Symbolic Forms and Cultural Studies: Ernst Cassirer’s Theory of Culture 9780300156836

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Abbreviations of Works by Ernst Cassirer
Part One: Culture as a Philosophical Concept
1. The Variety of Symbolic Worlds and the Unity of Mind
2. Cassirer’s Concept of a Philosophy of Human Culture
3. The Modern Concept of Culture as Indicator of a Metaphysical Problem
4. Cassirer’s Symbolic Theory of Culture and the Historicization of Philosophy
Part Two: Problems in the Philosophical Interpretation of Culture
5. ‘‘Art’’ and ‘‘Science’’ in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
6. The Subject of Culture
7. Styles of Change: Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophical Writing
Part Three: Comparative Studies
8. Bakhtin and Cassirer: The Philosophical Origins of Carnival Messianism
9. From Culture to Politics: The ‘‘Aufhebung’’ of Ethics in Ernst Cassirer’s Political Philosophy in Comparison with the ‘‘Political Theology’’ of Ernst Kantorowicz
10. Speaking of Symbols: Affinities between Cassirer’s and Jung’s Theories of Language
11. ‘‘Eine zarte Differenz’’: Cassirer on Goethe on the Symbol
12. Goethe as Model for Cultural Values: Ernst Cassirer’s Essay on Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar
Part Four: Cassirer’s Philosophical Outlook
13. The Missing Core of Cassirer’s Philosophy: Homo Faber in Thin Air
14. The Davos Disputation and Twentieth-Century Philosophy
15. Why Did Cassirer and Heidegger Not Debate in Davos?
Appendix: How the Cassirer Papers to Yale
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Symbolic Forms and Cultural Studies

Edited by

C Y R U S H A M L I N and JOHN MICHAEL KROIS

Symbolic Forms and Cultural Studies E R N S T C A S S I R E R ’ S T H E O RY O F C U LT U R E

Yale University Press New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Ernst Cassirer Publication Fund. Copyright ∫ 2004 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Sabon types by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Symbolic forms and cultural studies : Ernst Cassirer’s theory of culture / edited by Cyrus Hamlin and John Michael Krois. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-300-10329-8 (alk. paper) 1. Cassirer, Ernst, 1874–1945. 2. Culture—Philosophy—History—20th century. I. Hamlin, Cyrus. II. Krois, John Michael. b3216.c34s96 2004 306%.092—dc22 2004041987 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface ix Introduction xi Abbreviations of Works by Ernst Cassirer xxix Part One: Culture as a Philosophical Concept 1.

The Variety of Symbolic Worlds and the Unity of Mind Oswald Schwemmer 3

2.

Cassirer’s Concept of a Philosophy of Human Culture Donald Phillip Verene 19

3.

The Modern Concept of Culture as Indicator of a Metaphysical Problem Ernst Wolfgang Orth 28

4.

Cassirer’s Symbolic Theory of Culture and the Historicization of Philosophy Louis Dupré 35

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Part Two: Problems in the Philosophical Interpretation of Culture 5.

‘‘Art’’ and ‘‘Science’’ in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Michael Holquist 49

6.

The Subject of Culture Steve Lofts 61

7.

Styles of Change: Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophical Writing Barbara Naumann 78 Part Three: Comparative Studies

8.

Bakhtin and Cassirer: The Philosophical Origins of Carnival Messianism Brian Poole 99

9.

From Culture to Politics: The ‘‘Aufhebung’’ of Ethics in Ernst Cassirer’s Political Philosophy in Comparison with the ‘‘Political Theology’’ of Ernst Kantorowicz Enno Rudolph 117

10.

Speaking of Symbols: Affinities between Cassirer’s and Jung’s Theories of Language Paul Bishop 127

11.

‘‘Eine zarte Differenz’’: Cassirer on Goethe on the Symbol R. H. Stephenson 157

12.

Goethe as Model for Cultural Values: Ernst Cassirer’s Essay on Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar Cyrus Hamlin 185 Part Four: Cassirer’s Philosophical Outlook

13.

The Missing Core of Cassirer’s Philosophy: Homo Faber in Thin Air Gideon Freudenthal 203

14.

The Davos Disputation and Twentieth-Century Philosophy Michael Friedman 227

15.

Why Did Cassirer and Heidegger Not Debate in Davos? John Michael Krois 244

Contents

Appendix: How the Cassirer Papers Came to Yale Vincent Giroud 263 List of Contributors 271 Index 274

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The plan to publish this volume originated at a conference held at Yale University, 4–6 October 1996, under the title ‘‘Philosophy of Culture and Symbolic Forms: New Perspectives on Ernst Cassirer.’’ The essays in this book written by Dupré, Freudenthal, Holquist, Krois, Naumann, Orth, Poole, and Schwemmer are revised versions of papers selected from that conference. The other contributions were written subsequently, expressly for this project. About half are written by philosophers and the other half by literary theorists. All of them deal with various aspects of Ernst Cassirer’s theory of culture. The conference from which this volume evolved was sponsored by the Departments of German and Philosophy at Yale University, the Ernst Cassirer Publication Fund of Yale University Press, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, and the Goethe Institute Boston. Thanks are due to these institutions for their assistance in making that event possible. Funding for the publication of this volume was provided by the Ernst Cassirer Publication Fund, for which the editors are sincerely grateful.

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Introduction c y r u s h a m l i n and j o h n m i c h a e l k r o i s

The essays in this volume examine Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of ‘‘symbolic forms’’ as a theory of culture. Some address this topic in general philosophical terms, while others investigate more specific issues. In this introduction we address the question of culture in the broader contexts of theory and practice, to which Cassirer has much to offer.

‘‘Cultural Studies’’ and ‘‘Cultural Theory’’ The term ‘‘cultural studies’’ and its basic methodological orientation derive from the activities of the Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England. Beginning in the 1960s, the study of literature at that institution was expanded to include nontraditional depositories of culture, such as film and popular music, while the sociological compass was broadened to include popular and ‘‘working-class’’ culture in addition to the canon of great works. In the following decades, the topic of cultural studies spread far beyond the confines of the Birmingham school, and today it encompasses not only similar new directions in other fields, such as art history,∞ but it has come to stand as a catch-all designation for all fields dealing with what used to be called ‘‘the humanities.’’ The other main impetus in the turn to ‘‘cultural theory’’ came from France.

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In the work of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction in textual studies, the notion of ‘‘difference’’ was associated with the fact that sign and signified are irreducibly temporal and polyvalent in nature, leading to a rejection of attempts to ‘‘identify’’ fixed meanings. The primacy of difference in this conception of signs was taken as a justification for the idea of the primacy of cultural differences. The unifying conception in most contemporary conceptions of culture is that of the sign. Semiotics, deriving either from Saussure’s semiology or Peirce’s semeiotic, has become the accepted medium for cultural studies by a host of influential researchers in many fields, including sociology (Pierre Bourdieu), anthropology (Clifford Geertz), philosophy (Jacques Derrida), and literary theory (Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin), not to mention a host of other writers whose work spans different disciplines (Umberto Eco). The term ‘‘cultural theory’’ today, however, is used to refer to such a broad spectrum of methodological conceptions in different disciplines that even this generalization fails to provide a way to relate them all. Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault were only marginally interested in the theory of signs, and Theodor W. Adorno even less so. Perhaps no thinker has been more influential among contemporary cultural theorists than Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s contention that cultural activities ‘‘are nothing but mere disguises, changing masks behind which the all-powerful, all-prevailing ‘Will to Power’ hides itself,’’ as Cassirer described it (PSF, 4: 27), has found adherents even among nonspeculative, empirically oriented thinkers, such as Pierre Bourdieu.≤ We cannot summarize the complexities of contemporary cultural theory here; we only want to indicate how the topic of culture is often perceived. Today the philosophical conception that signs and symbols are central to all cultural processes, new in Cassirer’s time, has become commonplace among researchers in many fields. Given the extremely general nature of theories of symbolism, the question that distinguishes between theories becomes: what are the consequences that writers derive from their semiotic conceptions? and what are the further philosophical and practical implications of treating culture as a symbolic system? These are the questions linking the essays in this volume.

Historical Background of Cassirer’s Turn to ‘‘Culture’’ Cassirer occasionally referred in his English writings to his theory of symbolic forms as ‘‘philosophy of culture’’ and he occasionally spoke of it in German as ‘‘Kulturphilosophie,’’≥ but he treated these as applications of a general philosophical project: the creation of a ‘‘philosophy of symbolic

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forms.’’ He did not regard his book of the same name as equivalent to this philosophy, which he regarded as a project rather than as a system.∂ Cassirer favored the term ‘‘Kulturwissenschaft(en)’’∑ for the discipline(s) that study culture over the word ‘‘Geisteswissenschaft(en).’’ In German philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century the term ‘‘Kulturwissenschaft’’ was often associated with the so-called Baden school of Windelband and Rickert. Cassirer’s use of the word, however, has a different source.∏ Cassirer employed the term ‘‘Kulturwissenschaft’’ in the sense given to it by Aby Warburg (1866–1929), the founder of the Hamburg research library, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, or ‘‘K.B.W.’’ as it was called. Today this library is housed in the Warburg Institute, which is part of the University of London.π During his most prolific period, the 1920s, Cassirer utilized the Warburg Library’s collection extensively, and he originally published many of his most important works on the theory of culture (such as Language and Myth) in the library’s series of lectures or studies, both published by Teubner. Warburg’s library of cultural science was more than a collection of books; its organization embodied Warburg’s theory of culture. This theory is not well known in the English-speaking world, which accounts in part for the unfamiliarity of Cassirer’s approach to culture. This situation is changing, however. The first English translation from the German edition of Warburg’s writings appeared in 1999,∫ and the first set of essays in English about Warburg’s theory of culture appeared in 2001.Ω Warburg’s library was neither simply a resource nor an outlet for Cassirer’s ideas; it was the catalyst which gave him the direction that permitted him to develop them. Cassirer himself once summed up the importance of the K.B.W. to his thought in a letter by calling it ‘‘the archimedean point of my work.’’∞≠ Cassirer left the University of Berlin in the autumn of 1919 to occupy the chair in philosophy at the newly founded University in Hamburg. He encountered Warburg’s library for the first time on 27 November 1920, when the associate director, Fritz Saxl, gave him a tour. Warburg himself was in a sanatorium in Switzerland at the time, where he had been under treatment for a nervous breakdown since the end of the First World War. Cassirer later described his first visit, saying that he saw Warburg’s personality clearly in the library, adding: ‘‘I understood both at once and I succumbed to the force [Gewalt] that emanated from both, before I ever saw Warburg and before I ever exchanged a word with him.’’∞∞ ‘‘Gewalt’’ (literally: violence) is a rare expression for Cassirer. This library, he went on to say, was not the work of an ordinary academic researcher or bibliophile, but of someone struggling with the most elementary

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forces of pathos as they emerge in primitive cultural life and continue to pervade later social forms, albeit submerged beneath the surface. Warburg’s notion of the ‘‘survival of antiquity’’ (Nachleben der Antike) did not focus upon the rationalism of Greek philosophy, but on the visible, bodily expressions of pathos in Greek art, and their influence through history. Nietzsche’s theory of the cultic ‘‘Dionysian’’ sources of Greek tragedy paved the way for Warburg’s vision of ‘‘classical’’ art, which for him was full of agitation and conflict rather than Winckelmannian repose. The wind-blown hair and garments in Renaissance art are typical of the survival of antiquity in Warburg’s sense.∞≤ Whereas Nietzsche longed in The Birth of Tragedy for a rebirth of the spirit of ancient tragedy, Warburg harbored no such sentimental inclinations. For Warburg, primordial forces were too near at hand and needed nobody to call for their return. A comment by Cassirer at the end of his last book, The Myth of the State, reiterates Warburg’s outlook: myths are never defeated, only banished until their chance to return emerges again.∞≥ A note in Warburg’s early diary is particularly telling; he writes, ‘‘If Nietzsche were only better acquainted with the findings of ethnology!’’∞∂ Warburg called himself an ‘‘Aufklärer’’ (man of the Enlightenment), but, one must add, he was an enlightened Enlightenment thinker. He recognized the power of elemental pathological forces in cultural life and the enduring need for expressions of pathos.∞∑ Warburg’s unfinished final project, his Atlas of Images—Mnemosyne, was supposed to show the morphology of images expressing different forms of pathos.∞∏ Warburg coined the phrase ‘‘Pathosformel’’ (pathos formula or pathos formulae, the German expression can mean both singular and plural) for these images of pathos. Cassirer’s extensive work on mythic thought not only made use of Warburg’s library, it was in large measure an attempt to come to grips with Warburg’s recognition of the enduring place of myth in culture. Warburg’s conception of Kulturwissenschaft is best known in the English-speaking world in the form of Panofsky’s iconology, which develops only one aspect of it: the relation of images to literary contexts. It is impossible to sum up Warburg’s thought here, but certain aspects of his view of culture that were important to Cassirer can be noted. FIRST: PATHOS

Warburg conceived of culture as originating from expressive imagery and so from prelinguistic forms of symbolization. Bodily gestures once fixed in images provide a record of human suffering and striving (both words have the same root in German: Leiden and Leidenschaft), the two senses of ‘‘pathos.’’

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SECOND: CULTURAL MEMORY

Warburg regarded the cult and festival activity—dance, masks, narratives, and other symbolisms—as creating a ‘‘social memory’’ (prior to the invention of alphabets), which gives the world a past and a future, so that cultural life does not take place in an endless present. Warburg made an expedition in 1895–96 to witness the ritual dances of the Hopi Indians, and when he wrote up his recollections in 1921, Cassirer was one of the few people he permitted to see them.∞π The media of cultural memory, and not just art, was Warburg’s interest, which is why his Atlas contained minutiae—the imagery of cult objects, postage stamps, and advertisements—as well as lesserknown works of art in addition to so-called masterpieces. THIRD: THE SURVIVAL OF ELEMENTARY CULTURAL FORMS

Warburg’s library was assembled as a research tool to pursue a kind of Kulturwissenschaft in which images were the focal point. It was this conception, the view that the sources of culture were to be found in expressive, nonverbal symbolism: gestures, rituals, and images, that struck Cassirer so strongly. Cassirer’s own ‘‘emphasis on myth’’ (as Nelson Goodman called it) and his view of bodily gesture and the perception of expression as basic symbolic forms stem from Warburg’s influence. Culture began with mythical and cultic forms of life and these beginnings led to a recurrent struggle between the rational and the mythic forces in culture. As Warburg once put it: ‘‘Athens must be recovered over and over again from the hands of Alexandria.’’∞∫ For Cassirer, the view that symbolism is rooted in the phenomenon of expression situated language within a larger theoretical and social context: gesture and ritual action. Hence, visible expressions—not language—were the basis of culture. Cassirer conceived practice or action as the first embodiment of symbolic form. Cassirer developed this view in the first text he published in the Warburg library’s series of lectures.∞Ω From his visit in 1920 onward, Cassirer’s path was linked with the Warburg library, even after its removal to London in 1933. He visited it there often, and in his later years in Sweden and the United States, through frequent correspondence.≤≠ As a result of Warburg’s influence, Cassirer’s theory of symbolism differs from the majority of cultural theorists, many of whom work in the tradition of Saussure—taking language as the model for a theory of signs.≤∞ But in addition to Warburg’s anthropological approach to symbolism via imagery and gesture, Cassirer’s work on the philosophy of science also led him to emphasize the autonomy of ‘‘post-linguistic’’ (mathematical) symbolism, as seen in modern physics. In his studies of the theory of relativity and of quantum

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theory Cassirer stressed that neither could be adequately understood in terms of language.≤≤ Each offers a mathematical description of phenomena inaccessible to direct sense perception. None of these types of symbolism can be called upon to provide a foundation of the other: each is autonomous. Cassirer was one of the few twentieth-century philosophers who was fully at home in both of the so-called two cultures of literature and science.≤≥ He was friends with Thomas Mann and Robert Musil,≤∂ closely associated with Erwin Panofsky,≤∑ and a friend of Albert Einstein (and one of his chief philosophical interpreters).≤∏ In the 1920s Cassirer developed his philosophy in controversies with such antithetical philosophers as Moritz Schlick and Martin Heidegger.≤π Cassirer was able to address extremely divergent outlooks because neither the philosophy of science nor the theory of myth was an appendage to Cassirer’s philosophy. They were both necessary and explicable elements of culture when taken in terms of his conception of symbolism. In the academic year 1929–30 Cassirer was rector of the University of Hamburg, but his career in Germany came to an abrupt end shortly thereafter when Hitler assumed power in January of 1933. By April, the Nazis passed a law to eliminate everyone of Jewish descent from public office (the so-called Reichsgesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums). It was a sign of Cassirer’s political awareness that he had left Germany in March and never lived there again. Raymond Klibansky, Edgar Wind, and other scholars associated with the Warburg library initiated an attempt to move it out of the country, and thanks to the fact that it was a private collection, it was relocated to London in 1933, where it became, and remains, the basis of today’s Warburg Institute at the University of London.≤∫ In Cassirer’s first years of exile, the Warburg library remained his intellectual center of gravity, which he visited again and again while he taught at nearby Oxford. Cassirer taught in England at All Souls in Oxford from 1933 to 1935. When Cassirer returned to Britain in 1936 to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow, he also gave lectures at the Warburg Institute. Swedish law required Cassirer to retire from teaching at age sixtyfive in 1940. When he was offered a chance to teach for two years at Yale starting in 1941, he and his wife moved to the United States. He taught for a third year at Yale and thereafter as a guest professor at Columbia, where he died on 13 April 1945. During the last twelve years of his life, Cassirer encountered different intellectual climates of opinion, and his thought continued to develop, as his late, previously unpublished papers show. This work, written while living in exile, includes texts on anthropology, symbolism, the philosophy of culture and

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cultural sciences (Kulturwissenschaften), and his previously unknown doctrine of ‘‘basis phenomena,’’ which appears in numerous late manuscripts.≤Ω In America, Cassirer’s writings have been widely read over the years by anthropologists, linguists, physicists, scholars of German literature, and philosophers. Nelson Goodman was clearly indebted in his late work to Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms.≥≠ During the heyday of analytic philosophy, the fact that Cassirer understood his philosophy as a theory of culture counted against him. Philosophy’s primary task was taken to be the clarification and explication of the use of language. Language is a cultural phenomenon, but Cassirer’s attempt to relate it systematically to other kinds of symbolism and to investigate nonlinguistic symbolism (typical of Goodman’s later work) was largely ignored for many years (with the notable exception of Susanne Langer and some occasional references to Cassirer by Quine). The philosophical outlook prevailing in the English-speaking world in the years following Cassirer’s death had little room for a philosophical project like the philosophy of symbolic forms. The spirit of the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivism, which had come to dominate American philosophy, militated against the reception of Cassirer’s thought. Cassirer expressed fundamental agreement with what he called the ‘‘ethos’’ of the Vienna Circle, which he praised for ‘‘striving for definiteness, exactness, the elimination of the merely subjective and ‘Gefühlsphilosophie,’ for the use of an analytic method, and careful conceptual analysis.’’≥∞ But he also criticized the thinkers of the Vienna Circle for letting these methodological goals lead them to restrict arbitrarily the limits of what was to count as philosophy. He disagreed with their marginalization or elimination of the study of culture from philosophy. The theory of culture, Cassirer saw, was the next task of philosophy.

Scope, Plan, and Focus of this Volume The essays in this volume reflect different interests—systematic, historical, comparative and critical—as well as diverse methodological and philosophical commitments. They link together in a variety of ways since they all deal with problems in the theory of culture. We have ordered them in a way that creates a kind of continuity. The essays are grouped under four headings: Culture as a Philosophical Concept, Problems in the Philosophical Interpretation of Culture, Comparative Studies, and Cassirer’s Philosophical Outlook. We have not attempted in our comments to harmonize the differences between the essays and hope that these differences encourage further investigations. These

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summary statements seek to show the way the essays fit together in this volume rather than to condense the content of the texts, which often develop more than one argument or contain historical narratives that defy summarizing. PART ONE: CULTURE AS A PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPT

Oswald Schwemmer’s essay, ‘‘The Variety of Symbolic Worlds and the Unity of Mind,’’ seeks to place Cassirer’s thought within the various tendencies in twentieth-century philosophy that cut across and divide different schools of thought associated with names like Wittgenstein, Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger. These represent different attempts to include feelings, moods, and strivings in philosophy or to recognize the primacy of linguistic and general symbolic processes in experience, to develop a theory of science, or to return to the everyday situations of human existence. Schwemmer finds in Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms a model of thought capable of embracing all of these at the same time. Schwemmer argues that Cassirer’s interpretation of the culture of the Renaissance was crucial for his approach to philosophy. On Schwemmer’s reading, Cassirer took the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as illustrations for his own interpretation of ‘‘reason,’’ pointing out that whereas the Kantian tradition emphasized the unity of reason as everywhere and always the same for everyone, Goethe stressed the variety of sensible and creative forms of action, and Cassirer followed Goethe by making creativity the definition of reason. This meant that for Cassirer fixed forms (essences) or rulefollowing activities no longer qualified as the model of reason. Donald Verene’s ‘‘Cassirer’s Concept of a Philosophy of Human Culture’’ begins by dealing with the problem posed by such a conception of philosophy: that it does not (and cannot) form a system. Instead, Verene argues, Cassirer converts philosophy into the philosophy of culture. He outlines how such a philosophy emerges from Cassirer’s diverse writings, including his recently published, late writings on ‘‘basis phenomena,’’ particularly the phenomenon of ‘‘the work’’ (Werk). The claim that philosophy should become a philosophy of culture raises the problem of how such a project relates to the traditional questions of metaphysics. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and Louis Dupré treat this topic from different points of view. In his paper, ‘‘The Modern Concept of Culture as Indicator of a Metaphysical Problem,’’ Orth raises the question of the status of a philosophy which makes culture its topic. In Orth’s view, it is not a particular discipline like the philosophy of science that interprets a particular field of inquiry. Rather, the term ‘‘culture’’ is the new name for the general philosophical conception which used to be examined under the name of ‘‘Being,’’ so that the philosophy of culture replaces metaphysics as the new ‘‘first philosophy.’’

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‘‘Culture’’ and ‘‘world’’ become, Orth claims, convertible terms. The pathos adhering to talk of ‘‘Being’’ accrues also to the topic of culture, for, Orth points out, ‘‘Even the critics, who diagnose the mortification of man in the sciences and in social and political life, themselves rely upon and document the ever present and fundamental human need for significance or meaning.’’ For this reason, the term ‘‘culture’’ marks the spot (or is the indicator of) where metaphysical questions re-emerge in contemporary philosophy. Louis Dupré asks, in ‘‘Cassirer’s Symbolic Theory of Culture and the Historicization of Philosophy,’’ whether in fact Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms provides a substitute for metaphysics or if it does not require a metaphysical foundation? In addition, he raises the problem of how contingent matters, such as the historical process of culture, can enter into philosophy without philosophy losing necessity altogether and turning into an empirical science, such as the history of ideas. The central problem for Dupré is that in order to deal with these questions Cassirer had to deal with the ontological significance of time. Dupré discounts Heidegger’s approach to this matter, asking how the many, mutually incompatible cultures can convey a coherent revelation of Being in the way Heidegger thinks. At the same time, the variety of cultural symbolisms that Cassirer discusses, which create order in the patterns of living for a particular society, are not all directed to the ultimacy pursued by metaphysics. Dupré concludes with observations about the loss of cultural unity and observes that not even metaphysics can justify a cultural unity that does not exist. What, therefore, becomes the unitary task of philosophy? The essays in this section address this problem in general terms, while those in the next section take it up with regard to concrete cases. PART TWO: PROBLEMS IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE

In his essay ‘‘ ‘Art’ and ‘Science’ in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,’’ Michael Holquist investigates the debate about the division between science and the rest of culture. As he indicates, this is not a new subject, but it has taken on new acuteness in recent years. Holquist formulates the problem this way: If science, insofar as it deals with what humans do not make, has nothing to do with human values or meaning, then is it not radically different from the rest of culture? Holquist sees in Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms a way to bridge this gap. He concludes that Cassirer regards the symbolic forms of culture as a ‘‘spectrum of differences, but a spectrum without an absolute gap.’’ Science certainly deals with meaning in a particular sense, if not with values. Holquist contrasts myth and science as symbolic forms that are polar opposites. By his reading, art is a sphere opposed equally to both myth and

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science, and he suggests that perhaps Cassirer saw here a final unitary theory of culture. This formulation of the problem of science as a field of study which ‘‘leaves out the human’’ resembles a widespread tendency within contemporary ‘‘cultural theory’’ which (under various names) announces the ‘‘end’’ of subjectivity, a view perhaps most famously stated by Foucault.≥≤ One of the most striking features of contemporary cultural theory is the widespread rejection of the Idealist notion of ‘‘the subject,’’ either as the ‘‘author’’ of culture (often with reference to specific interpretations of this idea, such as the ‘‘great man theory of history’’) or as the literary canon of the ‘‘dead white European male.’’ Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms shifts the focus of philosophy from subjectivity to symbolism, but symbolism is not unrelated to subjectivity. Steve Lofts’s essay examines the nature of this relationship, which he calls ‘‘the subject of culture.’’ Cassirer maintains that subjectivity depends upon the symbolic forms of culture and is not therefore a given, yet subjectivity changes these symbolic forms. Mythical, religious, and artistic ways of having a world are the indispensable bases of subjectivity, and only by participation in them can there be any self to speak of. For Lofts, Cassirer’s view undercuts the contemporary polemical separation of culture and the subject. Cassirer’s way of writing, which seems not to distinguish between historical narratives and systematic arguments, has long vexed many readers because it makes him difficult to pin down to a particular position.≥≥ Barbara Naumann’s essay, ‘‘Styles of Change: Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophical Writing,’’ examines this problem. She begins by pointing out that for Cassirer the style in which a text is written was a matter of theoretical importance. Hence, the internal connection between philosophy and literature is central to Cassirer’s own texts. His style of writing was no coincidence. Using Cassirer’s comments on this question, particularly his appropriation of Goethe’s views, Naumann argues that for Cassirer the concept of style has an epistemological function and that it assumes the role of a constitutive category, particularly in the science of culture. Process and result, the historical development of culture as symbolic forms and the symbolic representation of the process of symbolic knowledge, converge in Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms so that his philosophy, as she says, makes itself the spectator of its own genesis. The philosophy of symbolic forms, as the title suggests, is oriented toward the symbolic process and not toward the book’s author. PART THREE: COMPARATIVE STUDIES

This group of papers deals with Cassirer’s writings in regard to other thinkers. Brian Poole’s essay, ‘‘Bakhtin and Cassirer: The Philosophical Ori-

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gins of Carnival Messianism,’’ appears here in its original form as it was presented at the Yale conference. It has since appeared, in a different form, as the lead essay in a special volume devoted to Mikhail Bakhtin.≥∂ Poole exposes the previously unknown and profound debt—indeed direct borrowings—of Bakhtin to Cassirer’s discussions of Renaissance literature. Bakhtin is one of the most cited literary theorists of recent years, while Cassirer’s writings on the subject are known mostly to Renaissance scholars. By showing this previously hidden influence on Bakhtin, Poole also shows the fundamental importance which literature had for Cassirer’s theory of culture, thereby putting flesh on Cassirer’s claim at the end of An Essay on Man that culture means ‘‘selfliberation.’’ This meant not only a liberation from ignorance or political oppression for Cassirer, but also the elementary liberation from ‘‘cosmic fear.’’ In his essay, ‘‘From Culture to Politics: The ‘Aufhebung’ of Ethics in Ernst Cassirer’s Political Philosophy in Comparison with the ‘Political Theology’ of Ernst Kantorowicz,’’ Enno Rudolph begins by asking about the place of ethics in the philosophy of symbolic forms. Rather than looking for Cassirer’s ethics in some particular text, he sees it in the entire philosophy of symbolic forms as a theory of culture. On this view, the relation between mythic thought and Enlightenment thinking cannot be regarded in terms of a linear ‘‘development’’ from the one to the other, but rather as a matter of better or worse forms of cultural complexity, the worse form being totalitarian states, which Rudolph calls examples of ‘‘cultural suicide.’’ Instead of serving as the source of a complex of possibilities for human freedom, culture prohibits complexity. Rudolph puts Cassirer’s view of political ethics into the form of a maxim: ‘‘Act in a manner that enables you to increase your capabilities to create a second nature [culture] which furthers complexity without putting the first nature [organic nature] at risk.’’ Rudolph goes on to show how Cassirer’s ‘‘pathology’’ of the modern state (i.e., The Myth of the State) relates to the problem of the positive representation of the state as set forth by Ernst Kantorowicz (in response to his own reading of Cassirer). The problem with the modern state, as Machiavelli was the first to see, was that it could have no theological basis. On Rudolph’s reading, Cassirer did not see Machiavelli as a Machiavellian, teaching that power is to be attained and maintained by any means. Rather, Machiavelli recognized the ambiguity of the modern state, which, because it is based upon reason alone, is susceptible to remythologizing. Rudolph’s concluding suggestion that Cassirer’s philosophy as a whole provides a ‘‘political anthropology’’ reasserts his claim that Cassirer’s ethics are not ‘‘part’’ of his philosophy but its unifying principle. Fear and other phenomena have rarely been considered from a psychoanalytic perspective in the literature on Cassirer. The article by Paul Bishop,

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‘‘Speaking of Symbols: Affinities between Cassirer’s and Jung’s Theories of Language,’’ examines the relation between Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms and depth psychology, particularly in Freud’s and Jung’s theories of symbolism. Bishop offers details concerning the commonalities of their views, their shared sources (which are extensive), claims, and parallels. He also summarizes earlier and recent attempts to show the relation between the theories of Cassirer and Jung. Bishop deals with a number of topics on which Cassirer and Jung diverge (e.g., with regard to the latter’s notion of the genetic inheritance of archetypes), but he is mainly concerned with their theories of language. When Freud or Jung sought to discover what it is that makes a dream symbolic, they ended up discussing language. Bishop compares Cassirer’s and Jung’s theories of language with reference to the difference between ‘‘directed thinking’’ and ‘‘nondirected’’ or ‘‘fantasy thinking,’’ as found in dreams. On the basis of a detailed comparative analysis of Cassirer’s and Jung’s writings, Bishop concludes that Cassirer was able to show the interrelated nature of these two kinds of thought, whereby the latter provided the precondition for the former, pointing more insistently to the significance of the aesthetic dimension of language and of art in general, as the synthesis of directed and nondirected thinking. Bishop concludes by sharply contrasting Jung’s and Cassirer’s different interpretations of a poem by Goethe. Jung sees it as an illustration of ‘‘given’’ and fixed archetypes of mind, while Cassirer emphasizes that Goethe overcame the distinction between what is ‘‘inside’’ and what is ‘‘outside’’ and eliminated the need for fixed givens. The importance of Goethe’s thought is the topic of the following essay. ‘‘ ‘Eine zarte Differenz’: Cassirer on Goethe on the Symbol’’ by R. H. Stephenson deals with Goethe’s importance for Cassirer’s theory of symbolism. Until very recently Goethe’s thought received little attention among Cassirer’s philosophical interpreters, and earlier treatments of Cassirer’s theory of symbolism compared it to many other theorists but made no mention of Goethe.≥∑ Stephenson argues that Cassirer’s most important theoretical conception—the theory of symbolism—derives from Goethe. Drawing upon his own earlier work and other recent research on Cassirer and Goethe, Stephenson develops new arguments to show that Goethe’s conception of symbolism can be understood in terms of the fine distinction (zarte Differenz) between ‘‘symbolic form’’ and ‘‘symbolic pregnance.’’ Beginning with this distinction, which derives from Goethe, it is possible to understand the way Cassirer understood manifold cultural forms of symbolism to stem from the primary notion of ‘‘symbolic pregnance.’’ Even Susanne Langer, Cassirer’s first American follower, as Stephenson argues, did not fully recognize the importance of Goethe for Cassirer’s theory of symbolism. Cassirer’s dynamic and nondualistic (non-

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Cartesian) approach to meaning began with the ‘‘animal body’’ and not with such cultural forms as language. In this Cassirer was consciously following Goethe. Stephenson argues that Cassirer’s theory of symbolism conjoined Goethe’s approach with that of Kant, creating a philosophy that was oriented neither to logic nor to naturalism. Complementing Stephenson’s essay, which deals with the importance of Goethe’s conception of symbolism for Cassirer’s theoretical philosophy, Cyrus Hamlin argues in ‘‘Goethe as Model for Cultural Values: Ernst Cassirer’s Essay on Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar’’ that Goethe’s thought provided Cassirer with a model of practical cultural values for the philosophy of symbolic forms as a cultural theory. Hamlin concentrates particularly on Cassirer’s late essay on Thomas Mann’s Goethe novel Lotte in Weimar (1939). According to Hamlin, this novel was especially important to Cassirer because it exhibited Goethe’s conception of metamorphosis in its existential dimension. Cassirer’s essay on the novel reveals a deep sympathy between Mann’s evocation of Goethe’s creative genius in its historical and cultural context and Cassirer’s own commitment to a philosophy of culture that derives its deepest insights from the example of Goethe. Hamlin argues that Cassirer’s reception of Goethe’s thought went beyond theoretical concerns to provide the basis for his view of human mortality and the survival of civilization. Of importance also is the shared condition of exile among these two representatives of German culture at precisely the moment that the forces of Hitler launched the Second World War. PART FOUR: CASSIRER’S PHILOSOPHICAL OUTLOOK

The essays in this last section deal with Cassirer’s general philosophical orientation in reference to major trends in twentieth-century thought. Gideon Freudenthal, of the authors represented in this book, is the most critical of Cassirer, arguing in ‘‘The Missing Core of Cassirer’s Philosophy: Homo Faber in Thin Air’’ that Cassirer’s method involves a debt to the tradition of philosophical Idealism that is at odds with his own philosophy. Freudenthal claims that as a result of Cassirer’s explicit acceptance of ‘‘critical idealism’’ he avoids developing the core of his own philosophy, which, Freudenthal concludes, thus remains ‘‘missing’’ from Cassirer’s writings. Freudenthal asserts that although Cassirer correctly saw that a successful constructionist approach (such as that proposed by critical idealism) depends upon the dual nature—that is, material and ideal—of the procedure of construction and of what is constructed (i.e., ‘‘Works’’), Cassirer’s philosophical commitment to critical idealism prevented him from admitting the importance of the role of the material elements in constructive action. To prove his point, Freudenthal focuses there-

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fore not on language, but on the most material form of understanding discussed by Cassirer: technology and tool-use. In ‘‘Form und Technik’’ Cassirer followed Ludwig Noiré in considering how one form of culture arises out of the products of the other, a continuity which guarantees the organic coherence of Cassirer’s philosophy, but at the same time Cassirer does not explain one particular development with reference to technology. No specific tools or any specific kind of work are ever mentioned in Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Although Cassirer proclaimed in theory that the emergence of new forms depended upon the synthesis of the material and the ideal, nothing is ever said about the material side of technology, which provides the link between these forms and so distinguishes the philosophy of symbolic forms from a history of ideas. Freudenthal concludes that this fault was Cassirer’s own failing, but not that of the promising program of a philosophy of symbolic forms, which still awaits a serious attempt at realization. Cassirer’s program for philosophy is the topic of Michael Friedman’s essay, ‘‘The Davos Disputation and Twentieth-Century Philosophy.’’ Friedman takes the famous debate between Cassirer and Heidegger in 1929 as his point of departure for an examination of the split between the analytic and continental traditions in twentieth-century philosophy. Friedman points out that among those in attendance at the debate was Rudolf Carnap, who thereafter wrote a famous criticism of Heidegger in his essay ‘‘Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Syntax der Sprache.’’ As Friedman points out, this criticism did not actually concern Heidegger because the two thinkers upheld radically different conceptions of philosophy. Carnap held fast to formal logic as the ideal of universal validity and confined himself to the philosophy of the mathematical exact sciences, while Heidegger renounced the ideal of universal validity itself and so cut philosophy off from logic and ‘‘exact thinking’’ in general. Carnap limited truly universal intersubjective communicability to what is expressible in rigorous logical notation, but Cassirer wanted to extend it to all the other symbolic forms as well. The problem is, according to Friedman, that Cassirer never makes clear, in particular, how truly universal, transcultural validity is possible outside the mathematical exact sciences. Friedman concludes that Cassirer nonetheless tried more than any other thinker to hold these strands together and that, for those interested in beginning a reconciliation of the analytic and continental traditions, there can be no better starting point than Cassirer’s project of a philosophy of symbolic forms. John Michael Krois, in his essay ‘‘Why Did Cassirer and Heidegger Not Debate in Davos?’’ begins with a historical examination of the situation in which the Davos debate actually occurred. He then goes on to summarize the differences between Cassirer’s stated views at the debate and in other lectures

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of the time as they relate to Heidegger and Cassirer’s own later statements about culture and about questions of current interest in cultural studies. The question of how Cassirer’s philosophy of culture relates to the later philosophy of Heidegger is implicit to the central concern of this volume. APPENDIX

The book concludes with a paper by Vincent Giroud on how the Cassirer papers came to Yale. In addition to explaining the transmission of the Cassirer papers and their current state, Giroud points out how the unpublished writings, which are now being edited for publication, have influenced the important revival of interest in Cassirer as a major philosopher of the twentieth century. Since the 1980s there has been a growing Cassirer renaissance in Europe, as seen in the number of conferences and new publications dealing with his work, as well as the new editions of both his complete, published writings (the ECW ) and of his unpublished manuscripts and texts (the ECN), both published by the Felix Meiner Verlag.≥∏ Meiner also publishes a series entitled ‘‘CassirerForschungen.’’≥π At this writing eleven volumes have appeared. In addition, there is a score of new French and Italian translations, and numerous books and essays about Cassirer’s philosophy have appeared regularly since the 1980s in French, German, and Italian. We hope that this ‘‘Cassirer renaissance’’ will soon spread to the English-speaking world and that with this volume we are making an important step in that direction.≥∫

Notes 1. See, e.g., The New Art History, ed. A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello (London: Camden Press, 1986). 2. See, e.g., Pierre Bourdieu, ‘‘On Symbolic Power,’’ in Language and Symbolic Power, ed. and intro. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 163–70. Here and in numerous other writings Bourdieu cites Cassirer’s work. 3. See, e.g., EM and ‘‘Zur Logik des Symbolbegriffs’’ (1938), Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), 201–30, esp. 229. 4. For this reason we follow the convention of referring to the project of a philosophy of symbolic forms using lower case and utilize italics and capital letters for references to Cassirer’s work of the same name. 5. See in particular his 1942 book Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften (Eng. trans. CS) or the recently published Ziele und Wege der Wirklichkeitserkenntnis (written 1937), ed. Klaus Christian Köhnke and John Michael Krois, Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, vol. 2 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1999).

