with Cassirer, Heidegger himself
does not stand behind this claim of neutrality. Heidegger himself refutes the
one passage of Being and Time that could resist Cassirer’s critique.

Conclusion
With death and Angst as the only teloi of Dasein, Heidegger’s human life is
either authentic, but limited to a personal sphere of meaning, or inauthen-
tic—Verfallen—and unable to inluence culture. This is why Cassirer wants
most essentially to break from Heidegger at this point and make a claim for
“objective spirit.” Geworfenheit does not preclude a transpersonal sphere,
as the only claims it makes regard Dasein’s inability to decide its own locus
in place and time. It is Verfallenheit that cuts Dasein off from transpersonal
meaning; staking a claim for the individual’s eficacy in the world, and in
 CASSIRER’S CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGER 127

shaping culture, entails its rejection. Heidegger wants all other modes of
consciousness to bow before his principles; he seeks the elevation of one
pseudo-religious form of seeing. For Cassirer, this one-sidedness is always
dangerous. What authority have we for elevating any one symbolic form over
others, if we must admit that all arise on the scene as equally basic? Now,
it may be that the Heideggerian will want to defend Heidegger and offer
some directive, some mandate by which Heidegger is justiied in claiming
Being-towards-death as the sine qua non of an authentic life. However, any
such justiication still leaves Heidegger without an account of transpersonal
meaning or a capacity to inluence culture. Cassirer’s critique is never that
Heidegger is “wrong,” but rather that Verfallenheit has no access to what are,
on Cassirer’s view, fundamental human concerns.
In his closing words at Davos, Heidegger says, “It is the essence of phi-
losophy as a inite concern of human beings that it has been conined within
the initude of human beings as something which is not a creative human
achievement.”38 If this is so, then philosophy, and Heidegger’s own as much as
any other, is conined to Dasein’s initude; it cannot lead to creative achieve-
ment. Cassirer’s philosophy offers an alternative, one which denies the general
pessimism of Heidegger and the authority of Being-towards-death, instead
acknowledging in the individual a capacity to engage in a meaningful way in
human culture. Verfallenheit is never outright refuted by Cassirer, but rather
rejected, as leading to a place Cassirer does not see as at all productive or exis-
tentially accurate. Reason and revelation, after all, can never refute one another,
but must always fall back upon the posture of mutual rejection; the same is
usually true of conlicting philosophical systems. Cassirer presents his own
views “in opposition” to Heidegger’s,39 as an alternative, one that he believes
is more palatable to the person who feels there is more to life than dying and
more to social life than absorption in averageness. In Cassirer’s own words
from Davos, “Nobody can be compelled to take up this position, and no such
purely logical compulsion can force someone to begin with the position which
appears to me to be the essential one.”40 He means to allow that Heidegger
might have his audience, but even the notion of philosophical difference points
to an objective world for which Heidegger can never fully account. Cassirer
is conident that, for an audience demanding a philosophy that offers a human
undertaking in a shared world, the notion of Verfallenheit must be excised. To
admit fallenness is to deny all creative potency to the individual in the world.

Emory University

Notes
1. I wish to thank Donald Phillip Verene for several long conversations on the his-
tory of the manuscripts forming the fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
128 IDEALISTIC STUDIES

