WHITE PONY CAB

MODERN TALKING

Devia estar a ir para Paris mas os planos saem todos furados;
Devia ir a Davos, na Suíça, em vez de ir a Paris, ver a neve e o sanatório de DORF;
Em vez disso vou a Entre-os-rios às termas, tal como fomos na semana passada.
- Perseguir mochos, atirar paus às árvores, vestir fatos de treino (outra vez), pôr em dia as leituras, andar de robe branco todo o dia com uma touca na cabeça, comer a horas, assistir a doentes em desintoxicação,
ficar com apele toda enrugada de horas em água sulforosa,
...comunidades destas têm vicíos secretos.

Abstract

The 1929 ‘Davo.s encounter’ between Mar.tin Heid.egger and Ernst Cas.sirer has long been viewed by intellectual historians as a paradigmatic event not only for its philosophical meaning but also for its apparently cultural-political ramifications. But such interpretations easily lend legitimacy to a broader and recently ascendant intellectual-historical trend that would reduce philosophy to an allegorical expression of ostensibly more ‘real’ or instrumentalist meanings. However, as this essay tries to show, the core of the dispute between Cas.sirer and Heid.egger is irreducibly philosophical: the Davos debate brought into focus the emergent themes of the so-called “Kant-crisis” of the 1920s, and cast new light upon neo-Kantian doctrines as to the status of objectivity and the possibility for intersubjective consensus in both knowledge and ethics. The Davos encounter cannot be retroactively decided on political or cultural grounds, since it concerns just that unresolved tension between transcendentalism and hermeneutics that is itself constitutive of intellectual history as a discipline.