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6. The earlier notion of ‘‘Kulturwissenschaft,’’ associated especially with Heinrich Rickert, conceived of culture as the field of ‘‘values’’ that adhered to things, rather than the tangible ‘‘works’’ so important to Cassirer. The aim of philosophy as Rickert conceived it was to establish a system of universal values. Ernst Cassirer regarded such a project as misconceived. See Cassirer, Axel Hägerström: Eine Studie zur Schwedischen Philosophie der Gegenwart, Göteborgs Högskolas Arsskrift 45 (1939:1), 1–119, particularly the chapter on ethics. See also Cassirer’s criticisms of the Baden school in his book on The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (CS, 36f. and 63). Cassirer rarely mentioned Rickert’s philosophy except to criticize it; cf. PSF, 3: 346–49. 7. For a history of the library, see Nicholas Mann, ‘‘The Warburg Institute—Past, Present, and Future,’’ in Porträt aus Büchern: Bibliothek Warburg und Warburg Institute, Hamburg—1933—London, ed. Michael Diers (Hamburg: Dölling und Galwitz, 1993), 133–44. When Cassirer first encountered the library it was still known as the ‘‘Bibliothek Warburg.’’ It was renamed ‘‘Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg’’ when the library moved into its own building in 1926. On 1 May, Cassirer held the opening address, ‘‘Freiheit und Notwendigkeit in der Philosophie der Renaissance.’’ 8. Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, intro. Kurt W. Forster, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999). The only text previously available in English was Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, trans. with an interpretive essay by Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 9. See Art History as Cultural History: Warburg’s Projects, ed. Richard Woodfield (Amsterdam: G & B Arts International, 2001). See also Margaret Iverson, ‘‘Retrieving Warburg’s Tradition’’ (1993), in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 215–25, and Kurt W. Forster, ‘‘Aby Warburg: His Study of Ritual and Art on Two Continents,’’ October 77 (summer 1996): 5–24. 10. Letter to Fritz Saxl, dated Göteborg, 11 September 1936. The letter is in the archives of the Warburg Insititute, London. 11. ‘‘Ich begriff beides und ich erlag der Gewalt, die von beiden ausging, noch ehe ich Warburg gesehen und ehe ich ein Wort mit ihm gewechselt hatte.’’ Nachruf auf Aby Warburg, Hamburgische Universität: Reden gehalten bei der Feier des Rektorwechsels am 7. November 1929 (Hamburg: C. Boysen 1929), 48–56. 12. Warburg discussed this even in his dissertation, ‘‘Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling’ ’’ (1893), Gesammelte Schriften, 1: 1–60. 13. Cassirer, MS, 297–98. 14. ‘‘Wenn Nietzsche doch nur mit den Tatsachen der Völkerkunde und Volkskunde besser vertraut gewesen wäre!’’ Warburg, diary entry of 9 December 1905, quoted in Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg: Eine intellektuelle Biographie, trans. Matthias Fienbork (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1992), 244. 15. Charlotte Schoell-Glass gives a well-researched discussion of this in her article ‘‘Aby Warburg’s Late Comments on Symbol and Ritual,’’ Science in Context 12 (1999): 621–42. 16. Warburg’s materials for this work were published in 2000. See Aby Warburg, Der

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Bildatlas: Mnemosyne, ed. Martin Warnke with the assistance of Claudia Brink, Gesammelte Schriften, Zweite Abteilung, vol. 2.1 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000). 17. See Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, trans. Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 18. ‘‘Athen will eben immer wieder neu aus Alexandrien zurückerobert werden.’’ See Warburg, ‘‘Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten’’ (1920), Gesammelte Schriften, Erste Abteilung, 1.2: 487–559, quote from 534. 19. Cassirer, ‘‘Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken,’’ Studien der Bibliothek Warburg 1 (Leipzig/Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1922). 20. The largest existing depository of Cassirer’s correspondence is the archive of the Warburg Institute in London. An edition of this correspondence is underway and will appear in the edition of Cassirer’s unpublished papers (ECN). 21. Saussure, it is well known, defined semiology as a generalization from the theory of language. 22. See on this Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), 95–98. 23. See C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). 24. Cassirer was friends with Mann and Musil. He also published ‘‘Thomas Manns Goethe-Bild.’’ 25. See on this Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), chap. 5: Panofsky and Cassirer. Cf. Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History, trans. Richard Pierce (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 26. Cassirer’s book on relativity appeared in German in 1921, an English translation was published together with a translation of his book Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (1910) as Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, trans. William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (Chicago: Open Court, 1923). 27. See Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, and John Michael Krois, ‘‘Ernst Cassirer und der Wiener Kreis,’’ in Elemente moderner Wissenschaftstheorie: Zur Interaktion von Philosophie, Geschichte und Theorie der Wissenschaften, ed. Friedrich Stadler (Vienna: Springer 2000), 105–21. 28. See Mann, ‘‘Warburg Institute.’’ Cf. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 32–34. 29. So far, the first three of twenty volumes containing his unpublished papers have appeared in German. An English version of the first volume appeared as PSF, 4; see therein pt. 2: ‘‘On Basis Phenomena.’’ Cassirer’s 1942 book Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften was recently published in a new English translation (CS). Other writings will appear in ECN 5: Zur Kulturphilosophie und zum Problem des Ausdrucks. 30. This is seen in Nelson Goodman’s work, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976) and Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). Cf. also Israel Scheffler, Symbolic Worlds: Art, Science, Language, Ritual (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Susanne K. Langer also took her starting point from Cassirer. See esp. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), and Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Devel-

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oped from Philosophy in a New Key (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), which is dedicated to Cassirer. 31. Quoted in Krois, ‘‘Ernst Cassirer und der Wiener Kreis,’’ 113–16. 32. See, e.g., Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, a translation of Les mots et les choses (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 385, where he concludes that there is ‘‘no doubt that man is in the process of disappearing.’’ 33. See Iredell Jenkin’s review of Schilpp, The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, in Journal of Philosophy 47 (1950): 43–55, 47: ‘‘What comes as a definite and cumulative shock is the uncertainty that these authors evidence concerning their interpretations and criticisms: their seeming inability to be satisfied as to what Cassirer’s position actually is.’’ 34. Brian Poole, ‘‘Bakhtin and Cassirer: The Philosophical Origins of Bakhtin’s Carnival Messianism,’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 97, no. 3 (1998): 537–78. Poole’s work on Bakhtin and Cassirer has been taken up by other researchers. See Craig Brandist, ‘‘Bakhtin, Cassirer and Symbolic Forms,’’ Radical Philosophy 85 (September-October 1997): 20–27, note 1. 35. See, e.g., Carl H. Hamburg’s essay, ‘‘Cassirer’s Conception of Philosophy,’’ in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul A. Schilpp (Evanston, Ill.: Library of Living Philosophers, 1949), 75–119. Hamburg’s essay is devoted almost exclusively to Cassirer’s theory of symbolism and its sources, but nowhere does he mention Goethe. 36. Cassirer’s complete published writings are appearing as Gesammelte Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, 25 vols., ed. Birgit Recki (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1998ff.) (ECW ); his previously unpublished papers and correspondence are appearing as Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, 20 vols., ed. Klaus Christian Köhnke, John Michael Krois, and Oswald Schwemmer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1995ff.) (ECN). 37. On the topic of culture, see, e.g., Enno Rudolph and B.-O. Küppers, eds., Kulturkritik nach Ernst Cassirer, Cassirer-Forschungen 1 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1995). An edition of Cassirer’s writings is also appearing in French translation: Oeuvres de Cassirer, edited in French in collaboration with the International Ernst Cassirer Society, under the direction of Fabien Capeillères et Heinz Wismann (Paris; Les Éditions du Cerf, 1995ff.). 38. Conferences on Cassirer have taken place since the 1980s in France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Norway, and Switzerland. In 1999 the University of Glasgow inaugurated an annual Ernst Cassirer Lecture in Intercultural Germanistics.

Abbreviations of Works by Ernst Cassirer

CS

The Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Five Studies. Translation of KW by S. G. Lofts. Foreword by Donald Phillip Verene. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

ECN 1

Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte. Edited by John Michael Krois and Oswald Schwemmer. Vol. 1, Zur Metaphysik der symbolischen Formen. Edited by John Michael Krois with Anne Appelbaum et al. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1995.

EM

An Essay on Man. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944.

KW

‘‘Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften: Fünf Studien.’’ Göteborgs Högskolas Årsskrift 48, no. 1 (1942): 1–139.

MS

The Myth of the State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946.

PsF

Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. 3 vols. Vol. 1, Die Sprache; vol. 2, Das mythische Denken; vol. 3, Die Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1923, 1925, 1929.

PSF

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Translation of PsF by Ralph Manheim. 3 vols. Vol. 1, Language; vol. 2, Mythic Thought; vol. 3, The Phenomenology of Knowledge. New Haven: Yale University

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Abbreviations

Press, 1953, 1955, 1957. Vol. 4, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: Including the Text of Cassirer’s Manuscript on Basis Phenomena. Translation of ECN 1 by John Michael Krois. Edited by John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

P A R T

Culture as a Philosophical Concept

I

1

The Variety of Symbolic Worlds and the Unity of Mind oswald schwemmer

Ernst Cassirer developed his philosophical conception during a period of new philosophical orientations. His book Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff came out in 1910.∞ In France, Henri Bergson published his Essai sur le données immédiates de la conscience in 1889 and then in 1903 his even more influential Introduction á la métaphysique.≤ In the United States, in 1904, Williams James published his famous article ‘‘Does Consciousness Exist?’’ and in 1907 his lectures on Pragmatism came out.≥ In German philosophy we have on the one hand the dominance of neo-Kantianism and a variety of very traditional conceptions like scholasticism, historicism, or other forms of academic philosophy, and on the other hand a number of of new orientations. In 1913 Edmund Husserl outlined his Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie.∂ The great works of twentieth-century German philosophy date to the 1920s, among them Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (published 1921),∑ Cassirer’s Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1923, 1925, 1929), Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927),∏ and Husserl’s Krisisschrift (in part in 1936, in a critical edition in 1954),π and, finally, Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen (1953, though completed in 1949).∫ Of course, there are other great works in German philosophy from the last century. But the works mentioned here, at any rate, belong to these great works and brought a decisive influence to bear on twentieth-century thought—and not only in German philosophy. 3

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If one would try to characterize what is new in these works, what they brought about as new ways or keys to thinking, then there are—roughly—the following points: 1. We see an attempt to transcend the conceptual systems taken for granted in rationalistic systems of philosophy of reason as well as in empiricist epistemologies, an attempt to attain a greater closeness to experience in its totality, including our feelings, moods, and strivings (Husserl, Cassirer and Heidegger). 2. We have an attempt to relativize the conceptual and logical relationships as they had been developed in the framework of the rationalistic and empiricist traditions by a new reference to their linguistic and general symbolic realization, deepening our knowledge of the historical and cultural reality of the human mind (the early Wittgenstein and Cassirer). 3. We have an attempt to return philosophy from an orientation to the scientific construction of concepts and theories back to the everyday situations of human life and to the entirety of human existence (Husserl, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the late Wittgenstein). It is no simple chance—and no rhetorical trick—that only the name of Cassirer occurs in all three perspectives. It is characteristic of Cassirer’s thinking that he grapples with all perspectives of human existence and their different forms of expression. In this way he hopes to grasp what mankind really is in its entirety. His philosophy of symbolic forms can be defined by the following three seminal theses: 1. Scientific knowledge does not frame the pattern for our knowledge in general. On the contrary, our knowledge is to be considered as a variety of different forms of comprehending our world: ‘‘The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is not concerned exclusively or even primarily with the purely scientific, exact conceiving of the world; it is concerned with all the forms assumed by man’s understanding of the world. It seeks to apprehend these forms in their diversity, in their totality, and in the inner distinctiveness of their several expressions.’’Ω 2. The different ways of comprehending our world are connected to different symbolic forms which all have their own, irreducible principles of construction: ‘‘None of these forms [i.e., the symbolic forms] can simply be reduced to, or derived from, the others; each of them designates a particular approach, in which and through which it constitutes its own aspect of ‘reality.’ ’’∞≠ 3. In these different ways of comprehending our world the emotional dimension of human existence is to be emphasized and reflected upon. ‘‘All thought and all sensory intuition and perception rest on an original foundation of feeling.’’∞∞

Symbolic Worlds and the Unity of Mind

5

Plurality seems to be the main characteristic of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy, not only the plurality of the ways we comprehend our world, but also of the forms of our expression and existence. And this seems to be the point which makes him a modern thinker in whose work many intellectual streams come together. Actually, this characterization touches only one side of Cassirer’s thinking. For his concern is not simply to show the plurality which governs human thinking and acting, but also to exhibit the unity of human relations to the world and of forms of existence. By acknowledging the variety and unity in man’s intellectual life, Cassirer’s thinking is drawn into a tension by which a certain ambivalence is conveyed into his thinking. This is not just a tension between two motives of his thinking, but a tension between the philosophical tradition within which Cassirer grew up and the modern world, many of whose developments were not recognized in this tradition. I will try to accentuate this tension as a main feature of his thinking. Cassirer’s intellectual origins are twofold. First, there is the tradition of Kantian philosophy especially in the form of the Marburg school represented by Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. Second, there is the work of Goethe which not only intellectually fascinates him, but also accompanies him through his life in the thoroughly and literally weighty shape of the Weimar edition—even in the worried times of emigration. Whereas the Kantian tradition emphasizes the unity of reason—a reason which is everywhere and always the same for everyone—Goethe stresses the variety of sensible and especially of creative forms of action and life. Cassirer settles the tension between these intellectual attitudes by raising this creative and shaping character to the definition of reason. Creative shaping in the sense of the production of forms is necessary for us to have an intellectual life at all. It is this concept of creative shaping which in Cassirer’s eyes allows us to bring together the spontaneity of conscious reason and creativity in Goethe’s sense. The difficulties of such a mediation, which at first glance could appear as a trivializing harmonization, constitutes at the same time its fruitfulness. This mediation is difficult because where in Goethe the sensuous concrete forms of deeds and works represent and testify to the creativity of the mind, the spontaneity of reason resides for Kant only in the logical order of categories and forms of intuition. In his attempt to mediate between these two perspectives Cassirer focuses on the connection of the conceptual and perceptible worlds of sense and the sensory. In a similar way the concept of creative shaping mediates between the two historical sources of the modern mind which Cassirer relies upon: the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. He is interested especially in the creative character of reason in both epochs. The Renaissance in his eyes represents a union of art and science, of shaping production and mathematical representation—a

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union which embodies reason in the production of works and in poeisis. In the Enlightenment he finds first and foremost ‘‘the fundamental tendency and main endeavor . . . not simply to observe life and portray it in terms of reflective thought’’ but rather ‘‘an original spontaneity,’’ attributing ‘‘to thought not merely an imitative function but the power and task of shaping life itself.’’∞≤ Cassirer sees both epochs as stations in an overall movement, an unbroken line of development of reason to self-liberation from a heterogeneous life. Actually, one could raise the same objection to both attempts at mediation, that they are not interpretations but rather intellectual inversions of Kant or Goethe, of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. But this is not the point here. What we are interested in is the central idea which provides the intellectual impulse for the systematic conception of Cassirer’s philosophy. This central idea seems to be brought about by the aforementioned attempted mediations. But then it develops its own intellectual force, and this force is the guiding idea of the philosophy of symbolic forms. We can pursue the development of this guiding idea in two views of human life and action. On the one hand, we can focus on the expressive behavior of man, especially on the production of works as a form of expressive behavior. On the other hand, we can focus on the specific symbolic activities of man, the symbolic processes, including the production and use of signs. Looking at the expressive and productive behavior of man we can state as a first principle of Cassirer’s philosophical perspective that our intellectual and cultural existence is founded upon our action. ‘‘It is not mere observation but action which constitutes the center from which man undertakes the intelligent organization of reality. It is here that a separation begins to take place between the spheres of the objective and subjective, between the world of the I and the world of things.’’∞≥ This founding of being on doing holds true in Cassirer’s eyes for the entirety of intellectual and cultural reality. Only in his intellectual deeds does man grow to consciousness of himself. In and by his actions, the human world articulates and organizes itself into a cosmos, within which man is able to orient himself. Our entire intellectual cultural being is founded upon our acting and doing, that is, it is practically founded. On further consideration we can make out three aspects of this philosophical conception: 1. Only in acting does being, that is, what someone or something really is, appear: ‘‘We can never lay bare the immediate life and being of consciousness as such.’’∞∂ ‘‘The paradise of immediacy is closed to it.’’∞∑ ‘‘For all these acts of expressing, representing and signifying are not immediately present as such and can never become visible except in their achievement as a whole. They are only insofar as they are active and manifest themselves in their action.’’∞∏ In our doing and working we become who we are.

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2. Our intellectual distinctions rest upon our actions, and our actions ensure their common use. Our actions are bodily concrete events which are elements of a common and public world. The internal connection of our linguistic and our symbolic distinctions in general with these public events consolidates the use and, thereby, the meaning of these distinctions. 3. Only in their constructive or investigative actions can the development of the sciences be founded and proved. Especially in his studies of the Renaissance, Cassirer accentuates this aspect of the practical foundation of the sciences and our intellectual life in general. Looking at Leonardo da Vinci, Cassirer points out that it was not the methodological element, that is, the well-defined and constructed conceptual order and the corresponding rules of procedure, which brought about the breakthrough of the new spirit in modern thought. It was rather the resolute putting aside not only of the language of the scholars but also of scholastic scholarship in general, which gave raise to the new spirit of the modern age. Not logic, which was oriented to linguistic grammar, but mathematics, not scholarly rumination on a procedure which set up the outcome in advance, but the technical trying-out of things were decisive factors in this change. Formulated a bit more loosely one could say that in Cassirer’s view the main discovery of the Renaissance was that there is only learning by doing or, better, learning by producing something. The conception of ‘‘doing by producing’’ is not only a question of style. On the contrary, it is founded upon the specific understanding of doing and action in general supposed by Cassirer. Doing in its founding function for being—as Cassirer conceived it—is shaping: shaping of expressive forms in general and of images and concepts in particular. In a very general way Cassirer defines our intellectual existence by the capability to bring the chaos of sensual impressions into a solid shape. So he writes that it is the common task of all symbolic forms and of the different products of our intellectual culture ‘‘to transform the passive world of mere impressions into a world of pure intellectual expression.’’∞π We are expressive beings able to give a form to expressions. Our mind is the capability or power to shape the forms of our figurative or conceptual expression. This is the meaning of Cassirer’s famous formula that man is an animal symbolicum. Symbolic forms are ways of intellectual shaping. Using them or, better, intellectually moving in them, we produce and are confronted with fixed forms of expression, worlds of images and concepts which define our culture. That is why man as an expressive being is at the same time a cultural being. One question evoked by this conception is whether the interpretation of human acting as the production of forms of expression is not an aesthetization of human existence? Such an all-encompassing aesthetization would conceive

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all our actions first and foremost as the presentation of our personality by a symbol—an image or a concept—of our acting, our attitude, or our view of life on the whole. Political necessities or technical relations, objective constraints, possibilities and tasks in these aesthetic points of view would appear only as moments or factors, as marginal circumstances of our main activity, i.e., of our presentational shaping and producing. Actually, Cassirer himself raises this question of aesthetization particularly in regard to our technical acting. On the one hand, he emphasizes the objectifying role of the use of tools and thereby of our technical acting in general. For in our technical acting we are compelled to acknowledge the laws of reality. Our technical activity in this way becomes a principle of reality which make us learn the decisive difference between dream, wish, or fantasy and reality. ‘‘Natura non nisi parendo vincitur’’ is Francis Bacon’s formula, which Cassirer quotes in this context. On the other hand, our technical acting is part of the overall task to shape the world in which we live and so to shape our own self. Technical acting as a moment of world- and self-shaping seems to be a specific variation on the main notion of a comprehensive aesthetization. Cassirer’s answer to this question, it seems, is not up to the standard of functional analysis he himself propagates in his philosophy of symbolic forms. Whereas technical work remains in a purely objective world, testifying only to itself and not to its creator, the work of art always testifies to the individual existence, the life of the artist. Aside from the difficulty of understanding contemporary works of art in this way, Cassirer’s distinction does not address the core of the problem. This is the question of whether we should conceive the whole of human life and all human acting as a more or less successful shaping, a production of forms through which we express ourselves and perceive others. Such a perspective of living as creative shaping would neglect some fundamental aspects of human life, namely, all the aspects which are connected with or brought about by the structural difference within the human-self seen as a process and a representation, and by the existential fact that we are thrown into our world, as Martin Heidegger calls it, the alienation, the unshakable facts of dying and death and all the other moments which belong to the unavailability of human life. Nevertheless we should see that Cassirer’s focusing upon the creative and shaping character of our acting brings into prominence one fundamental aspect of our existence which, particularly in the realm of German philosophy, was rather neglected. Cassirer was deeply convinced that it was this specific neglect which prevented philosophy from doing its duty in the Nazi era: because philosophy did not demonstrate the strength of reason, there could be no conviction that reason is a strength and a power, that reason indeed can shape a whole world. Instead of this, common distrust in

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reason delivered a whole culture into the hands of prophets and propagandists, preaching only the strength and the power of emotions, of blood, of destiny and the great leader. I think we have to recognize this ultimately ethical root of Cassirer’s thinking, including his aesthetization of human existence, if we are to obtain a reliable assessment of his philosophy. And I think that this ethical root also supports the work aspect of Cassirer’s interpretation of human acting and life. The work aspect of human acting is closely connected with the second principle of Cassirer’s philosophical conception, a principle which we could call ‘‘the principle of exteriorization.’’ Cassirer himself formulates it as his ‘‘basic rule,’’ his Grundregel: ‘‘Once again we see confirmed the basic rule which governs all intellectual development, namely that the mind arrives at its true and complete inwardness only by expressing itself. The form taken by the inner life reacts upon and determines its essence and meaning.’’∞∫ With this basic rule Cassirer is stressing that our mind does not posses itself in an immediate and transparent self-presence. Rather, it must form itself through the shaping of its own worlds of images and concepts, of intellectual symbolic forms, so it can conceive itself through and in its products, through and in its producing activity. This exteriorization principle gives raise to the question of the variety or the identity of the mind and its symbolic or cultural worlds. On the one hand, there seems to be a shaping energy which is one and the same in all the productions and products of the human mind. On the other hand, we have the variety of these products and productions including the variety of the symbolic forms. We can grasp Cassirer’s view of the symbolic forms through the image of a rosette. In the center of this rosette we have to place the symbolic form of myth. All the other symbolic forms grow out of this center like the petals, all of which are divided from one another and aim in different directions. This development is brought about by different processes of rationalization and differentiation. ‘‘Here we encounter a law that holds equally for all symbolic forms, and bears essentially on their evolution. None of them arise initially as separate, independently recognizable forms, but every one of them must first be emancipated from the common matrix of myth. All mental contents, no matter how truly they evince a separate systematic realm and a ‘principle’ of their own, are actually known to us only as thus involved and grounded. Theoretical, practical and aesthetic consciousness, the world of language and of morality, the basic forms of the community and the state—they are all originally tied up with mythico-religious conceptions.’’∞Ω This conception includes not only a growing difference and a structural distance between the symbolic forms, which grow out of the primary form of the myth, but also

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between these differentiated forms and myth itself. The differentiation of the symbolic forms creates new functions which can be fulfilled by these forms, and is realized by different material media which in fulfilling these functions have to be treated. The combination of these functions and materials compels all our expressions to assume a specific form which is internally structured by these functions and materials. If there are distinctive principles which structure different forms of expression—and the assumption of such distinctive principles is a main thesis of Cassirer’s philosophy—then we have indeed an irreducible variety of symbolic and cultural forms, within which we express ourselves. This variety, however, must not be confused with a simple fragmentation. One of the central points of Cassirer’s argumentation is that there is an order which holds together the different symbolic forms and forms of expression in a particular way. Cassirer himself speaks in this context of a ‘‘concrete totality.’’ This ‘‘concrete totality’’ is not a given state of affairs, but is something which we have to bring about by our intellectual endeavor. This intellectual endeavor is not a theoretical task with the aim, for example, of constructing a conceptual or logical supersystem encompassing all the different symbolic forms as its elements, like Hegel’s logic. It is rather a practical attitude and effort consisting in discovering and acknowledging the specific limits and possibilities provided by a symbolic form. Because we do not have a superior point of view and because we cannot construct such a point of view without claiming an intellectual competence and a knowledge we never can attain, we only can succeed in such a discovery of limits and possibilities by changing the whole context, by changing our perspective within which the world—and we ourselves—appears to us. By such a change of our fundamental perspectives we indeed may discover the structural one-sidedness of the scientific, religious, artistic, technical, or mythic-emotional comprehending of our world and at the same time the specific strength of all these different forms of world comprehending. The result could be that by these intellectual conversions we see relations between the different symbolic forms: relations, which, on the one hand, relativize the possibly exclusive claims of validity connected with the perspective of a specific symbolic form and, on the other hand, discover the special place and role of a perspective which is disclosed by a symbolic form in the process of human orientation in the world in its totality. The philosophical analysis of those relations would lead to a ‘‘complex system’’ which—I have to stress this again—is not a theoretically encompassing and homogenizing supersystem, but which would identify the factors and impulses working in the entire process of human world orientation and there-

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by relating them to each other. And these relations would not homogenize the discovered factors and impulses like the elements of a theoretical system, but would have to leave these factors and impulses in their conceptual and logical inhomogeneity arising out of the difference of context determined by the different symbolic forms. It is just this abiding inhomogeneity that Cassirer was alluding to when he spoke of the complexity of the system, which shall articulate the relationship between the different symbolic forms. Unfortunately, it is impossible in the course of a statement like this to pursue all the different steps that Cassirer traversed in his attempt to analyze the details of a process of symbolization. Actually, such a reconstruction would show the different aspects of the internal articulation of our sensuous life and of our emotions. Differences of relevance arise in our sensuous and emotional life by means of articulation and thereby create distinct, identifiable perceptions and emotions which provide—so to speak—the sensuous entities of symbolic sense: that is, the cultural symbols continue, emphasize, and transform the processes of internal accentuation which constitutes our sensuous and emotional life and thereby create a new realm of meaning. This symbolic meaning is characterized above all by the fixation of the changing articulation in our conscious life: a fixation which is established and controlled by the communicative use of the corresponding symbols and connected interaction. The world of symbolic meaning gives us a hold on our evasive and evanescent conscious life and thereby has a fundamental role in our world orientation and is the foundation of our cultural personal identity. Because of the variety of functions and the differences of the materials and their interaction, the symbolic articulation of our expressive life creates a variety of different realms characteristic of our expressive culture or, as Cassirer would put it, of different symbolic forms, and keeping this in mind we then have a more differentiated view of this irreducible variety, internally connected with the process of symbolization. Such a closer view of the process of symbolization and not merely of our acting or creative shaping in general shows not only this variety, but also give us insight into the identity of our creative mind. For if all differentiation in our cultural world is brought about by the creative force and expressive energy of the human mind, then all these differences—even their antagonistic or incommensurable character—stem from one and the same expressive and creative mind. This would be the ultimate consequence of the aforementioned aesthetization we discussed. Actually, Cassirer himself sometimes uses formulations which seem to urge this view. So he speaks of the productive imagination as the unifying ideal thread that ties together all the particular worlds of forms, that is, of symbolic

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or cultural forms. But a closer view makes clear that Cassirer here is emphasizing the creative character of the human mind and not asserting a separate identifiable power or energy which already exists and—so to speak—then looks for possibilities of shaping in different realms of our human life and culture. In fact, it is rather Cassirer’s main concern to bring into prominence the indissoluble unity of sense and sensuousness, of creative impulse and material realization in every expression which has a meaning at all, of creative intuition and particular possibilities of its realization, or simply of mind seen as a power and energy and world seen as the totality of contingent conditions and stubborn or supporting facts. So if we speak about the identity of the human mind at all, we have to take this identity as a practical category, as the demand to break up the natural closing of our cultural and intellectual worlds—very often labeled as cultural and personal identity—to change the perspective, our intellectual attitude, and so to become open and attentive to the otherness of different perspectives and worlds we have to deal with because we have to live with them. In this point, I hold Cassirer’s philosophical conception in high esteem. It is not only a very modern view of world orientation, but also an urgently needed one, and at any rate, a useful one. Taking up and continuing Cassirer’s perspectives we can hope to intellectually understand what we are confronted with in our practical and political life, a life in which there is a variety not only of interests and needs but also of perspectives and orientations.

Appendix: Additional Quotations ON FUNCTIONAL UNITY

daß alle diese Akte des Ausdrückens, des Darstellens und des Bedeutens, sich selber nicht unmittelbar gegenwärtig sind, sondern daß sie sich nirgends anders als im Ganzen ihrer Leistung sichtbar werden können. Sie sind nur, indem sie sich betätigen, und indem sie in ihrer Tat von sich selbst Kunde geben. Sie blicken ursprünglich nicht auf sich selbst zurück, sondern sie blicken auf das Werk hin, das sie zu vollziehen, auf das Sein, auf dessen geistige Form sie aufzubauen haben. Und hierin liegt zugleich, daß es zunächst keine andere Beschreibung ihrer eigenen Wirklichkeit und ihrer eigenen Wirksamkeit geben kann, als eine solche, die vom Werk, vom Gewirkten hergenommen ist und die gewissermaßen dessen Sprache spricht. (PsF, 3: 118) For all these acts of expressing, representing and signifying are not immediately present as such and can never become visible except in their achievement as a whole. They are only insofar as they are active and manifest them-

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selves in their action. They do not originally look back at themselves but look toward the work that they accomplish, toward the being whose spiritual form they have to build up. And this implies that by and large the only possible description of their reality and efficacy is one which is drawn from their work, their accomplishment, and which in a sense speaks its language. (PSF, 3: 101, translation emended) Und immer zeigte sich . . . , daß das ‘‘Verstehen’’ der Welt kein bloßes Aufnehmen, keine Wiederholung eines gegebenen Gefüges der Wirklichkeit ist, sondern daß es eine freie Aktivität des Geistes in sich schließt. Es gibt kein echtes Weltverstehen, das nicht in dieser Weise auf bestimmte Grundrichtungen, nicht sowohl der Betrachtung, als vielmehr der geistigen Formung, beruht. (PsF, 3: 16f.) And at every step it happens that the ‘‘understanding’’ of the world is no mere receiving, no repetition of a given structure of reality, but comprises a free activity of the spirit. There is no true understanding of the world which is not thus based on certain fundamental lines, not so much of reflection as of spiritual formation. (PSF, 3: 13) ON MEANING AND SENSIBILITY

One of the basic thoughts in the philosophy of symbolic forms is that zwischen dem Sinnlichen und Geistigen . . . eine neue Form der Wechselbeziehung und der Korrelation knüpft. Die reine Funktion des Geistigen [muß] selbst im Sinnlichen ihre konkrete Erfüllung suchen und vermag sie hier zuletzt allein zu finden. (PsF, 1: 19) Their metaphysical dualism seems bridged, since it can be shown that precisely the pure function of the spirit itself must seek its concrete fulfilment in the sensory world. (PSF, 1: 87) Es gehört zur ‘‘eigentümliche[n] Doppelnatur’’ der Zeichen und Symbole, daß in ihnen ‘‘ein geistiger Gehalt, der an und für sich über alles Sinnliche hinausweist, in die Form des Sinnlichen, des Sicht-, Hör- oder Tastbaren umgesetzt [ist].’’ (PsF, 1: 42f.) From this follows the characteristic twofold nature of these formations: their bond with sensibility, which however contains within it a freedom from sensibility: In every linguistic ‘‘sign,’’ in every mythical or artistic ‘‘image,’’ a spiritual content, which intrinsically points beyond the whole sensory sphere, is translated into the form of the sensuous, into something visible, audible or tangible. (PSF, 1: 106) Die Sphäre des Sinns und die der Sinnlichkeit bleiben aufs engste ineinander verwoben. (PsF, 1: 149)

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Oswald Schwemmer Here again, ‘‘meaning’’ is not distinct from sensibility; the two are closely interwoven. (PSF, 1: 198) Es herrscht eine Wechselbestimmung des Sinnlichen durch das Geistige, des Geistigen durch das Sinnliche. (PsF, 1: 299) Here again we find the same reciprocal determination of the sensuous by the spiritual and the spiritual by the sensuous as in the linguistic representation of the relations of space, time, number, and the I. (PSF, 1: 318) Für . . . [alle ‘‘Grundformen des geistigen Schaffens’’] gilt, daß sie die ihnen gemäße und eigentümliche Auffassungs- und Gestaltungsweise nur dadurch zur Geltung bringen können, daß sie für sie gleichsam ein bestimmtes sinnliches Substrat erschaffen. . . . Und damit ist in der Tat ein allumfassendes Medium gegeben, in welchem alle noch so verschiedenen geistigen Bildungen sich begegnen. (PsF, 1: 18) None of them can develop its appropriate and peculiar type of comprehension and configuration without, as it were, creating a definite sensuous substratum for itself. This substratum is so essential that it sometimes seems to continue the entire content, the true ‘‘meaning’’ of these forms. (PSF, 1: 86) Der Gehalt des Geistes erschließt sich nur in seiner Äußerung; die ideelle Form wird erkannt nur an und in dem Inbegriff der sinnlichen Zeichen, deren sie sich zu ihrem Ausdruck bedient. (PsF, 1: 18f.) The content of the spirit is disclosed only in its manifestations; the ideal form is known only by and in the aggregate of the sensible signs which it uses for its expression. (PSF, 1: 86) Indem der bloß tierische Schrecken zum Staunen wird, das sich in doppelter Richtung bewegt, das aus entgegengesetzten Zügen, aus Fucht und Hoffnung, aus Scheu und Bewunderung gemischt ist, indem aus diese Weise die sinnliche Erregung zum erstenmal einen Ausweg und einen Ausdruck sucht, steht der Mensch damit an der Schwelle einer neuen Geistigkeit. (PsF, 2: 99) When mere bestial terror becomes an astonishment moving in a twofold direction, composed of opposite emotions—fear and hope, awe and admiration—when sensory agitation thus seeks for the first time an issue and an expression, man stands on the threshold of a new spirituality. (PSF, 2: 78) Jeder noch so ‘‘elementare’’ sinnliche Inhalt ist . . . niemals einfach, als isolierter und abgelöster Inhalt, ‘‘da’’; sondern er weist in eben diesem Dasein, über sich hinweg; er bildet eine konkrete Einheit von ‘‘Präsenz’’ und ‘‘Repräsentation.’’ (PsF, 3: 149) Every sensuous content, however elementary, is charged, as it were, with such a tension. It is never simply ‘‘there’’ as an isolated and detached content, for in

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this very existence it points beyond itself, forming a concrete unity of presence and representation. (PSF, 3: 129) Durch das Zeichen, das mit einem Inhalt verknüpft wird, gewinnt dieser in sich selbst einen neuen Bestand und eine neue Dauer. Denn dem Zeichen kommt . . . eine bestimmte ideelle Bedeutung zu, die als solche beharrt. . . . Es steht als Repräsentant für eine Gesamtheit, einen Inbegriff möglicher Inhalte, deren jedem gegenüber es also ein erstes ‘‘Allgemeines’’ darstellt. (PsF, 1: 22) Through the sign that is associated with the content, the content itself acquires a new permanence. For the sign, in contrast to the actual flow of the particular contents of consciousness, has a definite ideal meaning, which endures as such. It is not, like the simple given sensation, an isolated particular, occurring but once, but persists as the representative of a totality, as an aggregate of potential contents, beside which it stands as a first ‘‘universal.’’ (PSF, 1: 89) Wir finden niemals die ‘‘nackte’’ Empfindung, als materia nuda, zu der dann irgendeine Formgebung hinzutritt: sondern was uns faßbar und zugänglich ist, ist immer nur die konkrete Bestimmtheit, die lebendige Vielgestalt einer Wahrnehmungswelt, die von bestimmten Weisen der Formung durch und durch beherrscht und von ihnen völlig durchdrungen ist. (PsF, 3: 18) We never find naked sensation as a raw material to which some form is given: all that is tangible and accessible to us rather the concrete determinacy, the living multiformity, of a world of perception, which is dominated and permeated through and through by definite modes of formation. (PSF, 3: 15) In ihr gibt es keinen plötzlichen Riß oder Sprung, keinen hiatus, durch den sie sich in disparate AFTeileAE auflöst. Vielmehr gehört jegliche Gestalt, durch die das geistige Bewußtsein überhaupt hindurchgeht, in irgendeiner Weise auch zu seinem bleibenden und dauernden Bestand. (PsF, 3: 92) In this world there is no sudden breach or leap, no hiatus by which it breaks into disparate parts. (PSF, 3: 78) Der Gebrauch des Zeichens aber befreit diese Potentialität erst zur wahrhaften Aktualität. Jetzt schlägt in der Tat ein Schlag tausend Verbindungen, die alle in der Setzung des Zeichens zum mehr oder minder kräftigen und deutlichen Mitschwingen gelangen. (PsF, 1: 45) Now, one blow strikes a thousand connected chords which all vibrate more or less forcefully and clearly in the sign. In positing the sign, consciousness detaches itself more and more from the direct substratum of sensation and sensory intuition: but precisely therein it reveals its inherent, original power of synthesis as unification. (PSF, 1: 108)

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Oswald Schwemmer Cassirer spricht in diesem Zusammenhang auch von ‘‘eine[r] philosophische[n] Systematik des Geistes, in der jede besondere Form ihren Sinn rein durch die Stelle, an der sie steht, erhalten würde, in der ihr Gehalt und ihre Bedeutung durch den Reichtum und die Eigenart der Beziehungen und Verflechtungen bezeichnet würde, in welchen sie mit anderen geistigen Energien und schließlich mit der Allheit steht.’’ (PsF, 1: 14) Then we could have a systematic philosophy of human culture in which each particular form would take its meaning solely from the place in which it stands, a system in which the content and significance of each form would be characterized by the richness and specific quality of the relations and concatenations in which it stands with other spiritual energies and ultimately with totality. (PSF, 1: 82)

My translation of the quote in note 19: In this a law becomes apparent that is true in the same way for all symbolic forms and which essentially determines their development. They all don’t immediately appear as separate shapes, separately being and cognizable, but they only quite gradually become detached from the native soil of the myth. All contents of mind—however much we systematically have to assign to them a domain of their own and base them on an own autonomous principle—in mere fact are given to us first only within this interlacing. The theoretical, the practical, and the aesthetical consciousness, the world of language und knowledge, of art, law, and morality, the fundamental forms of community and of the state: they originally all still are like bound to the mythicreligious consciousness.

