Wisner, Ernst Cassirer, Historian of the Will

Ernst Cassirer, Historian of the WillAuthor(s): David A. WisnerSource: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Jan., 1997), pp. 145-161Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3653992 .

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Ernst Cassirer, Historian of the Will

David A. Wisner

'Tis not Wit merely, but a Temper, which must form a Well-Bred Man. In the same manner, 'tis not a Head merely, but a Heart and a Resolu- tion which must compleate the real Philosopher.'

In order to possess the world of culture we must incessantly reconquer it by historical recollection. But recollection does not mean merely the act of reproduction. It is a new intellectual synthesis-a constructive act.... History is not knowledge of external facts or events; it is a form ... an organon of our self-knowledge, an indispensable instrument for

building up our human universe.2

Ernst Cassirer is probably best known to historians of ideas for his work on the problem of knowledge, which began with a neo-Kantian historical analysis of epistemological questions and culminated in the philosophy of symbolic forms. As he himself always admitted, even in his last public writings, this focus on epistemology was the foundation of his philosophical interests. Yet by the last two decades of his life he had in true Socratic fashion endowed his

investigations with heightened emphasis. "That self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophical inquiry," he wrote in the opening lines of An Essay on Man, "appears to be generally acknowledged."3 Cassirer perceived, however,

Thanks to William McGrath, Hal Parker, Deborah Kazazis, Philippos Kargopoulos, Bettina Tsigarida, Peter Derkx, and Donald R. Kelley; also to former students attending a seminar at West Virginia University in 1994. Versions of this paper were presented at the American Col- lege of Thessaloniki in November 1994, and at the University for Humanist Studies, Utrecht, in August 1996.

' Shaftesbury, cited in Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England, tr. James P. Pettegrove (London, 1953), 161.

2 Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven, 1944; 19702), 204, 211, 228. 3 Essay on Man, 1.

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Copyright 1997 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.



David A. Wisner

that the need for such an effort to be made had reached monumentally critical proportions: the early twentieth century had engendered grave historical and philosophical crises which threatened to reverse the progress of modem thought. Paradoxically, modem philosophy had many tools for attaining "knowledge of human nature" and yet stood farther from its goal than ever before. What Cassirer called "anthropological philosophy," concerned as it was "with the whole destiny of man," still required special consideration, in both its theoretical and its historical dimensions.4 It was essentially to these twin domains that Cassirer would devote himself in his later years.

The transformation of Cassirer's philosophical perspectives thus had two facets. In order to outline his program Cassirer had first to consider a broader range of human activities than thought alone, from which he concluded that human culture consisted of a hierarchy of symbolic forms beginning with myth and culminating in science. However, he also felt compelled to elucidate the historical process by which these symbolic forms could progressively manifest themselves, and more specifically the individual human effort which was required for true self-knowledge. This he did principally in his historical works of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and with particularly profound results: from a historian of knowledge Cassirer became a historian of the will; from an epistemologist he became an ethical thinker; from an academic he became an ex- emplar of self-conscious moral action, a paragon of human autonomy and freedom. Indeed, in this endeavor he proved to be more thoroughly and fundamentally a Kantian than ever his theory of knowledge would reveal.

I would go so far as to suggest that Cassirer's history of the will was an integral part of his mature constructive philosophy. On the surface this history can be restated in the following terms. First, Cassirer insists on a fundamental opposition between the rationalism and intellectualism of ancient Greek philosophy and the voluntarism of the Judeo-Christian tradition, both of which represent in Cassirer's view manifestations of a struggle in Western thought continuing well into the twentieth century. Second, he suggests that the historical task of Western philosophy since the first mature articulation of Latin Chris- tian theology by Saint Augustine has been to liberate the individual human will from any and all forms of subservience. Such views are most forcefully expressed in The Myth of the State, Cassirer's last book, but they actually consti- tute an essential and coherent element in all of Cassirer's later work on the history of ideas and culture. Indeed, Cassirer's history of the will provides us with a particularly keen and nuanced account of this essential Western legacy, while at the same time reading into it in Kantian manner a moral for the life of the individual human being.

4 Essay on Man, 24, 10.

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In making such claims I am situating myself among a group of contemporary commentators who see in Cassirer's theoretical and historical work a distinct moral character. This reading of Cassirer goes against the grain of much of earlier decades of interpretation, which often focused exclusively on Cassirer's theoretical writings and often found Cassirer's project most wanting in its ethical dimension. As Donald Verene writes,

Cassirer does not enquire into whether his account of culture offers a

theory of the good life. The question of the structure of individual existence and the status of human values is the point at which Cassirer's

philosophy of symbolic forms is least developed.... Cassirer's theory of man is the point at which his philosophy is most lacking.5

Nathan Rotenstreich took this conclusion one step further: "Cassirer never de-

veloped an ethical theory of his own."6 More recent students of Cassirer have

begun to challenge this negative assessment of Cassirer's contribution to modem ethical philosophy, however. Heinz Paetzold, echoing to an extent David

