A “Nationalist Ethic”? Cassirer Responds to Bruno Bauch.Husserl’s Mistake

Abstract

I have wanted to make a comment to Ernst Cassirer’s text, unpublished in Spanish, in which he responds to the neo-Kantian and anti-Semitic Bruno Bauch, having as a philosophical and political question the concept of ”Nation”. This essay highlights the metaphysical framework of that properly German idea that starts with Fichte and his ideal of education (Bildung) as the Formation of the National Spirit.Cassirer dismantles the nationalist intention of the Kulturkampf to base itself on Kant to make possible a German Ethics using (Ripke-Kühn and Bauch) the self-position of the concept as the properly German. I also point out the misreading that Cassirer, like Husserl, made of the Dialogues to the German nation of Fichte.