Notes 1. Cassirer, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff: Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1910). 2. Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, Thèse pour le doctorat [1888], Présentée à la faculté des lettres de Paris par Henri Bergson (Paris: Alcan, 1889). Introduction á la métaphysique. 1903. 3. William James, ‘‘Does Consciousness Exist,’’ Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 1 (1904): 477–91; Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. (New York and London: Longmans, Green, 1907). 4. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Des ersten Bandes, Teil I, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (1. Bd. Teil I.) (Halle/Saale 1913). 5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, first published as ‘‘Logischphilosophische Abhandlung,’’ Annalen der Naturphilosophie 14, no. ≥⁄∂ (1921): 185–262. 6. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Erste Hälfte.), Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 8 (1927): V–XII, 1–438.

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7. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinius Nijhoff, 1954). 8. Philosophical investigations/Philosophische Untersuchungen, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953). 9. PSF, 3: 13; PsF, 3: 16: ‘‘Die Philosophie der symbolischen Formen richtet ihren Blick nicht ausschließlich und nicht in erster Linie auf das rein wissenschaftliche, exakte Weltbegreifen, sondern auf alle Richtungen des Weltverstehens. Sie sucht dieses letztere in seiner Vielgestaltigkeit, in der Gesamtheit und in der inneren Unterschiedenheit seiner Äußerungen zu erfassen.’’ 10. PSF, 1: 78; PsF, 1: 9: ‘‘Keine dieser Gestaltungen [i.e., der symbolischen Formen] geht schlechthin in der anderen auf oder läßt sich aus der anderen ableiten, sondern jede von ihnen bezeichnet eine bestimmte geistige Auffassungsweise und konstituiert in ihr und durch sie zugleich eine eigene Seite des ‘wirklichen.’ ’’ 11. PSF, 2: 95; PsF, 2: 118: ‘‘Alles Denken wie alles sinnliche Anschauen und Wahrnehmen ruht auf einem ursprünglichen Gefühlsgrund.’’ 12. Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), viii. 13. PSF, 2: 157, translation emended; PsF, 2: 187: ‘‘Nicht das bloße Betrachten, sondern das Tun bildet vielmehr den Mittelpunkt, von dem für den Menschen die geistige Organisation der Wirklichkeit ihren Ausgang nimmt. Hier zuerst beginnen sich die Kreise des Objektiven und Subjektiven, beginnt sich die Welt des Ich von der der Dinge zu scheiden.’’ 14. PSF, 3: 53; PsF, 3: 63: ‘‘Wir können niemals das unmittelbare Sein und Leben des Bewußtseins rein als solches bloßlegen.’’ 15. PSF, 3: 40; PsF, 3: 48: ‘‘Das Paradies der Unmittelbarkeit ist verschlossen.’’ 16. PSF, 3: 101, translation emended; PsF, 3: 118: Denn ‘‘alle diese Akte des Ausdrückens, des Darstellens und des Bedeutens, [sind] sich selber nicht unmittelbar gegenwärtig.’’ Sie können ‘‘sich nirgends anders als im Ganzen ihrer Leistung sichtbar werden [. . .]. Sie sind nur, indem sie sich betätigen, und indem sie in ihrer Tat von sich selbst Kunde geben.’’ 17. PSF, 1: 12; PsF, 1: 12: ‘‘zu mannigfachen Ansätzen, die alle auf das eine Ziel bezogen sind, die passive Welt der bloßen Eindrücke, in denen der Geist zunächst befangen scheint, zu einer Welt des reinen geistigen Ausdrucks umzubilden.’’ 18. PSF, 2: 196, translation emended; PsF, 2: 235: ‘‘Es bewährt sich hierin aufs neue die Grundregel, die alle Entwicklung des Geistes beherrscht: daß der Geist erst in seiner Äußerung zu seiner wahrhaften und vollkommenen Innerlichkeit gelangt. Die Form, die sich das Innere gibt, bestimmt auch rückwirkend sein Wesen und seinen Gehalt.’’ 19. Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946), 44. Cf. Ernst Cassirer, Sprache und Mythos: Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Götternamen, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, 6 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1925), 37f.; reprinted in Ernst Cassirer, Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), 112: ‘‘Es offenbart sich hierin ein Gesetz, das für alle symbolischen Formen in gleicher Weise gilt und das ihre Entwicklung wesentlich bestimmt. Sie alle treten nicht sogleich als gesonderte, für sich seiende und für sich

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erkennbare Gestaltungen hervor, sondern sie lösen sich erst ganz allmählich von dem gemeinsamen Mutterboden des Mythos los. Alle Inhalte des Geistes, so sehr wir ihnen systematisch ein eigenes Gebiet zuweisen und ihnen ein eigenes autonomes ‘Prinzip’ zugrunde legen müssen, sind uns rein tatsächlich zunächst nur in dieser Verflechtung gegeben. Das theoretische, das praktische und das ästhetische Bewußtsein, die Welt der Sprache und der Erkenntnis, der Kunst, des Rechts und der Sittlichkeit, die Grundformen der Gemeinschaft und die des Staates: sie alle sind ursprünglich noch wie gebunden im mythisch-religiösen Bewußtsein.’’ See also my translation of this key passage at the end of the appendix.

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Cassirer’s Concept of a Philosophy of Human Culture donald phillip verene

Cassirer’s philosophy, in the end, is a philosophy of culture. He makes this clear in the title of his book An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Culture, published a year before his death, which he intended to be a summary of his philosophy of symbolic forms. In a review of this work, Brand Blanshard, while expressing admiration for Cassirer’s great learning, regrets its lack of speculative depth. He says: ‘‘It is hard not to think, as one reads a book so wealthy as this in historic and scientific erudition, but at the same time so oddly inconclusive, that Cassirer was rather a distinguished reflective scholar than a great speculative philosopher. The learning is not mobilized in the interest of any theory.’’∞ Cassirer claims that his philosophy of culture is more than the scholarly investigation of the facts of man’s various cultural activities. He writes that a philosophy of culture ‘‘seeks to understand these facts as a system, as an organic whole.’’≤ The notions of system and organic wholeness are common aims of speculative thought. Yet the reader comes away from Cassirer’s analyses of symbolic forms wondering how all these symbolic forms coalesce as a system that captures the organic whole of human culture. Is Cassirer’s philosophy of culture a series of scholarly analyses held together by some general themes (for example, the constant presence of the symbol in all human activity and the origin of all these activities in a stage of mythic thought), or is there a truly speculative structure that underlies Cassirer’s discussions? 19

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This question troubled not only Blanshard; it is a question that runs throughout the essays of the contributors to the Library of Living Philosophers volume on Cassirer’s work.≥ Due to Cassirer’s sudden death during the publication of that volume, we have no answer from him. One suspects, however, that whatever he might have said in the ‘‘Author’s Reply,’’ it would not have been much more than what he wrote in the conclusion to An Essay on Man: ‘‘All these functions complete and complement one another. Each one opens up a new horizon and shows us a new aspect of humanity. The dissonant is in harmony with itself; the contraries are not mutually exclusive, but interdependent: ‘harmony in contrariety, as in the case of the bow and the lyre.’ ’’∂ The quotation from Heraclitus which Cassirer cites is the name for a problem, not the solution to one. It is a metaphor that raises a question, not that answers one. What is the harmony that exists between the bow and the lyre? Heraclitus does not answer this, at least not in the fragments that remain of his thought. Cassirer places his philosophy of culture in the Socratic tradition in the first sentence of An Essay on Man: ‘‘That self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophical inquiry, appears to be generally acknowledged.’’∑ I do not think Cassirer intends to substitute this metaphor for an answer. I believe he intends it to give life to what he already has worked out. Is it possible to find the elements of the intellectual music that Cassirer claims lies within his presentation of symbolic forms? Or is Cassirer’s philosophy of culture simply a critical philosophy based solely on reflective analysis without a speculative moment inside it? When Cassirer speaks about the synthetic nature of his conception of symbolic forms, he echoes Hegel, either directly or indirectly. Hegel stands for speculation over reflection. Reflection is the work of the understanding, not of reason. Speculation, unlike reflection, is dialectical. Hegel says that in modern philosophy reflection became a slogan (Schlagwort).∏ Cassirer explicitly says that he adheres to the Hegelian maxim that ‘‘the True is the whole.’’π He regarded the relation among the symbolic forms as well as the stages of their development to be dialectical, although he does not subscribe to the Hegelian doctrine of Aufhebung, nor to what he sees as the ultimate reduction in Hegel’s system of all forms of experience to logic.∫ Let us attempt to reconstruct in brief form the elements of Cassirer’s ‘‘system’’ and attempt to identify its principles of harmony and contrariety. The center of his system is the three stages of his phenomenology of knowledge present in the third volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. At the beginning of this volume he says that he intends phenomenology in the sense of Hegel, not in the modern sense of, for example, Husserl.Ω Many of the contributors to the Library of Living Philosophers volume express the view that Cassirer owes much more to Hegel than is often thought.∞≠

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It is too easy to typify Cassirer’s philosophy as a form of neo-Kantianism and thus feel that it has been understood. A more correct approach is to regard Cassirer in his doctrine of symbolic forms to have moved from Kant toward Hegel. Cassirer, in his own thought, follows the path idealism itself took from Kant to Hegel, although Cassirer never abandons the Kantian form of criticism, nor does he ever fully absorb Hegel’s speculative mentality. A great influence on Cassirer, standing in the middle of these two, is Goethe, who, while intellectually impressed with the Kantian groundwork, has always the speculative insights of the philosophical poet. In his phenomenology of knowledge (Erkenntnis), which is more restrictive than Hegel’s general phenomenology of spirit (Geist), Cassirer distinguishes three functions of consciousness: expression (Ausdruck), representation (Darstellung), and signification (Bedeutung). These correlate to three cultural symbolic forms: myth, language, and scientific-theoretical knowledge. In its expressive function, consciousness is in an immediate relation to its object. Symbol and what is symbolized are on the same level of meaning. Thus the dancer who wears the mask of the god is not separate from the god but is the actual presence of the god. In its representational function, consciousness stands in a mediate relation to the object. The object, or what is known, is separate from the symbol through which it is known. The symbol refers to the object. Cassirer identifies this with language. Language is understood as the power to individualize objects and to classify them into orders of things. In the world of mythic expression all exists on the same plane of reality; the only fundamental division made is that between sacred and profane. Language is dominated by its metaphysical power to join entities together and to apprehend metaphors. On the level of representational consciousness the discursive power of language is realized. The contents of experience can be organized and run through as a catalogue of objects, events, and connections. In the significative function of consciousness the symbolic nature of the object of knowledge is fully attained. The object of knowledge is not separate from the symbol but is itself structured by the symbol. On this level of consciousness the relation of symbol and referent occurs between two systems of symbols. Scientific or theoretical thought involves the correlation of various logical orders of symbol systems. Cassirer mentions or discusses other symbolic forms—religion, art, history, technology (Technik), morality (Sitte), economics (Wirtschaft), and law (Recht).∞∞ How are these related to those forms that correlate most closely to the three basic functions of consciousness in his phenomenology of knowledge? What determines an area of experience to be a symbolic form or not? Cassirer defines a symbolic form as follows: ‘‘Under a ‘symbolic form’ should be understood every energy of spirit through which a spiritual content of meaning is

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connected to a concrete sensory sign.’’∞≤ This is what Cassirer understands to be the leading feature of the human mind itself and human nature to be: man as animal symbolicum. Every energy of spirit (Energie des Geistes) is a process of forming experience through the power of the symbol. What is purely geistig is united with what is essentially sinnlich. This is what is accomplished in all human activity. It is the first principle of human culture, and production of culture from nature is what distinguishes man from other organisms. No other organism predicates its existence on a distinction between nature and culture, a distinction that is maintained throughout every basic human activity, from the cooking of food and table manners, the clothing of the body, to the cultivation of eros, the production of artificial heat and light, the burial of the dead, and so forth, as modern anthropologists, especially thinkers such as Claude LéviStrauss, have made clear. Symbolic form not only refers to the very process that spirit or mind is itself, it also refers to the various areas into which we can divide human culture. Cassirer notes, ‘‘it is a common characteristic of all symbolic forms that they are applicable to any object whatsoever. There is nothing that is inaccessible or impermeable to them: the peculiar character of an object does not affect their activity.’’∞≥ The object has no limits to how it can be formed because its formation is always part of what it is. Cassirer says ‘‘we can never hope to find a definite limit: we cannot even seek it.’’∞∂ Cassirer gives a phenomenological demonstration of how the nature of the object depends upon its formation by Geist. He asks the reader to consider a Linienzug or graphlike line drawing. He says it may be regarded as simply a line, a thing with qualities; then it can be considered as having a scientific or theoretical meaning representing a set of mathematical relationships; then it may be seen in purely expressive terms, the eye following its movement, its shading; finally, it can be considered as an aesthetic form.∞∑ In this experiment Cassirer has moved through the three basic symbolic forms of myth, language, and science, adding also the aesthetic as a transformation of the mythic. This demonstrates Cassirer’s principle of symbolic pregnance (symbolische Prägnanz), which he defines as ‘‘the way in which a perception as a sensory experience contains at the same time a certain nonintuitive meaning which it immediately and concretely represents.’’∞∏ The object is always there for the knower in a particular way. These ways in which the object is apprehended are writ large in the various forms of human culture. These symbolic forms of experience differ from each other in ‘‘tonality’’ (Tönung).∞π Each symbolic form has its own senses of spatial and temporal order, of causality, objectivity, and so on. Each lays a total claim to the nature of the object and is then in conflict with similar claims of the other symbolic forms. Since these forms are forms of culture they are also parts of an

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overall harmony. This sense of proportion, of giving each of their claims what is properly due it, is the purpose of philosophy. Cassirer says that philosophy is not itself a symbolic form but is associated with the overall symbolic process.∞∫ Philosophy is not one symbolic form among many but is the one mode of thought that apprehends the true multiplicity of the object and of the forms of experience. Philosophy has no unique access to the object; its access is through the other symbolic forms, and it achieves this by being a mode of thought that can enter into the ‘‘inner form’’ of each one and penetrate its nature. Philosophy does this while also standing outside the form, for it is always aware of the competing claims on the object of the other forms while reflectively bringing to light the nature of any particular symbolic form. In this sense philosophy is the self-knowledge any form can forge of itself—the extent to which it can see itself as the others see it. Why are myth, language, and science, then, basic symbolic forms? Why do they have a privileged place in this ideal harmony of cultural forms of which philosophy is the caretaker or watchman? Cassirer never truly says what the answer to this is, but it is in a sense evident. There are only three distinct and fundamental ways in which meaning can be achieved. All other ways are derivative from these three. Consider the following thought experiment: if one wishes to say what a cat is, we can express it in an image. This expression can be pictorial or poetic, for language use at this level is imagistic, or one can refer to the cat by a word in a natural language, that is, one can apprehend it as a nameable thing having certain qualities that can be discursively understood in relation to the classifications of other things in the world accomplished in a system of language. One can signify the cat by a number, that is, one can apprehend the cat as a scientific entity subject to formulaic description: it has a certain pulse beat, weighs a certain amount, emits colors of certain wavelengths, has certain chemical composition, is composed of certain elements having certain atomic weights, and so on. The cat is an image, a sentence, or a cipher. It is all of these. The symbolic forms of myth, language, and science give us three different cats. Our attempt to have cats that are more than one of these three produces other symbolic forms that arrive in consciousness as mediations of these phenomenologically and semiotically original three. Thus for Cassirer art is myth recalled, with the essential difference that myth holds its production to be categorically true, whereas art, in a fashion analogous to science, holds its production to be hypothetically true. Myth when it describes the origin of the world or the nature of man holds its productions to be categorically true, to be the whole and final truth on the subject. Art gives us only partial and provisional apprehensions of its subject. Thus, for example, Lear, Hamlet, Faust, or Odysseus give us powerful portraits of the human

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condition but their narratives supplement each other; no one of them is the complete account of what it means to be human. They are hypothetical images of the human; they are fictions, not literal presentations of reality. History, Cassirer says, involves a palingenesis, a revival of past events or a past age. He says history is a combination of art and science. What history attempts to portray, unlike art, must have an empirical base, facts established by the methods of science. But history is not simply the presentation of these facts; it is the synthesis of them into a meaningful structure, a recombination of the human. Although history aims at a categorically true narrative, it is also hypothetical, because, unlike myth, it holds its truths as subject to investigation and revision. Art and history are examples of how we continue to make culture, once culture is made. Myth, language, and science are the forms through which culture itself is made. They are original directions or functions of spirit. The derivation of other symbolic forms may in principle be imagined—morality may involve doctrines from religion combined with the common-sense ordering of language; technology involves a combination of the theoretical systems of science and the concrete forms of the particular typical of art. Philosophical reflection on these forms requires a discourse that employs images or metaphors, referential words, and systematic modes of expression. What is at the basis of the actuality of culture must be at the basis of the philosophical account of culture. The philosopher speaks about all areas of culture using these three functions of consciousness as the basis of formulating the overall harmony of the project of human culture. This harmony in contrariety that the philosopher aims to express is not simply an epistemological project. It is also normative. Cassirer says that the symbolic forms are forms of man’s self-liberation.∞Ω The symbol liberates the knower from the immediate. This develops into the mediation of the object as external to the knower. The significative function, with its power of self-referential symbols and systems of symbols, parallels the concrete process of self-knowledge in which the knower confronts himself as the human. Self-knowledge is not achieved by introspection but by the individual recognizing his nature as human in the distinctive product of the human— culture. This is normative because what is sought is the ideal of harmony. Harmony of culture is parallel to harmony of the soul as sought by the ancients. This harmony is a product of the self achieved through its progressive release from immediacy in which it is held wholly within the grasp of the object and has an awareness of itself apart from the dominance of this immediacy. Harmony is a norm that is naturally sought in the aim of philosophy to present the true as the whole of human culture. In the fourth volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Cassirer distin-

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guishes three ‘‘basis phenomena’’: the process of life as present in the I; the drive toward ‘‘willing,’’ action, and the you (Du); and the sphere of the work (Werk). The first two of these basis phenomena are not especially original with Cassirer, although he has his own account of them. His most original insight is with the third, the idea of ‘‘the work.’’ He understands the work as a basis phenomenon, that is, as a phenomenon that must be accepted as an ultimate fact, not one derived from any other principle or type of occurrence.≤≠ Work is the art of cultural formation in its most primordial form. Werk is something made or done, a factum as opposed to labor (Arbeit). Culture is the first work of the human; culture is produced out of nature, or, to put it in Cassirer’s metaphysical terms, spirit arises as a transformation of life and always remains in relation to it. Work is spirit’s further transformation of itself into the various cultural forms generated by the symbolic act. Work is not initially the production of works of individuals but the work of all. If culture cannot be traced back to the basis phenomenon of work, then culture is an alienation of the human from itself rather than its fulfillment. Work is the basis of self-knowledge and guarantees that self-knowledge is a genuine part of the human condition. As works, the symbolic forms of culture are in principle and in fact forms of self-knowledge in addition to being forms of the knowledge of the object and manifestations of spirit as distinct from life. Cassirer’s philosophy of culture as philosophy of self-knowledge is systematic and dialectical, but it never is a system. Cassirer in several places calls the nature of his philosophy that of ‘‘systematic review’’ (systematischer Überblick).≤∞ He does not claim that he has a system. To have a system would be to reduce all the other forms of the human spirit to that of logic. Unlike Hegel and other, later idealists, Cassirer does not have a logic. Instead Cassirer has a place from which to allow philosophy to speak. Systematic reason means that one can enter into the series of symbolic forms at any point and begin to present their interconnections either horizontally or vertically: horizontally is to compare their structure; vertically is to show how they enter into each other’s nature. The beginning of each symbolic form is a stage of myth that gives way to a stage analogous to language as part of the general phenomenology of knowledge, and finally to the formally symbolic. Once Cassirer’s perspective of systematic review is assumed, his account of culture is determinate at every point, yet there is not an overall logic in which all the dialectic relations of the symbolic forms are aufgehoben. Systematic review becomes a discourse of the self with itself in an effort to apprehend philosophically the forms of human culture as such. Culture, the work of the self, is the alter ego, or Du, of the self, which takes it beyond the phenomenon of its life as a simple I and beyond its willing and acting in a world of others. In

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work or culture the self transcends both of these. In this way the self attains to a knowledge of things completely human. In the end, the key to Cassirer’s philosophy of culture is that he labels it Socratic.≤≤ It is a speech given in the agora of all the modern fields of knowledge from the Archimedian point of the symbol. Once the inner form of Cassirer’s standpoint is penetrated, his art of systematic review can be practiced across all of human culture. Cassirer has no more ‘‘system’’ than does Socrates, but the reader is drawn again and again into his works to see more interconnections and to encounter the work of the human. In this way Cassirer’s works always raise morale. The reader is at once taken into the details of culture and at the same time is shown culture as a human achievement, an ideal. Harmony in contrariety is achieved, on the one hand, by being able to relate contraries together in the same speech; on the other hand, harmony is achieved as an ideal toward which the activity of the self aims in its true moments. This dialectical motion cannot be frozen into a system. This is why Cassirer chose the notion of an ‘‘essay’’ as a way to present his philosophy; an essay is a Socratic form in that it is personal and open-ended. It brings the reader into a point of view.

Notes 1. Brand Blanshard, review of An Essay on Man by Ernst Cassirer, Philosophical Review 54 (1945): 510. 2. EM, 222. 3. Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (Evanston, Ill.: Library of Living Philosophers, 1949). See, e.g., the essays of Robert S. Hartman, Folke Leander, and William H. Werkmeister. 4. EM, 228. 5. EM, 1. 6. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), 45. On the history of reflection in philosophy, see my Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), ch. 1. 7. PSF, 4: 193. 8. PSF, 1: 84. 9. PSF, 3: xiv. 10. In Schilpp, ed., Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, see, e.g., the essays of Felix Kaufmann, Robert S. Hartman, Wilbur M. Urban, Helmut Kuhn. See also my ‘‘Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer: The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 30 (1969): 33–46. 11. PSF, 2: xv. 12. Cassirer, ‘‘Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften,’’ in Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956), 17.

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13. MS, 34. 14. MS, 34. 15. PSF, 3: 200–201. Cassirer also gives this example in ‘‘The Problem of the Symbol and Its Place in the System of Philosophy,’’ trans. John Michael Krois, Man and World 2 (1978): 411–28. 16. PSF, 3: 202; see also 235. 17. PSF, 2: 61. 18. PSF, 4: 226. 19. EM, 228. 20. PSF, 4: 141–43 and 182–90. 21. PSF, 4: 54–56, 227. See also Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel, trans. William H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 19. 22. In addition to EM, see PSF, 4: 184–86.

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The Modern Concept of Culture as Indicator of a Metaphysical Problem ernst wolfgang orth

In this essay I will not attempt to give an interpretation of Cassirer’s philosophy, that is, of his philosophy of symbolic forms; rather, by starting with problems and results in Cassirer’s work, I want to thematize our presentday concept of culture and show its role in our general orientation in philosophy. My thesis is that the concept of culture is coming more and more to fulfill a metaphysical function and that in this way the philosophy of culture is being transformed—explicitly or implicitly—into a new prima philosophia. Of course, the philosophy of culture also can be considered a general philosophical theory of the sciences that study cultural phenomena. In this case the philosophy of culture is a theory of empirical positive sciences, or cultural sciences as we call them in Germany: Kulturwissenschaften. The cultural sciences—cultural anthropology in the narrower sense—are not intended to be metaphysical at all. They provide information about empirical phenomena in an empirical way. They certainly do this, in the sense of ‘‘empirical’’ as understood in the natural sciences. But with their acknowledgment of phenomena of meaning, significance (Bedeutsamkeit), and symbolism, the cultural sciences seem to develop topics and methods that go beyond the attitudes of the natural sciences. These further concerns are sometimes referred to by the traditional term ‘‘hermeneutics,’’ which I, however, want to avoid. Sometimes we speak of ‘‘intentional analysis’’ or of ‘‘phenomenology.’’ Occasionally the word ‘‘men-

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Culture as Indicator

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tality research’’ (Mentalitätsforschung) is used. Finally, the epithets ‘‘culturalscientific’’ (kulturwissenschaftlich) and ‘‘cultural-anthropological’’ (kulturanthropologisch) themselves serve as characterizations of specific methods employed in the study of culture. But in any case, the prevailing intention is to investigate empirical phenomena and facts. This sketch could also characterize Cassirer’s approach. We would, however, thereby fail to understand a decisive trait of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms, which he calls a ‘‘philosophy of culture’’—a ‘‘prolegomena of a future philosophy of culture.’’∞ With the conception of symbolic formation, the ‘‘critique of reason’’ turns out to be a ‘‘critique of culture.’’≤ This critique is not identical with what in twentieth-century Germany has been, often emphatically, called ‘‘Kulturkritik.’’ Rather, it is a new form of prima philosophia, developed within the neo-Kantian theory of knowledge (Erkenntnistheorie). This theory of knowledge is deepened and enlarged by Cassirer—toward a philosophy of culture.≥ For Cassirer, only this philosophy can provide a way to a prima philosophia under the conditions of the modern era. Projecting a fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer formulated the title Zur Metaphysik der symbolischen Formen for an unpublished text of the year 1928. J. M. Krois published these manuscripts in 1995 in Hamburg together with texts concerning the so-called Basis-Phänomene (c. 1940).∂ As we all know, Cassirer is a critic of metaphysics. The term ‘‘metaphysics’’ in the title can almost be read in quotation marks. It seems to be used in an ironic sense. But in analogy to Heidegger—of course in a different terminology—traditional metaphysics, on the one hand, is criticized as mere construction, as substantialization, and as presumptuous, while, on the other hand, the task of understanding man and his reality remains a fundamental problem. The human condition is a metaphysical one: human beings are confronted with the puzzle or enigma of their existence. The reality of the human being leads to the problem of reality in general—and, to be sure, not only theoretically but also practically and existentially. With the question of significance or meaning, the problem of Bedeutsamkeit is enforced as a fundamental problem, as a first problem. The framework and the dimension—the medium —of significance is what we call culture. I now want to mention three points in order to show how the ‘‘metaphysical’’ comes into play in culture or in the discussion of culture: (1) the homonymous use of the concept or term ‘‘culture’’ since the late nineteenth century, (2) the problematic relation between the philosophy of culture and philosophical anthropology (or anthropological philosophy), and (3) culture as the ‘‘world of man’’ (‘‘man and world’’) and Christian Wolff’s formula of metaphysica specialis.∑

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Ad 1. Strikingly enough, ‘‘culture’’ is a leading keyword and catchword in the twentieth century and has the character of an immense equivocation. ‘‘Culture’’ is a homonym: ‘‘Culture’’ is a special sphere or stratum of society, for which we have administrative institutions (the ministry of culture, i.e., of education, arts, and universities). ‘‘Culture’’ is often seen in opposition to the technical and economic world. But there is also a culture of technology and a culture of economy. Furthermore, ‘‘culture’’ means a specifically developed state of man, but ‘‘culture’’ is also, simply and plainly, the world of man. This last notion of culture can be found especially in prehistory, ethnology, and in so-called Kulturgeschichte (history of culture). Here, ‘‘culture’’ includes technical products and action as well as nature itself, or at least the concept of nature. If we accept the thesis that nature can be understood only through man-made concepts, then nature too belongs to the world of man, to culture. Two main features of the concept of culture can be stressed: (1) culture as the world of man, a world which can be described and analyzed as a unique and universal factum (with its remarkable inner differentiations), and (2) culture as the aspect of value in human reality. This concerns man’s relation and attitude toward himself and toward his surrounding reality, which always becomes man’s own reality. This concept of culture, which functions at the same time as a value and as a measure, carries different norms which serve as standards of culture itself. The homonymy of ‘‘culture’’ reminds us of the Aristotelian doctrine of the special homonymy of ‘‘being’’: the pollachos legetai to on.∏ Accordingly, the word ‘‘be’’ or ‘‘being,’’ einai or on, is used homonymously in a particular way. It is homonymous pros hen, i.e., with respect to a unity that is not the unity of a genus. According to Aristotle, this problem is of fundamental importance. It is the first problem of orientation. The science that deals with it is ‘‘first philosophy’’ ( prote philosophia), which later was called metaphysics. It is a metaphysics of being, an ontologically orientated first philosophy. In a similar view, the homonym ‘‘culture’’ and the way it is used today points to a basic condition, a fundamental problem, and the first philosophy dealing with this problem would not be an ontological metaphysics but a cultural metaphysics. Cassirer’s doctrine of the ‘‘Basisphänomene’’ can support this approach. In Aristotle’s metaphysics we can recognize cultural paradigms, such as in hyle and morphe or the doctrine of the four causes, in which the technical world of the workman comes into play, and this world, of course, is the cultural world. Metaphysics, therefore, as well as culture, is a cultural problem.π As a further illustration, Nelson Goodman, speaking of ‘‘ways of worldmaking,’’ uses the concept of worlds in a way that—in accordance with Wittgenstein’s ‘‘Lebensformen’’—seems to be homonymous in the sense of the Aristotelian pros hen, but in a nominalistic version.∫

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Ad 2. If we understand the concept of culture in the wider sense as the world of man, then it becomes clear that the philosophy of culture implies a philosophical anthropology. In other words, dealing with culture means dealing with man, and speaking about man means speaking about culture. In developing his conception of symbolic forms, Cassirer is first of all dealing explicitly with culture. The anthropological aspect, however, became more important for him, at least in 1929 (on the occasion of the Davos meeting with Heidegger). But we experience what man really is indirectly, in the mirror of symbolic forms, i.e., in the mirror of culture. At first, Cassirer does not really found the symbolic forms in anthropology. In this respect Cassirer’s philosophy of culture, as a philosophy of symbolic forms, reminds us of the so-called culturology of Leslie A. White.Ω But we all know that Cassirer, in 1944, published a ‘‘philosophical anthropology’’ (in this text often using the formula ‘‘anthropological philosophy’’) under the title An Essay on Man. Nevertheless, the subtitle is An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. In An Essay on Man, human being is explicitly thematized as ‘‘animal symbolicum.’’∞≠ This means that the human being is a being who creates symbols, operates with symbols, understands symbolically, and projects a symbolic universe. In this symbolic universe man meets with himself and himself alone. Presenting Cassirer’s doctrine in this way is not altogether wrong, but it misses the decisive point of Cassirer’s anthropology. In the first place, man is not animal symbolicum because of the symbols he creates and projects or because he understands the symbols he is confronted with. On the contrary, man himself is symbolic. He is, as such, a symbolic form. Therefore, Cassirer’s anthropology—if he has one—is a cultural anthropology, strictly speaking: a philosophical cultural anthropology.∞∞ This can be shown by reference to a thesis in the third volume of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. There Cassirer criticizes the traditional, ontological-metaphysical model of the body-soul relation. Similarly to Helmuth Plessner, Cassirer points out the wrong ontological fundamentality of the body-soul/mind distinction. In a way that is analogous to Plessner’s formula of the double-aspect, he gives a new formulation of the traditional body-soul model. He claims that this model is ‘‘the first prototype and paradigm of a symbolic relation’’ which cannot be thought as a relation of things or as a causal one.∞≤ This means the human being itself is the paradigm of symbolic form. Man is a symbolic form. To express it in a pointed manner: man is a cultural phenomenon rather than an anthropological one. And this corresponds to Cassirer’s thesis that the ‘‘I’’ or the person is only the result of a process of symbolic formation, which Cassirer occasionally calls an Auseinandersetzung (an argumentative examination and, literally, a separating off of things). If Cassirer’s new view overcomes the traditional dualistic body-soul model

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with its naturalistic implications, then a new problem arises because animal symbolicum remains an animal, and in this respect animal symbolicum is, like other animals, a (natural) organism. But, as an organism it is not symbolic in a cultural sense. In the above-mentioned papers of 1928, Cassirer raises this problem, and in this context he refers to Jakob von Uexküll and Helmuth Plessner. Certainly symbolism and culture can occur only on the occasion of an organism, but the organism as such is not symbolic. Cassirer’s attempt to distinguish between ‘‘forms of mind’’ and ‘‘forms of life’’ and to understand them by contrasting them could be helpful here, but it is not a solution of the problem.∞≥ The ‘‘circles of functions’’ (Uexküll’s ‘‘Funktionskreise’’) in the animal sphere∞∂ can be seen in analogy to human symbolic formation,∞∑ but the connection between them remains obscure. With the formula of a ‘‘Gegenbild’’ (counter-feature) Cassirer insinuates that there is possibly a kind of preestablished harmony in the connection of mind and life. The question seems to be irresolvable, but it could be formulated more precisely. What the organic animal and the animal symbolicum have in common is—from the standpoint of an outside observer—a sensible interconnection or cooperation of elements in the virtual dimension of wholeness (Ganzheit). But the sphere of nature and the sphere of culture are to be kept strictly separated (of course, in human beings the two spheres are interwoven multifariously). For the sphere of organic nature I choose, following Heike Kempf, the term ‘‘symbiosis.’’∞∏ The organism is a symbiosis in the sense that the elements support each other by cooperation in the form of exchange, by a kind of metabolism, as it were. Indeed, here—in analogy to the symbolic sphere—the one element ‘‘reminds’’ us of the other one and vice versa. But this symbiotic metabolism is not a symbolic process. A symbolic metabolism can only occur on the level of meaning or significance (Bedeutsamkeit). But exchange in an organism first satisfies needs, needs which, from the standpoint of an outside observer, could be called significant or sensible. But symbolism, symbolic metabolism—in contrast to the symbiotic one—is founded on the discovery of the meaning of needs. Symbolism is this discovery of meaning. Furthermore, symbolism is a reciprocal exchange of meanings which, at first, were thematized needs. Needs get their significance by means of symbolism, and in this context the need for meaning (or sense) comes into play. A presupposition of all this is Erinnerung (which has the senses of memory, being reminded, and of internalization). According to Cassirer, Erinnerung is (as in Husserl) constituted within the immanent temporality of experience (Erleben) with its function of representation (Vergegenwärtigung as representation of past and future in the present). The need for meaning arises quite enigmatically within the organic process of nature (here Cassirer refers to a ‘‘critical philosophy of nature’’) and impreg-

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nates all phenomena of the pre-, extra- or para-symbolic world.∞π But this impregnation occurs after the symbolic reality of human beings is established as culture. In this way, organic symbolic nature easily becomes transposed into what I call para-culture. But obviously, it is an unavoidable metaphysical position, which sheds its light even on the strictest scientific work, because every question becomes a question of meaning or sense. Ad 3. According to our considerations so far, culture, taken as the world of man, appears as the concrete dimension, as the medium of all significance, sense, or meaning. But we should not reduce Bedeutung to a specific definition in advance and for all time. Reductions (interpretations) of such a kind are developed within a process, within the Auseinandersetzung that is culture itself. Culture is intrinsically structured according to an open variety of dimensions. Culture is the name we use with respect to the manifold meanings in which reality is given to us and made by us, theoretically and practically. In this culture, man establishes himself as an establishment in the world. That means the notions ‘‘culture’’ and ‘‘world’’ are convertible terms, equivalent with one another. A world is a horizon of meaning as well as a culture. The formula ‘‘man and world’’ reminds us of a threefold structure given in the eighteenth century in the so-called metaphysica specialis of Christian Wolff. Wolff’s metaphysica specialis was intended to establish principally the basis of all human orientation as far as it is can be grasped rationally. Wolff distinguishes between nature, god, and soul. Three philosophical disciplines correspond to these: cosmologia, theologia rationalis, psychologia rationalis. One might reduce the three names to two: nature and mind (or spirit). By ‘‘nature’’ we may understand independent reality, i.e., the world as it is characterized by various contents. ‘‘Mind’’ (or spirit) means, in accordance with the critique of theological and speculative metaphysics, the concrete human being of average intelligence, the anthropological type of culture, a being in the horizon of a world. Finally, I would again like to mention Nelson Goodman. The concept of the world dissolves in Ways of Worldmaking into an open plurality of worlds, which, as with the languages of art, are cultural worlds.∞∫ Culture is the pros hen katexochen. In light of these considerations, ‘‘man’’ and ‘‘world’’ prove to be the last remnant of traditional metaphysica specialis. But despite this reduction to such average phenomena like man and world, it is obviously unavoidable that the pathos of the older notions has survived. The universal claim of significance (and all hope of rationalization, too) survives in the concept of culture, which encompasses all forms of sense and nonsense, including the discussion of culture itself.