Lipton, discerns a latent ethical, if not implicitly political, character in Cassirer's

thought as early as the decade of the 1910s, a character which would be brought triumphantly to the fore during the years of exile.7 For Paetzold as for Fabien

Capeilleres, moreover, this character, which found its most profound and original expression in Cassirer's later historical work, was, as Capeilleres has put it,

"resolutely Kantian."8 The main point I wish to make here is simply that those essays on the

history of ideas and culture which indeed absorbed many of Cassirer's best moments as a mature thinker contain an even more systematic and specific ethical message than has hitherto been described. My principal purpose in the confines of this paper is to outline Cassirer's history of the will as it appears in

5 Donald P. Verene, "Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer: The Origins of the Philosophy of Sym- bolic Forms," JHI, 30 (1969), 46.

6 Nathan Rotenstreich, "Schematism and Freedom," Revue international de philosophie, 110, 4 (1979), 473.

7 Heinz Paetzold, Ernst Cassirer-Von Marburg nach New York. Eine philosophische Biographie (Darmstadt, 1995), especially ch. 10 (the key text in this respect is Cassirer's essay Freiheit und Form); and cf. David R. Lipton, Ernst Cassirer: The Dilemma of a Liberal in Germany, 1914-1933 (Toronto, 1978). Thomas E. Willey, Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought, 1860-1914 (Detroit, 1978), 116, 171- 73, has identified in general terms the ethical concerns of the Marburg neo-Kantians, although he stops short of conceding to Cassirer's philosophy the same ethical dimensions he finds in thinkers like Cohen. In a more recent account, Massimo Farrari, II giovanne Cassirer e la scuola di Marburgo (Milan, 1988), 94-96, has suggested that Cassirer may have learned to impart an "ethico-political" dimension to his work during his studies with Natorp.

8 Ernst Cassirer, L'ldee de l'histoire. Les inedites de Yale et d'autres ecrits d'exil, tr. Fabien Capeilleres (Paris, 1988), xxviii.

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these later historical writings and to suggest how it fits into the context of his thought-leaving aside for the moment a more comprehensive analysis and discussion. My attempt is partially grounded in Cassirer's own methodological assumptions as a historian. For one, Cassirer insists throughout his historical work on an organic integrity in the history of human thought and culture; as he states it in his work on the Cambridge Platonists, the goal of the historian of ideas is to discover "the self-contained unity" in a movement of thought or in an individual thinker.9 This consists moreover in the study of the dynamic forces and "characteristic depth" inherent in philosophical inquiry, which are often seen as unfolding in an even larger historical context.10

On the other hand Cassirer adds that the historian is also privy to the ever developing view of a certain subject which one writer might sketch out for continued elaboration by future generations. In this context he cites Kant:

[I]t is by no means unusual upon comparing the thoughts which an author has expressed in regard to the subject ... to find that we understand him better than he has understood himself. As he has not suffi- ciently determined his concept, he has sometimes spoken, or even thought, in opposition to his very intention."

This attitude had been developed in more generalized form in Kant's Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent: for the master as well as for the disciple the task was to lay the foundations of a philosophical understanding of history which later generations would develop more amply.

While it may well be premature to suppose that Cassirer consciously strove to consummate the Kantian project, he certainly did acknowledge the fundamental importance of his task, which he realized he himself would never complete. Concerned as he was with the achievement of Kant's "History of Pure Reason," that is to say, with the "whole intellectual development through which modem philosophic thought gained its characteristic self-confidence and self- consciousness," Cassirer clearly admitted that these principles of unity and historical development were at the heart of his own activity as a philosopher and a historian of thought. Moreover, he acknowledged, as in the opening pages of his history of the Enlightenment, that he had tried at the very least to pose the "building stones ... for the construction of a larger whole" which he hoped would serve "when the time is ripe for such an edifice."12 Armed ourselves with

9 Platonic Renaissance, 6; cf. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, tr. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, 1951), v.

'0 Platonic Renaissance, 75. " Essay on Man, 199, citing Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, tr. N. K. Smith (London,

1929), 310. 12 Philosophy of the Enlightenment, xi, v-vi.

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such working assumptions, we shall endeavor to identify the terms of Cassirer's history of the will and locate its place in his philosophy of human culture.

I. Cassirer makes explicit his view of the opposition between Greek philosophy and Christian theology in The Myth of the State.3 His chief point in this instance is to underscore the extent to which political thought in the Chris- tian West from Augustine to the seventeenth century remained subservient to the myth of an omnipotent, willful creator, and thus fundamentally opposed to the earlier attempts of Greek philosophers, notably Plato, to erect a strictly rational theory of political action. Inherent in this view also is the notion that the subsequent struggle between these two opposing modes of thought, particularly after the rediscovery of Aristotle in the Middle Ages, resulted eventu- ally in the tentative liberation during the Enlightenment of law and politics from religious myth.

