PETER CASSIRER Startsida   Environment and Heredity. Reflections by a grandson. On my grandfather Ernst Cassirer, The Trondheim version

PETER CASSIRER: Ernst Cassirer -
Environment and Heredity. Reflections by a grandson
in Forms of Knowledge and Sensibility. Ernst Cassirer and the Human Sciences. Gunnar Foss and Eivind Kasa (eds.) HøyskoleForlaget (Norwegian Academic Press). Norges Forskningsråd, Program for kulturstudier, Kulturstudier 22, 2002, pp 209-220

It's a great honour and privilege to have been asked to conclude the formal proceedings of this conference on the philosophy of my grandfather. Actually this is the first conference on EC that I have been invited to. That this has not occurred before is of course due to the fact that I am no philosopher, so I don't have to stress the fact that I am here only in my capacity as a grandson. Thus I beg your pardon if I say things about EC that you not only know already but perhaps much better than me.
People tend to think that only because I am the grandson of EC I should immediately know and understand his philosophy. But as a matter of fact, I have always had great difficulties in reading my grandfather's books. The reason may be that I searched for clear-cut answers to some questions of mine. I could however never discover any such answers in his learned discourse, which always seems to start with Plato and then going in loops through all great philosophers in all times from antiquity on, dwelling with special love on Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. For a non-philosopher this is no easy treat, and there was no-one around at the time to explain Ernst Cassirer to me. During these two days here in Trondheim I have learned more than ever before about his thinking.
The answer I was desperately looking for was to the question: "what is STYLE?" I was searching for a definition of the concept of style that was theoretically satisfactory as well as operational, because I wrote my thesis on the style in the short stories of the Swedish author Hjalmar Söderberg. (He is actually not totally unknown in German speaking countries since he had an ardent translatress in Austrian-Jewish Marie Franzos. But that was in the twenties, when interest was great in Scandinavian authors in Austria and Germany).

Writing on style, I wanted to know what I was writing about. This may sound strange, but there was only one thing all scholars of style really agreed upon at the time, i.e. in the sixties, and that was that they did not agree upon any other scholar's definition of the subject in question.
The story of the definition of style is a very interesting one, intimately linked with the prevailing paradigms of the time and the fashion of the day in science. During my time of studies the linguistic paradigm changed twice very quickly in Sweden from one extreme to another. Structuralism was introduced in the 60ies - unfortunately via the US and hence in its American form. Structuralism was originally a Check invention in the late twenties, founded and strongly influenced by scholars from the so called Russian Formalists, Roman Jakobson not the least. (He by the way introduced Swiss-Russian-Check structuralism to my grandfather as they went from Göteborg to New York on the little steamer Remmaren in 1941. Cassirer even wrote an article on that subject in Word, and if the structuralist ideas in parts may have been news to him they certainly corresponded very well with his own lines of thinking.

My parents and I were supposed to go to the US on the next boat, but that one never left Göteborg: the Germans did not allow more convoys between Sweden and the United States.)

By the publishing of Ferdinand de Saussure's readings on linguistics in 1916 structuralism was founded and influenced The Prague School of Linguistics (founded ten years later). Structuralism was exported to the USA by several persons, but the linguistic variant there was mixed with behaviourism in the shape of f.i. B.F. Skinner's in psychology. Bloomfield banned all so called "mentalism" and he claimed among other atrocities that

"mental images, feelings, and the like are merely popular terms for various bodily movements ... obscure and highly variable small-scale muscular contractions and glandular secretions, which differ from person to person, and having no immediate social importance."

It was a behaviouristic, scientistic and strictly binary structuralism that came to dominate Swedish linguistics. This was not exactly an ideal standpoint for stylistics which deals with subtle nuances of meaning. The situation did not get any better as the structural era in linguistics came to a sudden end with the appearance of Chomsky. His structuralism is as much structuralism as anybody's, but he rejected behaviourism and favoured introspection, which behaviourism had banned.

