 [Cassirer 1931] mirrors his just-completed attempt to embed the Marburg genetic conception of knowledge within a wider conception of the development of human culture as a whole. The way in which Cassirer situates his new philosophy of culture with respect to both Hegel and Heidegger then illuminates his fundamental divergence from Hegel – as it came to be expressed in Cassirer’s works on history and culture after he left Germany for good in 1933. By building the Marburg conception of knowledge, in his new philosophy of culture, on top of the more primitive forms of mythical thought [Ausdruckswahrnehmen] and ordinary language [Dingwahrnehmen], Cassirer takes himself to have done justice to the insights of both Hegel and Heidegger while avoiding both the infinite divine reason of the former and the radical human finitude of the latter. Yet he has now conceded to Heidegger that Kant’s theory of human cognition involves only the notion of potential rather than actual infinity. In particular, Kant’s treatment of the regulative use of the ideas of reason from a merely theoretical point of view leaves their actual content quite indeterminate. In the case of the idea of transcendental freedom, for example, we are only able to determine it negatively (from a theoretical point of view), as a species of causality that is not bound by the conditions of time-determination governing the phenomenal world.