This narrow view of The Myth of the State does not reveal the full scope of Cassirer's argument, however. True to his vocation as an epistemologist he connects the struggle between Greek intellectualism and Judeo-Christian voluntarism to a larger issue, namely the problem of human knowledge. Thus the key question is one opposing not will per se to reason, but revelation and faith to rational thought. In this context reason must submit to revelation; the "authority of faith must always precede the use of reason."'4 Thus for the history of Western philosophy the problem becomes one of an opposition between "theologians" and "dialecticians," between those who denigrate the power of reason and those who attribute to the human mind a legitimate sphere of its own.

This point is crucial to a preliminary understanding of Cassirer's work as a historian of ideas. The question has yet another dimension, however. Despite his personal aversion for the characterization of humanity made in Christian theology and particularly in its Augustinian formulations, Cassirer does pro- fess real respect for the accomplishments of Saint Augustine and other medieval thinkers within their historical context.'5 More important, Cassirer was also willing to acknowledge that some religious teaching represented an advance-above all a moral advance-beyond the world of myth. This is particularly the case with those religions which represent "the expression of a new positive ideal of human freedom."'6 This emphasis on freedom reveals in fact the central theme in all of Cassirer's later historical work, without which it is simply impossible to appreciate fully his philosophy of human culture. As

'3 The Myth of the State (New Haven, 1946; 2nd ed. 1974), 78 ff. 14 Myth of the State, 81-82, 84, 95; and cf., e.g., Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 38 ff.,

137 ff. '5 Platonic Renaissance, 86, 89; cf. Essay on Man, 119. 16 Essay on Man, 119.

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Cassirer conceives it in his own constructive remarks this notion of freedom is profoundly indebted to a philosophical tradition culminating in Kant. Thus in one of the climactic passages of The Myth of the State he writes:

According to Kant freedom is equivalent to autonomy. It does not mean "indeterminism," it rather means a special kind of determination. It means that the law which we obey in our actions is not imposed from without but that the moral subject gives this law to itself.... Ethical freedom, [Kant] declares, is not a fact but a postulate. It is not gegeben but aufgeben; it is not a gift with which human nature is endowed; it is rather a task, and the most arduous task that man can set himself. It is no datum, but a demand; an ethical imperative.... Freedom is not a natural inheritance of man. In order to possess it we have to create it.'7

Seen thus, the realm of human freedom is specific and peculiar to man, a sphere which is at once determined and determining, created yet capable of creation.

For Cassirer, then, the true problem to be faced in the history of Western thought is one opposing subservience to personal freedom, absolutism to autonomy. Cassirer offers multiple analyses of this problem, but nowhere does he make his point more clearly and eloquently than in his essay on the Cambridge Platonists. On the surface the Cambridge Platonists are indeed linked to those who oppose knowledge to faith, reason to revelation, nature to grace, ratio to auctoritas, freedom to fatalism, etc.'8 Yet Cassirer is even more explicit here about the specific types of authority reason has to overcome. Not only is this a case of two attitudes, which Cassirer labels here and elsewhere as Pelagian and Augustinian; it is also a case of two types of will opposed to each other. What is really at stake in this instance is a conception of freedom which finds itself opposed to an "absolute will based upon power to which faith is subordinated and must blindly submit."19 In the context of the seventeenth century this type of absolutism is advanced by two camps, the Puritans on the one hand and Hobbes on the other: in both cases the individual is overwhelmed by an "absolute Being, which, as absolute power, not only limits the capacities of the understanding and will, but finally absorbs them altogether."20 For the Cambridge Platonists, with whom Cassirer clearly sympathizes, this position ultimately constituted a moral challenge. According to Cassirer these thinkers "objected to no presumption with such passionate vigour as to the attempt to subordinate ethical reason to a merely external law...."2' As Cassirer puts it, as far as the

17 Myth of the State, 287-88. 18 Platonic Renaissance, 76 ff., and esp. 89-92. '9 Platonic Renaissance, 77. 20 Platonic Renaissance, 78; cf. 141-42, where unlimited divine will is opposed to the

"Plastick Nature" of the Cambridge Platonists. 21 Platonic Renaissance, 78.

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Cambridge Platonists are concerned good and evil are not categories imposed arbitrarily from without; rather they must have some grounding in a natural order.22

Cassirer repeats this type of analysis in a number of places in his historical work, to the extent that it is not important to enumerate the various instances here. What is essential to observe, however, is that Cassirer's categories do not result from an antipathy to voluntaristic philosophies in principle. Indeed, he concludes in his analysis of the Cambridge Platonists that for them at least "there was no occasion or inner necessity for deciding between intellectualism and 'voluntarism,' for ... intellect and will ... [are derived] from a common

principle...."23 In his own constructive comments Cassirer echoes this judg- ment, indicating that "the will" (der Wille) is an essential feature of individual persons which far from being inherently antithetical to reason is rather comple- mentary to human understanding. Although he seems hesitant to admit it out-

right, Cassirer does posit the existence of the will as a faculty of the mind.24 The closest Cassirer comes to a clear definition of this faculty may be

found in a neo-Kantian paraphrase of these same Cambridge Platonists, where the will is called the "most deeply rooted faculty of the soul..., the source of that special and highest form of self-consciousness which constitutes the privi- lege and character of thinking natures."25 This conception of the will is based on two principal philosophical traditions. In the first instance, especially as far as the Cambridge Platonists are concerned, we have something akin to what Aristotle called wishing (boulesis), which Cassirer identifies also in Platonic terms as "yearning after the idea" (oregesthai).26 Elsewhere, however, there is also a distinct Stoic dimension to Cassirer's notion of the will, according to which the will is seen as "the creative power of the rational soul," the source of man's "capacity for self-determination."27 Both ideas merge together throughout Cassirer's analysis to compose what Cassirer would call the creative and