In the study of literature, which in Sweden is performed in a different department from the study of the Swedish language, an æsthetic branch of structuralism was introduced already in the fifties through another American version by the famous book of the Austrian Prague-structuralist René Wellek and the American Austin Warren in their "Theory of literature", but it made no great impression on Swedish scholars of literature at that time. W&W propagated the structuralistic view that a text should be analysed as one independent whole and not, as the neo-positivists wanted it, as a result of the writer's biography and presuming a chain of cause and effect regarding the life and experiences of the writer, including his reading, and focussed on whom he was influenced by.

One form of structuralist attitude, inspired by I. R Richards, was driven to an extreme by some scholars who maintained that no knowledge whatsoever of the context of a text was allowed to be used for its interpretation. (As we know, this attitude has been more or less turned into its opposite by the post-structuralist movement with emphasis upon intertextuality (Kristeva) and deconstruction (Derrida).)

In the Swedish study of the "History of literature" as the field was called then, there prevailed the positivist approach. The life of the poet was used as a means of deducing the meaning of his texts, and the meaning of the text was then used to further illuminate his character, the results of which were then applied to his texts - and so forth. This procedure could achieve very interesting, even fascinating, books on our great writers, but methodically it was of course a circle - perhaps not very vicious but a circle nevertheless.

I don't want to bore you with my struggle for a sensible definition of what I was investigating how interesting it may be, but I had to confront a rather dominant position that claimed that scientific analysis was only possible through counting, through numbers. A well known word-counter at my institute, known by our Norwegian friends as the former permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, even maintained that stylistic analysis was nothing but numerical analysis.

I was deeply convinced that this attitude was wrong, but I did not understand why until I got hold of a book of my grandfather's that I hadn't previously known: Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff. Suddenly, and not least by the very nouns in the title, I understood the trap in the counting business: what people counted (and perhaps what one could count) were substances - like the ratio of nouns, verbs and adjectives or the length of clauses measured in words. What they did not count were the relations and functions of these ratios, and neither could they ever count meanings and most certain they could never even discern meanings on different levels in a text.

The following definition of style by one very well-known and highly esteemed colleague of mine, Nils Erik Enkvist, may give you a hint about what I was up against:

The style of a text is a function of the aggregate of the ratios between the frequencies of its phonological, grammatical and lexical items, and the frequencies of the corresponding items in a contextually related norm.

This definition seems at least to be operational, but it is not - not even in factual texts. It is also not quite clear what aggregate means - the best interpretation may perhaps be 'totality'. The definition is definitely not suited for texts with deeper layers of meaning than instructions and (perhaps) informative articles in newspapers. And Enkvist never gives the reader the slightest hint of how an investigation should be performed since he never applied his definition on an analysis of his own.

But what gives a text its style are not as much the "items" as the relations between them and the functions of these relations. This was something I knew, since it is the credo of Check structuralism, but I did not understand its relevance for a criticism of quantitative stylistics until I got hold of Substanzbegriff.

The structuralist quantificators were swept from the market by the chomskyans, who claimed that surface structure, which is the starting point for stylistics in its endeavour to describe, understand and explain texts of all kinds, was merely what they despitefully called "performance" which was the waste basket of all unwanted and I dare say, uncomprehended questions.

Even worse I found the fact that Chomsky tried to minimise the symbolic function of language, i.e. the capacity of language to mean, which was put aside in favour of syntax (or, as they called it, grammar). I never could accept this very fundament of generative/transformational grammar, and hence I never did really understand it. One of the most apparent stupidities of the early Chomsky theory was to put semantics in a box a little at the side, out of the way of "real language". The reason was of course that the translating machine, which Chomsky had in his mind from the very beginning, could not handle semantics. This had its repercussions on stylistics, since stylistics and semantics are very close.

