Abstract

This study begins with an examination of a debate between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger over the interpretation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The two men met in Davos, Switzerland in March, 1929, to argue their understandings of the text, but both before and after Davos they parried over the right reading of Kant's work. Not simply to further Kant scholarship did the two men air their disagreements, however: as the later parts of my study show, their readings of Kant had everything to do with their major works--with the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and with Being and Time --and their major works had everything to do, not only with their understandings of Kant, but with their methods of interpretation in general. ;Cassirer and Heidegger had been schooled in the tradition of German neo-Kantianism, and agreed that the central problem of Kant's book was the relation between space-time and the categories. Cassirer worked toward showing, however, that the categories give shape to space and time; Heidegger argued the reverse, that time determines the nature and shape of the categories. In his own work, then, Cassirer analyzed symbolic forms in relation to how certain categories shape space, time, and number; Heidegger, meanwhile, derived the "categories" of human existence from the features of time. ;There is another aspect in Cassirer's and Heidegger's readings of Kant, however, and so too in their writings: both men thought any understanding of Kant's book must take into account the book's form, and, as my study will show, both were greatly concerned with the forms of their own books. The structures of their writings thus provide an additional tool for settling problems of interpreting their works. ;Finally, running throughout the debate between Cassirer and Heidegger is an issue on which much of the debate in current literary theory turns. Shaping the interpretive methods of Cassirer and Heidegger are their understandings of language and meaning, and so the end of my study turns to those matters, aiming to suggest how the Cassirer-Heidegger debate could provide entry into the tangled underbrush of contemporary literary theory