[Due to technical problems this post appears a few days late--ES]
With this special sensitivity to concealed connections and affinities, for transitions and cross currents, went [A] a rooted distaste for sharp delineation and the drawing of firm distinctions between ideas and thinkers. Cassirer's tendency was [B] to conciliate and appease, [C] to see the past in the future and the future in the past, to represent the philosophy of the Renaissance....in such a fashion that later developments - those of the eighteenth and nineteenth, and even of the twentieth centuries were all too visible, almost fully formed, in these early beginnings. He liked to think of Leibniz as a kind of early Kant and of Kant (whom he all but worshiped) as almost a modern physicist; of Descartes or Lessing or Hegel as all, in their various ways, seeking to express one large single truth; all thinkers were to him loyal fellow-workers, engaged in a vast, common enterprise; the differences between them in Cassirer's pages became relatively blurred; the harmony between them covered a multitude of ephemeral disagreements, progressively less significant as the horizon widened...like all efforts at conciliation, it can only be achieved at some sacrifice of the critical faculty.--Isaiah Berlin Reviewing Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, in English Historical Review 68 (1953), 617-19.
Joshua Cherniss called my attention to Berlin's review during facebook discussion after yesterday's post; I am grateful to him for making a copy of it available to me. In the quoted passage, Berlin's "appeasement" -- a word that had become toxic in 1953 -- reveals something of the intensity of Berlin's critical attitude that follows the quoted passage. In particular, the core criticisms of Cassirer (1874-1945), who was already dead at the time of the review, are political and philosophical. So, for example, Berlin call's Cassirer's book "politically timid," and it is by no means clear that in granting that "the book as a whole remains lucid, civilized and agreeable," Berlin means to be offering a compliment.
That even the lucidity is not a compliment is clear from the closing lines of the review, where Berlin calls for more "business-like...that is, ice-cutting" approach. In fact, Berlin distinguishes between different kinds of clarity in the review, and he embraces the values of the then surging, analytical movement with which he was very familiar (and of which he would become a fierce critic); Berlin wants the clarity that is subsequent to fine-grained and "firm distinctions" and the pulling apart of atomic concepts from what might have seemed like an organic whole.
One need not be a friend of political timidity, or even Cassirer's "supremely innocent" philosophy, to be weary of Berlin's rejection of conciliation. For, it entails open-ended warfare (and the desire for total victory); that is, in his criticism of Cassirer, Berlin here comes awfully close to embracing the philosophy of Carl Schmitt and shares with it a disdain for harmony. To embrace such open-ended warfare is uncivilized; if by civilization we mean the art of keeping conversation going, then even appeasement can play a tactical role in advancing civilization and conciliation. This art is not very demanding and requires all our "critical faculties," including the self-command not to investigate, say, 'ephemeral disagreements' in the middle of a crisis; it also requires the ability to make careful distinctions in order to find tenuous common ground, especially when confronted with "mysticism and fanaticism" in others.
This is not the place to discuss what it meant for the philosophical interpretations of the unfolding cold war that Cassirer's philosophical project was unfairly coupled with Chaimberlain's disgraced politics.* Michael Friedman has already eloquently argued (in a different context) that by reducing the philosophical option-space to the more radical approaches represented by Carnap vs Heidegger, philosophy has been diminished.
It is, in fact, it is by no means obvious that Cassirer gets the thinkers of the Enlightenment wrong in thinking that (to quote Berlin again) that they were engaged in a joint project of building "the great cathedral of human culture and learning" with few "really profound differences of principle." As one of Berlin's intellectual lodestones, Benjamin Constant, argued, it is not wrong in so far as this seems to have been a guiding aspiration of many of the leading figures themselves nor unfair in light of the judgment of posterity, which they eagerly hoped would vindicate them. Even Jonathan Israel has to acknowledge that for much of the eighteenth century the so-called moderate and radical Enlighteners appeared as part of a united effort, despite huge disagreements over tactics and philosophies (for some qualification see here).
So, while my own commitments tend to be not far removed from Berlin's, I reject Berlin's linking of his political criticisms of Cassirer with his disagreement over philosophical method captured by [A-C] in the quoted passage at the top of this post. In fact, while I am no friend of Cassirer's historical epistemology nor his dynamics of reason (nor a worshiper of Kant), I do defend the legitimacy of [C], that is, to see the past in the future and the future in the past. Now in Cassirer the point is to articulate the ways in which "one large single truth" may be expressed.
For, the idea that one's philosophical efforts are, in part, realized or even more richly captured in later work guides nearly all our scholarly efforts; it's a regulative ideal that is presupposed in lots of academic activity--from publishing in learned journals, to citation practices, to archiving, to giving of honors and prizes, etc. (There are, of course, more narcissist philosophical projects that do not require the participation of others; some of these may, in fact, be beautiful to behold by outsiders.) The ideal follows from the realization that philosophy is very difficult and our time on earth relatively brief. While we engage in our puzzles and are fully absorbed in various programs, we need some to step back and figure out how all of these belong to the larger whole that we aim to capture.** From the vantage point of that larger whole much of what we do is foreshadowed by those born before us. It does not follow, of course, that one should always look for prior developments and only stress agreement, but, uncharacteristically, Berlin fails to recognize that widening one's horizons is a species of courage and that a steadfast resistance to a rising tide of pessimism is a species of magnanimity.
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