One thing that is really interesting in retrospect is that the different definitions of style that were discussed in the 60ies and 70ies NOWHERE mention classical rhetoric. In rhetoric, style is the third part of the parts (partes) that reflect work on a speech: invention, composition, style (elocutio), memory and delivery. If rhetoric had not been so totally forgotten, there would have been no problem (at least not for me) in regard how to handle style, even if the classical theory is perhaps somewhat too much focussed upon tropes and figures.

Since rhetoric is a pragmatic theory, "how to persuade", the stylistic part of it must also have a teleological aspect. Rhetoric looks at language from the speaker's perspective; stylistic looks at texts from the reader's or listener's point of view. Hence I consider style to be the result of an interplay of the formal level(s) and the level(s) of content and the effect of this interplay

I'm quite sure that the decline of the dogmatic Chomsky-school and the reappearance of classical rhetoric in the 80ies is not incidental. But it took some time until my ideas quite suddenly were regarded as more or less self-evident. As I learned a little about the life and study of my grandfather Ernst, I discovered much to my surprise that he, who was such a great scholar, had experiences that were not so far from my own. His career was far from cumberless. And as to understanding his writings I have observed that it no doubt has influenced me more than I actually have been aware of: going back looking at my notes in his books from readings in the sixties I understand that some of his thoughts must have made an impact on me. If I were to rewrite some of my articles I would happily quote Ernst Cassirer a lot of times! But I am still not sure that I did understand what I read until I had myself somehow reached an understanding. This seems to me to very clearly demonstrate the so called hermeneutical circle (or better: helix) and Heidegger's paradoxon: You can never understand anything that you have not already understood.

*

I remember my grandfather from 1938, as my parents and I came to Sweden, and during the three years we were in Göteborg at the same time, i.e. until 1941 when he went to the USA, I met him from time to time. One memory that easily gets symbolic value is the following: I had won two crowns in a competition and had gotten a beautiful new, shining coin as the prize. I could not part with it going out for a walk with a friend of the family, and held it in my mitten. Suddenly I had lost it. At home the news spread to my grandfather. I was called into his study where he sat working at his desk. He turned around to me and said: "I hear you lost your coin. That was my fault; I'll give you a new one". I think the reason that this incident remained such an unusually clear image in my memory is due to to the fact that I did not understand how it could be his fault that I lost my coin as little as I understand his reasoning in philosophy.

But before reading my grandmother Toni's biography over her life with my grandfather I did of course know nothing about his struggle to get his philosophy acknowledged. I'm happy that the rising interest in Ernst also has spread over to Toni's book, which is not only very well written but actually at parts really thrilling, in a clear and perspicuous German. She did not want the book to be published in Germany but since some German students of philosophy in the 70ies claimed that Ernst Cassirer left Germany for other reasons than she reports in her book, her daughter Anne Appelbaum (now deceased) and I agreed upon having it published. I am quite sure that this was a right decision since Toni Cassirer's book sheds much light also upon the atmosphere in Germany up to 1933.

The foundation of E.C's idea of man as homo symbolicon was laid during World War I. My grandmother tells how Ernst Cassirer went to his work at the Kriegspresseamt every morning to translate war reports from French newspapers in order to mislead the German people about the war results. On the overcrowded streetcar he read his philosophical books, totally unaware of the noise, the bad air and the weak light.

At that time my grandfather was a 42 years old "Privatdozent" in Berlin. He thus was born 1874, in Breslau, at the time a German part of Silesia, today Wroclav in Poland. In Breslau two factories could provide for Ernst Cassirer so that he could study without any economic troubles. He married his cousin Toni Bondy from Vienna. His own parents also were cousins and the many intermarriages in the family perhaps can explain the many peculiar and outstanding personalities in the family.

In Germany two of Ernst Cassirer's cousins are still more well-known than he himself: Bruno Cassirer, the publisher and Paul Cassirer, the art dealer who introduced the impressionists in Germany. In the family was also a neurologist Richard Cassirer, well-known for his thesis on multi-sclerosis, a conductor Fritz Cassirer and Kurt Goldstein, who is still well known in modern neurology. Of course the many intermarriages had a darker side which resulted in exceptionally many suicides. Grandfather, though, only suffered from an easy melancholy in the mornings, tells my grandmother, and he usually was in a sunny and happy mood.

