Foundational Disjunctions: Limit, Function, and Dialectic in Ernst Cassirer and Nicholas of Cusa

Ernst Cassirer is both an eminent scholar of the Western intellectual tradition and a philosopher in his own right.These two facets of his thought cannot be extricated from each other; indeed, his philosophy develops out of his evaluation and narrativisation of the progress of the Western intellectual tradition.Pivotal in this narrative is the 15th c. cardinal and philosopher, Nicholas of Cusa.Cusa, for Cassirer, encompasses all the strands of Renaissance thought and thus embodies the passage from the Middle Ages to Modernity.This thesis argues that Cusa's philosophy is defining for Cassirer's thought.More precisely, Cusa's elaboration of immanent and transcendental limit concepts enables Cassirer to bridge the gap between Plato's epistemology and the modern epistemology of transcendental idealism.Beginning with the Marburg Neo-Kantian reading of Kant's critical philosophy, I argue that their intellectualist reading implies a strongly dialectical foundation that requires the limitation of the understanding by reason and the limitation of reason by the absolute.The roots of this transcendental idealism are then traced back to Plato.Cassirer's philosophy is thus positioned within the context of the Platonic tradition as opposed to the Aristotelian tradition.More specifically, Cassirer is shown to rely on a disjunction between the sensible and the ideal realm in order to ensure the plenitude of the concept and its applicability to experience.This plenitude and this applicability, in turn, are achieved through by Cusa's elaboration of a concept of negation that enables the dialectical relationship between an immanent and a transcendental limit concept.Accordingly, Cassirer's interpretation and development of transcendental idealism are shown to evolve out of his reading of Cusa's works.Ernst Cassirer est à la fois un éminent spécialiste de la tradition intellectuelle occidentale et un philosophe à part entière.Ces deux facettes de sa pensée ne peuvent être dissociées l'une de l'autre ; en effet, sa philosophie se développe à partir de son évaluation et de sa narration du progrès de la tradition intellectuelle occidentale.Le cardinal et philosophe du XVe siècle, Nicolas de Cues, occupe une place centrale dans ce récit.Pour Cassirer, Nicolas englobe tous les courants de pensée de la Renaissance et incarne donc le passage du Moyen Âge à la modernité.Ce mémoire soutient que la philosophie du Cusain est déterminante pour la pensée de Cassirer.Plus précisément, l'élaboration par Nicolas des concepts de limites immanentes et transcendantales permet à Cassirer de combler l'écart entre l'épistémologie de Platon et l'épistémologie moderne de l'idéalisme transcendantal.En partant de la lecture néo-kantienne marbourgeoise de la philosophie critique de Kant, ce mémoire soutient que leur lecture intellectualiste implique un fondement fortement dialectique qui requiert la limitation de l'entendement par la raison et la limitation de la raison par l'absolu.Les racines de cet idéalisme transcendantal remontent donc à Platon.La philosophie de Cassirer est donc positionnée dans le contexte de la tradition platonicienne par opposition à la tradition aristotélicienne.Plus précisément, Cassirer s'appuie sur une disjonction entre le domaine sensible et le domaine idéal afin de garantir la plénitude du concept et son applicabilité à l'expérience.Cette plénitude et cette applicabilité, à leur tour, sont obtenues grâce à l'élaboration par le Cusain d'un concept de négation qui permet la relation dialectique entre un concept limite immanent et un concept limite transcendantal.En conséquence, l'interprétation et le développement de l'idéalisme transcendantal de Cassirer sont montrés comme évoluant à partir de la lecture des œuvres de Nicolas de Cues. Lindsay 2Cassirer pursued his study of the Renaissance in more depth.Equipped with Aby Warburg's famous library and surrounded by specialists on the Renaissance, such as Erwin Panofsky, Raymond Klibansky, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and Warburg himself, Cassirer was immersed in Renaissance thought.This period was not just one of historical study for Cassirer, however; it also proved to be his most productive philosophical period.Between 1923 and 1929, Cassirer published the three volumes of his magnum opus, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, not to mention several books and essays on language, myth, science, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy.It is also during this period, in 1929 at Davos in Switzerland, that Cassirer famously debated with Martin Heidegger about the concepts of freedom and rationality in Kant and their relation to the state of European philosophy.3 ICRP is part and parcel of this broader philosophical project and must be considered within the context of Cassirer's thought more broadly as well as understood to contribute to this philosophical system.Indeed, more generally, Cassirer's philosophy is inextricable from his scholarship.Following Hegel, Cassirer is preoccupied with identifying the spirit of an age or discipline.As he puts it in ICRP, although it can never cease trying to achieve the general, and even the most abstract universality, the history of philosophy must never forget that it can only make responsible generalizations by immersing itself in the most concrete particulars and in the most subtle detail.What is needed is the universality of a systematic point of view and of a systematic orientation which in no way coincides with the universality of merely empirical concepts used un the periodization of history for convenient classification.4 Cassirer's approach to history is thoroughly transcendental.He undertakes a twofold approach that insists on a "systematic orientation", a consistent method of inquiry, and that is preoccupied with identifying the general orientation and end towards which intellectual currents of an age or 3 Two extensive studies of this encounter and Cassirer's arguments and philosophical position are Peter E. Gordon's Continental Divide and Simon Truwant's Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos.4 Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, 5.7 Matherne, "Marburg Neo-Kantianism as Philosophy of Culture," 218.8 Cassirer, The Warburg Years (1919-1933), 265. 9 I do not wish to overemphasise Cassirer's Neo-Kantianism.As John Michael Krois points out, much non-Anglophone scholarship on Cassirer views him as a pure Marburg Neo-Kantian (Cassirer, Symbolic Forms and History, 6.) Though this aspect of Cassirer's thought is very important in the context of this study that focuses on his reception of the transcendental method, Cassirer's philosophy is rather more multi-faceted than a straightforward Neo-Kantian moniker can evince.28 Kant, A141/B180.29

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