22 Platonic Renaissance, 79-80. 23 Platonic Renaissance, 122. 24 That the "will" exists as a separate faculty of the mind is a philosophical issue which

continues to be debated. See Anthony Kenny, Aristotle's Theory of the Will (New Haven, 1979), vii ff.; Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, II, Willing (New York, 1978); and cf. Vernon J. Bourke, Will in Western Thought: An Historico-Critical Survey (New York, 1964).

25 Platonic Renaissance, 126. 26 See esp. Platonic Renaissance, 95-96. This is how the will often appears in Cassirer's

discussions of thinkers like Cusanus, Pico, and Kant; see Individual and Cosmos in the Re- naissance, tr. Mario Domandi (New York, 1963), 41 ff., 70, 84 ff., and Rousseau Kant Goethe: Two Essays, tr. James Gutmann, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Hermann Randall (Princeton, 1945), 23.

27 Esp. Individual and Cosmos, 43; The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, tr. Peter Gay (New York, 1954), 104; Descartes: Lehre-Personlichkeit-Wirkung (Stockholm, 1939; new ed. 1995), 98-101, 217-19.

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self-defining element of human character, one which by its very essence is opposed to any and all forms of servitude.28

But historically speaking such servitude did exist, especially in Cassirer's own lifetime. Cassirer accounts for this fact in two principal ways. In the simplest of terms he cites the Cambridge Platonists to the effect that what we have here is a conflict between two frames of mind, "an opposition ... founded upon the originalintellectual dispositions of men themselves," whereby the absolutist conception of the will amounted to a "projection" of men's " 'peevishness & Self-will.' "29 At the same time, however, he also implies that the tensions inherent in this conflict are indeed part of a historical process necessary for the creation of a "new dynamic of thought."30 In An Essay on Man, for example, Cassirer claims that these types of heterogeneous forces are manifestations of a "fundamental polarity" out of which the "equipoise in human culture" emerges in the form of a "dynamic ... equilibrium."3' As he puts it in his essay on the

Cambridge Platonists, the debate over determinism and free will placed the Cambridge school in "a truly universal perspective" in which their "mission in the history of thought" consisted in reaffirming "the principle of the autonomy of the will and of the practice of reason ... [as opposed to] the principle of

justification by faith."32 Here again there is a distinct ethical strain in Cassirer's history of the will, whereby the individual will seeks liberation from all external authority in order to create its own destiny.

In this regard Cassirer's historical analysis focuses first on those attempts like that of the Cambridge Platonists to bridge the potential gap between will and reason and forge a creative synthesis in which the two function together in a morally autonomous individual, and second on the historical process by which modem philosophy prepared itself for such synthesis. In his book on Kant, for example, Cassirer draws an opposition in Kant's ethical thought between a "necessity of means" and a "necessity of ends" one of which depends on some transcendent source for hypothetical imperatives, the other on immanent, inde- monstrable categorical imperatives.33 Likewise, in his essay on Rousseau, Cassirer focuses on a notion of Providence conceived as the source of a "revelation [which] is not transcendent but purely immanent" and which posits a "form of voluntary obedience [which] must not be subjected to any qualifica- tions or limitations."34 For Kant as for Rousseau a "resolution" is sought which

28 In this respect Cassirer may have drawn on the theoretical work of his mentors in the Marburg school as well, such as Cohen's Ethik des reinen Willens (1908). See Willey, Back to Kant, 112-16.

29 Platonic Renaissance, 191, 162-65, citing John Smith. 30 Individual and Cosmos, 75-76. 3' Essay on Man, 246-47. 32 Platonic Renaissance, 82, 85. 33 Kant's Life and Thought, tr. James Haden (New Haven, 1981), 233-34. 34 Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 93, 96-97.

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in this case takes the form of a God understood not as a willful and arbitrary creator but as an end, as the actuality of the highest original good.