Ernst Cassirer began to study law - his father needed a solicitor for the business - but he very soon changed to Germanistik, and also later, as he had become a philosopher still devoted him self to the great German poets, above all Goethe, who took a special room in his heart. His father Eduard often complained that his most talented son did not engage himself in the business. It would have been much better if Ernst had taken care of the factory, he used to say, and that the dull Richard had become a scholar.

Ernst Cassirer went to Hermann Cohen in Marburg to study Kant and he became Cohen's most prominent student in New-Kantianism. The fact that Cohen was Jewish was to become very important in Ernst Cassirer's carrier, since he already at that time was considered to be a representative of a "Jewish philosophy that was alien to the German Volksseele".

After his dissertation on Descartes and his next work, Leibniz' System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen (1902), for which he received a prize in a contest announced by Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften Cassirer applied for positions as Universitätsdozent at several universities - in Berlin, Strassbourg and in Göttingen, but as a representative for "Jewish New-Kantianism" he was not accepted anywhere. There can be little doubt that anti-Semitism was a major reason for these setbacks, even if this was still not said publicly. On the other side, there was no need for that; anti Semitism was a normal and predictable ingredient in Germany. Ernst Cassirer had to be prepared for that his being Jewish would have negative consequences for his carrier. The NS "Machtübernahme" in 1933 was only the peak of a ongoing brutalising of xenophobia in Germany which was to be fatal for Jews, gypsies, communists and other "deviant" people.

Early in 1933 a decree was proclaimed which launched the phrase "Recht ist was dem Führer dient". This decree was to become of decisive importance for Ernst Cassirer and his family. At the time the decree was launched my grandfather said that if not all of Germany's lawyers did protest against this, German would be lost. "Not one single voice of protest was heard", writes my grandmother, and my grandparents decided to leave Germany immediately. A law from 7 April 1933 with the opaque name of "Wiederherstellung des Berufsamtentums" aimed at eliminate all Jews in official positions and made Cassirer's emigration necessary.

At that point of time, Ernst Cassirer had been a full professor at the University of Hamburg since 1919. 1929/30 he was its "Rektor" and in that capacity he had to participate in many official events. Ernst Cassirer did not neglect the possibility to underline the importance of the democratic constitution and he tried to show the roots of democratic thinking i German history and philosophy in order to strengthen that way of reasoning.

In the speeches that Ernst Cassirer held at these occasions which he himself considered to be mainly political, he reasoned on a far to abstract and distanced level for his view to get any considerable effect. But in one of his rektorial speeches Cassirer claims that "Wissen ist Pflicht" and stresses the responsibilities and duties of intellectual people. This was a very obvious and clear declaration of a standing-point that can even be interpreted as an exhortation to act, more the obvious for those who knew the style of Cassirer's usual writings and lessons, in which abstraction and distance are prominent style-markers. So when Ernst Cassirer says "Wissen ist Pflicht" this is a unusually strong and straightforwardly put point of view.

For a reader of Sartre the pointing towards man's duty seems existentialist, but as you know existentialism in its primary form of Heidegger's was actually the school in German philosophy that launched the sharpest criticism against Cassirer's interpretation of Kant. An important and well-known incident in Cassirer's philosophy as well as private life was the disputation between him and Heidegger in Davos 1929. It seems that the bourgeois and "Olympic" Cassirer had no great chance of winning a dispute against the youthful and aggressive Heidegger.

Heidegger may very well have been a more acute philosopher than Cassirer - he was more original, in any case - but the fact that he was the winner of the Davos disputation also might be explained by the spirit of the times. Heidegger was the "modern" one of the two and his existentialism of "Blut und Boden" caught the wind (and might even have steered the same wind) much more than Cassirer's universal humanism ever could. The fact that Heidegger was known as an overt anti-semit in 1929 did certainly contribute to his success in the Reich: he was the first outspoken Nazi that became Rektor of a German university.

