Nobody today could write Cassirer’s Essay on Man, just as nobody could write Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man. But when the old idea collapsed something valuable may have been lost. Humanism may be an ideology, but it is also an ideal that the ideology betrayed, and dismissing the one with the other has become a bad reflex among the cynics and cognoscenti who regard all ideals with withering suspicion. While there is much in Cassirer’s book that we might now dispute, it was written at a time when fidelity to humanism appeared not naive but necessary. Though his erudition was distinctively European his political commitments were cosmopolitan in the best sense, and he continued to uphold those commitments even when much of the world fell into darkness. It is still in darkness. But even if we now speak the word with embarrassment, humanism may be the only alternative to inhumanity.
— Peter E. Gordon, from his Introduction to a new edition of Cassirer’s An Essay on Man. It occurs to me that the tag at the bottom of this post provides a good introduction to a topic I desperately want to write more fully about but can’t see the chance to. (Not anytime in the next 75 years or so, probably.)