Because a certain variety of Marxist, who uses SCIENCE!! (cue bells and fladhing lights) as a God-substitute and thinks Marxism is just such a SCIENCE!!!, feels threatened by anything that puts REASON!! in question.
The same reason a certain type of Christian feels threatened by anything that questions the literalness of the Bible, because the Bible is the TRUTH!!
Well that's put us all in our places. No replying to that. So I won't (I won't mention Saint Stalin either), but I thought this little rant below from the inimitable Ralph Dumain, from another list, has more energy to it than I would be able to muster in this non-discussion of Cassirer. (Couldn't imagine Cassirer would engage the short attention spans of the identity politicians for long.) Tahir
One note: I think the very creation of the artificial category of "continental philosophy" in order to selectively admit its contents into American philosophy (and into the British Commonwealth, I presume) is a way of adapting to the contemporary climate of globalization and irrationalism and is yet a subtler way of denying Marxism (which itself split philosophically into warring camps by the 1920s, not to mention the divisions already present before 1900.) This postmodernist crap, however tokenistically it may still acknowledge Marx here and there, or social class, is yet another way of vitiating the potential influence of Marxism. But then, what do I mean by Marxism, and how did it get to be an ism, and what about its assimilation of new knowledge and new theoretical perspectives? Hold those thoughts.
The bourgeois pluralist introduction of crap like feminist, black, Native American, queer, etc. philosophy into the revivified category of "American philosophy", including the irrationalist wing of pragmatism, is one sickening way in which the petty bourgeois humanistic academic star system makes room for the watered-down liberalism (akin to whoring for the neoliberal Democratic Party) of a segment of the intelligentsia letting off some steam for them while intensifying class inequality. It is all predicated on denying Marxism, and this can be perceived if one compares the climate of the '70s and very early '80s in which the effects of the new social movements as well as the contemporaneous class struggle bore their first fruits in the academy, to dominant trends now.
Of course I've begged the question of what I think Marxism is or should be, and how it should relate to other identifiable tendencies. I have written elsewhere that the notion of "Marxist philosophy" as it was codified was an erroneous conceptualization from the beginning. "Marxism" shouldn't mark itself off from the sum total of human knowledge; it should be a way of orienting oneself critically towards it, (in addition to supplying its own knowledge,) identifying the sources and consequences of ideological distortion, fragmentation, the division of labor, etc., and point the way towards the conceptual reconstitution of a demystified whole.
But now it's past my bedtime.
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