Considers the implications of Cassirer and Heidegger’s respective conceptions of philosophy for their views on its existential task. Cassirer asserts a hierarchy among the cultural domains based on the self-understanding of symbolic consciousness (10.1). Heidegger navigates the dialectics between disowned, average, and owned selfhood (10.2). On this basis, I address the ultimate breaking point between Cassirer and Heidegger: their respective Enlightened and ‘therapeutic’ conception of the task of philosophy. While for Cassirer philosophy is the caretaker of our self-liberation through culture, for Heidegger it ought to help us reconcile with our ineradicable shortcomings ‒ the latter view is therapeutic in the psychoanalytic sense, it has no affinity with Wittgenstein's notion of philosophy as therapy.

Adequate informational privacy is essential if people are to successfully seek self-realization as they interact in a variety of social roles. Those interactions create and maintain the necessary informational privacy as people conform to shared expectations about the selective flow of information. Conformity to shared expectations about information flow requires complex group coordination, which is facilitated by informational norms. Surveillance creates a massive capacity to know. The existence of that capacity undermines self-realization by undermining the norm-based coordination on which adequate informational privacy depends. Norm-based coordination depends on common knowledge of conformity to norms. Common knowledge is the recursive belief state in which people know, know they know, know they know they know, and so on ad infinitum. Surveillance undermines common knowledge by attacking the first, nonrecursive step in that sequence – simply knowing.

Nicolas de Warren examines not just a lesser-known text by Cassirer – Form and Technology – but also a symbolic form that has received little attention. This chapter reconstructs Cassirer's contribution to the animated debates about the value and dangers of technological power in Germany after the First World War. On the one hand, De Warren examines both the affinity and the differences between technical artefacts and language (as tools) and between technological and mythical consciousness (as magical), thus cutting out an indispensable role for the symbolic form of technology within the whole of human culture. At the same time, De Warren presents Cassirer's understanding of this form as indicative for his overall view of the relation between form and freedom, thus illustrating Cassirer's assessment of modern thought. Ultimately, technology is shown to have a moral status for Cassirer (only) in the sense that it strives toward the self-realization of human freedom.

At Environmental Studies at the University of Oslo, students began their semester by taking a weeklong hike over the scenic Hardangervidda mountain plateau. It was designed to take the students away from the capitalist and industrial setting of the city and deep into the periphery of a picturesque nature. Empowered by the mountains they could enter the valleys of industrialism and shallow ecological thinking with a do-gooding gaze of knowing what’s right from wrong. The institution was the intellectual think tank for the Deep Ecologists who were under attack from both Marxists, who saw them as counter-revolutionary, and supporters of the European Community, who thought they were unable to appreciate international cooperation empowered by capitalism. These tensions would energize and radicalize Environmental Studies scholars towards an ideological vision of a future world in ecological equilibrium. Environmental Studies was to point out an alternative direction for the nation other than communism and consumer capitalism. As the vanguard of social change, the scholars associated with Environmental Studies saw themselves as harboring an environmental vision for Norway that could inspire the world.