Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. By Peter E. Gordon. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. 2010. Pp. xiv + 426. Cloth $39.95. ISBN 13: 978-0674047136.

摘要

Readers of Peter Gordon’s first book, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism andrnGerman Philosophy ( 2003) will find themselves in familiar territory as they enter thernpages of Continental Divide. It was Rosenzweig’s apparently paradoxical, counterin-rntuitive, positive identification with Heidegger’s position in the famous philosophi-rncal disputation between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer in Davos, Switzerland, inrnMarch 1929 that firstmotivated Gordon to examinemore intensely the ambivalentrnstatus of Heidegger’s philosophical “revolution” in the history of continentalrnEuropean thought in the twentieth century. As Gordon notes, however,rnRosenzweig’s identification with Heidegger’s existential ontology was a mere side-rnshow in a historical drama in which the Davos disputation was clearly a main event,rnan event in which the most distinguished representatives of opposing positionsrnarticulated their differences in a public debate. Or at least in the public memoryrnof continental philosophy and modern European intellectual history morernbroadly the Davos debate between Cassirer and Heidegger took on the allegoricalrnsignificance of a fundamental rift, “between humanism and anti-humanism,rnenlightenment and counter-enlightenment, or rationalism and irrationalism, as ifrnthe defining struggles of twentieth-century thought were crystallized within thisrnsingle event” (p. 1). The task Gordon sets himself is not just to expand his analysisrnof the content and significance of Heidegger’s early philosophy by setting him inrnrelation to the major representative of the neo-Kantian tradition, but also tornexamine the process of historical memory construction itself.What is the relation-rnship between the philosophical dispute as it occurred in 1929 and the general cul-rntural meanings that have become embedded in our memory of it? How canrnhistorical analysis help us distinguish between memory and event?