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The pathos of values remains and endures in this accentuation of man as a telos for and of himself. Even the critics who diagnose the mortification of man in the sciences and in social and political life themselves rely upon and document the ever-present and fundamental human need for significance or meaning. Therefore, it seems to me the project of investigating the conditions of the concept of culture is a useful and unavoidable task, which follows from Cassirer’s investigations.

Notes 1. Ernst Cassirer, ‘‘Zur Logik des Symbolbegriffs’’ (1938), Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Darmstadt/Oxford: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956), 228. 2. PsF, 1: 11; PSF, 1: 80. 3. Ernst Wolfgang Orth, Von der Erkenntnistheorie zur Kulturphilosophie: Studien zu Ernst Cassirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1996). 4. ECN 1, 113–195; PsF, 4: 113–190. 5. Christian Wolff, Philosophia rationalis sive logica (Frankfurt/Leipzig, 1728), 3d ed., 1740 (Discursus praeliminaris de philosophia in genere). 6. Hans Wagner, ‘‘Über das Aristotelische pollachos legetai to on,’’ Kant-Studien 51 (1959/60): 75–91. 7. Martin Heidegger, Die Technik und die Kehre (Pfullingen: Neske, 1962). 8. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 6th ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992). 9. See the article ‘‘Culturology’’ by Leslie A. White, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 3 (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 547–551. 10. EM, 26. 11. In the English-speaking world ‘‘cultural anthropology’’ means merely ‘‘ethnology.’’ See Robert H. Lowie, An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (1934; 2d ed., New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1940). Erich Rothacker has used the term ‘‘Kulturanthropologie’’ in a philosophical sense since 1942 (see ‘‘Probleme der Kulturanthropologie’’ in Systematische Philosophie, ed. Nicolai Hartmann (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1942; special impression: Bonn, 1948). 12. PsF, 3: 117; PSF, 3: 100. Cassirer quotes Plessner, Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie, 1928 in ECN 1, 36, 43, 60. 13. ECN 1, 52. 14. ECN 1, 43. 15. ECN 1, 64. 16. Heike Kämpf, Tauschbeziehungen: Zur anthropologischen Fundierung des Symbolbegriffs (Munich: Fink, 1995), 88. 17. ECN 1, 50. 18. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (1968; 2d ed., Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976).

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Cassirer’s Symbolic Theory of Culture and the Historicization of Philosophy louis dupré

Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of culture steered philosophical thought in a new direction. In contrast to both the unmediated unity of being in traditional metaphysics and the epistemic unity of the transcendental subject in modern, critical philosophy, his theory of cultural symbols assumes the object of philosophical reflection to be irreducibly pluralist. His approach raises two fundamental questions. First, is the philosophy of symbolic forms a substitute for metaphysics or does it require a metaphysical foundation to remain consistent with its own principles? Second, how can it discuss contingent matters, such as the historical process of culture, without losing its philosophical necessity altogether and turning into an empirical science, usually referred to as history of ideas? In the following pages I shall discuss the second question, which is basic for the very possibility of a philosophy of symbolic forms, before considering the need for a metaphysical grounding. Culture enables humans to find and protect their place in a nature that threatens as surely as it nurtures them. Through technical inventiveness people acquire the ability to outwit nature in numerous ways closed to animals. But culture does more than assist humans in coping with the material conditions of life. It holds a spiritual surplus that drives them beyond the satisfaction of bodily needs. Georg Simmel, Cassirer’s onetime teacher, began his seminal essay ‘‘On the Concept and the Tragedy of Culture’’ with the following decla-

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ration: ‘‘Man, unlike the animals, does not allow himself simply to be absorbed by the naturally given order of the world. Instead he tears himself loose from it. . . . Somehow, beneath and above, there stands the demand that through all of the individual tasks and interests a transcendent promise should be fulfilled, that all individual expressions should appear only a multitude of ways by which the spiritual life comes to itself.’’∞ The symbolic meaning we attach to the most ordinary tasks conveys to them a specifically human, spiritual significance. Without the spiritual symbolization of customs and rituals, laws, and aesthetic activity, life would become unbearably poor, ‘‘mere toil for the slavish purpose of prolonging life for more toil’’ as Whitehead put it.≤ Culture, the integrated totality of these symbolic expressions, establishes a spiritual symbiosis that enables a society to survive as a fully human, organic unity. Clearly, then, culture carries a major theoretical significance. Yet philosophy was slow in recognizing it. The older metaphysics was directed too exclusively toward unity to appreciate the symbolic diversity of culture, whereas the philosophies of the early modern age, mostly ruled by a principle of efficient causality, were incapable of dealing with teleological complexity. Kant, stimulated by his former student Herder, was the first major philosopher to recognize culture as a new object of philosophical reflection. For him, it fulfilled the essential task of throwing a bridge over the chasm that separates nature from man’s moral vocation. By civilizing nature and man’s natural existence, culture paves the way to that moral ideal of Humanität that is the very purpose of reason. How is philosophy, especially metaphysics, the unifying, ultimate reflection on the real, to deal with the infinite variety of cultural patterns that distinguish one epoch and one society from another? Is it not futile to seek necessity and unity where such obvious contingency prevails? The problem is not new. It was intensely discussed among neo-Kantian philosophers who, recognizing the philosophical significance of culture, remained loyal to Kant’s distinction between the necessary and the empirical. Prominent among the Marburg Kantians was Ernst Cassirer. He brought the problems enunciated by his master, Hermann Cohen, and his colleague, Paul Natorp, to a classical solution in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, a work that remains fundamental to any philosophy of culture. A prerequisite for adequately dealing with culture consisted in liberating critical philosophy from its exclusive focus on the mind’s theoretical activity. Cassirer understood that philosophy had to account for the irreducible variety of symbolic processes. Art, religion, and ordinary language are no lesser carriers of meaning than science and philosophy. An essential task of a philoso-

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phy of culture, then, is to justify these various symbolic systems in their own right while at the same time seeking their philosophical unity in a concept of mind comprehensive enough to accommodate their variety. The critical search for the synthetic a priori judgments that determine all cultural symbolic expression became Cassirer’s lifetime project. To assure the success of his enterprise, Cassirer had to meet two essential philosophical conditions. One consisted in recognizing the ontological significance of time; the other in the admission of hermeneutics as a legitimate method in philosophy. Only if both conditions are fulfilled can a ‘‘philosophy’’ of culture transcend the level of a history of ideas. Neither is stated explicitly by Cassirer, but I think that he met them, though the latter more fully than the former. He never fully overcame the subjective restrictions Kant imposed upon the notion of time, even when those restrictions became a hindrance to the full development of his own thought. Often he appears to be moving toward Hegel’s philosophy of an intrinsically historical Spirit, only to withdraw at the last moment. Without entering into the development of Cassirer’s notion of time from the early works, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff and Das Erkenntnisproblem to the studies on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, it suffices to state that almost from the beginning he realized the insufficiency of a purely subjective form of time. If the symbolic forms of culture must count as ultimate principles of reality, then time, the principle of historical transformation, must be more than the inner form of perception. Cassirer assumes that the reality on which philosophy reflects becomes transformed in the process of culture. Historical changes affect not only philosophy’s subject matter, but the very nature of its enterprise, since philosophy reflects on that changing reality. However permanent each philosophy is in its own right, the real must constantly be rethought if philosophy is to understand it in the ever-new forms it assumes. Nor should we consider that development a road progressing straight toward the present. This kind of ‘‘intellectual imperialism,’’≥ so prominent in the Marxist theory of history and perhaps even implicit in Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit, fails to recognize the autonomy of each cultural form and epoch as a reflection of reality valid in its own right. The question then arises of how philosophy can rank this infinite and apparently contingent variety under the necessary principles that define its own method. If metaphysics is the science of being qua being, conceived as the invariable ground of variable appearances, it cannot deal with the symbolic forms of culture at all. Those forms belong to the empirical domain of the history of ideas. Metaphysicians from Plato to

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Wolff have denied that what by its very nature is transitory can ever become part of the study of the ultimate principles of the real. To be sure, metaphysics reflects on change in general, but it remains itself unaffected by change. Philosophers, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, have written on the metaphysical impact of time, and Plato even taught that recollection provides the only access to philosophy. But what is the significance of this past? Plato regards it as the gateway to permanence for a temporal being. Only the past cannot change. So Plato’s recollected past is not one moment in a temporal succession: it hypostasizes the past into a timeless image. In recollection we escape from time’s cycle of succession and return it to the eternal realm of true reality. The idea that historical events have an ontological significance owes much to the modern perception of freedom as capable of intrinsically transforming reality. The direction toward the future, inherent in this perception, has resulted in a view of the future as objectively different from present and past. The modern awareness of this difference has profoundly affected philosophy. Ortega y Gasset has pointed out: ‘‘If man’s only Eleatic being is what he has been, this means that this authentic being, what in effect he is—and not mere ‘has been’—is distinct from the past, and consists precisely and formally in ‘being what one has not been,’ in non-Eleatic being. . . . Man is not, he goes on being this and that.’’∂ It would take centuries before the awareness of the historical character of human existence came to be translated into one of the historicity of being itself. Yet even Kant, the philosopher of freedom and one of the first to develop an embryonic philosophy of history, recognized no philosophical significance in the difference between one cultural epoch and another, though he admitted that their succession results in a general progress of the human mind and increases the possibility of moral refinement. But by itself, time does not surpass the function of the inner form of perception through which the subject unifies and internalizes experience. Hegel abandoned the static ontology of the past and defined the ultimate philosophical idea, that of Spirit, as intrinsically historical. Yet he subordinates the autonomy of the various historical cultures to a final integration in the philosophical notion. The Phenomenology of Spirit concludes with the following remarkable statement about the Spirit’s relation to time and history. ‘‘Time is the notion itself that is there [insofar as it is there] and which presents itself to consciousness as empty intuition; for this reason, Spirit necessarily appears in Time, and it appears in Time just so long as it has not grasped its pure notion. . . . Time, therefore, appears as the destiny and necessity of Spirit that is not yet complete within itself.’’∑ Temporality hereby enters into the absolute without simply coinciding with the absolute itself. Temporality is the Spirit’s ‘‘destiny’’ (Heidegger later referred to it as its ‘‘fall’’),

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which impels it to overcome the mere presentness of the now and to move into the full self-consciousness of the Idea. Through the consciousness of time, Spirit moves beyond immediacy, but once Spirit attains its goal, time itself freezes into permanence. The philosophical reflection on history turns the actual process of time into a timeless idea. Not before the end of the nineteenth century did philosophy begin to overcome the all too subjective conception of time inherent in modern thought and thereby to meet one of the primary conditions for the possibility of a philosophy of culture. Of course, there had been nonsubjective theories of time before. In fact, premodern theories were never purely subjective. Augustine’s theology of history in The City of God certainly was not, and neither were Vico’s or Herder’s theories. But the sharp distinction between subject and object, initiated by Kant, required a different solution. The three who most directly and critically engaged with Kant’s subjective interpretation of time were Dilthey, Husserl, and Heidegger. Husserl’s masterful Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness, though deeply critical of Kant’s theory of the a priori form of time, still presented, as the title indicates, a phenomenology of the inner experience of time. Heidegger’s Being and Time differed in this respect from Husserl’s work (on the title page of which his name appears as ‘‘editor,’’ though his role in the arrangement of Husserl’s essays has been much disputed) yet still focused exclusively on Dasein— human existence. Nonetheless, Sein und Zeit marked a clean break with the traditional separation between temporality and ontology. Cassirer does not appear to have been much affected by either thinker. But he was undoubtedly influenced by Wilhelm Dilthey, one of his teachers in Berlin. Dilthey’s exploration of the philosophical foundations of the historical consciousness led him beyond the subjective notion of time. He surpasses the phenomenological description of time consciousness in the following way. In his own experience of duration a person never has a sense of wholeness because his life has not yet been completed. Rather than remembering his past, the person must reflect upon time through intellectual categories that do beyond the mere sensation of time. They alone can convey the kind of completeness required for the historical by the historical consciousness. In an essay on Dilthey’s theory of time, David Carr put the matter this way: ‘‘Die Zeitlichkeit des Lebens schliesst das Verständnis des Lebens aus.’’∏ Others see what we are unable to see of ourselves! This historical consciousness of time goes, of course, well beyond the Kantian sense of time. Cassirer himself, although he had not yet clearly detached himself from the neo-Kantians, for reasons which John Krois well explains elsewhere in this volume, was obviously aware of this objective, historical concept of time. That

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he was influenced by it, his posthumous writings abundantly illustrate. In most of the work published during his lifetime, however, his position remains ambiguous. Still, as early as the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms he appears to move away from the subjective neo-Kantian position. In the second volume he describes the mythical representation of time in a manner that obviously surpasses the cognitive forms of Kantian epistemology. Here time appears as one of the basis phenomena mentioned in the recently published Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, namely, as an original expression of an ontological reality to which also the cognitive structures belong. Thus he writes about mythical time: ‘‘The mythical world achieves its true and specific articulation only when its dimension of depth, so to speak, opens up in the form of time. The true character of mythical being is first revealed when it appears as the being of origins’’ (PSF, 2: 105). I therefore agree with Donald Verene’s thesis that Cassirer is moving toward a phenomenology in the Hegelian sense, one that exceeds a mere description of the phenomena of experience, regarding them as manifestations of a transcending reality. Even an unqualified admission of the historicity of being, such as we find in Heidegger’s later philosophy would not have sufficed for developing a metaphysics of culture. How could the many, mutually incompatible cultures convey a coherent revelation of being? Cultural symbols, indefinite in number and substance, are formed to introduce some meaning into the intolerable arbitrariness of contingent ‘‘events.’’ Their syntheses originate not in a quest for universal truth, but in the need for creating some order in the patterns of living of a particular society. Undoubtedly, cultural structures transcend immediate needs. But do they aim at the ultimate questions pursued by metaphysics? We may reply that historically the same impulse to overcome the multiplicity of appearances that is the driving force behind culture stands also at the origin of the metaphysical quest. The reflective mind refuses to be satisfied with multiplicity as an ultimate, unjustifiable datum. Surpassing all partial syntheses, philosophy follows the cultural impulse toward unity until it has reduced the principles to interpret reality to an irreducibly small number. In the beginning this philosophical quest for unity had consisted in reducing the multiplicity of phenomena to one substance (water, air, the indefinite) on which all others depend. Later it became a search for a ‘‘first cause.’’ Obviously such a simplistic reduction to unity does not work for a philosophical justification of culture: its unmelting multiplicity resists being constrained within, or causally justified by, a philosophy based on the ultimacy of a single ‘‘substance,’’ or even a substantial conception of being. It is one of the reasons why Cassirer, like all neo-Kantians, abandoned a ‘‘substantialist’’ philosophy in favor of a search for a fundamental ‘‘rule’’ of mental creativity. On

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the other side, Cassirer understood that a philosophical foundation of culture needs to move beyond a purely epistemological critique of its achievements, such as the neo-Kantians had begun to develop. For Kant’s followers, including Cassirer’s master Hermann Cohen, all objects of knowledge as well as of ethical striving or aesthetic contemplation receive their unity from no other source than the transcendental subject. Cassirer rightly rejected this solution as insufficient for explaining the specific nature of the various forms of cultures. The unity of the cultural phenomenon in the infinite variety of its realizations is not explained by a cognitive process that always follows identical rules. Cohen’s neo-Kantian colleague Paul Natorp had already regarded the transcendental unity of consciousness inadequate for justifying the fact that the cultural universe appears, in spite of all diversity, as one. What remains to be explained is das Phänomen des Phänomens—the fact that subject and object coincide in the phenomenon without losing their duality.π In his posthumously published Vorlesungen über praktische Philosophie, Paul Natorp repudiated the traditional Kantian interpretations of culture as inadequate. While considering the actual symbolic expression to be purely subjective, Kantians fail to account for the expressiveness itself of symbolic expression. ‘‘At least this much is clear that there is always a transfinite that reveals as much as it conceals under a finite. For symballesthai [the root of ‘symbol’] means to collapse into one, to coincide, and therein lies, if one reflects on it profoundly enough, the awesome mystery with which we are dealing.’’∫ The confluence of mind and reality required, according to Natorp, a transcendent principle of unity. This position, if taken literally, marked a return to metaphysics. The ultimate principle of unity clearly surpasses the unity of the individual mind. It had to be a self-developing Spirit that includes but also transcends the Kantian subject. Cassirer did not take Natorp’s idea literally and referred to the tentativeness of Natorp’s formulation for not doing so.Ω His own position corresponded with what, he claimed, Natorp had really meant by his symbolic reference to the Spirit. The unity of culture needed no transcendent Spirit. His basic objection to a (Hegelian) philosophy of Spirit was that in it the forms of culture merely serve as preparatory stages towards the Spirit’s full self-consciousness in philosophy. It thereby subjects all forms of to a philosophical function, depriving them of their particular autonomy.∞≠ Still, Cassirer admitted that the interpretation of culture required overcoming the subject-object opposition in an area in which, unlike that of nature, the objective is shot through with subjective interiority. Interpretation here required going beyond the kind of objective knowledge Kant attributed to the understanding. Kant himself in the

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Critique of Pure Reason had argued that reason liberates understanding from the limits of actual and possible experience. Still, as Cassirer understood Kant, the function of reason consists not in moving beyond the understanding, but in conveying a systematic unity and completeness to empirical knowledge. There is no need, then, to interpret Kant’s theory of reason as a return to metaphysics —as Heidegger did in his Kant study.∞∞ The idea of Spirit may be used for synthetic purposes, but it must be shorn of any kind of absolute knowledge. From a Kantian perspective, the unity of meaning rests on expressiveness as an ultimate principle. No absolute Spirit is needed for this function. Contrary to Heidegger’s hermeneutics, Cassirer’s philosophy was never to result in a metaphysics of being: its unifying principle remains that of a rule, albeit a more comprehensive rule than that of objective science. Most philosophies of culture, being neo-Kantian, have repudiated a theory of being. Metaphysics, to them, reduces multiplicity to an illusory unity. In fact Cassirer’s philosophy intends to be a substitute for traditional metaphysics. So the question arises whether a true philosophy of culture, rather than a mere history of ideas, can dispense with a metaphysical foundation. I shall attempt to answer that question in the next section. But this much we must certainly concede to the neo-Kantian principle: the relation between culture and its unifying principle can no longer be the one by which metaphysics formerly defined the relation of beings to being. The modern turn to the subject has definitively closed the access to any unmediated unity. Once the relation of thinking to being becomes a question the metaphysician must first clarify the limits of thought in its ability to think being. Descartes did so by basing his investigation on the one point in which being and thinking undeniably coincide—the being of consciousness. But problems developed as soon as he attempted to derive further ‘‘indubitable’’ conclusions from the basic cogito. That privileged moment proved incontrovertible only as long as it remained restricted to the existence of consciousness as such. Any attempt to extend its certainty beyond the mind returned the doubt about the reality of the ideas. At this point I turn to the second transcendental condition for the possibility of a philosophy of culture. We have called it the ‘‘hermeneutic principle.’’ Even though, to my knowledge, Cassirer does not explicitly mention it as an indispensable condition for the success of his enterprise, he nevertheless adheres to it in his philosophizing. One of the publishers of Cassirer’s literary Nachlass has in fact suggested that his entire philosophy consists of what today we would call hermeneutics or semiotics.∞≤ The principle is based on the assumption that, after the modern turn to the subject and after Descartes’ failure to derive all truth from that subject by an introspective reflection on the ego, we

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should abandon the short road of a reflection on the individual consciousness and instead follow the long one that leads around the mind’s objective achievements. As Ricoeur writes: ‘‘We understand ourselves only by the long detour of the signs of humanity deposited in cultural works. What would we know of love and hate, of moral feelings and in general of all that we call self, if these had not been brought to language and articulated by literature?’’∞≥ Only in its cultural expression does consciousness fully disclose the most essential characteristic of existence—what Heidegger called der Sinn des Daseins—namely, temporality and historicity. To capture the existential meaning of this symbolic march through time is the task of cultural hermeneutics. There is, of course, an essential difficulty inherent in the use of hermeneutics as a philosophical method. The hermeneutics of culture never yields the kind of certainty and completeness philosophers are wont to seek. Cultural symbols are essentially contingent. I encounter them because they are there, but I shall never fully know why they are there. What I find depends on my own wholly contingent place and time in history. Those who reflect on other cultures at other times or from different perspectives will discover different symbols. Philosophical hermeneutics gambles on a faith that the always hazardous interpretation of cultural symbols will yield some understanding of existence, and indirectly some insight into the nature of being itself. But he has to take the risk since being is not directly accessible to philosophical investigation. Nor can, contrary to Descartes’ thesis, existence be explored through the pure cogito. Modern thought has fallen from immediacy: it has lost its immediate certainty! Having come so far in the philosophy of culture—that is, as far as Cassirer ever came—we must at last answer the questions: (1) Does a philosophy of culture require an ultimate ontological unification if it is to avoid a subjective relativism? (2) If it does, is such a metaphysical unification still possible within the current fragmentation of culture? With respect to the first question, our answer may be brief. Culture, by its nature, is an attempt to integrate the variety of symbolic expressions into some kind of unity. But unless this unity be grounded in a transcendent principle apt to integrate an unlimited multiplicity of forms, any unifying synthesis is bound to be arbitrary, one-sided, ideological. Such syntheses, claiming to be ultimate but in fact being ideologically exclusive, are opposed to one another and have over the centuries spawned numerous cultural conflicts, never more so than in our own time. If philosophy demands a reflection on culture, it is no less true that philosophy itself functions as a primary factor in achieving the unification of culture’s symbolic forms. Without some metaphysical, that is, ultimate, foundation of this unifying synthesis the philosophical project itself is never fully justified. The Kantian premises of

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his philosophy prevented Cassirer from developing a metaphysics of culture. Yet many passages, philosophically closer to Hegel than to Kant, suggest his constant search for metaphysical ultimacy. Formally, however, Cassirer’s synthesis never surpassed the status of a regulative idea. The second question concerns the possibility of achieving a genuine metaphysical synthesis in the present age. Philosophy never originates in a vacuum: it is the ultimate reflection on what is, and that includes the culture that prevails at the time and in the place of reflection. For a metaphysical unity to be possible, the culture upon which philosophy reflects must already possess some basic coherence of its own. Irreconcilable oppositions constitute no problem to a cultural synthesis as long as the opponents remain capable of understanding one another. For that purpose the members of a cultural group need to agree on the most basic values and to share a vision of the real. Only the acceptance of such a common frame of reference makes the kind of cultural communication possible which philosophy presupposes. In the past, communication rested on the actual integration of the essential components of culture—the cosmic, the anthropological, and the transcendent—within a common worldview. In the cultural fragmentation of the modern age, however, the lack of such an integration deprives a metaphysical reflection on culture of its precondition. Comprehensive metaphysical systems, such as Aristotle, Aquinas, and Hegel construed, are no longer possible once the preliminary synthesis has ceased to exist. Metaphysics cannot ‘‘justify’’ a cultural unity that has disappeared. Here then lies the main obstacle to metaphysics in the modern age. Where the component principles of culture have become disrupted, the real itself no longer appears as a unified totality. We have ceased to experience the world as a unified whole, both intellectually and socially. Yet doing so is a precondition for the building of a metaphysics of culture. Instead, we tend to impose an ideological unity upon that world, often not more than a unifying myth, though not recognized as myth and therefore, as Cassirer warned, all the more dangerous. The conclusion follows that a genuine metaphysics of culture has become unattainable in our time.

Notes 1. Georg Simmel, The Condition of Modem Culture and Other Essays, trans. Peter Etzkorn (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968), 27–28. 2. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 348. 3. Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Bucherei, 1955), 233.

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4. José Ortega y Gasset, Toward a Philosophy of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1941), 212. 5. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 487. 6. David Carr, ‘‘Künstliche Vergangenheit,’’ in Dilthey und die Philosophie, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth (Munich: Karl Alber, 1985), 427. 7. Cassirer, ‘‘Paul Natorp,’’ Kantstudien 30 (1925): 282–83. On Cassirer’s critique of Natorp, Scheler, and Heidegger, cf. Irene Kajon, Il concetto dell’unità della cultura e il problema della trascendenza nella filosofia di Ernst Cassirer (Rome: Bulzoni, 1984), 149–70. 8. Paul Natorp, Vorlesungen über praktische Philosophie (Erlangen: Verlag der Philosophischen Akademie, 1925), 250. 9. Cassirer, ‘‘Paul Natorp,’’ 296. 10. Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1922–23), 3: 372. 11. Cassirer, ‘‘Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik,’’ Kantstudien 36 (1931): 13. 12. John Michael Krois, ‘‘Einleitung,’’ in Ernst Cassirer, Symbol, Technik, Sprache, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and John Michael Krois (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1985). 13. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on language, action, and Interpretation, ed., trans., and with intro. by John B. Thompson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 121.

P A R T

Problems in the Philosophical Interpretation of Culture

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‘‘Art’’ and ‘‘Science’’ in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms michael holquist

Whatever else one might say about him, Ernst Cassirer would seem indubitably to be a modern philosopher, not only in the contingency of his birth, but in the nature of his concerns. Like so many modernist artists, he is consumed by a passion to understand relations rather than things; thus it is not surprising that The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is a philosophy of culture. Not merely because its basic analytic tool is semiotic of a particular kind, but because of the urgency one senses on every page to connect regions that otherwise are in danger of falling into isolation from each other, especially the four worlds he identifies (again and again) as myth, religion, art, and science. Cassirer is overwhelmingly a philosopher of repair, one who seeks to stitch together elements that under the conditions of modern life have fallen away from each other. In this essay I would like to meditate on some of the ways the currently strained relation between the arts and the natural sciences might look within the overarching concept of culture proposed by Cassirer. At the heart of the work Cassirer did on the philosophy of science, and even more so in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, is a search for an algorithm of relation. His drive to make the body of culture whole again derives from what is arguably Cassirer’s fundamental insight: the key to all understanding is hidden in the specifics of how connections are made. He is obsessed by the strategies and masks of the copula.

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This drive to connect is one of the more productive ways Cassirer’s thought articulates his lifelong dialogue with Kant. They are both driven to strengthen the human capacity for synthesis, and they both perceive the results of the natural sciences in their own time as the ultimate challenge to any effort to unify sensation and intellect. Newtonian laws are important in Kant because —insofar as they are extrapersonal—they raise in the most fundamental way the question of how persons can know them. They are, in Kant’s term, transcendental in some sense, and yet a particular man, the offspring of Lincolnshire yeomen named Newton, born on Christmas Day in 1642, a creature inhabiting a unique body that ceased to function eighty-five years later in Kensington, made connection with, or ‘‘discovered,’’ those apparently universal laws. It is thus Newton the man in combination with the laws that bear his name who poses in the most acute form the dilemma that Kant addresses in his first Critique: ‘‘the possibility of connection at all’’ (die Möglichkeit einer Verbindung überhaupt) [B 129]. This overwhelming drive to bridge a chasm of difference, so great that many other thinkers declared it absolute, is arguably what most attracted Cassirer to Kant. Each devises quite different strategies for defending the priority of the act of relation over that which is related. I would like to touch briefly on these before examining the major topic of this chapter, the dilemma that reductionist claims for the uniqueness of the natural sciences among human endeavors continue to pose for any theory of culture that presumes to be holistic. I begin with Charles Hendel’s insight that ‘‘the schema’s the thing that caught the imagination of Cassirer.’’∞ Hendel is, of course, alluding to the chapter in the first Critique that opens the Analytic of Principles, which is devoted to schematization. This chapter has a place in Kant’s oeuvre similar to the Timeaeus in Plato, for just as Plato in that late work seeks finally to explain how it is that ideas and their reflections—for all their disparity—might still exist together in the same cosmos, Kant in the chapter on schematism spends his greatest energy trying to elucidate the simultaneity of timeless categories and the contingency of embodied experience. In the Transcendental Deduction, Kant had already argued (B 132–36) that: ‘‘The empirical consciousness, which accompanies various representations, is itself various and disunited and without reference to the identity of the subject. Such a relation takes place, not by my simply accompanying every relation with consciousness, but by my adding one to the other and being conscious of that act of adding, that is, of that synthesis.’’≤ The question then becomes how the universally valid categories can in fact be combined with the dense particularity of unique experience. Kant begins the chapter by restating the conditions of cognition: ‘‘In comprehending any object under a concept, the representation of the former must

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be homogeneous ( gleichartig) with the latter. . . . Thus, for instance, the empirical concept of a plate is homogeneous with the pure geometrical concept of a circle, the roundness of which is conceived in the first forming an object of intuition in the latter.’’≥ He concludes that ‘‘there must be some third thing homogeneous on the one side with the category, and on the other with the phenomenon, to render the application of the former to the latter possible. This intermediate representation must be pure (free from all that is empirical) and yet intelligible on the one side and sensuous on the other. Such a representation is the transcendental schema.’’∂ ‘‘Nun ist klar, dass es ein Drittes geben müsse, was einerseits mit der Kategorie, andererseits mit der Erscheinung in Gleichartigkeit stehen muss, und die Anwendung der ersteren auf die letzte möglich macht. Diese vermittelnde Vorstellung muss rein (ohne alles Empirische) and doch einerseits intellektuell, andererseits sinnlich sein. Eine solche ist das tranzendentale Schema.’’∑ There are many ways to specify this theory of the schema, but few have been satisfied with Kant’s own procedure (which we will here avoid). This is why later students have assigned it a special status in Kant scholarship, where it is regarded as particularly ‘‘controversial’’ or ‘‘mysterious.’’ Robert Pippen has remarked that it is ‘‘the most obscure chapter in the Critique . . . [which] has been called superfluous, unintelligible, an architectonic anachronism, as well as the most important in the Critique, the key to the central argument of the Analytic.’’∏ The basic problem of Kant’s schema is the difficulty encountered by anyone (including Kant himself) who tries to specify the nature of that thirdness that defines the infamous ‘‘third thing homogeneous on the one side with the category, and on the other with the phenomenon, to render the application of the former to the latter possible.’’ What can render this relation possible? Cassirer begins by accepting the primacy of relation and, as corollary, the question, if absolute identity is not possible, what is the nature of the claim therefore that nothing exists in isolation? He spent his life in pursuit of an answer to a simultaneity that permits difference while still guaranteeing connectedness. He is, of course, far from unique among modern philosophers in obsessing the mysteries of relation, particularly those who were concerned with epistemological challenges raised by the new discoveries in theoretical physics. Alfred North Whitehead, who, like Cassirer, devoted himself to thinking relation’s priority and who therefore also denounced the fiction of independent existence, stated the intrinsic connectedness of all knowledge as an axiom: ‘‘If anything out of relationship, then complete ignorance as to it.’’ Whitehead proposed to explain simultaneity’s thirdness by grounding it in mathematical operations, first in his examination of the logical bases of math-

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ematics (with Bertrand Russell) in the Principia Mathematica (1910) and later in less forbidding terms in Science and the Modern World (1925). In agreement with one of the great traditions in Western metaphysics that goes back at least to Plato, he argued that the power of mathematics to map the world in the natural sciences is explained by the purely relational aspect of numbers, untroubled by any extrasystemic contingency. ‘‘The originality of mathematics consists in the fact that in mathematical science connections between things are exhibited which, apart from the agency of human reason, are extremely unobvious.’’π Other modern thinkers also turn to mathematics as a ground for the primacy of relation, though perhaps less rigorously than Whitehead, as when Gaston Bachelard argues: ‘‘Put simply, algebra contains all relations and nothing but relations.’’∫ But by privileging one system of symbols so completely over all others, Whitehead lost the ability to do the very thing that leads him finally to mathematics: that is, to show how structure could connect with event (or, as Cassirer would say, he lost the capacity to fuse Geist with Leben). It is here, of course, that Cassirer makes his intervention. Instead of turning to mathematics itself as the key to simultaneity, Cassirer seeks to define symbol in such a way that number will simply be one of its instantiations, an undertaking that inevitably involves a turn to theories of language. Kant’s death in 1804 preceded the rise of modern, scientific linguistics. He had no chance to incorporate the powerful new insights into the formal properties of language adduced by Franz Bopp, the brothers Grimm, and, above all, Wilhelm von Humboldt. Humboldt was first to point out the absence in Kant of any attempt to formulate the place of language in the transcendental aesthetic. (Humboldt’s path-breaking ‘‘Introduction to the Kawi-work’’ [1835] is articulated within a self-consciously neo-Kantian framework, which is well documented to have influenced Cassirer as well.) Cassirer, of course, takes full advantage of all that the new science of linguistics could provide for a theory of symbol. It would, however, be incorrect to interpret his move as simply introducing language into Kant’s system as the means through which syntheses and judgment are articulated. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Cassirer reconsiders the problem Kant poses by legislating a gap between mind and world in light of the new limiting term of culture, where culture is understood as the tensile unity of discursive systems, which are viewed by other thinkers as increasingly isolated from each other. One of the more powerful insights of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is contained in its recognition that what appear to be mutually exclusive activities, such as religious ritual and scientific research, are related to each other through their filiation in the same need, namely, to over-

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come the gap between mind and world, and through the turn each makes to the same solution for meeting that need: systematization through symbol formation. As Cassirer says in volume 1: ‘‘Every authentic function of the human spirit has this decisive characteristic in common with cognition: it does not merely copy but rather embodies an original, formative power. It does not express passively the mere fact that something is present but contains an independent energy of the human spirit through which the simple presence of the phenomenon assumes a definite ‘meaning,’ a particular ideational content. This is as true of art as it is of cognition; it is as true of myth as of religion.’’Ω Since what had been said by Kant of cognition is now understood to extend to myth, language, religion, art, and science, Cassirer concludes that ‘‘the critique of reason becomes the critique of culture.’’∞≠ But what can ground a ‘‘critique of culture’’? It cannot be logic, the postulate of traditional philosophy, for ‘‘the universality of the logical form threatens ultimately to efface the individuality of each special province and the specificity of its principle—but if we immerse ourselves in this individuality and persevere in our examination of it, we run the risk of losing ourselves and of finding no way back to the universal. An escape from this methodological dilemma is possible only if we can discover a factor which recurs in each basic cultural form, but in no two of them does it take exactly the same shape.’’∞∞ That factor is, of course, the symbol. It is significant, however, that when Cassirer finally comes to introduce this term, he does so not by appealing to philosophers of language, but to Heinrich Hertz and Hermann von Helmholtz.∞≤ He does so for reasons that have to do with the way in which he locates the place of the natural sciences in the spectrum of culture. For, with most others, he assumes that the work of physics in its modern phase exemplifies the most advanced form in the process whereby symbols are systematically deployed. If myth is prior to language, but deeply implicated in its earliest stages, then science can be posited at the other extreme of developments in the use of symbols. Thus, if the fundamental status of the symbol can be derived from its use in physics (something Cassirer had already indicated in his earlier work devoted more exclusively to the sciences, such as Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff [1910] or Zur Einstein’schen Relativitätstheorie [1921]), its relevance to earlier formations of culture, such as religion and art, would be more apparent than would have been the case had he derived the symbol from them. The importance of Hertz in this undertaking consists in his discovery that the phenomena he was describing were not physical objects but were products of his own concepts. These, Hertz recognizes, are fictions insofar as ‘‘Cognition devises them in order to dominate the world of sensory experience and

