Wolfram Eilenberger on Cassirer’s hermeneutics

Heidegger, too, struggled against this same complacency or, as he termed it, unconcernedness, in his 1922 essay “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle.” Here, however, Heidegger spoke expressly of a necessary “destruction” of extant concepts, particularly in philosophy. By contrast, Cassirer’s analyses are not aimed at their wholesale destruction — where could that lead but to a new yet also inevitably mythical set of formulations? Rather, they were fostered by a growing awareness, in itself radically enlightening, of the possibilities and impossibilities inevitably imposed by every conceptual form, whether it be mythical, religious, or scientific.

Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy (2020)

Cf. Foucault