and for his comments on this article; I also wish to thank Bruce Milem for his thoughts
on an earlier version of the sections on Heidegger.
2. This is the focus of the two books; see Peter Gordon, Continental Divide (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Michael Friedman, A Parting of
the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000). Both stress
the centrality of Geworfenheit, but ignore what I take to be the more pressing point of
contention.
3. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 3: The Phenomenology
of Knowledge, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957),
p. xvi.
4. On the interesting history of these papers, see Krois and Verene’s Introduction to
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 4: The Metaphysics of Symbolic
Forms (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996). The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms will henceforth be referred to as PSF, followed by the volume number and page
number in the volume.
5. Cassirer, PSF4, 201 (emphasis added).
6. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson
(New York: Harper & Row, 2008), p. 284. Page references refer to the marginal pagina-
tions from the later German editions of Sein und Zeit.
7. Even John Michael Krois’s account of Cassirer’s critique, in “Cassirer’s Unpub-
lished Critique of Heidegger,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol. 16 (January 1, 1983), pp.
147–159, lacks any reference to the centrality of Verfallenheit. Krois, like Gordon, sees
the “basic difference” as revolving around Geworfenheit (p. 155).
8. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 175.
9. Ibid., pp. 169–170. “The ‘they’ prescribes one’s state-of-mind, and determines
how one ‘sees’” (p. 170).
10. Ibid., p. 177.
11. Ibid., p. 175, my emphasis.
12. Cf. James B. Steeves, “Authenticity and Falling in Martin Heidegger’s Being
and Time,” Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 1 (July 1997): pp.
327–338, who advances a similar argument.
13. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 176.
14. Ibid., p. 222.
15. My own neologism, taken from the name of the lead character of Aristophanes’s
Assembly of Women. I use it to refer to the “doings of the marketplace,” the mode of das
Man into which Dasein is absorbed.
16. This point is made by Alexander von Schönborn in his article, “Heidegger’s Ar-
ticulation of Falling,” Philosophy and Archaic Experience: Essays in Honor of Edward
G. Ballard, ed. John Sallis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1982), pp. 210–226
(217).
17. It is dificult to escape the natural question which arises at this point. One might
ask: Is not the very task of Being and Time, the inquiry into Dasein, proven at this point
to be an impossibility? Is not any analytic, even that which has brought us to this point,
 CASSIRER’S CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGER 129

self-defeating? Heidegger often seems to fall into the common philosophical fallacy of
believing himself to be “outside” of his own system.
18. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 266.
19. E.g., Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity (New York: Routledge, 1995),
especially pp. 108–109. Golomb, in this text, makes this move by reading Heidegger
through the lens of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
20. Cassirer, PSF4, 203; 207.
21. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1972), p. 87.
22. See Cassirer, PSF3, Part I: “The Expressive Function and the World of Expres-
sion.”
23. Cassirer, Essay, pp. 91–92.
24. Ibid., p. 89.
25. Cassirer also wants to stress a certain connection between Heidegger as a religious
thinker and the earlier thought of Luther and Kierkegaard (PSF4, 203). Krois (1983),
153–154 makes some noteworthy points situating Heidegger in a tradition with Luther
regarding free will. Heidegger’s debt to Kierkegaard has been more extensively commented
on; see Walter Kaufmann, introduction to Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, trans.
Alexander Dru (New York: HarperCollins, 1962), pp. 15–16: “Heidegger’s originality is
widely overestimated, and that many things he says at great length in his highly obscure
German were said earlier by various writers who had made the same points much more
elegantly, and that some of these writers . . . were known to Heidegger.”
26. Cassirer, PSF4, 201–202.
27. Ibid., p. 202.
28. See Michael Roubach, “The Limits of Order: Cassirer and Heidegger on Finitude
and Ininity,” in The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer, ed.
Jeffrey Andrew Barash (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008), pp. 104–113 (especially
111, on das Man).
29. Cassirer, PSF4, 203.
30. The text of the Davos disputation has been published in: Martin Heidegger, Kant
and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft, Appendix IV: “Davos Disputation
Between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1997), pp. 193–207 (205).
31. Cassirer, PSF4, 204.
32. See G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Amherst, N.Y.: Human-
ity, 1969), pp. 137–150: “Ininity.”
33. Cassirer, PSF4, 205.
34. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 227; Cassirer, PSF4, 206.
35. Cassirer, PSF4, 207.
36. Ibid., p. 208; cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §276; Ecce Homo, “Why
I Am So Clever,” §10.
37. “Davos Disputation,” p. 203.
130 IDEALISTIC STUDIES

38. Ibid., p. 207.

39. Cassirer, PSF4, 203.
40. “Davos Disputation,” p. 205.