Debate
Cassirer and Heidegger at Davos
1929 · Is the human being bound by an insurmountable finitude, or can it attain, through culture, science and morality, something of objective and lasting validity – and which of the two did Kant teach?
From 17 March to 6 April 1929 the second Davos University Courses, founded to bring scholars and students of different nations together after the First World War, featured lectures by Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger and a public disputation between them on Kant. Among several hundred participants were Emmanuel Levinas and Rudolf Carnap; two young philosophers, Otto Friedrich Bollnow and Joachim Ritter, wrote the record of the debate, printed since the fourth edition (1973) as an appendix to Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Witnesses such as Levinas later remembered it as the end of one world and the beginning of another, and after 1933 – when Heidegger joined the NSDAP and Cassirer left Germany – the encounter was often read politically. Recent scholarship asks how much of this meaning was already there in 1929.
Positions
Finite beings, objective forms
Cassirer did not deny that human beings are finite, but he challenged Heidegger’s radical emphasis on finitude by pointing to the necessary validity found in mathematical science and in morality: such truths do not depend on the finite being who grasps them. Human beings cannot leap into a real infinite, Cassirer granted; yet through the symbolic forms of language, myth, art and science they build a shared world of meaning – in this sense, alluding to Schiller, he said that their infinity flows from the realm of spirit. In a review of Heidegger’s Kant book (1931) Cassirer stressed the ethical and aesthetic sides of Kant’s thought, within which the standpoint of finitude has its place.
Held by
- Ernst Cassirer1874–1945
Finitude as the ground of metaphysics
Heidegger read the Critique of Pure Reason not as a theory of knowledge for the natural sciences, as he took the Marburg neo-Kantians to do, but as a laying of the foundation of metaphysics. Human knowledge is finite because it must receive what it does not create; at its root Heidegger placed the transcendental imagination, from which, he argued in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Kant himself shrank back in the second edition. For Heidegger even the moral law, which commands as an imperative, points to a finite being. Philosophy’s task, he said at Davos, is not to rest in the works of culture but to throw human beings back into the hardness of their fate.
Held by
- Martin Heidegger1889–1976
A parting of the ways – or a later legend?
Michael Friedman (A Parting of the Ways, 2000) reads Davos as the point at which problems shared by Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger, all shaped by neo-Kantianism, began to divide into what became analytic and continental philosophy, with Cassirer’s philosophy of culture as a last attempt at mediation; Carnap walked with Heidegger at Davos on 30 March 1929. Peter E. Gordon (Continental Divide, 2010) sees a contest between two images of the human being, spontaneity and thrownness, and finds no sign that anyone present read it politically: the picture of liberal humanism against rising nationalism took shape in later memories. John Michael Krois, by contrast, points to antisemitic attacks on Hermann Cohen’s Marburg School as a background to Cassirer’s defence of neo-Kantianism.
Read more
- Ernst Cassirer (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Hans Sluga: review of Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2011)
- Simon Truwant: Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos, introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2022; excerpt)
- Dominic Kaegi, Enno Rudolph (Hg.): Cassirer – Heidegger. 70 Jahre Davoser Disputation, Meiner (in German)
As of 10/2026. Summaries for orientation – the sources give the full arguments. · How Agora is made