Abstract

We trace here the layout of Cassirer’s intellectual itinerary, highlightning the growing political commitment in his thought as he faces the national socialist ideology from the vantage point of history of ideas and his philosophy of the symbolic forms, invoking in this sense the spirit of Enlightenment in general and Kant in a very particular way as well. Cassirer’s ideological rebuttal of Nazism begins in 1928 with his hommage to the Weimar Republic and reaches up to 1945 with The Myth of State. Here however it is presented an interpretation of the dangerously moral meaning that Judaism had for the totalitarian ideology of National Socialism.