2 - Kant’s Legacy and New Thinking: Heidegger, Cassirer, and Rosenzweig

Summary

When Sein und Zeit appeared, it was hardly an isolated work of philosophy. Self-consciously rebellious, it operated within a highly charged set of assumptions, values, and views in a crisis-laden cultural context in which philosophy, theology, and politics were tensely intertwined. As noted in the introduction, the world this work rebelled against was, inter alia, represented by the philosophical idealism of the neo-Kantian schools that had increasingly lost their appeal in the minds of many younger students. From the perspective of the younger generation of Jewish intellectuals who sought to shake off the devitalizing legacy of the Enlightenment and embrace a more existential and expressive mode of thinking, Heidegger’s framework would be, potentially, an ally in their effort of revitalizing Jewish existence. However, while it is figures from this rebellious generation of German Jews who are often taken to represent the Weimarian intellectual and aesthetical world in the narrative of twentieth-century European intellectual history –