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survey it as a world ordered by law, but nothing in the sensory data themselves immediately corresponds to them, yet although there is no such correspondence—and perhaps precisely because there is none—the conceptual world of physics is . . . contained. Each particular concept, each special fiction and sign is like the articulated word of a language meaningful in itself and ordered according to fixed rules.’’∞≥ There are two points here that bear on any discussion of Cassirer’s potential usefulness in clarifying the current situation in what have come to be called cultural studies. The first of these is that culture is conceived as a whole, with differences between its expressions but no absolute cut offs between them; and, second, that the category for insuring this tensile unity, the symbol, is derived (in its initial formulation in the first volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms) from the theory and practice of the exact sciences: ‘‘What the physicist seeks in phenomena is a statement of their necessary connection.’’∞∂ These two aspects of Cassirer’s argument are important because in our own time the possibility of conceiving culture as a whole has begun to recede as never before. This condition has arisen not because of arguments by quondam cultural critics, who oppose any unifying gesture in principle, although such arguments abound. Arguably more important is the role increasingly played by natural scientists in these developments, for it is precisely they who have forgotten the lessons of Hertz and Helmholtz and who now make reductionist claims for an absolute cutoff between the world revealed by their activity and the activity of all others. Cassirer’s undertaking could thus hardly be more urgent. Geistesgeschichte and the philosophy of culture have been all but swept away by the emergence of a far more inchoate phenomenon, loosely called ‘‘cultural studies,’’ a rapidly growing professional formation still without a commonly agreed upon theory to guide its practice. Part of the problem is explained by the changing role of ‘‘culture’’ as a category of explanation. As a recent observer of the phenomenon has commented: ‘‘Culture (however defined—as a system of signs, a coherent order of meanings, an interpretive paradigm, a set of logical principles ingrained within and orienting social action, etc.), conceived as embedded in practices and inalienable from them, is less something to be explained than [it is something] vital in [the process of ] explanation [itself ].’’∞∑ That is, a major question currently posed to any concept of culture is its ability to explain its own capacity to comprehend the extraordinarily enhanced knowledge we have not only of ourselves but of our world. For all its apparent voraciousness, cultural studies had until recently excluded one important item from the list of its targets, namely, the natural sciences. Beginning in the late 1970s, the work of such pioneering figures as

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Donna Haraway, Lynda Birke, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sandra Harding, a feminist group within cultural studies, had questioned claims to the universality of the natural sciences on the basis of gender. But increasingly it has been recognized that, for any analysis wishing to base its authority on the constructed aspects of human knowledge, far more than gender issues are involved in the preeminent role enjoyed by scientists in our society. Where science is taken to represent the most definitive version of nature, it must sooner or later come to be perceived as the ultimate affront to the epistemological assumptions of those who claim that culture is ‘‘the very ground of being and practice.’’∞∏ Thus it is not surprising that an increasingly large number of cultural critics have begun to address science as their main target across a wide spectrum of academic disciplines, resulting in the formation of a new specialty: ‘‘science studies.’’ Social Text, a canonical journal within cultural studies, recently published what might be thought of as a manifesto for the movement. It was in this issue (spring/summer 1996) that Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, published a hilariously (and intentionally) wrong-headed paper, ‘‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,’’∞π which he later denounced in the pages of Lingua Franca. Sokal’s prank set off a firestorm, with articles on the front page of the New York Times (18 May 1996), in the New York Review of Books, and in the popular press, all of which have had the lugubrious effect of affirming the subtitle of the issue of Social Text where Sokal’s piece appeared: we are indeed in the midst of ‘‘science wars.’’ The whole affair will no doubt soon blow over (if it has not done so already), but the issues that have been raised in the various debates set off by the hoax will continue to haunt us for a long time to come. One reason for thinking so is that the same issues have cast their shadow over the academy since at least the sixteenth century. Thus the title of Sokal’s piece may be the one thing about it that has an undeniable validity: the issues he has raised are indeed about ‘‘rethinking the boundaries,’’ particularly the boundaries between science and the rest of culture. Inasmuch as this is the case, the whole affair may be historically grasped as yet another skirmish in a long series of battles that have swirled around the question of science’s place in the spectrum of culture. This conflict has in many ways defined modern philosophy and a not inconsiderable portion of theoretical physics as, either intentionally or unwittingly, neo-Kantian. And, of course, no one was more deeply committed to the project of grounding the phenomenon of culture than Ernst Cassirer. It may well be that the full power of his work will only now be appreciated as providing a kind of map that can help us find our way in the shattered landscape that the term ‘‘culture’’ cur-

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rently struggles to designate. Before suggesting some of the reasons why this might be the case, let me describe what I regard as the particular aspect of a more general crisis in representation that Cassirer’s achievement may help us resolve. One chief reason why culture as a construct is now so embattled is due to the fact that its capacity to include all that humans make has never been more severely challenged by the claims of our most distinguished scientists that what makes their work important is precisely that aspect of it which is not human. One of the most eminent of those who hold this view, and without doubt the most influential, is Steven Weinberg, winner of both a Nobel Prize and the National Medal of Science for his work in suggesting how the two great physical theories of our time, Einstein’s theory of special relativity and quantum theory—seen as mutually contradictory by some, including Einstein himself—might nevertheless be merged into a single theory. This merger has been far more difficult to achieve than physicists at first expected, largely because fields and particles were conceived as distinct from each other. Weinberg played a key role in the later stages of a breakthrough recognition that particle and field are complimentary manifestations of the same thing. Thus, while Weinberg is chiefly important in the evolution of physics as a great unifier (his latest book is entitled Dreams of a Final Theory),∞∫ who seeks to understand the place of science in general within the spectrum of other human endeavors, he is the chief spokesman for the particular dualism that says there is an utter cut-off between science and all other manifestations of human culture. Other scientists, such as the biochemist Jacques Monod (another Nobel laureate), might argue with some trepidation that ‘‘By a single stroke [science] claimed to sweep away the tradition of a hundred thousand years, which had become one with human nature itself. It wrote an end to the ancient animist covenant between man and nature, leaving nothing in place of that precious bond but an anxious quest in a frozen universe of solitude.’’∞Ω But Weinberg, while holding to the same view, evaluates it in quite different terms. In effect, like a stern scoutmaster he admonishes even such other scientists as Monod to pull up their socks and take responsibility for the manly stoicism that science requires: ‘‘The laws of nature are . . . impersonal and free of human values. . . . We didn’t want it to come out this way, but it did. . . . The whole system of the visible stars stands revealed as only a small part of the spiral of one of a huge number of galaxies, extending away from us in all directions. Nowhere do we see human value or human meaning.’’≤≠ ‘‘Nowhere do we see human value or human meaning’’—does this not utterly deny any connection between science and the rest of culture? And if

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there were any doubt, Weinberg has recently made clear that not only is there an absolute gap between science and all other human undertaking, but that such a gap is necessary: ‘‘I think that an essential element needed in the birth of modern science was the creation of a gap between the world of physical science and the world of human culture. Endless trouble has been produced throughout history by the effort to draw moral or cultural lessons from discoveries of science . . . [the split between science and the rest of culture] is a much-needed gap.’’≤∞ Such claims make clear that the chief task of any contemporary theory of culture must be to achieve a holism capable of closing this particular gap, which Weinberg celebrates in the name of science. It is here that Cassirer’s emphasis on the fundamental role of symbolizing processes in human activity holds out a glimmer of hope, first of all because it is a theory that is unashamedly holistic, without at the same time seeking to homogenize different kinds of activity into a glutinous unity. What he offers is a spectrum of differences, but a spectrum without an absolute gap. It is a supple system that presupposes a range of possible relations between mind, body, and world, that maps its categories both in time and across the range of cultural practices as they present themselves at any given moment in history. At one extreme would be those activities governed by an unperceived (or, in later stages, actively suppressed) awareness of a noncorrespondence between words and things. This is, of course, the Adamic realm of myth, the symbolic form whose meaning and objective forming activity can be understood, not by just conceiving it ‘‘as a form of perception or thought, but by conceiving it as an original ‘form of life.’ . . . It does not ‘have’ these as objects; rather, it is in them, has entered into them and is interwoven with them.’’≤≤ Religion is marked off as a related but separate sphere insofar as a constitutive aspect of its activity is an attempt to recognize gaps in the possibility of subsuming things in words. Yet nevertheless it devotes its energies to a subsumption of such differences within a transcendence of one kind or another. Because of limited space, we will overlook some of the intermediate steps that preoccupy Cassirer and go to the other end of the spectrum, to the activity of the exact sciences, where the greatest degree of distance between systematic symbolization and bodily sensation is achieved. On the one hand, this spectrum can be perceived vertically as a movement in time, where even logic has its history. ‘‘Ancient logic is entirely founded on the relation of subject and predicate . . . it seeks finally to grasp the absolute and essential properties of absolute self-existent substances. Modern logic, on the contrary . . . comes more and more to abandon this ideal and to be made into a pure doctrine of form and relation.’’≤≥ Cassirer makes the radical argument that this spectrum is one in which none

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of its parts is ever completely overcome. Myth does not fall away in modern culture. Rather, it is in constant dialectic with other forms of expression, including science, where its presence is marked most conspicuously by the never sublated need to suppress its insidious call to presence. Thus ‘‘science,’’ as Cassirer uses the term, no matter how particularized his instantiation of it is in his different books, is always the place name for a particular locus on the map of culture: it is where disembodied mind has its fullest expression. As such, it is a terminus of constantly expanding possibilities that is opposed at the opposite end of the spectrum by all those activities that Cassirer calls ‘‘myth.’’ Is this, then, just another way of imposing a binary structure upon the mind-body relation, that for all its vast learning and rhetorical cogency merely produces a different dualism? It is in asking such a question that the category of art as used by Cassirer takes on its fullest cogency. Of all the various ways in which thirdness operates in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to establish copulation in all its relational suppleness, art and the aesthetic are surely the most important. Most accounts of art in Cassirer tend to portray it as significant because it is the place where the two polarities of myth and science, which come to dominate the philosophy of symbolic forms, find their most equally supportive union. And there is much to support this view. Consider only the argument at the end of volume 2 where Cassirer writes, ‘‘it is characteristic of the aesthetic trend that here the image is recognized purely as such . . . to fulfill its function it need give up nothing of itself and its content . . . [for myth there is always a great problem], again and again the question of the truth of its meaning content [shifts] into the question of the reality of its objects, at which it faces the problem of ‘existence’ in all its harshness. It is only the aesthetic consciousness that leaves this problem truly behind it. Since from the outset it gives itself to pure ‘contemplation,’ developing the form of vision in contrast to all forms of action, the images fashioned in this frame of consciousness gain for the first time a truly immanent significance. They confess themselves to be illusion as opposed to the empirical reality of things.’’≤∂ It is here that a different configuration of science begins to manifest itself within the spectrum of Cassirer’s thinking and in so doing to suggest one of the ways in which his philosophy of culture may be of particular relevance in current debates about the incapacity of the covering term ‘‘culture’’ to include the work of the exact sciences. For it is not the mythic, finally, that stands in the most radical opposition to science, and vice versa. Rather, insofar as the aesthetic is the confession of its own illusion, it is art that stands over against both myth and science—and all other cultural forms as well. If it is the case that myth is a condition in which the forms of things are not recognized as such, but are confused with things, is not

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the kind of claim now being made by such scientists as Weinberg for the uniqueness of science then mythic to a profound degree? The nature of this reductionist claim is that those who make it have the right to dream of a final theory because the truth at the heart of their enterprise is the fundamental truth, one not available to the vagaries of the merely stochastic as it is present in other forms of symbolization. It is mythic, in other words, because, like myth, it has suppressed mediation and forgotten its own lessons about the power of relation over substance. Thus the place of art in Cassirer’s spectrum can be read as that which stands in opposition to both myth and science in the degree to which the aesthetic, in its recognition of illusion, presents the most powerful affront to absolutist pretensions, whether in myth, theology, or physics. It is the constant reminder that there must be a gap in all relations, it is the structured knowledge of undecidablity. Not the least virtue of Cassirer’s theory of culture is that it is itself a dream of a final theory, but it is one in which finality is merely the temporal product of relation. Thus it is utterly appropriate that, in final volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, he should summarize much of what he has been meditating over the full course of the four volumes by quoting a poet, in this case not his beloved Goethe, but Byron, when he says in ‘‘Manfred’’: But grief should be the Instructor of the Wise; Sorrow is Knowledge: who know the most Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.≤∑

Notes 1. Charles W. Hendel, ‘‘Introduction,’’ PSF, 1: 14. 2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Max Müller (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), 78. Cf. the later translation [1929] of Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965), 153; in German, B 133. References to the German are based on: Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Ingeborg Heidemann (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966). 3. B 173, Müller, 121; Kemp Smith, 178. 4. A 138/B 177, Müller, 122; Kemp Smith, 181. 5. Ibid. 6. Robert B. Pippen, Kant’s Theory of Form: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 124. 7. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillian, 1925), 19. 8. Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit (1934), trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon, 1984), 29.

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9. PSF, 1: 78. 10. PSF, 1: 80. 11. PSF, 1: 84. 12. PSF, 1: 75–76, 85. 13. PSF, 1: 85. 14. PSF, 1: 85. 15. Bruce Kapferer, ‘‘Foreword,’’ in Creating Culture, ed. Diane J. Austin-Broos (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987), x. 16. Kapferer, ‘‘Foreword,’’ ix. 17. Knowingly or not, Sokal’s title paraphrases the title of another book, Redrawing the Boundaries, an anthology published with the majesty of the Modern Language Association’s imprimatur and nervously addressed to many of the issues raised by science studies. Bruce Robbins, an editor of Social Text, is one the contributors to the MLA volume. Cf. Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: Modern Language Association, 1992). 18. Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992). 19. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (New York: Knopf, 1971), 172. 20. Steven Weinberg, ‘‘Reflections of a Working Scientist,’’ Daedalus 103 (1974): 43. Emphasis added. 21. Steven Weinberg, ‘‘Reply,’’ New York Review of Books 43, no. 15 (3 October 1996): 55. 22. PSF, 4: 19. 23. Ernst Cassirer, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, trans. William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (New York: Dover Books, 1923), 389. 24. PSF, 2: 261. In making this argument, Cassirer makes evident an otherwise unexpected link to those who have argued for ‘‘literariness’’ as a fundamental tool in interpretation not confined to the study of what at any particular historical moment is contingently designated ‘‘literature.’’ Compare, for instance, Roman Jakobson’s assertion that poetic function is ‘‘set [Einstellung] toward the message’’ (‘‘Linguistics and Poetics,’’ in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987], 69), or Paul de Man’s claim that ‘‘whenever . . . [the] autonomous potential of language can be revealed by analysis, we are dealing with literariness’’ (‘‘The Resistance to Theory,’’ The Resistance to Theory [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], 10). 25. Lord Byron, ‘‘Manfred, A Dramatical Poem,’’ quoted by Cassirer, PSF, 4: 23.

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It is often forgotten that Cassirer’s ‘‘critique of culture’’ entails a ‘‘critique of the subject’’ of culture: for culture exists only insofar as an individual subject actively engages with other subjects in its continual construction and reconstruction. For the most part, however, Cassirer speaks about the subject of culture in the most general and abstract of terms: it is the anonymous force of the ‘‘energy of Geist’’ that constitutes the cultural world. The task of the philosophy of symbolic forms, as a ‘‘critique of culture,’’ as a philosophy of Geist, is to establish the structure of the different forms of objective spirit and to determine their specific function within the whole of culture. The focus is thus placed upon determining the nature of language, myth, art, religion, and science and not upon determining the nature of the individual subject from whose activity these cultural forms emerge and whose objective expression they constitute. When Cassirer wrote The Logic of the Sciences of Culture in spring 1940, he was very much preoccupied by the dramatic events of his time.∞ In this historical context Cassirer’s attention shifted more and more toward the problems of ethics and subsequently toward the role of the individual subject in the constitution of the cultural world. The accent is now placed more explicitly than it had been in the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms on the activity of the individual subject as the active agent of culture. But the precise nature and

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status of the subject nevertheless remains vague and undeveloped in Cassirer’s account. What is more, the dynamic relation between the individual subject and culture proves to be paradoxical, to say the least. Cassirer’s conception of the subject must reconcile two seemingly contradictory theses within his philosophy. On the one hand, Cassirer maintains that it is the cultural world of symbolic forms that differentiates and determines the individual qua individual. Prior to the activity of the cultural forms there is no human subject to speak of. We are always already within culture and determined by culture. The different cultural forms are, in other words, the precondition for all human subjectivity whatsoever, the subject being nothing more than the effect of culture. On the other hand, the world of culture exits only in and through the activity of individual subjects. Language exists only insofar as it is spoken. The formations of objective spirit that are no longer animated by the activity of living subjects stand before us as dead things belonging to the mere physical world. Here the thesis is reversed and it is culture that becomes the product of the subject. Is it I who speaks through language, or is it language that speaks through me? How, in other terms, do I constitute the cultural world that constitutes me as an historical and cultural subject? The situation remains paradoxical only as long as we continue to assume that the subject is either fully determined or absolutely free: as long as we understand the subject as either the simple effect of structure or as a free entity existing independently of and prior to culture and other subjects. As we shall see, however, the Cassirerian subject is both culturally determined and free to determine its culture: free to determine its own determination. It exists only in a community of subjects, and in the final analysis is nothing other than its relation to an Other, and in fact to a whole series of others as a member of this series. Radically split and decentered, the subject never falls absolutely together with itself and is therefore alienated from itself. The following reflections on the nature of the subject implicit in Cassirer’s theory of culture cannot hope to exhaust the problem here. Rather, they aim only to establish a direction of research that must be completed by a more comprehensive analysis.≤ We begin our consideration of the subject by way of a reflection on Cassirer’s concept of life and organic being, for the individual subject is above all a living organic being. For Cassirer, the life of spirit obeys the same laws of formation that apply to all forms of life.≥ Whereas biology undertakes a ‘‘morphology’’ of the natural organism, the philosophy of symbolic forms undertakes a ‘‘morphology of spirit.’’∂ The pure ‘‘formless life’’ of Bergson’s élan vital never exists; it is a philosophical hypothesis and abstraction.∑ What exists

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is always a life-form. There exists within life itself the impulse toward its own exteriorization, a ‘‘will to attain its own self-representation, its own selfobjectification, its own ‘visibility.’ ’’∏ ‘‘Life cannot apprehend itself by remaining absolutely within itself. It must give itself form; for it is precisely by this ‘otherness’ of form that it gains its ‘visibility,’ if not its reality.’’π The form of life provides life with the structure and unity of a being. Each life-form proves to be organic, ‘‘a self-enclosed world in which everything ‘weaves itself into the whole.’ The organism is no aggregate of parts, but a system of functions which condition each other.’’∫ Although Cassirer is summarizing here Jakob von Uexküll’s definition of the ‘‘organic forms’’ of nature, this definition applies equally well to the structure of the symbolic forms of spirit. Not only does each symbolic form constitute a self-enclosed world of meaning, but the whole of spirit as such ‘‘forms a coherent whole in which all the parts are interdependent upon each other.’’Ω The cultural world as a whole constitutes a ‘‘system of functions’’ in which each symbolic form defines itself according to its function and ‘‘place’’ in this organic totality.∞≠ But in what way does the animal symbolicum differ from other living organisms? How are the ‘‘symbolic forms’’ of spirit distinguished from the ‘‘organic forms’’ of nature? Cassirer locates the differentia specifica between the natural world and the spiritual world of culture in a characteristic ‘‘change in function’’ that occurs when we pass from the one sphere to the other.∞∞ Spirit is able to secure itself a new ‘‘freedom’’ which is denied to the physical world of things and the animal world of mere impulses and instincts. The natural world is a world of pure determination. In the physical world the particular object is wholly determined by certain universal laws. Each particular planet, for example, follows a given trajectory that is determined for it according to its unique place within the solar system. The movement of each planet and of the solar system as a whole is the direct objective expression of the Kepler’s rules of motion and Newton’s law of gravitation. We can therefore predict with absolute precision the celestial movement of each planet. The ‘‘particular ‘instances’ can be deductively derived’’ from a universal ‘‘law’’ that governs the whole.∞≤ In the animal world we discover a progressive movement toward a greater autonomy of the individual organism within the determining form of its species. The higher and more complex the life-form, the more autonomy the particular organism has in its reactions to the world. Here we can only predict approximately how any particular animal will react to any given situation. Each individual organism ‘‘answers’’ the world a bit differently from every other organism: ‘‘even organisms, for all the determination of their form, possess a peculiar freedom.’’∞≥

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Each particular animal ‘‘perceives’’ and ‘‘lives in’’ a world that is preformed for it by the nature of its species.∞∑ Although in their basic orientation, in their manner of responding to the world no two animals are ever precisely the same, the specific differences between them are unimportant. Here, as in the physical world of objects, the activity of the particular represents an objective expression of the universal law, determining its nature from which it cannot deviate nor alter. ‘‘The variations which realize themselves in individual specimens within the sphere of the plant and animal world remain biologically insignificant; they emerge, only to vanish again.’’∞∏ When we turn to the life of spirit, however, we discover that the individual acquires a new autonomy and freedom. Here ‘‘the activity of the individual is linked to the whole in a totally different and more profound way.’’∞π Each individual plays an active role in the formation of the form of humanity itself.∞∫ The path that the individual must follow is not entirely predetermined for it in advance. In contrast to the world of nature, spirit must seek its own path by forming it along the way; and in fact spirit exists only insofar as it is creative and productive. The different symbolic forms are thus not fixed predetermined paths that must be followed, but rather different modes of pathmaking. They are not so much predetermined worlds as universal ways of making worlds. We see that the ‘‘mode of action’’ has taken on a new temporal orientation. In nature all animal actions are essentially ‘‘reactions’’ to something immediately present. The specifically human mode of ‘‘action’’ takes its orientation not from the present, but from the ‘‘future.’’ All human action is characterized by an ‘‘intent’’ (Absicht) that embodies a certain ‘‘fore-sight’’ (Voraus-Sicht): ‘‘The impulse does not originate only from the spur of the present, but belongs also to the future, which must in some way be ‘anticipated’ in order to become effective in this manner. This ‘representation’ of the future characterizes all human action. We must place something not yet existing before ourselves in ‘images,’ in order, then, to proceed from this ‘possibility’ to the ‘reality,’ from potency to act.’’∞Ω It is necessary here to distinguish between ‘‘form’’ and ‘‘style.’’ What the individual’s activity determines is not the form of seeing, but rather its style.

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Each symbolic form constitutes a specific mode of seeing and understanding. There is, for example, a ‘‘perspective of language’’ that distinguishes it from every other mode of seeing.≤≠ What distinguishes one language from another, however, is not its form, nor its structural function within culture as a whole, but rather the specific Weltanschauung that it constitutes: ‘‘each linguistic form expresses its own ‘world view,’ a certain fundamental direction of thinking and representing.’’≤∞ To characterize this difference between the generic form of seeing and the specific Weltanschauung or direction of thinking and representation of any given language, Cassirer appears to have introduced the concept of ‘‘style.’’≤≤ The different symbolic forms thus determine the different universal modes of seeing and understanding, which are the same for every culture, as for every human being, but it is the unique ‘‘style’’ of this seeing and understanding that distinguishes one mode of seeing of from another.≤≥ Cassirer illustrates this through the example of Jacob Burckhardt’s portrayal of the ‘‘Renaissance man.’’ What we find here, Cassirer maintains, are the qualities that define the individual subject of the Renaissance against the subject of the Middle Ages. This Renaissance style does not ‘‘determine’’ the various individual subjects, but only ‘‘characterizes’’ them. No historical person actually embodies all the traits that define this specific cultural outlook. When we examine any number of specific individuals of the period (Leonardo da Vinci, Aretino, Marsiglio Ficino, Machiavelli, etc.), we perceive them not only as being ‘‘thoroughly different’’ but even ‘‘opposed’’ to one another. [And yet] what we assert of them is just this, that, this opposition notwithstanding, and indeed perhaps just through it, they stand in a certain ideal connection to one another; that each in his own way cooperates in the construction of what we call the ‘‘spirit’’ of the Renaissance or the culture of the Renaissance. It is a unity of direction, not a unity of being which is expressed in this way. The particular individuals belong together—not because they are alike or resemble each other, but because they cooperate in a common task, which, in contrast to the Middle Ages, we sense to be new and to be the distinctive ‘‘meaning’’ of the Renaissance. All genuine concepts of style in the sciences of culture reduce, when analyzed more precisely, to such concepts of meaning.≤∂

A style is thus an individual manifestation of the universal form of the symbolic function. It is a particular way of seeing, a unique orientation of awareness that is indistinguishable from the subject precisely because it constitutes the individual perspective of the subject. ‘‘In this respect, Goethe was right in saying that style rests in the deepest foundations of knowledge, in the very essence of things, insofar as we are permitted to have knowledge of it through visible and tangible forms.’’≤∑ It is a particular ‘‘feeling of life’’ (Le-

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bensgefühls)≤∏ that weaves the myriad of different life-moments into the unity of a direction that determines these various moments as belonging to one and the same life. In other words, it is the unity that constitutes the identity of a life-form. Cassirer would thus fully agree with Lacan when he says that ‘‘le style, c’est l’homme même.’’ This ‘‘feeling of life’’ manifests itself as that dimension of meaning which Cassirer calls ‘‘expression.’’ In expression it is ‘‘the certainty of living efficacy that we experience.’’≤π It is the awareness of this ‘‘living efficacy’’ which provides our perception of the world with the liveliness of a lived experience that assures us of our own unique existence, our own lived self-affectivity. ‘‘What is primarily apprehended here is life as such far more than any individual spheres or centers of life.’’≤∫ The passage from the natural world to the specifically human world is brought about in the moment when the ‘‘unitary life stream’’≤Ω of expression is differentiated and determined through the ‘‘image of life’’ provided by the symbolic function. It is only through the representational force of language and art that a distance from the immediacy of life is achieved. ‘‘A life in ‘meanings’ supplants the life of mere impulses, of being absorbed by the immediate impression and into the various needs.’’≥≠ At first, however, this determination remains firmly within the sphere of expression. The world that is formed is a concrete life-world of spirit, or what Cassirer calls the world of myth. The mythical world, as a form of life, remains bound to the ‘‘sphere of efficacy.’’≥∞ Within the mythical sphere ‘‘to be real’’ is ‘‘to be effective.’’≥≤ Here, the cultural meaning that has differentiated and determined the unitary life stream is ‘‘perceived,’’ or better lived, as the meaning of life itself. If the cultural process were to end here, there would be no essential difference between the mythical human world and the biological world of nature. And in fact Cassirer often speaks of the mythical world as a ‘‘biological’’ world.≥≥ There occurs, however, a second movement that is already implicit in the first in which the reflective and critical forces reveal the mythical world to be the work of spirit and thus render spirit conscious of its own subjectivity. ‘‘Thus although myth, language and art interpenetrate one another in their concrete historical manifestations, the relation between them reveals a definite systematic gradation, an ideal progression toward a point where the spirit not only is and lives in its own creations, its self-created symbols, but also knows them for what they are. Or, as Hegel set out to show in his Phänomenologie des Geistes: the aim of spiritual development is that spiritual reality be apprehended and expressed not merely as substance but ‘equally as subject.’ ’’≥∂ At this point it is necessary to insist upon the fact that the subject is ‘‘split’’ by the representational force of the symbolic function.≥∑ The various symbolic

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forms are the preconditions for this separation. The individual too cannot remain within itself, as a being-in-itself, but must express itself in objective form not only in order to become a being-for-itself, but also in order to become a being for and with others. Only in this way can the individual obtain selfknowledge and be known by others. ‘‘For the ‘conversation of the soul with itself’ is only possible if the soul, as it were, splits itself. . . . In soliloquy the soul ceases to be a mere particular, an ‘individual.’ It becomes a ‘person’—in the basic etymological meaning of the word, which goes back to the mask and the role of the actor.’’≥∏ As we shall see, it is in and through the mythical process, which in the final analysis manifests itself as a cult of the mask, that the individual acquires a persona. But as we shall also see, the subject never falls entirely together with this mask, and the recognition of this fact plays an important role in the life of the subject: for it is only insofar as the subject is able to see beyond the objective expression of its mask that it is able to make the life from which this objective expression originally emerged visible again. However, at the same time the subject can never directly see beyond the mask, and so there always remains a certain degree of ‘‘alienation’’: ‘‘every initial expression is already the beginning of an alienation. It is the destiny and, in a certain sense, the immanent tragedy of every spiritual form that it can never overcome this inner tension. With the resolution of the tension the life of spirit would also be extinguished; for the life of spirit consists in this very act of severing what is so that it can, in turn, even more securely unite what has been severed.’’≥π In the mythico-religious process we can follow the differentiation of the subject from the feeling of life to the awareness and knowledge of self. It is important to emphasize here that the representation of the ‘‘I’’ as the living and active subject is not the beginning of the mythical process, its terminus a quo, but rather its end, its terminus ad quem. Everything begins from the universal feeling of life which is not yet differentiated into either an awareness of a self, an other, or an objective world of objects. ‘‘Life is still a single unbroken stream of becoming, a dynamic flow which only very gradually divides into separate waves.’’≥∫ ‘‘In myth we can still look directly into the growth of the more stable eddies which gradually detach themselves from the continuum of the life stream. We can see how, from life as a whole, from its undifferentiated totality, which along with the human world also contains the world of animals and plants, one’s own being and also a form of what is human rises up and separates out only very slowly.’’≥Ω In his study of myth Cassirer demonstrates this progressive movement by which mythical consciousness gives expression to this feeling of life and in so doing gives form to humanity. At first it appears as a ‘‘nameless presence,’’∂≠ as ‘‘a whispering or rustling in the woods, a

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shadow darting over the ground, a light flickering on the water.’’∂∞ Slowly this image becomes the figure of the totem plant or animal, and finally the figure of the god. We cannot follow this movement in all its detail here. In each case the mythical figure functions to condense and objectify the feeling of life into an ‘‘idea of life’’ which provides this feeling with the unity and form of an objective and enduring existence. In this way centers of life are formed within the stream of life. The cult around these mythical figures forms the basis of all mythical activity. ‘‘The cult is man’s active relation to his gods.’’∂≤ It is ‘‘the eternal process of the subject making itself identical with the essence of its being.’’∂≥ In the enacting of the sacred drama, for example, the dancer does not represent the mythical figure, the totem, the god of the clan, but rather becomes the figure itself.∂∂ In and through this ‘‘act of identification man asserts his fundamental unity with his human or animal ancestors’’ and at the same time ‘‘identifies his own life with the life of nature.’’∂∑ Each particular clan possesses its own particular totem. [In] the choice of a totem animal . . . a specific life attitude and spiritual attitude is represented and objectified . . . the relationship between the clan itself and its totem animal is so close that it is hard to decide whether the clan chooses a particular totem animal according to its own character or whether it has not rather molded itself according to the character of the animal; warlike clans and occupations correspond to wild, powerful animals and peaceful clans and occupations to tame animals. It would seem as though the clan saw itself objectively in its totem animal, as though it recognized its nature, its particularity, its basic trend of action in the animal.∂∏

In the mythical figure what the individual recognizes is the vitality of life, the universal feeling of life or that living efficacy that it is. But because mythical consciousness lacks the ability to distinguish between the image and the real, between the means of representation and that which is represented it takes the image for the real. ‘‘From this point of view the relation between the ‘image’ and the ‘thing’ insofar as the two are differentiated must actually be reversed. The image must assert a peculiar primacy over the thing.’’∂π The image thus forms the feeling of life into an objective presence. It is here that the work of language and aesthetic imagination comes into play. For ‘‘the god acquires full individuality only through his name and image.’’∂∫ The representational forces of language and art give objective form to the intuition of life in mythical consciousness and thus lend it the stability necessary for it to become objectively present. ‘‘The true foundation, the legitimation, of this union [between language and art] is found only if we understand both language and art as basic ways of objectification, of raising consciousness to the level of seeing

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objects. This raising is in the end possible only when the ‘discursive’ thinking in language and the ‘intuitive’ activity of artistic seeing and creating interact so as together to weave the cloak of ‘reality.’ ’’∂Ω ‘‘Word magic and image magic stand in the center of the magical world view.’’∑≠ Hence why when we first observe a culture other than our own we see only the linguistic and aesthetic forms of a culturally determined comportment; while from within the natural attitude of our own culture we are wholly unaware of such cultural determinations. Blinded by the transparency of our own self-affectivity we are unable to recognize the presence of the cultural forms that give this self-affectivity its visibility, if not its reality. At the mythical level ‘‘the feeling of self is immediately fused with the feeling of community. The I feels and knows itself only insofar as it takes itself as a member of a community, insofar as it sees itself grouped with others into a unity of a family, a tribe, a social organism.’’∑∞ In and through the sacred act the individual is able to internalize the image of life that comes to function as its ‘‘alter ego,’’ thus establishing its identity as a ‘‘link in the chain of life.’’∑≤ Here the subject is, as Lacan would say, more subjected to culture than the subject of culture. The subject, however, is not its alter ego. This ego is an objective image that provides the subject with a purely functional unity.∑≥ It is the mask, the persona of the subject that renders the subject visible to itself and to others. The subject can know itself only in the reflection of this mask.∑∂ The mask is a product of the subject, a work that has been fabricated from the raw material of culture. The subject takes up the linguistic and aesthetic forms of culture in which it recognizes its own ‘‘specific life and spiritual attitude.’’ The feeling of life is what is essentially recognized in the image. The image gives this feeling a form and center, thus determining it as a specific attitude of life, as a specific life-form. Through the repetition of the cult around this image the subject becomes its persona. The subject constructs and reconstructs itself in light of the image of itself in the mirror of its culture which acts as its ideal archetype. In this way, the subject is always in the process of becoming itself. The process of differentiation of the life stream into the identity of the tribe or the individual subject within the tribe takes place through a simultaneous determination of another center of life and in fact in contradistinction to it. The two centers form the two poles of one and the same functional relation that divides the life stream into distinct spheres. As we have already said, the symbolic function separates and reintegrates in one and the same moment. The two spheres of life are thus co-constitutional, they are nothing other than their functional relation to the other. The mythical process first establishes the general distinction between ‘‘two provinces of being: a common, general accessible province and another, sacred, precinct which seems to be raised out of

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its surroundings, hedged around and guarded against them.’’∑∑ The first is the earthly finite world, the other the celestial world of the infinite. The I stands over against a thou, and together they stand as members of a clan, as finite human beings, before the divine. The identity of one center of life presupposes and includes the identity of the other as its difference. Thus, ‘‘the ‘I’ and the ‘thou’ exist only insofar as they are ‘for one another,’ only insofar as they stand in a functional relation of being reciprocally conditioned.’’∑∏ The subject is therefore decentered, as its being lies partly in another. ‘‘Here the I is in itself only insofar as it is at the same time in its counterpart, and only insofar as it is related to this counterpart, to a ‘thou.’ . . . Except for this mode of being directed toward, of intention toward other centers of life, the I is nowhere in possession of itself.’’∑π In and through its symbolic activity the subject constitutes itself and its other, and is constituted by the other: ‘‘In the beginning is the act: always, in the use of language, in artistic formation, in the process of thinking and research a specific activity expresses itself, and it is only in this activity that the ‘I’ and the ‘thou’ at once find each other, and separate themselves from each other. They are in and with each other, as they preserve their unity through speaking, thinking, and all kinds of artistic expression.’’∑∫ As we have seen, at the mythical level ‘‘the feeling of self is immediately fused with the feeling of community.’’ The individual takes up a ‘‘place’’ within the whole as a ‘‘link in the chain of life’’ and is indistinguishable from the place assigned to it by its relation to the sacred.∑Ω The individual knows itself only within the life-form of its clan. Here there is no distinction between life and spirit, between nature and culture. Thus the specific spiritual attitude or specific direction that defines the meaning of the clan appears as the meaning of life as such. The moral law appears here as the law of nature. The cultural ‘‘custom’’ of the clan determines the whole life of the subject. ‘‘It watches over his every step and allows scarcely a moment of free space in his activity. Not only his actions, but also his feelings and ideas, his beliefs and delusions are governed by it. Custom is the perpetually constant atmosphere in which he lives and exists; he cannot escape from it any more than from the air that he breathes.’’∏≠ If the intuition of the I is to be freed from this confinement, if the I is to be apprehended in ideal freedom as an ideal unity, a new approach is needed. The decisive turn occurs when the accent of the soul concept shifts—when the soul ceases to be considered as the mere vehicle or cause of vital phenomena and is taken rather as the subject of ethical consciousness. Only when man’s vision passes beyond the sphere of life to that of ethical action, beyond the

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biological to the ethical sphere, does the unity of the I gain primacy over the substantial or semisubstantial notion of the soul.∏∞

The conditions for the movement from the mythical to the religious are already present within the structure of the mythical itself: for in recognizing in the mythical figure its own self-affectivity the subject mistakes the form of this configuration for its own. Taken in by its own transparency to itself, it fails to recognize the opaqueness of the cultural formation that provides it with the visibility of an objective presence. In this mythical misrecognition lies the ‘‘immanent condition for its own future sublation, [for] the potentiality of a spiritual process of liberation which is indeed effected in the progress from the magical-mythical world view to the truly religious world view.’’∏≤ Like mythical consciousness, the religious attitude is oriented toward the living efficacy of life. The religious feeling of life, however, ‘‘gives scope for a new feeling, that of individuality.’’∏≥ We cannot enter into a detailed consideration of Cassirer’s theory of religion here.∏∂ The essential point is that the religious attitude is able to distinguish that which mythical consciousness continuously confounds: namely, the form of the configuration that gives life its objective presence, on the one hand, and life itself, on the other. ‘‘Religion takes the decisive step that is essentially alien to myth: in its use of sensuous images and signs it recognizes them as such—a means of expression which, though they reveal a determinate meaning, must necessarily remain inadequate to it, which ‘point’ to this meaning but never wholly exhaust it.’’∏∑ Religious consciousness recognizes the mythical figure to be a mask that reveals only by hiding: the idol is transformed into an icon. It is important to note that the religious and mythical spheres are dialectically connected to each other. The life of spirit is a constant process of ‘‘bondage and liberation’’ possessing no final redemption or deliverance from the force of the mythical worldview.∏∏ The religious attitude realizes itself in its purest form in ‘‘mysticism,’’ which ‘‘must negate all the image worlds of culture’’ in order to ‘‘free itself from ‘name and image.’ ’’∏π That is to say, it must recognize the true meaning and presence of life beyond the historically contingent linguistic and aesthetic comportment of custom. The mystic returns to the living selfaffectivity of his own subjectivity, for it is only in and through this living efficacy that the life beyond culture can be intuited. In the pure contemplation of this living efficacy of the soul the mystic stands before that which resists all objective expression, which lies beyond the mask of the ego or the persona. The subject comes to the awareness of itself as a radically finite living being standing over against and within the infinite totality of life as such. The mystic cannot,

