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A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger

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A Parting Of The Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, And Heidegger by Michael Friedman (Ruth N. Halls Professor of Arts and Humanities, Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science, and Professor of Philosophy, Indiana University) is a informative, scholarly study in the division of philosophy into the analytic tradition (held widely in the Anglophone world), and the continental philosophic tradition of Europe. Examining how this split took place just before and during the 1930's, A Parting Of The Ways focuses upon a pivotal 1929 debate between two respected German philosophers, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. Rudolf Carnap, who represented the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. A Parting Of The Ways is an intrinsically fascinating study of changing social dynamics and ways of thought, and the negative impact that the rise of Hitler had on philosophy schools as a whole and German philosophers in particular. A Parting Of The Ways is an invaluable contribution to Philosophy Studies academic reference collections and supplemental reading lists.

The history of early 20th century philosophy is woefully little known these days, even by philosophers. Friedman provides an extremely detailed and well-documented account of the early evolutions of the views of probably the two most influential German philosophers of the century, Carnap and Heidegger. He pays attention to the connections both philosophers saw between their philosophies and both politics and everyday life, connections of which most admirers of Carnap are unaware, and connections which most admirers of Heidegger would prefer to ignore. Cassirer is of course not as influential a figure as either Carnap or Heidegger, but reconciliation projects are generally viewed as less exciting, and Friedman makes a plausible case that Cassirer's position sought to navigate a middle ground between the then rising Positivist and Existentialist movements.

Cassirer is also important to the overall picture because he is the most avowedly Kantian of the three philosophers Friedman examines, though another valuable contribution of this work is to highlight the heavy influence of the early 20th century German neo-Kantian schools on both Carnap and Heidegger (the Kantian influence on Carnap is also discussed in Friedman's book on Logical Positivism).

Friedman himself seems to hope to encourage more modern dialogue between the analytic and the continental traditions which are the heirs of Carnap and Heidegger respectively. This is of course no easy task, but while as an analytic partisan myself my response to the discussion of Heidegger's views tended to be along the lines of "so that's why the continentals have gone so horribly wrong," (not because of Friedman's presentation, I think; he presents all three philosophers he discusses quite favorably), greater mutual understanding is surely a necessary beginning, even if prospects for any kind of agreement are far off.

Micheal Friedan's "A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger"(2000) is a helpful overview of the early twentieth-century Neo-Kantian disputes on logical validity and phenomenological universality which, in the philosophies of Rudolf Carnap and Martin Heidegger, would famously diverge into the "analytic-continental" divide. Friedman's book aims to discuss the intellectual relationship between three broad representatives of twentieth-century Kantianism: the logical positivist Rudolf Carnap, the strict neo-kantian Ernst Cassirer, and the existential-phenomenologist Martin Heidegger. The book occasionally digresses into what may seem to be needless biographical and historical discussions, which would be more appropriate to a book of intellectual history than history of philosophy. Although this book patiently summarizes and thoroughly examines their distinctive interpretation of Kant's philosophy with prolific references to other philosophers, it nonetheless seems to ultimately present merely the relevant fragments of each writer's epistemological conception. As such, this book cannot be expected to serve as a general introduction to either logical positivism or phenomenology, while it does a more admirable service of discussing Neo-Kantianism. Friedan's book is not easily accessible, and seems intended for intermediate and advanced student-scholars of Kantian and German philosophy. Apart from the numerous post-Kantian and Neo-Kantian philosophers which are occasionally referenced, the reader must possess a working knowledge of the "transcendental aesthetic" and "transcendental analytic" from Kant's first Critique of Pure Reason, as many of the disputes concerning logic, perception and validity arise from this section of the first Critique. If the reader is unfamiliar the inner workings of Kant's epistemology, I would suggest T.K. Seung's short book, "Kant: A Guide for the Perplexed". The most informative chapter in this book is the ninth and final chapter, which summarizes the disputes within their historical context. I would recommend reading this chapter first to familiarize oneself with the topics of dispute.

This is a rather technical but accessible case study of the split between "continental" and "analytic" philosophy. Friedman focuses on 3 disparate figures; the analytic philosopher Rudolph Carnap, the seminal continental philosopher Martin Heidegger, and the the influential neo-Kantian philosopher and historian Ernst Cassirer. As Friedman demonstrates, these men had a common intellectual heritage in the Neo-Kantian revival that occurred at the end of 19th century. This heritage provided something of a common vocabulary and also resulted in the identification of common philosophic problems, notably aspects of dualities in Kants' epistemology. The specific roles of logic, mathematics, and scientific thought as forms of knowledge were also points of contention. Friedman provides a concise but detailed discussion of the Neo-Kantian background, emphasizing its diversity, with Heidegger emerging from one strand of the Neo-Kantian background, and Cassirer as he final flower of another strand. These 3 philosophers are presented as responding to the common set of problems in Neo-Kantianism in markedly different ways. Carnap pursues a reconstruction of epistemology inspired by newer developments in mathematical logic. Heidegger undertakes perhaps the most radical transformation with an effort to strike out in a new direction which appears (to me, at any rate) as a wholesale rejection of the previously crucial role of logic and scientific knowledge. Both of these thinkers drew on important new developments in philosophy; Carnap on Frege and Heidegger on Husserl's phenomenology. Friedman has a very sympathetic discussion of Cassirer's thought, which he sees as something of an effort to respond to concerns that motivated both Carnap and Heidegger, resulting in a body of thought that occupies something of middle way between Carnap and Heidegger.

Friedman, then, stresses the common heritage of "analytic" and "continental" philosophy and suggests that the split is not as great as conventionally portrayed. He suggests also that the split is partly the contingent result of the success of Nazism. Carnap, Cassirer, and most other analytically oriented philosophers had to leave Germany, eiher because of ethnicity or because of their political views. Heidegger, who later embraced Nazism, was left as the only great philosopher in Germany, and possibly in continental Europe. Friedman points out that Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger had very collegial relations prior to the Nazi seizure of power. The implication is that preservation of routine academic life in Germany would have resulted in more interaction and cross-fertilization. I'm not sure that Friedman is entirely convincing on this point. Its clear from his account that Carnap and Heidegger produced radically different and quite irreconcilable responses to what appears to have been a set of common problems. Friedman argues well for Cassirer's distinctive contribution but Cassirer's continued emphasis on the importance of science, mathematics, and logic places him much closer to Carnap in some crucial respects. It really appears that despite a common heritage, there really was a great split.

It also has to be commented that the claim of contintental philosophy to be more oriented to human concerns, as opposed to the technical preoccupations of analytic philosophy, is belied by the fact that in fundamental matters of ethics, it was people like Carnap and Cassirer who got it right.