In similar fashion the philosophers of the Renaissance had, as Cassirer saw it, already grappled with multiple problems of this sort. According to Cassirer Cusanus, Lorenzo Valla, Pomponazzi, and Pico all sought to resolve aspects of the fundamental opposition between "ancient humanism and medieval religi- osity" in terms granting the individual thinker a "specific direction of intellectual activity," one which was free and directed against arbitrariness, which es- poused "personal powers and personal acts of the will," and which was directed toward a "final symbiotic relation between knowledge and freedom."35 In a particularly revealing passage on John Colet, Cassirer writes,

Election by grace is... no force from without, no "via illata"; for nothing is farther from an act of God than coercion. Election is rather the natural longing and the natural will of man which so mysteriously accompanies the divine will and providence, and stands with both in such remarkable accord that all that man wills and does, God knew before, and all that God knew, necessarily came to pass.36

These thinkers all played a role in a larger historical drama, which Cassirer sums up in neo-Kantian fashion in the closing lines of An Essay on Man: "Hu- man culture taken as a whole may be described as the process of man's progressive self-liberation."37 The heroes in Cassirer's historical essays all sought according to this view to develop a sphere of human autonomy, through which man freely creates his "ideal" universe. Even the scientists whom Cassirer ad- mires in An Essay on Man-Galileo and Newton, Maxwell and Helmholtz, Planck and Einstein-fit squarely into this mold of theoretical, and therefore constructive, mental production which for Cassirer stands at "the very center of all human activities."38 But these conclusions themselves were, as Cassirer would have been the first to acknowledge, equally the product of a historical process by which the human mind struggled to come to terms with its surroundings and with its own power, the understanding of which was partly to be discovered through historical analysis, as Cassirer clearly states in An Essay on Man. Moreover, this effort to trace the history of human knowledge had, as Cassirer

3S Individual and Cosmos, 37, 41, 104, 117-18; cf. "Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: A Study in the History of Renaissance Ideas," especially part 2, JHI (1942), 319-46; repr. Re- naissance Essays, ed. Paul Oskar Kristeller and Philip Wiener (Rochester, 1992), 33-60.

36 Platonic Renaissance, 106. 37 Essay on Man, 252. 38 Essay on Man, 244.

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saw it, a distinct ethical purport. Self-understanding is an act of the will, which can only function freely. This understanding is inherently historical, as man's cultural universe, through which such understanding is possible, is a historical

product. The effort toward self-understanding constitutes moreover the most

profound moral gesture an individual human can make. Only thus can the sub- lime heights of "man's progressive self-liberation" be scaled.

II. As a historian Cassirer had thus to take into account the historical devel-

opment of the will, without which the human mind could never have come to understand itself. That history, as we have already glimpsed, covers nearly the whole of Western philosophy from the ancient Greeks to Kant and beyond. Indeed, as Cassirer acknowledges in at least one place, the goal of moder

philosophy has to some extent been to recapture the heritage of Greek humanism.39

In Cassirer's terms this humanism consisted of an attempt to find the "unity of the will," that is to say, true self knowledge.40 The object of this "will," as we have seen, is opposed to the commands of the absolute will of the Judeo-Chris- tian creator, an opposition which seemed to admit no compromise or reconciliation, particularly when advanced by adherents of Augustinian theology. And

yet compromise and then reconciliation were attempted, first by Abelard, Anselm, and above all Thomas Aquinas, by whom "reason was reinstated to all its rights and dignities," and then by those thinkers of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, like Descartes, the Cambridge Platonists, or Hugo Grotius, who set the stage for the final synthesis of the Enlightenment.41 These broad modern philosophical movements were, significantly, in large part the result of an infusion of Greek philosophy-first Aristotle then Plato-into the mainstream of Western thought.

But in characteristic fashion Cassirer's history of the will also introduces important nuances to this general picture. First, as we have already seen, he

suggests that while Greek philosophy did not have an absolutist conception of the will it did contribute an important component of what would later be identified as personal will. Thus it was above all Socrates who aspired to that "unity of the will" so central to Cassirer's own philosophical quest. "For Socrates as for Plato," writes Cassirer, "this effort amounts to a synthesis of the rational and the moral, of both understanding and desiring the truth."42

At the same time Cassirer briefly offers insights into the means by which Judaic voluntarism gradually permeated the Greco-Roman philosophical mind.

39 Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 235. 40 Myth of the State, 57-58. 41 Cf. Myth of the State, 94-96, 110-15; Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 236 ff. 42 Myth of the State, 57-58; cf. 76. On Cassirer's notion of the "unity of the will" cf. John

Michael Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (New Haven, 1987), 160-62.

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Those readers familiar with the traditional distinction between Greek intellectualism and Judeo-Christian voluntarism are aware that the two traditions merged during the early Christian period in ways which have yet to be fully explored. Cassirer can only proffer a highly impressionistic overview of this process, but he concludes that it was the work of early Greek Fathers like Origen which first showed systematic signs of having incorporated the voluntaristic strain of Ju- daism into their theological statements, of thus having subsumed the classical

topos of King Nomos under the framework of the Judeo-Christian worldview.43 But while Cassirer tends indiscriminately to lump the Fathers of the Greek

and Latin churches together, he does identify an important Roman contribution which further characterizes the Augustinian strain of Christian voluntarism. This occured when Augustine, at best, as Cassirer acknowledged, only indi-

rectly familiar with the Greek philosophical tradition, incorporated elements of Roman imperial ideology in his conception of divine will. Thus for Augustine, "Escape from the world and dominion over the world, mystical longing for faith and a forming and commanding will, the fundamental teachings of Chris-

tianity and thefundamentalforces of the Roman Empire, now interpenetrate."44 In this way Roman imperial tradition coalesced with and helped shape voluntarist theology, as well as the absolutist tradition in medieval and early modem

political thought, particularly during the formative stages of Christianity and then again, via the rediscovery of Roman Law in the West, in the later Middle