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however, totally negate the symbolic world of spirit. The perspective of the mystic remains, after all, a perspective determined by a symbolic form: ‘‘all ‘negative theology’ in its dispensing with the logos is itself an act, a deed of logos, so too is the return to the pure immediacy of life only possible by a particular act of ‘seeing,’ of the ‘intuition’ of life. And this intuition can never go behind the world of forms per se because it is itself nothing other than a way of giving form.’’∏∫ Although the subject cannot go beyond culture, this is not to say that the idea of that which lies beyond culture, that which resists being objectified by the symbolic function, does not possess a specific meaning and function within the structure and dynamism of the life of cultural meaning in which the subject is enveloped. The recognition of the human world can only come about in and through its being placed in opposition to another sphere that lies beyond the sphere of spirit. Within the sphere of spirit, within its monadic existence, spirit must place before itself in an image the idea of that which lies beyond its own sphere, that which is wholly other: for it is only in and through this recognition of that which is wholly other that spirit can finally recognize itself. In the act of prayer one subject speaks out beyond the wall of language, beyond the many ‘‘masks’’ of culture,∏Ω to another—albeit a divine other: ‘‘the I, man’s true ‘self,’ finds itself only through the detour of the divine I.’’π≠ In the very moment that the subject recognizes the autonomy, and in this case the absolute autonomy, of the other beyond the objective presence of the work of culture that renders the other present, it recognizes itself and its own individual autonomy in and through its own symbolic activity and works.π∞ To the extent that the God of the mystic remains a ‘‘deus absconditus,’’ a hidden God, ‘‘his image, man, . . . also remains a homo absconditus.’’π≤ Cassirer’s anthropology thus proves to be a negative anthropology. The subject never falls together with its objective expression, with its name and figure, with its work. We can ‘‘catch sight’’ of the subject only in the reflections of these objective formations, in ‘‘the mirror of his culture.’’ We cannot, however, ‘‘turn this mirror over to see what lies behind it.’’π≥ Religious thought seeks ever new images for the self, for the intangible and incomprehensible subject, . . . in the end it can only define this self by dropping all these images as inadequate and unsuitable. . . . In this act of pure contemplation it differs from everything that has objective form, that has ‘‘shape and name.’’ To it applies only the simple determination ‘‘it is,’’ without any closer specification and qualification. Thus, the self is opposed to everything that is intelligible and yet at the same time it is the heart of the intelligible world. Only he who does not know it, knows it—he who knows it, knows it not. It is not known by the knower, known by the nonknower. With all its intensity the drive to knowledge is directed toward it, but at the same time, the

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problematic nature of all knowledge is contained in it. The aim of knowledge is not to manifest things; it is the self that one should see, hear, understand— and he who has seen it, heard it, understood it, and known it knows the whole world. And yet precisely this all-knowing entity is itself unknowable.π∂

The subject of religious consciousness is the pure self-affectivity of the subject’s Dasein. From this perspective the I can only say that ‘‘it is’’ and not ‘‘who it is’’: for every attempt to answer this question necessarily involves a reference to culture and subsequently to the persona of the subject within the cultural tapestry of relations that religious consciousness seeks to overcome. When we want to say who the subject is we must return to myth. For Cassirer we are born without an I. What we are is a self-affective awareness of being alive which is open to being formed. As we have already seen, it is only in and through the mythical process that we acquire an I that provides this selfaffectivity with its center and unity. The answer to the question ‘‘who am I?’’ is: ‘‘I am my mythical self that provides me with my identity and meaning as a person.’’ We might say that the subject of myth is the myth of the subject. For Cassirer all vision is always already formed. The persona of the subject gives the various life moments of the pure vision of living efficacy the unity of belonging to one and the same individual. The subject of myth is thus necessarily unconscious to the subject of experience, as it is what forms the vision of the subject who experiences. How then could we ever come to know who we are? How can we ever know the form of our own nature? It is through the symbolic formations of art that this dimension of the subject’s self can become known. In An Essay on Man Cassirer quotes Shakespeare’s Hamlet to define the function of dramatic art: ‘‘The purpose of playing, both first and now, was and is, to hold, as t’were, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.’’π∑ ‘‘The ‘visibility of nature’ is the actual, even the only goal of artistic activity.’’π∏ The artistic image thus reveals the ‘‘living form’’ of nature and thus renders it visible.ππ ‘‘The great painters show us the forms of outward things; the great dramatists show us the forms of our inner life. . . . What we feel in art . . . is the dynamic process of life itself.’’π∫ The artistic image functions as a ‘‘catharsis’’ of the subject.∫∞ In the mythical world the subject is subjected to the image. Here the same image now functions to free the subject from the power of the imaginary. We recognize in the different roles of the actors, in their words and masks, our own selfaffectivity, the living form of our persona ‘‘in the etymological meaning of the word, which goes back to the mask and the role of the actor.’’∫≤ The subject recognizes in the caricature of the comedian or the dramatic role of the tragic

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figure the general direction and character of the activity that governs its life. The form may be the universal form of humanity itself (which is the case, for example, in the great tragedies and comedies) or the form of a particular historical period of a particular culture (which is the principal aim of comic satire, for example), or the from of a specific historical figure (which is the case in parodies and caricatures). We are perhaps never nearer to our human world than in the works of a great comic writer—in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, or in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. We become observant of the minutest details; we see this world in all its narrowness, its pettiness, and silliness. We live in this restricted world, but we are no longer imprisoned by it. Such is the peculiar character of the comic catharsis. Things and events begin to lose their material weight; scorn is dissolved into laughter and laughter is liberation.∫≥

In the mirror of art we recognize the roles that we play and the masks that we wear. We are confronted by the fact that we are nothing but a caricature of ourselves; that we play ourselves on that great stage of life that Shakespeare so rightly and justly called the world. The tragedy of this comic masquerade is that we can never leave the stage but must go on playing ourselves. However, to play ourselves playing ourselves permits us to take a distance from the mythical configurations of our existence, from ourselves; a distance that is necessary for our coming to know who we are. Born without form, but open to being formed, the subject is thrown into the world of culture that constitutes the subject’s identity by determining the image in which the subject will come to see itself. Here the subject is, as we have said, more subjected to culture than the subject of culture. Through this process of cultural determination the subject is formed into a subject, and in fact forms itself in light of its image within the mirror of culture. Once the subject has assumed itself, however, once it has become a person, it is able then to distinguish itself from others and from its culture. Through religion and art the subject is able to take up a new attitude toward life and itself. Without completely abandoning itself it is able to act from this center to reform its cultural image in and through its religious sensibility and its aesthetic judgment. Only now does the subject truly become the subject of culture, the subject who constructs and reconstructs culture in light of its image of culture and humanity.

Notes 1. Cf. translator’s introduction to CS. 2. The only literature that I know of treating the nature of the subject in Cassirer’s

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philosophy is Fabien Capeillères, ‘‘Le sujet de l’action: Le sujet de la connaissance,’’ Cahiers de philosophie politique et juridique 28 (1995): 39–59. 3. Cf. for example, EM, 24: ‘‘Obviously [the human world] forms no exception to those biological rules which govern the life of all the other organisms.’’ 4. PSF, 1: 69. Cf. also CS, 125, and Cassirer, ‘‘Structuralism in Modern Linguistics,’’ Word: Journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York 1 (1946): 95–120. 5. PSF, 4: 15. 6. Cassirer, ‘‘ ‘Life’ and ‘Spirit’ in Contemporary Philosophy,’’ trans. Robert Walter Bretall and Paul Arthur Schilpp, in The Philosophy of Cassirer, ed. Paul Schilpp (Library of Living Philosophers, 6). (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1958), 866. 7. PSF, 3: 39. 8. CS, 23. 9. Cassirer, ‘‘Structuralism in Modern Linguistics,’’ 110. 10. PSF, 1: 82. 11. CS, 24. 12. CS, 70. 13. CS, 125. 14. CS, 28ff. 15. ‘‘In the world of a fly, says Uexküll, we find only ‘fly things’; in the world of a sea urchin we find only ‘sea urchin things’ ’’ (EM, 23). 16. EM, 126. 17. EM, 126ff.. 18. EM, 127. 19. EM, 26. 20. PSF, 1: 285. 21. CS, 62. 22. At first it would seem that Cassirer is only employing the concept of style as a synonym for form. This would certainly seem to be the case in the context of his consideration of Wölfflin’s aesthetics. Distinguishing style from value concepts, Cassirer writes: ‘‘What the style concept represents is not an ought but a pure ‘being’—even though this being is not concerned with physical things, but with the existence of ‘forms’ ’’ (CS, 63). However, in the case of Jacob Burckhardt’s portrayal of the ‘‘Renaissance man,’’ which we are about to consider, it is a question of a ‘‘unity of direction, not a unity of being’’ (CS, 73). 23. In his four volumes devoted to the Problem of Knowledge and in his other ‘‘historical’’ works like The Philosophy of the Enlightenment and The Individual and Cosmos, Cassirer sets out not so much to establish a chronological history of ideas as to determine the épistémai, to borrow the term from Foucault, that characterize the general direction of the particular periods in question. In his The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, for example, Cassirer writes that the aim of his work is to determine ‘‘the dramatic action of its thinking,’’ ‘‘the spiritual energy which spurs it on,’’ and not ‘‘a merely narrative account of the growth and vicissitudes of the philosophy of the Enlightenment’’ (Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951], v). 24. CS, 73ff. 25. CS, 31.

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26. PSF, 2: 69; PsF, 2: 89. 27. PSF, 3: 73. 28. PSF, 3: 73. 29. PSF, 3: 86. 30. CS, 15. 31. PSF, 2: 26. 32. PSF, 2: 37. 33. ‘‘Expression is . . . a general biological process’’ (Cassirer, ‘‘Language and Art,’’ 158). Thus, for example, mythical time is felt as a ‘‘biological time.’’ (Cf. PSF, 2: 109 and 148.) 34. PSF, 2: 25. 35. Throughout The Logic of the Cultural Sciences Cassirer repeatedly demonstrates the ‘‘double function’’ of the symbolic, namely, ‘‘the function of splitting and reunification’’ (CS, 55). The ‘‘separation between the ‘I’ and the ‘thou,’ and likewise the separation between the ‘I’ and the ‘world,’ constitutes the goal and not the starting point of spiritual life’’ (CS, 107). Everything begins from the undifferentiated universal feeling of life, from a oneness in the life stream. The symbolic function creates a ‘‘Riß im Dasein’’ (a split in being). And as we shall see, everything seeks to overcome this division in order to reestablish this oneness. However, this return to the ‘‘security’’ of oneness in the whole proves to be impossible: in the world of nature ‘‘each animal is so completely adapted to its environment that it rests in it as quietly and securely as a baby in its crib. But this calmness comes to an end as soon as we enter the human sphere. . . . No human knowledge and no human action can ever find its way back to this kind of unquestionable existence and unquestionable certainty’’ (CS, 28). 36. CS, 54. 37. CS, 55. 38. PSF, 3: 71. 39. PSF, 3: 89ff. 40. Cassirer, Myth and Language, 71. 41. PSF, 3: 71. 42. PSF, 3: 219. 43. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, Werke, 15: 67, cited by Cassirer in PSF, 2: 220. 44. Cf. PSF, 2: 39: ‘‘In the cult and in the rite the mythic is itself still something lived; it is put into living action’’ (Cassirer, PSF, 4, 91). 45. MS, 38ff. 46. PSF, 2: 186 (my italics). 47. PSF, 3: 69. 48. PSF, 3: 91. 49. PSF, 4: 83ff. 50. PSF, 4: 80. 51. PSF, 2: 175. 52. CS, 194. 53. Cf. CS, 50. 54. We ‘‘can attain knowledge of the ‘essence’ of man only in that [we] catch sight of

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him in culture, and in the mirror of his culture; [we] cannot, however, turn this mirror over to see what lies behind it’’ (CS, 102). 55. Cassirer, PSF, 2: 85. 56. CS, 49. 57. PSF, 3: 89. 58. CS, 51. 59. CS, 194. 60. CS, 2. 61. PSF, 2: 166. 62. PSF, 2: 24ff. 63. EM, 96. 64. Cf. the chapter on religion in S. G. Lofts, Cassirer: A ‘‘Repetition’’ of Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 125–60. 65. PSF, 2: 239. 66. PSF, 2: 25. 67. CS, 107. 68. PSF, 4: 13. 69. CS, 76. 70. PSF, 2: 205. 71. ‘‘Whenever a subject—whether an individual or a whole epoch—is prepared to forget himself, in order to be absorbed by another and completely give himself away: then he always finds himself in a new and deeper sense’’ (CS, 111). 72. EM, 12. 73. CS, 102; cf. also p. 53: ‘‘the yearning for a direct communication in thought and feeling, which could dispense with all symbolism and all mediation through the word and image, rests on a self-deception.’’ 74. PSF, 2: 173ff. 75. EM, 147. 76. PSF, 4: 84. 77. EM, 151. 78. EM, 147ff. 79. Cassirer links his theory of dramatic art to Aristotle’s theory of catharsis. Cf. EM, 148. 80. CS, 54. 81. EM, 150.

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Styles of Change: Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophical Writing barbara naumann Translated from the German by Larson Powell

On first looking into a text by Cassirer, nearly every reader notices two things: first, the clear language, which loses none of its immediacy even when Cassirer elucidates the most complex theoretical contexts, and, second, the difficulty, despite this clarity and vividness of language, of reconstructing the argumentative process of Cassirer’s thought.∞ Cassirer’s texts blend the objects represented with the author’s own position or thesis in each work. This individual, if not idiosyncratic type of argumentation often has the effect of making the place and voice of the author seem to disappear behind the problem in question. It is thus not always easy for the reader to figure out Cassirer’s theoretical orientation and the turns of his argument. For what is at first so impressive is rather the closed surface of the texts and their indirect, mediated manner of presenting an argument. In this chapter I will discuss the basis of this, at first sight, paradoxical and double stylistic effect, characterized by clear, direct language and a simultaneous opacity of argumentation. Connected to this is the larger question of the role of style in Cassirer’s philosophical prose. Cassirer not only wrote texts of stylistic concision, but he also raised the concept of style to a prominent medium of philosophical reflection. A further concern of my discussion will be the characteristics of this reflection and how it correlates literary and philosophical aspects of thought. Cassirer describes philosophical and poetic texts

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by simultaneously circumscribing them and thus letting them become the commentary of a philosophy which understands and explicates itself as symbolic. The problem of the internal connection between philosophy and literature is thus central to Cassirer’s texts. This is true not only in places where Cassirer explicitly clarifies this relation from a literary perspective,≤ but, above all, where his stylistic reflections participate in the immanent production of philosophical thought and meaning. Even by the time of his Kant edition—the last volume of which, the Kant biography Kants Leben und Lehre, appeared in 1918—Cassirer developed a concept of philosophical style which allowed him to speak of Kant as a ‘‘philosophical writer.’’≥ Thus, long before Cassirer developed in detail his philosophy of symbolic forms, he was formulating questions in a way that emphasized the ‘‘complementary relation’’ between ‘‘form of life’’ and ‘‘form of doctrine,’’ and in which the consideration of the performative style of philosophy, the ‘‘entire action of judgment and conclusion,’’ is in the foreground.∂ The consideration of style is thus oriented from the start toward the differential criteria of movement and alteration of terminology and toward the development of representation as a form of thought. With this, Cassirer anticipates decisive aspects both of the terminology and of the construction of the philosophy of symbolic forms. The step from a consideration of philosophy as style to one of philosophy as symbolic form, which makes evident philosophy’s symbolic function in its style, is only a small one. Therefore, one may say that Cassirer’s early considerations of style anticipate the development of his theory of symbolic forms. A passage which is suggestive in this respect may be found in an essay which announces in a certain way the ‘‘systematic-philosophical’’ program of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms before the latter’s publication. This pathsetting essay was meant to propound an introduction to the ‘‘task of a general systematics of symbolic forms’’ and is titled ‘‘The Concept of Symbolic Form in the Construction of the Human Sciences’’ (1923).∑ Cassirer sketches out here a ‘‘threefold sequence’’ of symbolic forms, which he designates as being essentially a semiotic development. All the symbolic forms which are treated in this text—myth, language, and art—must pass through this tripartite set of stages of specific relations between the sign and the signified.∏ The development begins with the first stage, a reproduction which is as ‘‘accurate and as complete as possible,’’ so that the sign ‘‘absorbs the signified in itself, as it were.’’π It then leads to a second step, in which the ‘‘analogical’’ form of designation reveals a ‘‘subjectivity of thought’’ yet still seeks for a ‘‘correspondence’’ between the sign and the signified.∫ At the third, abstract level, finally, ‘‘any form of real imitation . . . is now abandoned, and in its place there emerges the function of meaning in its pure self-sufficiency.’’Ω

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Cassirer follows these stages above all in the domain of language development and refers in the footnotes mostly to historical and grammatical research, and also to the ethnology of language. Up to this point, Cassirer sought to represent the history of language as the developmental history of increasing abstraction, leading through the stages of mimetic, analogical, and purely symbolic form. Along with the historical aspect of this set of stages, and connected to it, he is expressly interested in the ‘‘systematic and philosophical’’ analysis of symbolic forms in general, including the aspect of a general theory of representation.∞≠ In order to integrate this aspect into his text, Cassirer repeats the argumentative sequence which has just been sketched out, together with the terminology which he has unfolded using the example of the history of language. This time, however, he does so under different auspices. He now situates the development of symbolic forms up to the stage of representation and pure signification into the context of Goethe’s essay, ‘‘Simple Imitation of Nature, Manner, Style’’ (1789).∞∞ The link between the first sequence, which works with the history of language, and the second one, which is oriented to imitation, manner, and style, is indicated when Cassirer explains that he will now turn to the ‘‘world of aesthetic forms.’’∞≤ In a gliding alteration of epistemological interest, Cassirer seeks, on the one hand, to continue the argumentation he has developed through the history of language, yet he already anticipates, as something new, Goethe’s view of style. For now Cassirer no longer wants to understand the historical sequence of stages ‘‘as a simple historical series of specific artistic forms of representation.’’ Rather, ‘‘An artistic form in the proper sense of the word arises only there, where intuition has freed itself from any tie to mere impression, where it has become pure expression.’’∞≥ With these words, Cassirer has rewritten as a typology of ‘‘fundamental moments of artistic representation’’ what in the earlier context of the history of language was supposed to be a historical process.∞∂ He thereby has introduced an argument situated on the typological level of Goethe’s essay on imitation. Even before he quotes Goethe at all, Cassirer has oriented the theory of the (historical) development of symbolic forms toward a Goethean dimension and anticipated the latter in paraphrase. When, one page later, Goethe’s text is finally quoted, it has already, by its position in the sequence of the argument, taken on a different meaning. It has been assigned the role of witness for Cassirer’s own position.∞∑ The quote from Goethe ennobles style as the ‘‘highest degree’’ of art,∞∏ valued by Cassirer as ‘‘the highest expression of objectivity, but not the simple objectivity of existence, but rather the objectivity of artistic spirit . . . that is, the both free and regulated nature of formgiving.’’∞π

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There is a third aspect, in addition to this gliding argumentation and the new characterization of the evolutionary ladder as an ordered typology. There is, one might say, a third rewriting. For in his approach to Goethe’s typology of types of representation, Cassirer simultaneously broadens the focus of his analysis yet again. In the analogy between the development of language and the Goethean typology of art, Cassirer finds a way to give a contour to his own theory of culture. For here he discovers that which he programmatically terms the ‘‘general character of symbolic formation’’ in myth, language, and art.∞∫ Although Goethe’s essay on ‘‘Imitation’’ establishes a hierarchy of the concepts of imitation, manner, and style, Goethe does not rank style above the other two concepts. Cassirer is interested in the perspective under which Goethe may affirm a ‘‘both hierarchical and genetic character’’ of typology.∞Ω Cassirer establishes an analogy between the hierarchical and genetic character of Goethe’s typology and the hierarchy and genesis of symbolic forms. This analogy, however, blurs the specific difference between individual symbolic forms. In order to both mark and bridge over this difference, Cassirer rewrites the historical givens as a reflection on Method and then restates the latter as a presentation of ‘‘the regulatedness of progression.’’≤≠ This type of analogical transformation is not new in Cassirer’s work. In fact, Cassirer interprets and develops symbolic forms through a series of rewritings into which he integrates Goethe’s text as their center and turning point. When this text of Goethe’s appears, it has already been focused in a specific way, so that Cassirer may here speak ‘‘through Goethe,’’ that is, he can repeat and ‘‘represent’’ Goethe. Goethe’s position has in this fashion been made identical with Cassirer’s own thought. Thus Cassirer quotes the following passage from Goethe: ‘‘Just as simple imitation depends on a calm existence and an affectionate presence, and as manner takes hold of a phenomenon with a quick and apt temperament, thus style rests on the deepest foundations of knowledge, on the essence of things, inasmuch as we may know them in visible and palpable form.’’≤∞ Walter Solmitz has thus characterized this ventriloquistic mise-enscène of other writers as Cassirer’s own mouthpiece: ‘‘Cassirer agrees with Galileo and speaks ‘through’ Galileo, somewhat as a dramatist speaks through a historical character.’’≤≤ In numerous other texts Cassirer proceeds in the same way. It is typical of Cassirer’s style to present the development of his thought generally in a synthetic, indirect, and circumstantial mode. The result of such a textual strategy is, on the one hand, certainly what Cassirer’s commentators have called the ‘‘distinctness’’ or immediacy (German: Anschaulichkeit) of this style. But this immediacy is a result of Cassirer’s rhetorical procedure of representing both quoted texts and authors and his own sequence of thought together on the

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same textual level, in one and the same, apparently undifferentiated, terminology. On the other hand, this procedure thus gives the integrated text, in this case the Goethe essay, a rather floating status. The quoted text alternates between different roles, between paraphrase and quote from a historic source, and at the same time it assumes the role of the referential text. It is both witness to Cassirer’s own position and has the differential status of an object under discussion. The difference remains, however, only implicit. Precisely through this nonmarked place of difference, the reference to Goethe preserves its symbolic character. Cassirer’s indirect and synthetic procedure performatively transforms Goethe as source into a symbolic and circumstantial form, which must follow the path to the representation of Cassirer’s text in order to acquire its own force as a statement and significance. It may thus far be determined that Cassirer’s style of argumentation completes the circumstantial construction of symbolic form within itself and constitutes itself in a symbolic relation to its various subtexts or sources and references. To this extent, Cassirer’s style follows a model of critical, circumstantial, symbolic thought even where this is not the explicit theme of discussion. When, in this drama of multiple authorial voices, the curtain goes up on Cassirer’s explicit concept of style, it has already been introduced as a methodologically reflected concept. Therefore Cassirer’s next step is only a small one: that of connecting the methodical aspect with that of style, under the aegis of knowledge: ‘‘In Goethe’s definition of style, there lies simultaneously an indication of another set of problems. For here the concept of style is bound up with that of knowledge (German: Erkenntnis). Thus we are reminded that knowledge, the development of logical and intellectual functions, is subject to the conditions which are valid for any kind of progress from natural existence to spiritual expression.’’≤≥ With this link between knowledge and style, the movement of Cassirer’s text has reached a preliminary goal, a point of generality, where the gradual progression of symbolic forms appears essentially as a detour. The path of ‘‘intellectual symbols’’≤∂ thus parts ways with the ‘‘immediacy of life.’’≤∑ Cassirer can appeal to Goethe all the more as witness for his synoptic reading of style and knowledge, since the latter, in his essay ‘‘Diderot’s Essays on Painting’’ (1799), defines the methodological concept of style in contrast to ‘‘manner’’ even more clearly than in his essay of 1789: ‘‘The result of an authentic method is named style, in opposition to manner. Style raises individuality to the highest point that the species is capable of attaining, and thus all great artists resemble each other in their best works. . . . Manner, on the other hand, individualizes, if one may say so, the individual still further.’’≤∏

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Cassirer is certainly correct to situate Goethe’s concept of style in a horizon of methodological considerations. But it is worth considering that Goethe’s reflection on method is on the whole quite differently oriented than Cassirer’s. Goethe limits the ‘‘uniformity of great style’’ strictly to works of art;≤π it is by definition always reached with reference to manner which may produce great art but is always in danger of dissolving into merely ingenious emptiness as a consequence of a too strong orientation toward subjectivity. The term ‘‘style’’ remains reserved for the ‘‘highest degree of art’’≤∫ and groups together the tendencies toward ‘‘generality’’ in art, so that ‘‘the truth of art, beauty, and perfection’’ may be associated with it.≤Ω Cassirer has gone further than Goethe, who limits the concept of style to aesthetics, although he nowhere disputes Goethe’s status as his key witness. Positively formulated, he has extended the interpretability of Goethe’s terminology to a general foundation of the philosophy of symbols. But since essential traits of this philosophy have already been derived from Goethe’s views on representation and symbolism in the natural sciences and poetry, both texts enter into a relation of reciprocal commentary. The inner closeness of Cassirer and Goethe—which Cassirer always felt—results from his rhetorical staging of this relation of mutual commentary. In addition, Cassirer isolates Goethe’s concept of style from the constitutional triad, in which, by reference to imitation and manner, the significance of style is not only prepared but also qualified. For every style also bears, in Goethe’s work, imitative and mannerist characteristics by varying degrees. Cassirer’s concept of style has become so charged with its epistemological burden that it neglects the related concepts—imitation and manner—which still bear the unmistakable stamp of a descriptive aesthetic. Beyond this, Cassirer attributes to the concept of style not only the whole function of an epistemological and thereby constitutive category, but also the function of a form of knowledge particular to the science of culture. As soon as style is associated with knowledge in Cassirer’s text, the concept of knowledge seems to absorb stylistic reflection into itself. Cassirer then operates with the term ‘‘knowledge’’ on a reflective level which extends neoKantian epistemology in at least two dimensions: in the direction of more or less clearly articulated aesthetic questioning, and in that of a concise perspective for the philosophy of culture. Regarding style as a constant and formative companion of the ‘‘development of logical and intellectual functions’’ and of ‘‘the progress from natural existence to spiritual expression’’≥≠ lies in the consequent nature of Cassirer’s arguments. In a later study of theoretical concepts, Cassirer thus identified ‘‘concepts of culture’’ with ‘‘concepts of form and style’’ in order to shore up the ‘‘autonomy’’ of the concepts of a science of

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culture.≥∞ Style appears in Cassirer often in the guise of a sheltering and formproducing companion of symbolic forms. Cassirer’s concept of style, however, tends to go beyond this role and eventually transforms itself into the alter ego of symbolic forms. The link between style and knowledge is only comprehensible if one recalls that this connection is made in the light of the Kantian critique of knowledge —a critique which certainly plays no role in Goethe’s essay on imitation. Kant, on the other hand, plays a decisive role in Cassirer’s work. At first Kant is introduced with the thesis that the core of his philosophy is not knowledge ‘‘in the free spontaneity of the spirit,’’ but rather ‘‘the doctrine of the unknowability of the thing in itself.’’≥≤ Kant nonetheless acts in Cassirer’s works as the advocate of the circuitous nature of knowledge. In form, and thus also in style, Cassirer sees an answer to the question of how thought must behave when faced with a void, the dilemma of knowledge when faced with the impossibility of knowing the thing in itself. It is this void, the impossibility of drawing a straight line between the knower and the thing in itself, which forces thought into form. In other words, ‘‘knowledge in its own form’’ always has style.≥≥ Style is the movement of thought.

Hypertextuality: The Symbolic Form of Style Cassirer subjects philosophical concepts to a gliding re-evaluation, a modification which takes its point of departure in the specific historical and systematic demands of his argument. Walter Solmitz described the double valence of Cassirer’s concepts, regarding the system and history of philosophy in this fashion: ‘‘Furthermore, in addition to the horizontal dialectics, there is a kind of vertical dialectics: a historical statement by Cassirer has a systematic significance at the same time.’’≥∂ This doubling he terms Cassirer’s characteristic ‘‘style,’’ which leads Solmitz to the question of ‘‘whether what Cassirer taught should or could be separated from how he taught it.’’≥∑ Cassirer’s style itself thus presents, along the conduit of his own text, what his theory of style claims: form and content cannot be understood merely as veil and veiled. It is just as inadequate to see them as tied together in a dialectic of mutual interpenetration and resolution of contradiction. Form and content as style are bound to each other through the performative role which concepts also play. On the basis of the rhetorical quality of this performatively oriented model of thought, Cassirer claims that the rewriting of meanings is also the process of the generation of meaning. Cassirer uses the traditional word ‘‘style’’ in order to displace its meaning. The meaning of style is no longer the individual particularity of the writer. Writing is thus not only the signature of

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individuality. Rather, Cassirer’s concept of style embraces the larger movement and necessary circuitousness of thought itself. Wherever the Cassirer papers, his unpublished writings, offer a look into his conception of style, this discovery of a performative theory of style is supported. A note on the catchword in question reads as follows: Concept of form (style). Characteristic understanding of style in Goethe, completely based on his understanding of form. This depends on the deepest foundations of knowledge—on the essence of things insofar as it is permitted to us, to know it in visible and palpable forms. Art manages on this level to know the characteristic of things and their manner of existence ever more precisely. Thus it has a precise overview of the series of shapes, and knows how to set these various characteristic forms beside each other and imitate them.≥∏

The next sheet of notes in the same folder identifies, again with reference to Goethe, the concept of form and movement: ‘‘The concept of form (becoming, genesis).’’ Under this title, Cassirer notes, half-paraphrasing, a passage from Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe: ‘‘Reason must be referred to that which is in the process of becoming, but understanding to that which has already become. Reason delights in development, understanding wants to hold fast to everything, in order to retain it. (Marginal note:) Therefore mineralogy is only for the understanding’’ (Eckermann, 13 February 1829). The concept of style thus moves unmistakably into the vicinity of symbolic form. The philosophy of symbolic forms pursues, in every detail it discusses, the great project of understanding knowledge in specific forms of becoming, ‘‘in its pure processual character.’’≥π The tendency to situate the concept of style at the basis of movement and change completely removes style from the determination of descriptive and classificatory categories. It transforms style into a form by which thought may observe itself also from an aesthetic viewpoint. Yet, in those statements in which Cassirer uses style in a more limited sense, as restricted to the individuality of an author, the tendency is also manifest to use the category of style simultaneously to open up a methodological dimension and observe the ‘‘effect,’’ the movement and performance of thought. This becomes evident, for example, in Cassirer’s statements about Montaigne’s style. The exemplary function which Montaigne has for many subsequent artists and philosophers can hardly lie only in his skeptical method and the range of his knowledge. Rather: ‘‘It was this personal style that gave to his works its greatest charm and its full effect. Never before had a writer spoken in

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this way. All the former writers—philosophers, theologians, moralists, pedagogues—were concerned with some general aspect of human life. They were striving for definite ends and fighting for definite ideals. Montaigne is the author who dares to abandon this procedure. He detects new problems: the problem of individual life. . . . Montaigne is perfectly aware of the fact that his way was a new one and a very uncommon one.’’≥∫ This passage from the unpublished writings may be found in a sketch with the title ‘‘Introduction: Fundamental Types of Philosophical Anthropology,’’ which Cassirer intended as an introduction to the Essay on Man. Here too, where Cassirer uses the concept of style as the characteristic of an individual manner of writing and even gives it the personal attribute of charm, his attention is concentrated primarily on the effect of this writing. For Cassirer, this effect consists in the fact that ‘‘definitive ends’’ and ‘‘definite ideals’’—forms which attempt to fix meaning—are no longer accepted. Cassirer sees Pascal as Montaigne’s antipode since Pascal returned to dogmatic faith while Montaigne privileged the concept of passage. ‘‘I do not paint its being, I paint its passage,’’ says Montaigne in a statement quoted in Cassirer.≥Ω From Cassirer’s perspective, this statement may even be referred to ‘‘any object of observation.’’ Cassirer underlines an orientation to process, mobility, and gradual transition in thought. The sequence of thought culminates in the sentence: ‘‘Experience [is] not a substantial thing, but a continual passage.’’∂≠ Cassirer’s own terminology forms here the homologous coordinate to his considerations on style in Montaigne. Homology is the form which Cassirer opposes to theoretic fixation, as also his immediate mobility of thought. As in the Goethe passage cited above, Cassirer here completes a sliding shift of paradigm from a historical case study, the description of the ancient skeptical tradition, to observing the epistemological significance of style in Montaigne. With this, Montaigne becomes, for Cassirer, again a figure representing a ‘‘new’’ position of thought, a stepping-stone on the path of the history of philosophy toward critical thought which is simultaneously a stepping-stone toward an aestheticism of philosophical forms of representation. Cassirer determines that there is a critical position in Montaigne that leads directly to the epistemological background of the philosophy of symbolic forms. The critical reflection of the ‘‘individual’’ becomes, in Cassirer’s work, the condition of style in general. Cassirer’s stylistic procedure, however, itself undergoes a process of literary transformation, which in this context is even more important. This literary transformation leads him at times even to replace fixed philosophic conceptuality with a procedurally shifting terminology. Thus the re-evaluation of language treats concepts in such a way that they acquire metaphorical charac-

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ter. Walter Solmitz was one of the first critics of Cassirer to notice this aspect of his writing: he designates it accurately as an aesthetic dimension. A decisive further step was made by the philosopher E. W. Orth. He characterizes a literary dimension of the philosophical text as the direct consequence of the philosophy of culture. Orth takes his point of departure from the observation that Cassirer does not limit the concept of style to the ‘‘highest form of artistic style,’’ but rather uses it also for ‘‘mathematical-functional structuration.’’∂∞ According to Cassirer’s thesis, ‘‘all culture necessarily runs its course between (!) [sic] the two extremes of expression and pure signification, so that art produces an ideal balance between the two.’’∂≤ This thesis binds philosophy to the dimension of expression. The ‘‘process of symbolic formation,’’ however, does not go so far as to separate persons entirely from reality and absorb them into ‘‘the void of mere forms,’’ of ‘‘pure significations.’’∂≥ At the very point where the philosophical text takes the representation of culture as its task—an opening which characterizes the entire undertaking of the philosophy of symbolic forms—symbolic expression always also takes place, that is, it ‘‘permeate[s] it with the function of linguistic thought.’’∂∂ Precisely here Orth makes out the literary and metaphorical quality of Cassirer’s texts. Orth sees here a ‘‘peculiar relativization of Cassirer’s conceptuality, and even that of symbolic forms themselves. Such concepts are literary attempts to interpret the meaning of the reality in which we always find ourselves already, without hypostasizing the forms of interpretation.’’∂∑ Orth understands the process of ‘‘world agreement’’ in Cassirer’s philosophy as a form of literary production, and with the condition that ‘‘the spelling out of appearances as a literary model remains a metaphor for Cassirer.’’ Orth concludes: ‘‘Thus Cassirer likes to work in the medium of literature—as if in a life-order of life-orders. This is evident in the eminent role that Goethe’s work, for example, has for him.’’∂∏ The merit of Orth’s work is that he has completely freed Cassirer’s Goethe reception from its traditional links to the Goethe cult typical of his generation. He goes, however, a step further than this. For he allows literature to take on a weighty, even ‘‘paradigmatic’’ role in Cassirer’s writings, so that it can assume the task of ‘‘interpreting the world’’ in the place of philosophy. Yet, one must not forget that the affinity between Cassirer’s philosophical discourse and Goethe’s literary one cannot lead simply to their mutual agreement. The tension between literary-metaphorical and philosophical forms of knowledge draws, for Cassirer, its meaning-constitutive force rather from an ‘‘in-between realm,’’ the domain arising in the processual, constantly recommencing reformulation and translation of symbolic forms. The symbolic form of literature, if it were ever to be declared to be representative of philosophy, would have to

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take on the function of a critical commentary or meta-text. Cassirer, however, converts all literature—and Goethe’s symbolic knowledge in particular—into a critique of the possibility of meta-languages, of a meta-text and meta-theory. It would run against the grain of Cassirer’s relational and symbolic thought if one were to seek in literature the results which philosophy has up to now only been able to formulate in inadequate fashion. Through a mutual assimilation with his texts, and through the style of mediated presentation, Cassirer displaces the relation between literature and philosophy. The style of Cassirer’s thought unfolds itself not in a meta-textual but rather in a hyper-textual relation. The philosophical hypertext demonstrates, even incorporates, as a performative act, the style of its representation—and declares, at the same time, style to be the form of its knowledge.