I think that one of the possible reasons for the fact that Cassirer never founded any "school" (contrary to Heidegger) is that his personality prevented him from writing in a style that evaded problems, objections or other perspectives in the history of philosophy, all of which together make his writings rather cumbersome and which also makes it impossible to summarise his theories in slogans and catchwords. The reason that the pro-Rektor of Trondheim's University could not find any citation that covered Cassirer's philosophy is of course due to this very fact!

My father once asked him what he was going to say in his lecture next day, which Ernst then explained to him. My father said, well that was not so difficult, why don't you say it in those words, whereupon my grandfather of course replied that it would be a catastrophe for his carrier to be so easily understood.

As my grandfather left Germany in 1933 I think his decision was not only based upon a rational analysis of the ominous decree "Recht ist was dem Führer dient". I think a very important ingredient was his personality. In the book that my grandmother wrote he appears to have been severely inhibited as to expressing aggression, and I've been told that whenever a quarrel came about in the family (which must have been rather often) he just left the room. This inadequacy made him to a permanent "friendly" person, who even saluted a subordinate university clerk with the same respect as any of the profes sors. (My Grandmother characterised him in her viennese bourgeois way as having no "Klassenbewußtsein". Maybe she had enough of it for both of them.) I used to think that Ernst Cassirer might not have made any difference between people, because he was equally little interested in them all, but having listened to yesterday's and today's presentations of his philosophical thinking I am inclined to revise this: it seems on the contrary to verify grandmother's judgment: EC really did not see people as representatives of groups and classes but as individuals.

The passages in Toni Cassirer's book that describe what happened after 1933 are extremely interesting. Immediately after the emigration, during his stay in Oxford 1934/35 as a visiting scholar, my grandfather uttered the intent to write a philosophical essay on (and against) Nazism. Toni Cassirer, though, felt it to be her responsibility to prevent him from doing that. In a very emotional part of her book my grandmother tells how vehemently she had to argue to obstruct Ernst Cassirer from writing something that could harm relatives and friends in Germany. Ernst Cassirer followed her advice and he actually never accomplished his intent.

My grandmother's very emotional defence for her acting deviates considerably from her usual style, which I suppose is due to reproaches on Ernst Cassirer for not having spoken up while there was still time to do so and perhaps even a possible result to be expected. "Not one single person opened his voice against the decree of 1933", my grandmother laments, not understanding that she acted in exactly the same way as she forbade her husband to do so. There is of course one complication: they were not only German, they were Jews. But even if times were different in those days as to freedom of utterance and even if the situation in Germany already was very difficult with the uniformed young men on the street scaring people, there must have been opposition against Hitler also apart from the communist one. Was there not a single newspaper in which the former Rektor of Hamburg's University could have written an article against what he felt was wrong without fear of reprisals? But the incident shows that already in 1933 terror was so dominant in Nazi Germany that protests really were dangerous - also for "ordinary" Germans and hence the more for Jews.

Ernst Cassirer's friendliness had an important effect in that it obviously was difficult to dislike him. Ardent academic opponents and even anti-Semites as Heidegger felt an unwilling admiration and perhaps even a kind of affection for him, and many of his students and listeners became his friends. The most important one of these friends was to be the professor of philosophy at Göteborgs Högskola, Malte Jacobson, who became governor of Göteborgs och Bohus län in the thirties. He had been listening in on some of Ernst Cassirer's lectures in Germany and he mediated an invitation for a personal professorship for five years in Göteborg. My grandfather accepted the invitation with great pleasure, something that is said to have surprised the faculty in Göteborg: Cassirer was a highly estimated academic and Göteborgs Högskola had only a couple of hundred students. But Cassirer never felt at home in Oxford, the reason among other things being that there he was obliged to lecture in English. In Sweden he could speak German since more or less all educated people knew German, and the structure of the university and of university teaching was more or less the same as he was used to from Germany. So he felt very much at ease in Sweden and he and my grand mother were very proud to become Swedish citizens in 1939, which they both were until their death.