Ages. The history of the struggle between theology and dialectics, punctuated by

alternating periods of apparent triumph on both sides, may have remained ob- jectless had it not been for one final Greco-Roman contribution, Stoicism. Cassirer emphasizes the importance of this late classical philosophical school, which challenged earlier Greek philosophy on the key issue of human equality and as such permeated basic Christian dogma via the writings of Cicero and Seneca. In Cassirer's account Stoicism emerges as the key intermediary between the intellectualist and voluntarist tendencies, and the vehicle by which modem philosophy could arise.45

Stoicism's principal contribution to the history of the will was in its con-

ception of "moral will," which is represented in Cassirer's work as the motivat- ing force behind the historical emancipation of reason and reestablishment of the ethical dignity of man, to which Cassirer himself subscribes with such

adamancy. In a characteristic passage in The Myth of the State Cassirer stresses the Stoic notion of "original freedom" which no soul can legitimately lose or renounce.46 Paradoxically, the reasoning of the Stoics on this account was ac-

43 Myth of the State, 98. 44 Platonic Renaissance, 89 (my emphasis). 45 See especially Myth of the State, 100 ff. 46 Myth of the State, 104. On Augustine's notion of human will (delectatio) see Patrick

Riley, Kant's Political Philosophy (New York, 1983), 18 ff.

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cepted into the mainstream of Augustinian theology. In this way of thinking those forces which allowed for the potential despotism of the sovereign, including implicitly Augustine's God, the Divine Sovereign, were also limited, in essence at the very least, by the tenets of natural law.

It was on this plane that Stoicism, especially when combined in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance with elements of Aristotlian and Platonic philosophy, provided the necessary general framework for the progressive liberation of the individual will. As Cassirer portrays it the battle was intense. Medieval rationalists fought tooth and nail with contemporary Augustinians, nominal- ists, and Paduan Aristotelians. The dialectic continued when Martin Luther rejected the basic conclusions of Renaissance humanism, and the Puritans and Jansenists launched an all-out attack on seventeenth-century rationalism. It was not until the eighteenth century, when Rousseau recast the terms of the traditional debate on theodicy, that a new synthesis was possible, and indeed could be carried out by Rousseau's self-styled spiritual heir, Immanuel Kant.

As Cassirer recounts the story, the specific context for Rousseau's theory of the general will was an impasse in ethical thinking engendered in the debate between Jansenists and Jesuits in late seventeenth-century France.47 But by extension Cassirer acknowledges that a number of transformations had taken place in early modem Europe to prepare the ground for the Enlightenment. In general terms the proponents of modem philosophy had to wage their greatest battle yet in the name of individual freedom. For the voluntarist thrust of neo- Augustinian theology, represented by English Puritans, French Jansenists, and Dutch Calvinists alike, combined forces with new forms of absolutism, not only in the reason of state doctrine practiced at the court of the Bourbons, for example, but also in the theory of Thomas Hobbes and in the general character of the scientific revolution.4

More specifically, according to Cassirer, three things had to have occurred in the crucible of the seventeenth century for the emergence of modem philosophy. First, there was needed a conception of God corresponding to the general principles of the scientific revolution, according to which the commands of this same God were mediated, in a manner of speaking, by some intelligible realm open to rational analysis. To be sure, this is what Cassirer's Renaissance thinkers had already sought to establish. But at the same time they had engendered specifically modem problems, notably the naturalistic determinism of early modem science, which needed further attention.49 These problems were indeed taken up anew by the Cambridge Platonists, by liberal thinkers like Grotius,

47 See esp. Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 137 ff., and Myth of the State, 170 ff. 48 Platonic Renaissance, 76 ff.; Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 38-48, 138, 238 ff.;

Descartes, 231-32. On modem scientific method see Platonic Renaissance, 193-95, and Indi- vidual and Cosmos, 116-18.

49 Individual and Cosmos, 101 ff., esp. 109.

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and finally by English deists like Tindal at the turn of the eighteenth century.0 In essence the conclusions of early Patristics like Origen were thus gradually inverted.

