Ernst Cassirer's Enlightenment: An Exchange with Bruce Mazlish

Abstract

Ernst Cassirer's Enlightenment: An Exchange with Bruce Mazlish ROBERT WOKLER In 1932 there appeared a study of the European Enlightenment of seminal significance. The book immediately caught the attention of the general public and for the past sixty years has colored assessments of that intellectual movement put forward, mainly by its critics, of virtually all denominations. No treatment of eighteenth-century thought in any language has been published in more editions. The work is elegant, lighthearted, and urbane, but I believe that its influence upon interpretations of the Enlightenment has been sinister. In developing the proposition that eighteenthcentury thinkers made science the new religion of mankind and offered a kind of terrestrial grace or happiness to its true believers alone, it portrayed the secular world of modernity within an ideological mould which merely turned Christianity inside out, in the service of absolutist principles of another sort. To my mind this proposition in different permutations informs the account of Jacob Talmon and his disciples that the Enlightenment was at bottom an age of totalitarian democracy. It underpins the postmodernist critique of the monolithic metanarratives of Enlightenment put forward by Jean-François Lyotard and his followers. It prefigures the charge of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Zygmunt Bauman that the Holocaust was facilitated by eighteenth-century ideals of social engineering and Enlightenment canons of instrumental reason.1 It even forms the intellectual framework on which is painted the canvas of Charles-Louis Müller's The 335 336 / WOKLER Last Roll Call of the Victims of the Terror at the Snite Museum of Art, illustrated on the program cover of the 1998 annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies assembled here at the University of Notre Dame. The work to which I am alluding is of course Carl Becker's Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers.2 Its central thesis as I read it is that the philosophes demolished the City of God only to rebuild it upon the terrestrial plain. In substituting dogmatic reason for dogmatic faith, the Enlightenment thus loved the thing it killed and embraced it even by destroying it. In the same year there also appeared another work, couched in a wholly different idiom, a work that should have served as a rebuttal of Becker's text, around which all the true friends of Enlightenment might have rallied. If there is a single book in any language that might be said to encapsulate the true "Enlightenment Project," supposing that there was one at all, it is Ernst Cassirer's Die Philosophie der Aufklärung. Here is a work before which scholars of eighteenth-century thought profess to stand in awe, on account of the range of its themes and the depth of its arguments. Michel Foucault, in reviewing the first French translation of Cassirer's book in 1966 hailed it as a masterpiece which, no less than Kant himself two hundred years ago, sought to identify the conditions necessary for scientific knowledge to be gained.3 It had attempted to address the forms of understanding which made Kant and Kantianism possible and thus, by excavating a set of foundational abstractions, set out in a manner not dissimilar to Foucault's own archeological investigations, to identify the constitution of modernity itself. If only such praise from the Enlightenment Project's fiercest postmodern critic had genuinely echoed the esteem in which Cassirer's work was held by eighteenth-century scholars, the history of Enlightenment studies over the past forty years would, I believe, have taken a very different course. In fact, that history has by and large been marked by our abandonment of Cassirer's approach and perspectives, as we have descended from his great temple of Parnassus to study instead the Grub Street pamphleteers and salonnières in the mundane world below. In reviewing The Philosophy of the Enlightenment soon after it first appeared in English in 1951, Alfred Cobban condemned what he took to be the excessively German focus, beginning with Leibniz, on the one hand, and concluding with Kant and Herder, on the other, of a book purportedly attempting to portray the cosmopolitanism of European thought. Here, wrote Cobban (somewhat carelessly...