10 - Enlightenment or Therapy

Summary

Considers the implications of Cassirer and Heidegger’s respective conceptions of philosophy for their views on its existential task. Cassirer asserts a hierarchy among the cultural domains based on the self-understanding of symbolic consciousness (10.1). Heidegger navigates the dialectics between disowned, average, and owned selfhood (10.2). On this basis, I address the ultimate breaking point between Cassirer and Heidegger: their respective Enlightened and ‘therapeutic’ conception of the task of philosophy. While for Cassirer philosophy is the caretaker of our self-liberation through culture, for Heidegger it ought to help us reconcile with our ineradicable shortcomings ‒ the latter view is therapeutic in the psychoanalytic sense, it has no affinity with Wittgenstein's notion of philosophy as therapy.