The Discursive Style of the Philosophy of Culture The hypertextual structure has consequences relative to the epistemological orientation of Cassirer’s theory. An essential part of this theory is the impossibility of direct and immediate knowledge, which means the end of a ‘‘naively realistic view of the world.’’∂π This central vacancy takes on a new appearance in the hypertextual context. It is characterized by the fact that the mobile, circumlocutory concept of the symbol cannot occupy any fixed place in the system of philosophy nor in the latter’s systematically conceived history. In a certain sense, this mobility is forced upon concepts. It allows them gradually to convert into metaphors, which means in Cassirer’s terminology symbolic forms. In Cassirer’s philosophy, knowledge and meaning are not presented as a place or a topos, rather, they are developed in a constantly changing process. In the framework of a theory, which places so strong an accent on process and on performance, the performative character of style may be seen as analogous in general to the performative character of the philosophy of culture. The philosophy of symbols is opened to a theory of culture by means of critical insight into the performative character of language and style. Cassirer had already made this clear in the introduction to the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: ‘‘the content of the concept of culture may not be separated from the fundamental problems and directions of spiritual production: Being may here be grasped nowhere other than in the ‘doing.’ ’’∂∫ The concept of style circumscribes the emphatic form of contradiction to determination and fixation. Style is in essence the expression of movement and of change in thought. On the basis of this movement, the concept of style and the concept of symbolic form come to correspond to each other. Where Cassirer diagnoses theoretic fixation, dogmatic rigidity, and immobility of thought, he

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speaks not of another kind of style but abandons reference to the concept of style altogether. Cassirer takes theoretical presentation necessarily to betray rigid, even dogmatic thought. A look at his study of Descartes may make this clearer: The result of Cartesian thought becomes completely clear and convincing only when we see his thought in the process of becoming and may follow it in its process of emergence, in all stages of growth and maturity. This is what the presentation of the Discours makes possible for us. Descartes does not here discuss questions and answers, doubts and solutions, but—involuntarily— inner struggles, victories and defeats. . . . This stylistic characteristic is preserved even in Descartes’ later works. It is only the Principia Philosophiae which offers, instead of this internal movement of thought, the final result, which thereby acquires a certain rigidity and dogmatic quality. As far as the Meditations are concerned, they are visibly influenced in form by Augustine’s Soliloquies. However, Augustine’s religious pathos has been transformed into a purely intellectual pathos in Descartes.∂Ω

In his study of Descartes, Cassirer stresses throughout the new and doubting gesture of Cartesian thought. Doubt has taken the place of ‘‘formal-dialectic logic’’ and forms, for Descartes, ‘‘the proper synthetic constructive form of knowledge.’’∑≠ Although the modern and individualized self must experience doubt as an ‘‘obligation’’ (Pflicht), doubt nonetheless contributes toward an unprecedented valuation of independent thought. The result of this thought is a self which from now on must constitute itself ‘‘without any help from others and purely from its own strength.’’ ‘‘Even the style of the Discours de la Methode,’’ Cassirer continues, ‘‘testifies clearly to a new spiritual mood, which penetrates the entire work.’’ This style, however, is a new form of representation, which makes Descartes not only into a new type of philosopher, but also a new type of writer: No philosophical system has ever been presented in the form Descartes chooses here. It is not a complete system of doctrine which appears before us here: it is a narrative, which seems at first to have a more biographical than systematic character. Descartes, who is otherwise so hostile to anything merely historical, does not shrink from calling the ‘‘Discours’’ a story, even a fable. The deeper reasons for this form of presentation lie in the fact that the objective result of Cartesian thought may not be separated from its finding. The way in which a thought is found is not random or external to it here, but is included in the substance of the thought itself.∑∞

The characterization of a philosopher as a writer has here reached its extreme. Cassirer expressly takes over the Cartesian identification of philosophi-

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cal form of presentation with one that is literary and individual (history, fable, biographical character). He then explains this perspective as a fundamental characteristic of discursiveness in general. The coincidence of style, thought construction, question formation, philosophical reflection, and representation, which is typical of Cassirer’s own style, is fruitful in two ways. This kind of discursiveness includes both individuality as well as the critical dimension, the negativity of thought, for this last must no longer appear in the negative form of an opposing thesis in order to find its place in philosophical representation. Nelson Goodman, who refers explicitly to Cassirer in his study of the theory of symbols, Ways of Worldmaking, distinguishes between stylistic characteristics and those distinctive features of a text, which, even though bearing an individual signature, need not necessarily describe a style as individual expression. ‘‘Not every property that helps determine the maker of period of provenance of a work is stylistic.’’∑≤ Style proves to be a criterion indicative of the symbolic function of a text, insofar as style points beyond the literal signature of individuality: ‘‘Although a style is metaphorically a signature, a literal signature is not a feature of style. . . . Style has to do exclusively with the symbolic functioning of a work as such.’’∑≥ Compared with Cassirer’s discussion of Descartes’ style, Goodman’s claims, however, remain vague. Cassirer’s theorem of style argues for a more precise connection between style and symbolic form. It becomes clear that philosophy may only be recognized as such when an essential kinship with the symbolic form of literature, its circumstantial mode, may be attributed to it. Only then may one speak of the style of philosophy in Cassirer’s sense. But a critical inversion of this sentence is also possible. For one might also say: Only where philosophical discourse reflects on its own literary status and draws the latter into its own construction of thought, as Descartes’ Discours explicitly does, will it know itself as a symbolic form of thought. Therein lies not least the relevance of the concept of style for a science of culture, and also the reason why Cassirer went so far as eventually to identify the concepts of style and culture. Cassirer’s style is the symbolic form of the individuality of discursive thought.

The Performative Character of Philosophical Movement Cassirer’s style is in the most emphatic sense performative. Only when a philosophy bears performative traits, as discussed here in the case of Kant or the early Descartes, does Cassirer grant to it stylistic qualities. From a performative viewpoint we can attribute to philosophical language a certain ten-

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dency toward the poetic. This is not to be understood in the sense that, in reference to Cassirer’s writings, one might speak of a collapsing of poetry and philosophy; but it does mean that form sees itself as irreducibly reflexive. Thus it shows its kinship to philosophical thought. A terminology which seeks to control and exhaustively present its object has something violent and false about it; it will remain trapped in its own argumentative limits. Even over great historical distances, it seems that precisely those philosophers who think along the grain of language and do not describe their objects theoretically and in fixed concepts exercise an enduring fascination. Cassirer’s concept of style is oriented to such texts which pursue a mobile and linguistically reflected form of representation. Cassirer himself may certainly be included in the great series of conceptually lively thinkers, for his style produces a form of presentation which grafts itself onto its objects. Cassirer’s language follows the authors it treats of by making itself so familiar with their language that the boundaries between his text and theirs, between paraphrase, quote, and commentary, become fluid. But Cassirer does not remain satisfied with this alone. It is one of the specific traits of Cassirer’s rhetoric that he speaks through the terminology of others. He arranges a mise-enscène of other texts in such a way that their own words develop his thesis. One may in this recognize again the flexibility of his thought, but also the dialectics of appropriation, which allows the other text to keep its own properties and yet steals whatever may already be in the service of something else. A thought which lets itself be led to positions instead of setting them out in advance makes itself the spectator of its own genesis. In this way, this thought is always oriented to process, directs itself to becoming and the changes in that which it investigates. In this manner, a philosophy of change arises. Cassirer’s unstatic thought certainly does not imply that his style of thought is not also interested in results. On the contrary, the vital interest in the representation of historical and systematic developments includes development as a result of symbolic thought, which is always in motion. Process and result are not understood here as polarities or opposites. The mediation between alternatives, the stress on ‘‘in between’’ as symbolic knowledge was the conclusion Goethe had drawn from the insight into the relational conditioning of every form of knowledge. Process and result, historical development, and representation of the process of symbolic knowledge all converge in Cassirer’s thought in an analogous fashion. This is why Goethe’s maxim of the convergence of style and meaning can be for Cassirer of systematic and central importance. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s often-expressed critique that Cassirer’s style lacks a certain suggestive power is certainly justified insofar as Cassirer never sought suggestiveness through terseness of expression.∑∂ Cassirer’s style displays

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rather the modesty of an author who only expresses his theory in mediated form, through the medium of the history of philosophy and literature. He allows this theory to gain its force of persuasion through the process of presenting other theoretical and poetic texts. Thus the author Cassirer seems to disappear with the gesture of indirect discourse, into the concepts and metaphors of his ‘‘objects.’’ The latter, for their part, lose their roles as objects and instead assume the role of chief actors within Cassirer’s texts. The gesture of modesty characterizes, however, only one side of Cassirer’s prose. One has to admit that a clear claim is made: The philosopher is in no way merely content to enter into the long series of philosophical discourses as an eminence grise. On the contrary, Cassirer’s style is based on an immense confidence in the force of its own staging and its own style, confidence in the persuasive power of a style which forms itself through conscious arrangement and constellation. In this lies a gesture of universal appropriation, the claim to be able to control everywhere the concepts and metaphors of other authors, indeed, to be able to appropriate alien terminology at any time without thereby making concessions regarding comprehensibility or the persuasive power of his own argument. Whether Goethe, Hölderlin, Descartes, Galileo, or Helmholtz present their theses in Cassirer’s text, it is always the concise ‘‘symbolic form’’ of Cassirer’s knowledge which assigns them their representative place and finally also their language. Thus Cassirer’s language possesses a double face, an internally contradictory tendency, which one must recognize if one is not to fall victim to the illusion that the reading of a Cassirer text offers only an immediate and generally understandable commentary on a specific problem from the history of philosophy. The doubling of Cassirer’s writing, which lets the individual speak and count for himself, and simultaneously also subordinates it to the generality of his philosophy, forms the coherence of a work which is internally multiply differentiated. This manner of writing also produces the symbolic form of style—and lets the knowledge of style fail at precisely that point where it can no longer be integrated into the knowledge of symbolic forms. ‘‘The general and the particular coincide: the particular is the general, appearing in different circumstances’’—this maxim of Goethe’s sums up such a relation.∑∑ The conditions under which Cassirer’s symbolic form of style appears are themselves set by the Kantian and critically reflected process of symbolic knowledge itself. In this process, symbolic form and style converge into a unity. They form, for Cassirer, that exceptional instrument which is his critique of culture, with which he breaks up the ‘‘force of a naively realistic view of the world.’’

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Notes 1. This difficulty in reconstructing the argument has also been noted by students participating in the author’s Cassirer seminars at the Freie Universität in Berlin (and it can be assumed that they represented a great number of readers’s responses). They identified this obscurity of argument as the main reason why—in addition to Cassirer’s abundant use of sources—they found that reading Cassirer was easy and convincing only at first sight, but complicated and occasionally irritating at a closer look. 2. See the essays of the volume Idee und Gestalt: Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Kleist, 2d ed. (1924; reprint, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989). 3. Ernst Cassirer, Kants Leben und Lehre (1918; reprint, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), e.g., 30 and passim. 4. Ibid., 26f. 5. The original German title is ‘‘Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften’’ (1923), Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs, 7th ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), 171 and 174. 6. Ibid., 178. 7. Ibid., 178. Unless otherwise indicated, the translations are mine. 8. Ibid., 180. 9. Ibid., 182. 10. Ibid., 171. 11. The original title is ‘‘Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Stil,’’ Goethe, Werke, 14 vols., ed. Erich Trunz, Hamburger Ausgabe (Munich: Beck, 1981ff.), 12: 30–34. 12. Cassirer, ‘‘Der Begriff der symbolischen Form,’’ 182. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Walter Solmitz has described this argumentative strategy in the following manner (with respect to a Cassirer text on Galileo): ‘‘In order to testify for Cassirer’s own views, Galileo is called in.’’ Walter Solmitz, ‘‘Cassirer on Galileo: An Example of Cassirer’s Way of Thought,’’ The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. P. A. Schilpp (Evanston, Ill.: Open Court, 1949), 729–56, here 737. 16. Goethe, ‘‘Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Stil,’’ 32. 17. Cassirer, ‘‘Der Begriff der symbolischen Form,’’ 183. 18. Ibid., 174. 19. Klassik und Klassizismus, Bibliothek der Kunstliteratur, vol. 3, ed. H. Pfotenhauer (Frankfurt am Main: Bibliothek deutscher Klassiker, 1995), 601. 20. Cassirer, ‘‘Der Begriff der symbolischen Form,’’ 183. 21. Goethe, ‘‘Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Stil,’’ 32. 22. Solmitz, ‘‘Cassirer on Galileo,’’ 755. 23. Cassirer, ‘‘Der Begriff der symbolischen Form,’’ 183. 24. Ibid., 185. 25. Ibid., 200. 26. Goethe, ‘‘Diderots Versuch über die Malerei,’’ Schriften zur Kunst, ed. Ernst Beutler, Sämtliche Werke, Gedenkausgabe (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1977), 13: 245.

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27. Ursula Link-Heer, ‘‘Maniera: Überlegungen zur Konkurrenz von Maier und Stil (Vasari, Diderot, Goethe),’’ Stil., ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 111. 28. Goethe, ‘‘Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Stil,’’ 34. The same holds true also for the essay ‘‘Der Sammler und die Seinigen’’ (1799), Goethe, Schriften zur Kunst, Gedenkausgabe, 13: 259–320. 29. Goethe, ‘‘Der Sammler und die Seinigen,’’ 319. 30. Cassirer, ‘‘Der Begriff der symbolischen Form,’’ 183. 31. Cassirer, ‘‘Naturbegriffe und Kulturbegriffe,’’ Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften (1942; reprint, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), 63f. 32. Cassirer, ‘‘Der Begriff der symbolischen Form,’’ 185. 33. Ibid. 34. Walter Solmitz, ‘‘Cassirer on Galileo,’’ 755. 35. Ibid., 755. 36. Unpublished Cassirer Papers, box 40, folder 792 (n.p.). The original text is ‘‘Formbegriff (Stil)/Charakterist. die Auffassg. des Stils bei Goethe ganz auf seiner Auffass. der Form ‘gegründet.’ Er ruht auf den tiefsten Grundfesten der Erkenntnis;—auf dem Wesen der Dinge insofern uns erlaubt ist, es in sichtbaren u. greifbaren Gestalten zu erkennen. Die Kunst gelangt auf dieser Stufe dahin, daß sie die Eigenschaften der Dinge u. die Art wie sie bestehen genau u. immer genauer kennen lernt, daß sie die Reihe der Gestalten genau übersieht, u. die verschiedenen charakteristischen Formen nebeneinander zu stellen und nachzuahmen weiss.’’ 37. PsF, 3: vi: ‘‘nur durch die Bewegung seines Werdens’’ (translation mine); PSF, 3: xiv. 38. Cassirer, ‘‘Fundamental Types of Anthropology.’’ Unpublished draft of the introduction to the Essay on Man (1944). Cassirer Papers, box 10, folder 184, p. 35f (original in English). 39. Ibid., 36. 40. Ibid., 37. 41. Ernst Wolfgang Orth, ‘‘Cassirers Philosophie der Lebensordnungen,’’ Ernst Cassirer, Geist und Leben, ed. E. W. Orth (Leipzig: Reclam, 1993), 21. 42. Ibid.. 43. Ibid.. 44. PsF, 1: 20 (translation mine); PSF, 1: 87. 45. E. W. Orth, ‘‘Cassirers Philosophie der Lebensordnungen,’’ 21f. 46. Ibid., 23. 47. PsF, 1: 11: ‘‘naiv-realistischen Weltsicht.’’ Cf. PSF, 1: 80. 48. PsF, 1: 11; PSF, 1: 80. 49. Cassirer, Descartes: Lehre—Persönlichkeit—Wirkung (1939; reprint, Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1978), 30. 50. Ibid., 29. 51. Ibid., 29f. Berel Lang, in his study The Anatomy of Philosophical Style (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), comes to the exact opposite conclusion: ‘‘The reader . . . is impelled by the form of the work to reserve judgment until he sees how the narrative ‘comes out’ ’’ (47). Lang throughout stresses Descartes’ referral to platonic and stoic philosophical traditions, while Cassirer (whom Lang does not read) is fascinated by the innovative trait

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that the description of the self in Descartes entails. Lang ‘‘anatomizes’’ philosophical style and therefore points out the unchanging, fixed aspects of a textual corpus. Cassirer, on the contrary, neither provides a fixed concept of ‘‘corpus’’ nor anatomy, but sees in the form of philosophy the transcendental, phenomenological entity of change. 52. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester, 1978), 34. 53. Ibid. 54. Hans-Georg Gadamer expressed this, e.g., in a radio interview with Patrick Conley: ‘‘Die vergessene Tradition. Zum 50. Todestag von Ernst Cassirer.’’ Broadcast in Germany on the Hessischer Rundfunk, Second Program, 13 April 1995. 55. Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, ed. Max Hecker (1907; reprint, Frankfurt am Main 1976).

P A R T

Comparative Studies

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Bakhtin and Cassirer: The Philosophical Origins of Carnival Messianism brian poole

Toward the end of the 1960s, as the Soviets tightened their grip upon Eastern Europe, a far more subtle invasion made its way toward the West. The translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World in 1968 unleashed a new subversive dynamic in literary studies, which with time would make the pungent winds of the body’s after and the raucous cries of the marketplace popular subjects in the seminars of our best universities. The unkind object of this essay is to demonstrate that Ernst Cassirer, genteel and urbane though he was, is nevertheless in some sense responsible for this wondrous achievement.

Relics and Rig-Veda In Rabelais and His World Bakhtin follows a curious pattern of images surrounding the grotesque body and its dismemberment. He calls attention to ‘‘the influence on the grotesque body exercised by relics’’ in the medieval world. The medieval literature on the dismembered bodies of the saints was an ‘‘occasion for grotesque images and enumerations.’’∞ In the Middle Ages ‘‘there was no small church or monastery,’’ Bakhtin contends, ‘‘that did not preserve a relic, at times a quite unusual one. . . . Arms, legs, heads, teeth, hair, and fingers were venerated. It would be possible to give a long grotesque enumeration of all these parts of a dismembered body.’’≤

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The parodies arising from this are Bakhtin’s immediate concern. His examples here, the ‘‘Treatise of Garcia of Toledo,’’ the ‘‘Ass’s Will,’’ and ‘‘The Pig’s Will,’’ are taken from Paul Lehmann’s study of Parody in the Middle Ages.≥ The interpretation is not. ‘‘The dismemberment here,’’ Bakhtin writes in his commentary on the ‘‘Ass’s Will,’’ ‘‘corresponds to the divisions of the social hierarchy: the ass’s head is for the Pope, the ears for the cardinals, the voice for the choir, the feces for the peasants, etc. The source of this parody is very ancient.’’∂ ‘‘In these satires,’’ Bakhtin continues, ‘‘it is interesting to note the combination of the dismemberment of the body and of society. This is a travesty of the widespread mythical concept of the origin of various social groups from various parts of god’s body. (The oldest monument of this social topography is the Rig-Veda.)’’ In a footnote in his study Bakhtin clarifies the relation: The Rig-Veda pictures the birth of the world from the body of the man Purusha; the gods sacrificed him and cut up his body, according to the method of sacrificial dismemberment. Various social groups were thus created from the various parts of Purusha’s body, as well as from certain cosmic phenomena. From his mouth appeared the Brahmans, from his arms soldiers, from his eyes the sun, from his head the sky, from his feet the earth, etc. In the christianized Germanic mythology we find a similar conception, but here the body is composed of flesh from the earth, bones from stones, blood from the sea, hair from plants, and thoughts from clouds.∑

The parallel with this ancient source furnishes Bakhtin with another example of the deep archaic roots of the images of the grotesque body; revealing these roots provides a bridge to a central motif in Bakhtin’s study: the theory that the ‘‘bodily topography of folk humor is closely interwoven with cosmic topography.’’∏ We sense that the relevance of the medieval texts for Bakhtin’s theory of comedy lies in the associations they appear to have with ritual and myth, their temporal and their spatial forms, and their significance. This pendulum movement in Bakhtin’s mature works—from a particular literary text to its roots in the archaic forms and rituals of human culture, and then back— has a paradigmatic significance in Bakhtin’s assessment of genre. In this dynamic sense of culture and in the material used to illustrate it we note the hand of Ernst Cassirer. The passage on the Rig-Veda and the comments on Germanic mythology were grafted, with very minor changes, from Bakhtin’s ninety-one-page synopsis of the second volume of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Bakhtin’s notes provide auspicious discoveries of Cassirer’s role in the theory of grotesque imagery. In these notes Bakhtin makes use of the word ‘‘excrement’’ for the first time in writing. More important, however, is the context in which the reference occurs.

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Bakhtin’s notes on the Rig-Veda stem from Cassirer’s chapter on the structure of space in mythic consciousness. These notes engendered a fundamental change in Bakhtin’s approach to the body in literature and indicate that Cassirer’s work is of seminal importance for Bakhtin’s project of interpreting the body and its visual representation in literature in terms of it’s relation to time, space, astrology, and the collective.π All of these axiomatic concerns arise out of the fundamental role of the body in language. In this axiom Bakhtin follows Cassirer verbatim, though writing in Russian: ‘‘The expressions in languages of spatial orientation, the words signifying ‘forward,’ ‘backward,’ ‘high’ [and] ‘low,’ were assimilated from the contemplation of one’s own body. The human body and its limbs serve as the system to which all other spatial distinctions refer.’’∫ ‘‘Myth,’’ Bakhtin continues, ‘‘follows the same path. It takes hold of the entirety of the world by coordinating it with the image of the human body and its organs. The external world is dismembered by analogy with the human body. Often the representation of the human body in the world as a whole determines all mythic cosmography and cosmology.’’Ω These observations inaugurate a new line of thought in Bakhtin’s research: ‘‘That is how,’’ he writes, ‘‘the unity of the microcosm and the macrocosm was created.’’∞≠ Their unity is reflected in the fact that cosmic topography always contains within it a particular evaluative accent, an attitude toward the body.∞∞

Heraclitus Bakhtin’s tendency in his mature works to organize complex temporal forms in visual images is the most outstanding feature of Cassirer’s influence. The temporal forms of grotesque imagery are a case in point. They are open to misinterpretation and have led some to believe that Bakhtin gives bad press to geriatrics. On the contrary, Bakhtin’s sense of the ambivalence of these traditional comic motifs bestows a relativity upon the perception of age itself. Here again the visual poignancy of Cassirer’s approach to forms of time and the body is literally what caught Bakhtin’s eye. In Cassirer’s study of myth Bakhtin encountered a comparison between a Buddhist and a Greek that illustrates a new sense and meaning in perception of the temporal present as the ‘‘harmony of becoming.’’ I quote Bakhtin’s formulation, which closely follows Cassirer’s: If, according to the Buddhist legend, Prince Siddharttha, following his first glance upon the aged, sickness and death, becomes an ascetic, then Heraclitus, upon the same occasion, holds fast to his view [of the harmony of becoming] in order to reveal within it the secret of the logos, which exist only

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The passage is notable for the constellation of temporal motifs which are not so much analyzed as pictorially represented with the body. ‘‘Here,’’ Bakhtin notes in conjunction with Cassirer, a new, more full and multifaceted and deeper view and sensation of time has been achieved; all sides (moments) are brought to balance with one another. The plenitude of time here is not sacrificed to the mythic origin of things (the absolute past), nor is it sacrificed to a prophetic last goal (the absolute future). There arises thus a specific feeling of the present: in it consciousness yields itself up to the present instant, but is not held by it and does not fall under its power; consciousness is free within it and it does not allow content to dominate it, neither does it allow joy to take control of it, nor does it define itself with the aid of suffering. In this philosophical ‘‘now’’ the empirical differences of time are sublated.∞∂

The theory espoused here spins the wheel full circle; whereas it began with a glance at the aged, it returns to the image of a child representing time in Heraclitus’s famous fragment, which Bakhtin noted both in Greek and in Cassirer’s German:∞∑ ‘‘time is a boy who plays, who moves the figures hither and thither across the board, the domination is the child’s.’’∞∏ This quotation appears on four occasions in Bakhtin’s study of Rabelais, once as the motto for his chapter ‘‘Popular-Festive Forms and Images in Rabelais.’’∞π The harmony of becoming transforms not only the symbols of age, but also those of youth; together they find expression in Bakhtin’s interpretation of ritual festive forms of culture: ‘‘the ritual of the feast tended to project the play of time itself, which kills and gives birth at the same time, recasting the old into the new, allowing nothing to perpetuate itself. Time plays and laughs! It is the playing boy of Heraclitus who possesses the supreme power of the universe (‘domination belongs to the child’).’’∞∫

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The Theory of Ambivalent Laughter and the Battle against Cosmic Fear Bakhtin’s notes from Cassirer’s study of myth clarify the relation he sees between the worship of relics in the Middle Ages and one of the oldest forms of mythic consciousness: the rituals involving sympathetic magic. The association depicts Renaissance laughter and Renaissance philosophy as a force striving to shake off the grip of mythic consciousness on the mind. In mythic consciousness the complete identification of part and whole sets a purely affective causal nexus in motion which ascribes a certain magical power to any parts of the body or even to objects in the body’s vicinity. As Bakhtin noted in his synopsis, this ‘‘identity of the whole and part (for example, the nails of an individual and the entire man) lies at the root of all magic.’’ In the rituals founded upon sympathetic magic, it is enough to possess relics of an individual or objects from his vicinity in order to exercise a power over him: ‘‘the leftovers of one’s food, the bones, one’s saliva, one’s excrement’’ were among the examples Bakhtin recorded.∞Ω Such objects are magically charged; they are a source of control and of fear. Objects infected with sympathetic magic, like the objects of taboo and mana, tend to lock the mind in its own projections, embodying powers which cause fear and terror. Both mana and taboo operate with the same category of ‘‘similitude’’ and with magic analogy. Both perform the function of distinguishing the essential from the nonessential and thus represent a primitive form of differentiation.≤≠ The sacred objects of mana, and the forbidden objects of taboo tend to subject mythic consciousness to the terror of the ‘‘magical’’ power which mythic consciousness itself projects upon them. ‘‘Mythic consciousness,’’ Bakhtin noted, ‘‘is held [or contained] by everything that manifests itself to it, by everything that attracts its attention.’’≤∞ In this sense mana and taboo are objects of fear. They differentiate and terrorize at one and the same time. In combination, however, in the so-called taboo-mana formula a dynamic element more characteristic of religion emerges. And here the phenomenon of ambivalence appears in Bakhtin’s vocabulary for the first time. In his study of myth Cassirer compares the mana-taboo formula with the meaning Plato attributed to the word yaumázein (to wonder or to be amazed). The manataboo formula (in Bakhtin’s version of Cassirer’s text) ‘‘expresses that wonder or amazement (yaumázein) with which myth as well as scientific cognition and philosophy begin. Here for the first time animal terror is changed into human amazement (Staunen), in which the ambivalent feelings—fear and hope, timidity and jubilant astonishment—coalesce.’’≤≤ This ‘‘ambivalence’’ of mean-

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ings, Bakhtin notes, can be found in the Latin word sacer and the Greek word a ¡ giow, ‘‘meaning both sacred and accursed or forbidden.’’≤≥ The suggestive idea behind these ambivalent words is the double character of the ‘‘sacred’’ which Bakhtin, following Cassirer,≤∂ places at the root of religion. Bakhtin was inspired by this passage; he supplements his notes here with an indication of the application he has in mind for this concept (in the entire ninety-one pages of Bakhtin’s synopsis this is the only occasion where Bakhtin adds his own comments): ‘‘Thus . . . the sacred is at one and the same time an object of sanctification-praise and an object of the forbidden and accursed. It is also an object of grief and laughter.’’≤∑ The association of laughter with the ambivalent origins of religion, with the sense of wonder that transforms ‘‘animal fear’’ into an ambivalent human feeling, is a vital part of Bakhtin’s theory. In laughter, ‘‘fear’’ and ‘‘hope’’ coalesce in overcoming fear by uniting it with its opposite, by rendering it ambivalent. In the first chapter of Rabelais and His World Bakhtin describes the battle against cosmic terror as the ‘‘victory over mystic fear (the fear of God), but also a victory over the awe inspired by the forces of nature [thus Cassirer’s animal fear],≤∏ and most of all over the oppression and guilt related to all that was consecrated or forbidden (‘mana’ and ‘taboo’).’’≤π ‘‘Laughter,’’ Bakhtin maintains, ‘‘liberates from the fear that developed in man during thousands of years: fear of the sacred, of prohibitions, of the past, of power.’’≤∫

Cosmic Fear and the Static Hierarchical Astrology In the Middle Ages, temporal and spatial forms characteristic of myth were still active. Bakhtin noted that in Cassirer’s study of myth that the early development of temporal and spatial orientation related to the body follows a distinct pattern leading from a primitive magic anatomy and mythical geography to the most advanced mythic structures: to astrology.≤Ω As Bakhtin recorded in yet another notebook dedicated to Cassirer’s study of The Individual and the Cosmos in the Philosophy of the Renaissance, mythic astrology still played a role in the Renaissance, where it appeared as an achievement and as a threat: ‘‘On the one hand,’’ Bakhtin wrote, ‘‘astrology strives to reveal the laws of the world and it has a certain mathematical apparatus; on the other hand, in practice astrology is defined by the fear of the gods, that is, by the most primitive forms of religiousness.’’≥≠ Bakhtin correlates this fear with the temporal structure of astrology.≥∞ In astrology, space is viewed as a rigid substantialized substrate which Bakhtin, following Cassirer, defines as the ‘‘Fatum of predetermination’’: ‘‘This predetermination covers both the individual as well as the entire world.’’≥≤ It extends as well to the body.

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In the Rig-Veda and the Germanic-Christian mythology we already encountered stories of the creation of the universe which implicate the body and have a stubborn temporal form. Cosmology and astrology have, like myth, the tendency to look backward. In his synopsis of Cassirer’s study of myth Bakhtin wrote: ‘‘Everything sanctified in mythic being is ultimately related to the beginning. . . . When a particular content appears to recede into the temporal distance, and to be related to the depth of the past, it is not only thus sanctified, but is, in a mythic sense, ‘justified.’ . . . The mythic past is an absolute past and does not admit to further reduction.’’≥≥ Bakhtin follows Cassirer in seeing in cosmology a threat to ethical freedom. The structure of the mythic cosmos is not temporal in the modern sense, but hierarchical. The ‘‘high’’ and the ‘‘low’’ and the characteristic mythic distinction between ‘‘sacred’’ and ‘‘profane’’ dominate the vertical cosmic images.≥∂ In these temporal forms, rooted in the past, and spatial forms, reflecting an absolute hierarchy, Bakhtin finds the basic components of the medieval cosmos.≥∑

The Medieval Cosmos It is comforting for friends of the Marburg school to learn that Bakhtin holds Aristotle responsible for the ‘‘substantial’’ forms of thought in physics which exercised a negative influence upon cosmology during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In Bakhtin’s study the Platonists and neo-Platonists, along with laughter, lead the battle for liberation. Bakhtin’s illustration of the Aristotelian ‘‘hierarchical picture of the world’’ which the Renaissance destroyed is remarkable for its precision.≥∏ Here again we find the hand of Ernst Cassirer. The almost full-page description of the Aristotelian cosmos in Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (362–63) is a verbatim translation from Ernst Cassirer’s The Individual and the Cosmos in the Philosophy of the Renaissance.≥π Bakhtin’s translation is so accurate that it is possible in places to correct some minor errors of the Russian-English translation by using Cassirer’s text.≥∫ In fact, what we find in this seminal portion of Bakhtin’s study of Rabelais—his analysis of a new sense of the cosmos in Renaissance philosophy—is five running pages of Cassirer punctuated intermittently with quotations from Bakhtin (see 361–65).≥Ω These passages of Bakhtin’s study have recently been anthologized in a reader with the title ‘‘Bakhtinian Thought.’’∂≠ Bakhtin’s philosophical explanation of the victory over medieval astrology is a catalogue of Cassirer’s heroes of the Renaissance. Not surprisingly for Cassirer fans, Pico is eulogized for his formulation of the micro/macrocosm motif in which man’s historic becoming and his autonomy find their adequate expres-

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sion: ‘‘Man is not something closed and ready-made, he is incomplete and open: such is Pico della Mirandola’s basic idea.’’∂∞ (Here Pico is, for Bakhtin, the spokesman for the Marburg school.) The ensuing discussion of Pico’s Apologia,∂≤ the themes of ‘‘natural magic,’’ ‘‘astrology,’’ and ‘‘sympathy’’ in Renaissance thought, their expression in the works of Porta, Bruno, and Campanella, and their ‘‘role in destroying the medieval notion of hierarchical space’’ stem from just a few pages of Cassirer’s classic study of Renaissance thought.∂≥ On the corresponding pages of Cassirer’s text we also find verbatim Bakhtin’s quotations of Paracelsus on medicine and astronomy, his analysis of the identity of the body and the soul in Pomponazzi’s De immortalitate animi, his formulation of Ficino’s concept of ‘‘universal animation,’’∂∂ ‘‘the source of his reference to Patrizzi’s Panpsychia,∂∑ and his passing allusion to Cardano’s natural philosophy, complete with the quotation from Cardano’s De Subtilitate: ‘‘metals are ‘buried plants’ and stones experience youth, growth and maturity.’’∂∏ Finally we arrive at the proverbial bird’s-eye view for which Bakhtin is famous: For all the Renaissance philosophers mentioned previously—Pico della Mirandola, Pomponazzi, Porta, Patrizzi, Bruno, Campanella, Paracelsus, and others—two tendencies appear characteristic. First is the tendency to find in man the entire universe with all its elements and forces, with its higher and lower stratum; second is the search for this universe in the human body which draws together and unites the most remote phenomena and forces of the cosmos. This philosophy expressed in theoretical terms the new sense of the cosmos as man’s own home, holding no terror for him. It was reflected by Rabelais in the language of images and on the plane of laughter.∂π

Bakhtin’s proverbial bird’s-eye view certainly raises the question of his dependency on secondary sources. More important here, however, is the issue of Bakhtin’s own philosophical orientation in Cassirer’s thought. We discover in these passages that Bakhtin’s prominent theoretical terms and quotations reflect his debt to Cassirer’s work. For it is in Cassirer’s cosmos that Bakhtin finds ‘‘man’s own home, holding no terror for him.’’ In the wake of the Stalinist purges and on the eve of the Holocaust Bakhtin turned to that placid German Jew whom Husserl in a letter to Natorp in 1918 called ‘‘the only truly significant scholar of his entire generation.’’∂∫

Cusanus: Vision, Relative Center of Cosmos, Tolerance Bakhtin’s unpublished manuscripts provide a startlingly new, philosophically coherent interpretation of his study of Rabelais and His World; in them

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Nicolaus Cusanus, the hero, so to speak, of Cassirer’s two studies on Renaissance philosophy, plays a central role. ‘‘The philosophy of Nicolaus Cusanus,’’ Bakhtin notes, ‘‘destroyed’’ the medieval ‘‘map of the world.’’ Cusanus adopted ‘‘the principle of Anaxagoras: everything is in everything. The entire world is homogeneous.’’∂Ω Here the sense of the homogeneous, relative, and not absolute definition of space has immediate consequences for the old relation between the macrocosm and the microcosm, for it results in, as Bakhtin wrote, ‘‘the destruction of the hierarchy; the transference of the evaluative center into the body.’’∑≠ Cassirer wrote in this connection: ‘‘If the new form of cosmology teaches us that there is no longer an absolute ‘high’ and ‘low,’ that no one physical body is nearer or farther away from the divine source of being than another, but that each is immediately equidistant to it [unmittelbar zu ihm], then this thought corresponds to a new form of religion and a basic religious disposition.’’∑∞ Again what caught Bakhtin’s eye is Cassirer’s appreciation of the visual form in which this new cosmos and new sense of time found expression. In The Individual and the Cosmos Cassirer recalls Cusanus’s encounter with the self-portrait of Roger van der Weyden in Brussels, which had the quality of casting its gaze upon all who look upon it, no matter where one stood.∑≤ If we envision just such a portrait hanging on the northern wall of a monastery and a group of monks gathered in a half circle around it, we can imagine (Cassirer tells us) ‘‘that each one of them will believe that the eye of the portrait is directed straight at him.’’ The gaze of the portrait is directed simultaneously ‘‘to the south, the west and the north,’’ but it also has a ‘‘threefold status of movement.’’ The gaze is stationary for the beholder standing still in front of it, the gaze follows the beholder who moves from the east to the west, and another who moves from the west to the east; the ‘‘image seems to participate in both these diametrically opposed movements.’’∑≥ ‘‘Here,’’ Cassirer concludes, ‘‘we have in this visual comparison the elementary relationship that exists between the all-encompassing being and the being of the finite, the final particular. Every particular and every individual has an immediate relationship to God. . . . But the true sense of the divine can be grasped only when our spirit no longer remains fixed to one of these relationships, nor to their mere totality, but rather when it takes the unity of this seeing [Schau], the ‘visio intellectualis’ together.’’∑∂ Early in the 1940s Bakhtin found in this poignant visional image not only a ‘‘transference of the evaluative center’’ of the cosmos ‘‘into the body,’’∑∑ but also a concomitant creation of a new sense of time, a form of time which Bakhtin used to define the Renaissance (I quote here Bakhtin’s early pointform notes for his study of Rabelais):

Figure 8.1: Self-portrait by Roger van der Weyden from Cassirer’s Individuum und Kosmos, opposite page 32