In the memoirs of my grandmother Sweden is pictured more or less like a paradise: Sweden was clean, there was (already at that time) high living standards with no beggars in the streets, and nor was there any anti-Semitism - at least, that was what she believed. She was wrong in that assumption, and even if anti-Semitism in Sweden was quite different from anti-Semitism in Germany the situation for refugees who wanted an asylum in Sweden was as repelling in 1935 as it actually is again today.

The anti-Nazi position of most of the professors at Göteborgs Högskola and in Göteborg in general, a standing point for which Torgny Segerstedt was the incarnation, of course contributed to that Ernst and Toni Cassirer felt so well in Göteborg.

The first book that Cassirer published in Sweden was "Determinismus und Indeterminismus. Über das Kausalproblem in der modernen Fysik" which he had written in England. It happened at that time that my grandmother fell ill and my grandfather for once was forced to go into the kitchen - a place I think he was not very familiar with. He made some tea, which endeavour he accomplished. But as he was to warm the milk, he put the bottle directly on the stove with a consequence that he theoretically should have been able to foresee if you regard the title of his newly published book. My grandmother was so happy for that incident that she recovered immediately.

As soon as Ernst Cassirer arrived in Sweden he begun to learn the language and read Swedish philosophers. Somewhat surprising he fished out a romantic poet and philosopher from his oblivion and wrote a book on him: "Thorilds Stellung in der Geistesgeschichte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts". Less surprising is that he became involved in the criticism of the radical rationalism of the domineering school of Axel Hägerström in Uppsala which discarded assertions about practical and moral knowledge as superstitious. Being a witness to the moral collapse of Germany (and much of the rest of the western world) it is most natural that EC should claim both an ontological as well as epistemological rationality for moral judgment. It is typical that he nowhere explains his personal experience as an incitement to that standpoint, and of course his biography does not shed any further light on his very philosophy, only on his perspective. I think that a deconstrutive reading of Cassirer's works in Sweden would show his deep concern for human values that were so ostensibly violated in Germany.

Sweden was the right place to return to his early interest in Renée Descartes and he investigated Descarte's part in the conversion of queen Christina to Catholicism (Drottning Christina och Descartes.). The appointment in Göteborg ended in 1941. Ernst Cassirer had accepted an invitation to Yale University and also since the political climate had become highly unhealthy in Sweden after the German invasion of Denmark and Norway, my grandparents decided somewhat reluctantly to leave Sweden in May 1941.

In the USA Ernst Cassirer wrote his two last and most popular books, "An essay on man", in which he tried to summarize his philosophy, and "The myth of the state", a philosophical approach to politics. He actually achieved to write them in English! Cassirer's state of health had deteriorated under the pressure of the political events and my grandmother writes that she was in constant fear when her husband did not return on scheduled time - which happened now and then when her husband became totally absorbed by some idea he wanted to pursue in the university library.

On the 12th of April 1945 the radio reported (falsely, as it later turned out) that Franklin Roosevelt died calmly in his sleep. "If you promise me to die in the same way", my grandmother said to Ernst Cassirer, "I grant you to die tomorrow". As the obedient husband that he was, he did so. He had a heart attack after his lecture the 13th April and dropped down dead on the street outside Columbia University, where he held an appointment after Yale.

I have been able to observe the rising interest in my grandfather's writings during the more than fifty years since his death. Thanks to several scientific introductions of him and the endeavour to publish his posthumous manuscripts his name has once more become well-known also for a wider public. This conference on him, the first in Scandinavia!, also shows this. And there has been a trait of friendliness in the discussions that I have never experienced in any other conference. Thinking upon the "Ghost Sonata" by Beethoven that introduced this conference I am tempted to say that if not his ghost then well Cassirer's spirit has hovered over the participants!

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