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PARTISAN REVIEW
we remain silent)-Cassirer accepted the motto as a directive for
recasting as a general form all the multitude of little facts about
Kant's life so lovingly recorded in earlier biographies. From the
many descriptions of Kant's daily routines and affairs, he ab–
stracted what he needed
to
present "a truly unified whole, not
merely ... the unity of a characteristic type of behavior."
Cassirer wanted to capture Kant as he really was: "the total act of
judging and reasoning" come alive.
Kant's Life and Thought
does justice
to
the generality, the
formality, and the systematic intent of Kant's life and thought,
and it satisfies Cassirer's own neo-Kantian need for coherence
and integrality. But the cost is very great: the biography lacks
both historical consciousness and self-consciousness on the part
of the biographer himself. The price seems to be typical for this
mode of biography.
If
you have never met a "truly unified spiritual whole, " it is
probably not because your acquaintance is limited.
If
it is possi–
ble at all, oneness of
Lebensform
and thought form is possible
only in particular historical moments-moments when there is
surface equipoise amongst conflicting forces and turmoil brew–
ing unheeded in the depths, in the as yet unmanifest aspirations
of emergent historical figures. To approach his subject clearly,
Cassirer would have had
to
take the measure of the distance be–
tween the years prior
to
the French Revolution, when Kant was
writing his
Critiques,
and the years of the First World War, when
Cassirer was writing
Kant's Life and Thought.
And he would
have had to combine his measuring with insight into his own
life in the context of the First World War, into his own life as an
heir of Kant, a neo-Kantian in times profoundly un-Kantian.
Cassirer's reticence on both these counts was obviously impor–
tant to him in philosophical terms-he, too, followed the motto
De nobis ips is silemus.
But this attitude makes philosophy,
which certainly is in one sense
philosophia perennis,
a plant
without soil.
In
our times, anyone who writes biographically
about a philosopher must take the steps that Cassirer did not
take; that is, he or she must explore why it is that in our time life
and thought do not cohere very often or for very long-why it is
that struggles for integration are not finally successful , even
though they can be waged, again and again, heroically.
Nonetheless, Cassirer's ideal is an important corrective
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