But the triumph of scientific method in the Enlightenment represented above all the triumph of the human mind's power over a natural world which threatened to engulf everything human in a deterministic, or worse yet, indetermi- nate, matrix. Thus Cassirer concludes characteristically in the corresponding chapter in The Philosophy of the Enlightenment that moder science imparted a new "function" to the human mind: "the mind now becomes aware of a new force within itself."5 In this process "it was necessary to sever the bond between theology and physics once and for~all.... By virtue of [its newly won] freedom philosophy could attain to full self-knowledge and to knowledge of its inherent forces."52

Once this had taken place, it was then imperative, according to Cassirer's

interpretation, to apply the premises of this type of thinking to general political and ethical problems. It is here in particular that the weight of the Stoic tradition made itself felt in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As Cassirer remarks in numerous passages scattered throughout his historical essays, a

political document like the American Declaration of Independence was the di- rect and perhaps finest outcome of this Stoic tradition but one which "had been preceded and prepared by an even greater event: by the intellectual Declaration of Independence that we find in the theoreticians of the seventeenth century."53 In more general terms Stoic thinking had come to represent a form of "natural" religion which could replace the traditional forms of medieval faith. If Sto- icism could not relieve existential Angst, it could certainly "restore man to his ethical dignity."54 Historically speaking, in this manner the absolutist conceptions of God and of the state could be overturned in favor of a contractarian polity where, in terms of both Rousseau and Kant, each individual will freely acknowledges the authority of the general will.

But this step required one final development, a development which represented in fact a departure away from certain elements of Stoicism, accom- plished as a logical conclusion of the application of scientific method. Cassirer claims that this final stage occurred with the elaboration of sensationalist psychology by Locke at the turn of the eighteenth century and then by various proponents of the French Enlightenment. This psychology made it possible to evaluate human passions and desires as constructive, constituent elements of human character-its "original moving principle"-and not the negative, de-

o Platonic Renaissance, 131 ff.; Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 174. 5' Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 37. 52 Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 48-49. 53 Myth of the State, 167. 4 Myth of the State, 169-70; cf. Descartes, 104 ff.

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structive forces which Stoic and Cartesian thought had discerned.5 In the analysis of the French Enlighteners, according to Cassirer, reason has a fundamental complement in an irrational realm. The consequences of this doctrine were as vital as they were revolutionary: "the pure power of the soul springs from the harmonious balance of the passions, not from their destruction."56

The process of erecting a "constructive psychology" of the passions was ultimately carried to a new plane by Rousseau, who according to Cassirer also found a means of synthesizing this with both a rationalist notion of divine will and a contractarian conception of the state. Rousseau fixed on man's capacity for self-determination according to an ethical law to which the individual sur- renders voluntarily. Of Rousseau's ethical position Cassirer writes, "Man should seek the real law of his being and his conduct neither below nor above himself; he should derive it from himself, and should fashion himself in accordance with the determination of his own free will."57 To be sure, this reads like a

blueprint for Cassirer's general ethico-epistemological formula, which he finds in the thinkers of the Renaissance, in the Cambridge Platonists and in Grotius, and in the proponents of the Enlightenment. But he takes this analysis one step further when he writes of Rousseau that this free will also combines a balance between intellectualism and feeling, between reason and passion.58 Having reached this stage Rousseau's accomplishment could then in turn be given a universalized ethical formulation by Kant, who at the same time recast the epistemological debates of the Enlightenment.59 As Cassirer puts it succinctly in his book on Kant, "It is only in self-determination of the will that reason knows and comprehends itself, and it is this knowledge that comprises its peculiar, most profound essence."60 With this conclusion it was possible once and for all to look forward to "the progress from natural bondage toward the spirit's autonomous consciousness of itself and of its task."61

III. This is surely a marvelous story as far as it goes. But having arrived at this point one wonders where Cassirer means to lead his reader. Indeed, it is here that his general history is most susceptible to criticism. Are not all his

55 Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 102 ff. According to Cassirer (Descartes, 237) Descartes himself had already begun to break away from traditional Stoic thought on this account.

6 Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 107-08 (my emphasis). 57 Rousseau Kant Goethe, 23. 58 Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 93-105. 59 The link between Rousseau and Kant is repeatedly emphasized; cf. Rousseau Kant

Goethe, 31-32, for a characteristic formulation. See Lewis White Beck, Early German Phi- losophy: Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 489 ff., and "Kant's Two Conceptions of the Will in their Political Context," in the author's Studies in the Philosophy of Kant (Indianapolis, 1965), esp. 215-24.

60 Kant's Life and Thought, 247. 61 Kant's Life and Thought, 227-28.

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heroes Vorkantianer, links in a chain necessarily leading to Kant? Where does one go after Kant? What is the function of Cassirer's own philosophical endeavors in the general scope of his historical outline?

Cassirer does in fact seem to have reflected on this type of line of inquiry, and gives explicit answers to these and other questions throughout his historical work. To begin with Cassirer readily admits to having established something like a Whiggish genealogy of pre-Kantians. His general purpose is to trace the progress of modem thought, and it is Kant who in Cassirer's eyes provided the most powerful and distinctive stamp to this movement. Thus he claims that the formulations of the Cambridge Platonists were part of a "mission in the history of thought ... leading from Luther to Kant," in which the stakes were nothing less than the concept of the freedom of idealism, and that of the autonomy of the will and of the practical reason.62

One of the principal problems with Cassirer's analysis here and elsewhere clearly has to do with the neo-Kantian language with which he describes the epistemological positions of those thinkers he studies.63 On the other hand we recall that Cassirer claims that his history of modem thought has focused on objective problems, which link these thinkers together in a universal spiritual community. With this thought in mind Cassirer also argues that in the simplest of terms those philosophers whom he discusses, including above all Kant, were in a way merely reviving an ancient philosophical tradition.

