Politics climates and philosophical responsibilities: The Cassirer’s lecture on Philosophy and Politics (1944)

Abstract

In his speech of 1944 on Philosophy and Politics, Ernst Cassirer puts forward an idea that will be revisited in The Myth of the State and prevails in a good part of his works. Philosophy must be accountable for promoting certain political climates, such as what happened with some thinkers who favoured the consolidation of Nazism. Thought crises may generate social or political turbulences, because in these circumstances there is a continuous dialectic between thinkers and people of action, between ideas and facts, summing up, between theory and praxis. The main historic-political problems cannot be solved without taking into account the fundamental questions approached from a philosophical perspective, because there is an unavoidable interaction between the structure of ideas and our socio-political reality. The Davos’s debate, The idea of the Republican Constitution, The problem Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Moral Philosophy, Rights and Metaphysics: A dialogue with Axel Hägerstrom are presented in order to illustrate this thesis defended by the author of this paper, who has also written La Quimera del Rey Filósofo (The Chimera of the Philosopher King).