But Cassirer is willing to go farther than this. Inasmuch as he is a philosopher of becoming, he is interested in the continued dynamic of thought, in which context he claims, as will be recalled, that freedom is not simply given but is something for which man must continually strive. The history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is proof to this general observation. And Cassirer is in fact willing to pursue his history of the will beyond Kant, although what he finds is not encouraging. To the liberalizing tendency in eighteenth-century philosophy Cassirer contrasts the establishment in the nineteenth century of new absolutisms opposed once again to the individual will. The chief villain in this movement is Hegel, but he is joined by other nineteenth- century philosophers like Carlyle as well as by the perpetrators of totalitarian- ism in Cassirer's own lifetime.64

Cassirer's own position is very clear with respect to these tendencies in moder thought, and he gives ample vent to his own feelings regarding these new forces of absolutism. In particular he seems to have been fully aware throughout the 1920s of the fragility of the Weimar Republic, and he uses particularly strong language with respect to the historical enemies of freedom

62 Platonic Renaissance, 85; and cf. Descartes, 99-100. 63 This is particularly the case with the Renaissance humanists; see, e.g., Individual and

Cosmos, 8, but also the passages on Coreille in Descartes, 87-88, 104. 64 See esp. Myth of the State.

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in thinly veiled references to the contemporary political scene in Germany. Thus for instance he uses battle metaphors throughout his works on the history of modem philosophy. In one such passage on Shaftesbury which epitomizes admirably the moral dimension of Cassirer's own philosophical endeavors, he claims unequivocally with that the philosopher must attack fanaticism and narrow-minded sectarianism. "Nothing," Cassirer avers, is "so sure a sign of de- pravity, indeed of the complete moral degeneracy of human nature, as blind religious zeal and malicious religious persecution." What does the philosopher offer in return? "[A] religion of freedom ... of trust ... of aesthetic enjoyment of the world."65

The proper role of the true philosopher, whose character Cassirer finds perfectly expressed in Shaftesbury, is to assail this fanatic zeal and dogmatic narrow-mindedness. Cassirer's own decision in 1932 to publish a major revi- sionist synthesis of the philosophy of the Enlightenment-arguably his crown- ing achievement as a historian of ideas-was thus not fortuitous, as he himself admits. "More than ever before," he urged, the time was "ripe" for a balanced critical assessment of the much maligned but ever valid philosophical orienta- tion of the Aufklarung.

The age which venerated reason and science as man's highest faculty cannot and must not be lost even for us. We must find a way not only to see that age in its own shape but to release again those original forces which brought forth and moulded this shape.66

As opposed to the "multitude of prejudices" hurled against the Enlightenment by the "Romantic Movement," of which the fascist poussees of the 1920s and 1930s were directly related, or so Cassirer attempts to illustrate in The Myth of the State,67 we have a Kantian reassessment of the Enlightenment and, by extension, of all of the Western philosophical tradition, which is meant to culmi- nate in a constructive philosophy of human freedom and dignity.

Of course Cassirer's admonitions against the Nazis remained, relatively speaking, an isolated cry in the wilderness.68 But even in the immediate post-

65 Platonic Renaissance, 162. For Cassirer's activities during the critical years of the late Weimar Republic see Lipton, Ernst Cassirer, and also the editorial remarks in Ernst Cassirer, Symbol, Technik Sprache: Aufsatze aus den Jahren 1927-1933, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and John Michael Krois (Hamburg, 1985), xi ff. Pierre Aubenque, "Le d6bat de 1929 entre Cassirer et Heidegger," Ernst Cassirer de Marburg a New York: l'itineraire philosophique, ed. Jean Seidengart (Paris, 1990), 92, has also called attention to the extent to which such violent battle metaphors could be wielded during the philosophical debates of the 1920s and 1930s.

66 Philosophy of the Enlightenment, xi-xii (my emphasis). 67 Myth of the State, particularly part 3. 68 Besides Lipton, Ernst Cassirer, see Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as In-

sider (New York, 1968), 32-33.

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war period he did not give up all hope; although the final lines of The Myth of the State breathe a profound and devastating pessimism, if not defeatism, to those readers predisposed to adopt the Kantian motto sapere aude and its corresponding connotations of freedom he had already offered a choice. Given the prospect of an eternal cyclical battle between the forces of reason and of myth, Cassirer saw but one alternative to the chaos and malevolent destruction inherent in the world of the latter:

We should see the adversary face to face in order to know how to com- bat him.6

American College of Thessaloniki.

69 Myth of the State, 296.

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Wisner, Ernst Cassirer, Historian of the Will

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