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In order that the contemporary moment (the present) could take its place at the center of literature (in order, consequently, to put an end to the projection of images into the past), it was necessary to sense one’s own contemporaneity as a new beginning.∑∏ This is what the Renaissance did. It restructured not only the spatial, but also the temporal cosmos. The beginning and the end lost their absolute meaning, and the center took its place ‘‘everywhere,’’ at any point, i.e., in any contemporaneity. Nicolaus Cusanus. The epoch had a sense of itself at the relative-absolute center of historical time. This is not a matter of an abstract-theoretical formulation of this sensation. . . . What is important is that the scale for measuring and evaluating ages give us this very contemporaneity (as the relative center of history: paraphrase of the definition of God and the image of Nicolaus Cusanus).∑π

Cassirer on Laughter Here I must anticipate one objection: that Bakhtin’s thought is foreign to such ‘‘seriousness.’’ On the contrary, the origins of Bakhtin’s theory of laughter are rooted in Cassirer’s study of the Platonic Renaissance in England. A subtle hint may be found in Bakhtin’s seemingly offhand remark that humor is an ‘‘inner-form.’’∑∫ ‘‘Laughter is essentially not an external but an inner form of truth.’’∑Ω The combination of inner form, truth, and laughter lead us inevitably to Cassirer’s interpretation of Shaftesbury. ‘‘Shaftesbury,’’ Cassirer held, ‘‘was the first to demand and to master aesthetic form.’’ If beauty is truth, then truth must possess the beauty of form. ‘‘Form is not merely something appended and external, but the reflection of the soul itself,’’ it is, Cassirer writes, ‘‘inward form.’’∏≠ Shaftesbury defines ‘‘enthusiasm’’ as the response to the inner form of the beauty of the universe. But such enthusiasm, particularly religious enthusiasm, must be accompanied by humor.∏∞ ‘‘Humour,’’ Cassirer maintains in his characterization of Shaftesbury, ‘‘represents that fundamental attitude and disposition of the soul in which it is best equipped for the comprehension of the beautiful and the true. . . . The recognition of humour as a fundamental power of the soul and likewise as an objective criterion of truth and falsehood is indeed one of the most paradoxical features of Shaftesbury’s world picture.’’∏≤ For Cassirer, Shaftesbury was a living anachronism, the only English thinker of the Enlightenment for whom the antique world was still alive and the last bastion of Platonic idealism on the island of English empiricism.∏≥ And like the Platonists of the Renaissance, like Rabelais, Shaftesbury finds himself confronted with what Cassirer calls ‘‘the harsh seriousness,’’ ‘‘the severe intolerance and the dogmatic narrowness of Calvinism and puritanism.’’∏∂ Against

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religious dogmatism Shaftesbury argues for a ‘‘free form of religion’’ which subjects intolerance, fanaticism, and ecstasy to the critique of humor, placing all narrowmindedness before ‘‘the comic mirror.’’∏∑ At this point in his study Cassirer returns to the Renaissance and literally reinterprets it in light of Shaftesbury’s theory of humor, revealing an entirely new dimension of Cassirer’s studies of the period: ‘‘It is at once evident that, along with all the other fundamental powers of the intellect to which it gave new form, the Renaissance also endowed the comic with new force and new meaning. Our conception of the Renaissance would remain fragmentary and incomplete, if we were to forget this aspect of the comic.’’∏∏ Again and again Cassirer cites what will become Bakhtin’s favorite examples, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Rabelais:∏π These names signify far more than mere details in the luminous and variegated picture of the literary Renaissance; they represent its substance and spirit in all its vigor and in its clearest expression. It was first in the realm of the comic that this spirit celebrated its highest triumphs and won its decisive victories. . . . In all its variations the comic performs . . . a certain similar intellectual task. . . . Everywhere it is striving towards one goal, the goal of liberation. Renaissance emancipation from all the forces that were binding it to the past, to tradition and to authority, is really achieved only when it succeeds in reflecting these forces in the comic mirror.∏∫

The comparison is striking. Like Shaftesbury in Cassirer’s text, Bakhtin claims that laughter liberates us ‘‘from all religious and ecclesiastic dogmatism, from all mysticism and piety.’’∏Ω Laughter is the ‘‘corrective’’ to the ‘‘narrow-minded seriousness’’ of ‘‘spiritual pretense.’’π≠ Laughter liberates from the ‘‘fear’’ of the ‘‘past.’’π∞ Along with Cusanus’s destruction of the medieval cosmos, laughter, for Bakhtin as for Cassirer, redefines the achievements of the Renaissance. ‘‘The sixteenth century,’’ Bakhtin wrote, ‘‘represents the summit in the history of laughter.’’π≤

Conclusion The recognition of Cassirer’s presence in Bakhtin’s work is (forgive the pun) no laughing matter. It ought to encourage those interested in Cassirer, for some of his ideas have obtained unexpected popularity in various works by Bakhtin. During the eighties, when the vitality of Cassirer’s thought was the subject of study among a comparatively small group of scholars, Bakhtin appeared to possess his own decade in literary criticism. ‘‘If,’’ as David Lodge wrote, ‘‘the 1960s was the decade of structuralism, and the 1970s the decade

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of deconstruction and other varieties of post-structuralism, then the 1980s have arguably been dominated by the discovery and dissemination of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work.’’π≥ By 1990 Bakhtin was ‘‘one of the three names most mentioned in manuscripts submitted to PMLA.’’π∂ Certainly Bakhtin’s use of Cassirer lends urgency to the question of the sources of Bakhtin’s texts. There are instances where substantial portions of Bakhtin’s published studies are based upon German secondary literature. Although Bakhtin has been compared to Spitzer, Curtius, and Auerbach for his comprehensive erudition, he rarely lived near a good library. Bakhtin himself propagated the story that his friend Kanaev, who held a senior post at the library in Leningrad, sent cartons of books to Bakhtin in exile, beginning in the late thirties during the Stalinist purges and continuing through the blockade of Leningrad.π∑ The story of how Prospero, in Shakespeare’s Tempest, got his library to the island in that ‘‘rotten carcus of a butt’’ is just as romantic and more credible. We still don’t know who Bakhtin was. In an interview in 1973, Bakhtin described his studies in philosophy and classics and his graduation from the University of St. Petersburg. Yet Bakhtin was never registered at the university, and for obvious reasons: Bakhtin never finished high school.π∏ It is nevertheless impossible to dismiss the philosophical coherence of Bakhtin’s thought, although its reception has certainly given birth to eclectic tendencies. Cassirer can, indeed, must be used to reveal the depth and the direction of some of Bakhtin’s most mind-boggling neologisms and important observations. Bakhtin was certainly one of Cassirer’s most adept readers. Through this comparative study we can learn something new about Cassirer: the vitality, the implications, and the applications of his thought in cultural studies.

Notes 1. M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), 350. 2. Ibid., 350. 3. Paul Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1922), 45, 234ff. Lehmann’s study was dedicated to Vossler, the twentieth-century pioneer of linguistic idealism and a favorite of Cassirer and Bakhtin. 4. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 351. 5. Ibid., 351, note 14. 6. Ibid., 354. 7. The attention to the body is of course not new to Bakhtin’s thought. The phenomenological analyses of the body which Bakhtin offers in The Author and the Hero (aban-

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doned in or after 1925), written under the influence of Max Scheler and particularly Theodor Litt’s Individuum und Gemeinschaft, 2d ed. (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1923), examines the mutually exclusive perspectives of each individual in his perception of the other. In all of Bakhtin’s earlier works the central link of the body to the development of spatial and temporal perception per se is missing; there is also no hint of the body’s correlation with the cosmos in myth and in Renaissance philosophy. 8. Bakhtin, synopsis of Cassirer, MS, 113; cf. PsF, 2: 112. 9. Ibid. 10. Bakhtin, synopsis of Cassirer, MS, 114. Cf. PsF, 2: 113. 11. Bakhtin composed his synopsis of Cassirer’s study of myth prior to completing his two-hundred-page essay ‘‘Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel’’ and before he began his largest study on Rabelais and His World; his careful reformulation in Russian of Cassirer’s German provides a key to many of the most perplexing formulations in both texts. We find here a new atmosphere and a new vocabulary in which Bakhtin, through Cassirer’s philosophy, increasingly views the questions of meaning and genre, the questions of body and mind. The synopsis contains an abundance of terminology foreign to Bakhtin’s earlier works but characteristic of his mature ones. 12. Bakhtin’s Russian reads: ‘‘beznkoe eænhoe’’ (Cassirer speaks of ‘‘das große Eine’’). 13. Bakhtin, synopsis of Cassirer, MS, 146; PsF, 2: 164 (‘voåectba’—‘‘des Göttlichen’’). 14. Bakhtin, synopsis of Cassirer, MS, 147–48 (the italics are Bakhtin’s). Cf. PsF, 2: 165–66. 15. Beyond the titles of books and the quotations from Goethe, this is the only occasion where Bakhtin records material in German in the present synopsis without translating it. 16. Bakhtin wrote: ‘‘Tak haæo øohnmatd ≥ameœatezdhqe czoba Gepakznta: ‘a¯ivn ` pa˜iw e¯ sti paízvn, petteúvn. paidòw h˘ basilhíh’ (die Zeit ist ein Knabe, der spielt, der hin und her die Brettsteine setzt, eines Kindes ist die Herrschaft) (fr. 52).’’ (Cf. PsF, 2:. 166.) 17. Bakhtin, synopsis of Cassirer, MS, 149. Cf. PsF, 2: 166; compare Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 82, 147, 196 (as motto for the chapter), 435 (in the Russian, 95, 163, 452, 480, the motto entirely translated is on 219). 18. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 82. 19. Bakhtin, synopsis of Cassirer, MS, 101. Cf. PsF, 2: 67. 20. Bakhtin, synopsis of Cassirer, MS, 103–4. Cf. PsF, 2: 96–97. 21. Bakhtin, synopsis of Cassirer, MS, 103. Cf. PsF, 2: 95. 22. Bakhtin, synopsis of Cassirer, MS, a106. Cf. PsF, 2: 99. 23. Bakhtin, synopsis of Cassirer, MS, 106. Cf. PsF, 2: 100. 24. Cassirer follows here Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige (Göttingen, 1917) (cf. PsF, 2: 95, 101). 25. Bakhtin, synopsis of Cassirer, MS, 107. 26. Cf. PsF, 2: 99: ‘‘der bloß tierische Schrecken.’’ 27. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 90 (translation modified; see («Pavze», c. 104). 28. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 94. 29. Bakhtin, synopsis of Cassirer, MS, 112 (cf. PsF, 2: 111); mythic perception of the world’s totality ‘‘finds its most complete expression in astrology.’’ 30. Bakhtin, synopsis of Cassirer’s Individuum und Kosmos, second notebook, 1. Cf.

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Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, vol. 10 (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1927), 111 (Cassirer speaks of ‘‘Dämonenfurcht’’ as ‘‘die primitivste Form der religiösen Verursachung’’). Here Cassirer refers his reader to Aby Warburg’s study of antique pagan prophecy. 31. Cf. Bakhtin, Synopsis of Cassirer, PsF, 2, MS, 112–13, see PsF, 2: 110–11. Bakhtin notes: ‘‘For astrology, all events, any activity, all becoming’’ prove to be just an ‘‘illusion,’’ since behind any new phenomena lies what Bakhtin calls here the ‘‘uniform determination of being.’’ 32. Bakhtin, Synopsis of Cassirer, PsF, 2, MS, 113. Cf. PsF, 2: 111. 33. Bakhtin, synopsis of Cassirer, MS, 125–26. Cf. PsF, 2: 130–31. 34. Bakhtin, synopsis of Cassirer, MS, 119. Cf. PsF, 2: 120–21. 35. Cf. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 401: ‘‘In the medieval picture of the world, the top and the bottom, the higher and the lower, have an absolute meaning both in the sense of space and of values. . . . All that was best was highest, all that was worst was lowest. . . . The concrete, visible model of the earth on which medieval thought was based was essentially vertical.’’ 36. Ibid., 362–63: ‘‘The medieval cosmos was built according to Aristotle. It was based on the precept of the four elements (earth, water, air and fire), each of which had its own spatial and hierarchal position in the structure of the universe. According to this theory all the elements were subject to a definite order from top to bottom. The nature and the movement of each element were determined according to its position in relation to the center of the cosmos. Nearest of all to this center is the earth, and any part separated from the earth tends to move back to the center along a straight line; that is, it falls to earth. Fire moves in the opposite direction; it continually tends upward and therefore away from the center. The realms of water and air lie between the realms of earth and fire. The basic principle of all physical phenomena is the transformation of one element into the element nearest it. Thus fire is transformed into air, air into water, water into earth. This reciprocal transformation is the law of creation [German: Entstehen] and destruction [German: Vergehen] to which all earthly things are subject. But above the earthly world there rises the world of celestial bodies, not ruled by this law of creation and destruction. The celestial bodies are composed of a special kind of matter, quinta essentia. This matter is not subject to transformation; it is capable only of pure motion, that is, movement from place to place. Celestial bodies, as the most perfect, are endowed only with the most perfect movement, the circular movement around the center of the earth.’’ I have modified the English text to include what the Russian-English translation has left out. 37. Cassirer (Individuum und Kosmos, 25–26) is defining the salient characteristics of ‘‘mittelalterliche Physik’’: ‘‘Diese stützt sich auf die Aristotelische Grundlehre von den vier Elementen, deren jedem im Aufbau des Kosmos ein ganz bestimmter Platz angewiesen ist. Feuer, Wasser, Luft und Erde stehen zueinander in einer fest geregelten räumlichen Beziehung, in einer bestimmten Ordnung des ‘Oben’ und ‘Unten.’ Die Natur jedes Elements weist ihm einen bestimmten Abstand vom Mittelpunkt des Universums zu. Diesem zunächst steht die Erde; und jeder Teil von ihr strebt, wenn er einmal von seinem natürlichen Ort, von der unmittelbaren Nähe zum Weltmittelpunkt getrennt ist, in geradliniger Bewegung zu ihm zurück. Im Gegensatz hierzu ist die Bewegung des Feuers ‘an sich’ nach oben gerichtet, so daß es sich ständig vom Mittelpunkt zu entfernen strebt.

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Zwischen dem Ort der Erde und dem des Feuers lagert sich dann das Gebiet, dem Luft und Wasser angehören. Die allgemeine Form des physikalischen Wirkens ist durch diese Stellenordnung bestimmt. Alle physische Wirksamkeit vollzieht sich derart, daß eine Umwandlung von einem Element in ein anderes, ihm benachbartes stattfindet, so daß Feuer zu Luft, Luft zu Wasser, Wasser zu Erde wird. Dieses Prinzip der gegenseitigen Umwandlung, dieses Gesetz des Entstehens und Vergehens, prägt allem irdischen Geschehen seinen Stempel auf. Über der irdischen Welt aber erhebt sich die Sphäre, die diesem Gesetz nicht mehr unterworfen ist, die weder Entstehen noch Vergehen kennt. Die Materie der himmlischen Körper hat ein eigenes Sein, eine ‘quinta essentia,’ die von der Art der vier irdischen Elemente wesenhaft verschieden ist. Ihr kommt keine qualitative Umwandlung zu, sondern sie besitzt nur noch eine mögliche Art der Veränderung: die reine Ortsbewegung. Und da von allen möglichen Formen der Bewegung dem vollkommensten Körper die vollkommenste zukommen muß, so ergibt sich, daß die himmlischen Körper reine Kreislinien um den Mittelpunkt der Welt beschreiben.’’ 38. Where the English text reads: ‘‘This transformation is the law of creation and destruction,’’ the German text reads ‘‘Dieses Prinzip der gegenseitigen Umwandlung’’ (i.e., ‘‘This principle of reciprocal transformation’’); and in fact the Russian-English translator left out the Russian word b≥anmhoe, i.e., ‘‘this reciprocal transformation’’ (see «Pavze», 402). There are more examples. The German translation of Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais by Gabriele Leupold is remarkably close to Cassirer’s original German text. Cf. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais und seine Welt (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 407–8. 39. Cf. Rabelais and His World, 361 (bottom, beginning with Paracelsus) to 366 (where Bakhtin resumes discussion of Rabelais and the ‘‘eulogy of Pantagruelion’’); in the German translation, Rabelais und seine Welt, cf. 406–11. 40. See Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), 248ff. 41. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 364 (the translation has been modified); cf. Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos, 88ff. 42. Cf. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 364, and the almost verbatim source: Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos, 158. 43. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 365. Cf. Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos, 156–60 44. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 365: ‘‘the world is not an aggregate of elements but an animate being’’; cf. Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos, 116: ‘‘so wahr die Welt kein Aggregat toter Elemente, sondern ein beseeltes Wesen ist.’’ 45. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 365. Cf. Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos, 157. 46. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 365. Cf. Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos, 157–58: ‘‘Die Metalle sind ihm [Cardanus] nichts anderes als ‘begrabene Pflanzen,’ die ihr Dasein unter der Erde führen; die Steine haben ihre Entwicklung, ihr Wachstum und ihre Reife.’’ 47. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 365, translation modified; the italics (almost always left out in the translation) are Bakhtin’s. 48. Husserl in a letter to Paul Natorp, 29 June 1918, quoted in Ulrich Sieg, Aufstieg und Niedergang des Marburger Neukantianismus (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994), 447–48.

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49. Bakhtin, synopsis of Individuum und Kosmos (cf. Cassirer, 26–27). Bakhtin had already followed the significance of the functional concept of homogeneous space in physics in his synopsis of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. 50. Bakhtin, synopsis of Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos (in part interpolation). 51. Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos, 29. 52. Ibid., 32. 53. Ibid., 33. 54. Ibid. The relation of Cusanus’s De visione Dei to central aspects of Bakhtin’s mature thought (the superaddressee and Bakhtin’s dialogic sense of Dostoevsky’s ‘‘authorial seeing’’) can scarcely be ignored. The conception discussed here provides for an intersubjective common ground (the singularity and distinctiveness of the portrait), the validity and dignity of each individual ‘‘subjective’’ perspective (the inexorable and noninterchangeable ‘‘situatedness’’ of the individual), and the final notion that the truth may lie beyond all the individual perspectives, although this in no sense diminishes the status of the individual, whose own particular vantage is part of the whole. 55. Bakhtin, synopsis of Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos (in part interpolation). 56. Compare the use of the term ‘‘contemporization’’ in Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 106. 57. Bakhtin, ‘‘Towards Questions of the Theory of the Novel’’ (unpub. MS), fourth notebook, 5–6. Compare the second to last paragraph of Bakhtin’s ‘‘Epic and Novel’’ for his broad application of the temporal categories defining the Renaissance in this passage. 58. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 94 (translation modified; the Russian is typical of the Plotinian expression for inner form: ‘‘bhytpehhrr fopma’’). In this passage Bakhtin subtly recalls the ambivalent origins of religion. 59. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 94 (translation modified). Bakhtin continues here: ‘‘Laughter opened up men’s eyes to that which is new, to the future. . . . It helped to uncover this truth and to give it an internal form.’’ 60. See also Ernst Cassirer,’’ The Platonic Renaissance in England, trans. James P. Pettegrove (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1953), 167. 61. See also ibid., 168. 62. Ibid., 167–68. 63. Cassirer also places Shaftesbury in a tradition arising from Cusanus. He stresses Cusa’s ‘‘truly wonderful tolerance’’ arising out of his theory that ‘‘the one being and the truth can only be expressed in the form of alterity.’’ (Cf. Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos, 31; compare the translation: ‘‘The unattainable unity of truth is known in conjectural otherness’’ in: Cassirer, Platonic Renaissance in England, 14.) This tolerance found expression in Cusa’s dialogue De pace fidei; following Cassirer’s interpretation of Cusa’s text, Bakhtin referred to Cusanus as ‘‘the propagandist of dialogue.’’ Similarly, in his notes from Cassirer’s study, Bakhtin underscores Cusanus’s ‘‘new form of religiousness,’’ his ‘‘justification of individuality’’ and of ‘‘the multiplicity of religious beliefs, rituals and practices’’ (Bakhtin, synposis of Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos, 29–32). Cassirer finds traces of Cusa’s influence on Ficino in the latter’s defense of any form of worship ‘‘be it ever so absurd,’’ so long as it is ‘‘human’’ (Cassirer, Platonic Renaissance in England, 15; cf. Individuum und Kosmos, 76) In this combination of the divine and the absurd, in the alterity of religion itself we find once again the ambivalence of religion which Bakhtin

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noted in the words ‘‘sacer’’ and a ¡ giow, a combination of the sacred and forbidden, the divine and the profane to which Bakhtin added ambivalent laughter. 64. Cassirer, Platonic Renaissance in England, 169. 65. Ibid., 170–71. 66. Ibid., 170. 67. See Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 2, 52, 66, 124. 68. Cassirer, Platonic Renaissance in England, 170–72 (my italics). 69. See Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 7. 70. See ibid., 22. 71. See ibid., 94. 72. See ibid., 101. 73. David Lodge, After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990), 4. 74. See Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London: Routledge, 1990), 195. 75. In light of recent research the account appears unlikely. During the forties Bakhtin asked Yudine to send him books on many occasions. Why no Kanaev? Another myth: Bakhtin had already attempted, in 1941, to publish his study of Rabelais. From 1943 to 1945 he remained active in the search to find a publisher. 76. And he had to repeat his first year at school. See H. A. Øahdkob, «∂alaækn pahhelo ©axtnha» , in «Ænazol, Kaphabaz, Xpohotoø», N. 1(2), 74–89.

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From Culture to Politics: The ‘‘Aufhebung’’ of Ethics in Ernst Cassirer’s Political Philosophy in Comparison with the ‘‘Political Theology’’ of Ernst Kantorowicz enno rudolph

Cassirer did not write an ethics, and there are interpreters of his work who consider this a deficiency. This criticism reminds me of a question an interlocutor whose name we don’t know is supposed to have directed to Martin Heidegger: ‘‘When will you write ethics?’’ Heidegger tells us about this event in his famous ‘‘Letter on Humanism,’’ which he wrote to Jean Beaufret in 1946.∞ In the wake of ‘‘destroying’’ the traditional understanding of humanism he raises this question after a revealing reference to a pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus, and provides the following answer: ethics derives from the Greek ‘‘ethos’’ which means man’s ‘‘original existence.’’ Hence, any thinking ‘‘which considers the truth of existence to be the initial element of man as an existing entity represents ethics in its original pure form.’’ By taking a detour via Heraclitus, Heidegger goes back to ontology or, to be more precise, to his own existential ontology and the fatalism of destiny (Seinsgeschick) which he used polemically against Cassirer in their 1929 dispute in Davos about the notion of freedom: ethics as a doctrine that teaches man how to resign sympathetically to a destiny of fear and death.≤ From a formal point of view Cassirer’s approach to ethics seems to be analogous insofar as the evidence for his ethics is implicit as well. Confronted with a similar question—when will you write an ethics—Cassirer could have cited his earlier writings, such as Freiheit und Form, as well as the ‘‘morphol-

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ogy of culture’’ in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. If this assumption is true, however, then it is necessary to specify the way in which the morphology of culture represents an ethical system.≥ Cassirer’s work provides an indirect but nonetheless very clear answer to this question. He advocates an interaction of cultural forms—myth, religion, science, art—and criticizes any attempts to narrow this interaction to some exclusive alternative, for example, to religion or myth. In such a case a cultural impoverishment is eminent, which may be counteracted only by transforming the exclusive alternative into an ‘‘as well as,’’ a dialogical togetherness or interdependence. To stay with the example of religion and myth, Cassirer reveals the peculiar ambivalence which characterizes the process of substituting religion for myth, and he develops a dialectics of peculiar enrichment and impoverishment. For example, the abandonment of polytheism in favor of monotheism could be understood as an increasing display of human rationality and in this sense also as a growing emancipation from what, up to then, had been feared as demonic threats. This distancing from magical ritualism would deserve to be designated as ‘‘Enlightenment.’’ This process tends to be considered as a landmark on the road from myth to rationality—a road which is often hailed as progress. On the other hand, Cassirer also points to an almost tragic loss, since the diverse descriptions of divine acts characteristic of myth are radically diminished. In line with a rationalization of religious world views, this loss of diversity corresponds to a lack of concretion, sensuality, and immediateness. Whereas in the Bible the God who spoke to Moses through the burning bush is still presented in the rudimentary settings of mythical metaphor, God’s self-introduction symbolizes a highly sophisticated degree of abstraction and reflection typical of monotheistic high religion in its heyday. God says: ‘‘I am who I am.’’ Theologians call this sentence God’s ‘‘self-introduction formula.’’ In any case, it contains an unsurpassable degree of abstraction. It symbolizes the consistent rationalization in monotheistic sovereignty. Yet—and this is where Cassirer’s criticism applies—despite its richness in reflection, this sentence is remarkably poor in content, intuition, metaphor, and life. But the decisive thing is that the achievement of a liberation from the ‘‘terror’’ (Blumenberg) of a world full of demons is counteracted by a new burden: morality. Monotheist religion requires from mankind an obligatory orientation toward rationally founded commandments, whereas mythic consciousness is governed by taboos. The birth of religion is also the birth of ethics. Where the mythic forces at least carried the responsibility for everything, God in monotheistic religion encumbers mankind with unacceptable responsibility. The God of Judaism—and this was inherited by the God of the Christians—was a God of theodicy. That is, he is acquitted from responsibility for evil in the

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world, especially from having to account for the existence of moral evil, for which mankind is given the liability. At least he did not evict him from paradise without compensation, but rather offered him the chance to prove himself in history. Following Cassirer, we can reconstruct an aetiology of ethics using the history of culture. This view regards ethics as the strict regulation of culture, whose force is gradually reduced by the enlightened criticism of religion or replaced by an autonomous morality of reason. Cassirer presupposes this view without taking a dogmatic view of its validity. His concept of culture does not obtain its legitimation from a pregiven ethics. His concept of culture replaces ethics. Cassirer’s criticism is not confined to preserving the ideal of a lively interaction between a multitude of cultural forms as expressions of human freedom — the implicit guiding ethos of the cultural criticism unfolded in his philosophy of symbolic forms—rather, his suspicion is directed more generally at the dismantling of cultural complexity. One could say that Cassirer’s implicit plea for cultural complexity hides his defense of a good, which earlier philosophers described by using the term ‘‘ethics.’’ Cassirer chose a different approach in that he did not derive a moral imperative for the preservation of human culture from his implicit plea for cultural complexity, rather he describes what will happen to culture should this complexity be menaced or, even worse, reduced, namely, cultural suicide. The political forms suitable to demonstrate the mechanisms of such cultural suicide are totalitarian states—suitable for the macabre reason that here homicide and suicide are mutually interdependent. The implicit ethics of Cassirer’s criticism of culture is reflected not only in his effort to interpret the philosophy of the Renaissance, from Cusanus to Pomponazzi, as a process of early European Enlightenment and in his attempt to give evidence of the modernity of this epoch.∂ In his later analysis of Machiavelli’s theory of power and its maintenance—an analysis which I think is a key to understanding his last work, The Myth of the State—Cassirer complements his implicit ethos of cultural complexity with the outline of a philosophy of politics. In my opinion, the value of this text, which was first published in English and subsequently in German translation in 1946, the year after his death, lies in the fact that it takes the political message implicit in his 1920s philosophy of culture and renders it explicit. Certainly this political ‘‘counterbalance’’ to the analytic results of his philosophy of culture was prompted by the German people’s ‘‘volonté generale’’ to help political totalitarianism achieve a cultural victory in a Europe so obviously fed up with Enlightenment. Cassirer did not have to change anything in his earlier outlook because the later work confirmed the results of his earlier criticism of culture. The outcome of his cultural analysis may be translated without hermeneutical force into a

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succinct definition of culture. According to this definition, culture would be the ‘‘quintessence’’ of the results of human practice that broaden the scope of evident manifestations, that is, the scope of ‘‘symbols’’ of freedom in history. To put it briefly: culture would be a nonreducible complexity of possibilities in the realm of the expressions of human freedom. I believe that this thesis entails a modified ethical imperative that includes an implicit ethos of cultural criticism: act in a manner that enables you to increase your capabilities to create a second nature which furthers complexity without putting the first nature at risk. This is an implicit demand for a cultural pluralism, by which I mean that Cassirer’s genealogy of epochal political theories in the European history of ideas, as he initiated it in his late work, suggests that those states and societies with a tendency to put cultural pluralism at risk have to be classified as potentially totalitarian. Yet as a cultural analyst of the 1920s, Cassirer knows that such a destructive tendency in culture originates in a logic of freedom. This logic corresponds to the idea that cultural impoverishment is the price we have to pay for the increasing rationalization of worldviews. We know this from the example of Kant, who interpreted the phenomenon of moral evil neither as an anonymous violent force nor as a natural moral weakness, but rather as the conscious expression of free will and thus, so to speak, as a source of anticulture. Whoever seeks to counteract this tendency has to analyze its historical and anthropological dimensions and use them as a critical mirror in which to view tendencies today—just as Machiavelli did. Such a genealogy of the causes of an original tendency toward cultural suicide is, in my opinion, provided in Cassirer’s The Myth of the State. The message of this text may be put as follows: the destruction of freedom as an act of freedom may well lead to cultural suicide, but this cultural suicide in itself constitutes a cultural phenomenon. In Cassirer’s work we do not find ethical imperatives that would call for definite decisions—for example, by an affirmative ‘‘you shall’’— which, as with Kant, would rely upon the optimistic belief that freedom might win out over bondage. Here Cassirer sides with Niccolo Machiavelli, whose political theory Cassirer analyzes as the centerpiece of his last work and whose methodological approach he shares in at least three aspects. (1) Machiavelli and Cassirer both suggest a logic of action. For Machiavelli this logic leads to a severe transformation of freedom into political power; for Cassirer, it results in a tragic self-denial of freedom. (2) Machiavelli and Cassirer both share a common understanding of history. In their perspective, human rationality, being independent from history, does not have an impact on history in the way that Kant’s Reason has an impact on the world, but rather it represents a function of history. This is one reason why we may learn from history. (3)

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Finally, both explore their subject—political culture—by a reconstruction of its decay. They write pathologies: Machiavelli writes a pathology of statecraft, Cassirer a pathology of modern forms of the state. The characterization of The Myth of the State as a ‘‘pathology’’ of the modern state was inspired by Ernst Kantorowicz’s discussion of the history of law in his treatise The King’s Two Bodies.∑ Kantorowicz himself suggests this synopsis with an explicit reference to Cassirer, namely, that Cassirer had written a ‘‘pathology’’ and Kantorowicz a ‘‘physiology’’ of modern state. A contextual reading of Cassirer’s cultural analysis and theory of the state, implying the synthesis of Cassirer’s and Kantorowicz’s main work on the theory of the state, might provide the basis for an interlocutory constellation that is centrally important for a proper understanding of Cassirer’s interpretation of Machiavelli. To verify this, one has to recapitulate some of Kantorowicz’s main theses, since they refer to a stage of development in the modern state that not only precedes but also presupposes Machiavelli’s theory of political power. Kantorowicz’s research on legal history provided a previously unheard-of basis for the term ‘‘political theology,’’ which Carl Schmitt reintroduced into twentieth-century writing on politics. In his path-making investigation, Kantorowicz shows how the legal legitimation of authority in the right of kings takes place through the deification of kingship, and how it breaks down because of the high claims made by this legitimation. The human and the ideal ‘‘bodies’’ of the king come into conflict. The preservation of power depends upon the balance between the person and the office of the king. Kingship fails when this balance is lost, so that it resembles a norm that makes excessive demands. Kantorowicz provides examples of both success and failure that had important historical effects. He shows how in the Middle Ages the churches again and again called into question the divine legitimation of the king’s office. The king became a tragic figure when the church was successful. Only power with a metaphysical legitimation has legal authority; only this kind of legitimation requires no further moral justification. Kantorowicz shows us that such immorality in the use of power, which Machiavelli exposed after the Middle Ages, and the legality that protects it were established in politics through Christian-theological legitimation. One of the major accomplishments of Kantorowicz’s text is that he shows how the transition from the twelfth to the thirteenth century—he named the latter the ‘‘century of legal experts’’—brought a ‘‘shift’’ in the theoretical legitimization of the immortal power of the king as a judiciary institution, a shift which may be described as a transformation from theologically legitimated

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politics to ‘‘political theology.’’ In theologically legitimated politics the king’s sovereignty was justified Christologically, that is, it was based on a dogmatic model of Jesus Christ as the personified unity of God and man. This Christology served as a blueprint for the paradoxical unity between the moral individual and the immortal institutional body of the king. From a theological viewpoint, and especially from the Church’s perspective this definition of political sovereignty possessed two important advantages: first, it binds the legitimization of political power to theological preconditions that lie at the discretion of the Church; second, this model of political power resides in the paradoxical personal duality of the pope, who remains superior to the worldly sovereign. Yet when such a Christologically defined duality between a natural person and a mercy-induced participation in immortal dignity, or, to put it briefly, between nature and mercy, changes into a new specimen of dualism—namely, a dualism between nature in the sense of a natural law, on the one hand, and the individual person, on the other hand—a revolution in political thinking takes place. A new strategy concerning the legitimization of political power enters the scene; theological politics is transformed into ‘‘political theology.’’ It is this interesting shift to which Kantorowicz draws our attention. Kantorowicz uses as example the political role of Frederick the Second to demonstrate in detail how the former paradoxical dialectic between the freedom from law characteristic of the immortal kingdom and the commitment to law that binds the office-holder is transformed to create a new dialectic, one which considerably strengthens and stabilizes sovereign power. With Frederick, the dualism between freedom from the law (legibus solutus) and commitment to the law (legibus alligatus) is superseded by a new duality between freedom from the law and a commitment to reason (ratione alligatus). This shift is crucial since it cultivates a type of political sovereignty that, according to Kantorowicz, is the characteristic feature of political theology in the late Middle Ages, a characteristic which Kantorowicz defines in a different way than does Carl Schmitt. Whereas for Schmitt all relevant notions of the modern state are ‘‘theologized political notions,’’∏ Kantorowicz regards relevant legal definitions of political sovereignty to be politicized theological notions. As far as the thirteenth century is concerned, prior to the Renaissance, Kantorowicz’s evaluation has more historical validity than Schmitt’s version. The transformation from a Christological legitimization of the principle legibus solutus to one based upon natural law was an accomplished fact. ‘‘The concept of mercy,’’ concludes Kantorowicz, ‘‘had no more room in this thinking.’’ This also held true—dangerously enough—for the commitment to reason and thus for the decision as to which political measures were rational and which were not. These now depended solely on the sovereign. A shrewd eman-

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cipation from legal-theological dualism was achieved as a crucial aspect of the complicated process of secularization. An autonomous, self-enthroned political ratio replaced the dependency on mercy, which up until then had seemed inviolable. De facto, Kantorowicz describes the development of the concept of absolute political sovereignty as a manifestation of an ambivalent process of Enlightenment. Although this development is due to the victory of ratio over mercy, it elevates the absolute monarch above any control or competition. Here we come to the point where the political genealogies of Kantorowicz and Cassirer supplement one another, although chronologically their discussions were generated in opposite order. In the key chapter of The Myth of the State, Cassirer portrays Machiavelli as a political realist with respect to his times. Machiavelli’s prince has no need for a theological justification of his use of political power; he is the epitome of the autocrat who follows only the principle of legibus solutus. More important, Cassirer even claims that Machiavelli exemplifies the use of reason—the ratio mentioned in connection with Frederick the Second. This does not diminish his competence, but it certainly contradicts the idea that the prince’s actions are purely arbitrary. Cassirer justifies his view by means of an interpretation of Machiavelli’s Discorsi, which examine the first ten years of Titus Livius’s reign. Cassirer applies this interpretation to the Principe—a very controversial approach, which subsequently has been repeatedly supported. Cassirer uses the clandestine republicanism of the Discorsi to justify his thesis that Machiavelli had not written a political manual for the practice of arbitrary rule and tyranny but rather provided a piece of contemporary criticism, holding up a mirror to his times. Therefore Machiavelli would not qualify as an ideological pioneer of modern totalitarianism.π Things look differently, however, if one adopts Cassirer’s thesis of the nonMachiavellian Machiavelli and scrutinizes the Principe solely for its methodological dialectic: the dialectic between analysis and criticism. In this context it is by no means necessary to evoke a hidden meaning of the Principe the way Spinoza does. It may be derived directly from the exoteric text that Machiavelli holds up as a mirror to the prince: any practice of power can be successful only if it relies upon a consistent strategy of power preservation. The latter, however, is an art, the management of which requires virtu. Virtu is the distinguishing character of the political sovereign. It is the skill to use the means necessary for the preservation of power, especially the use of terror and cruelty, in proportion. The right proportion, however, is not determined by the political goal of simply retaining power—no matter how much blood it will cost—but primarily by what enhances the well-being of the people. In my opinion, Machiavelli makes this point very clear, so as to preclude any misun-

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derstandings: cruelties may be ‘‘used in a good and in a bad way’’ (crudelta male usate o bene usate).∫ The ‘‘bad’’ use of cruelty automatically subordinates the well-being of the people to the principle whereby the prince retains his power. In contrast, we may speak of the ‘‘good’’ use of cruelty—if any evil may be called good—when it is not simply prompted by the prince’s immediate need to defend his position and merely hang on but rather, if possible, by his attempt to alter his position so as to enhance the well-being of his people. Virtu is reflected in three major abilities: first, the ability to differentiate between good and bad, based upon the premise that any individual, not only the despot, is more likely bad than good, that is, driven by egotism rather than social conscience; second, the ability to balance strategies enabling him to preserve his power and the people’s well-being in such a way that the prince will not be trapped by the necessity (necessita) to act cruelly in order to defend his power; and third, the ability to win friends and followers regardless of the need for strategies involving the ruthless preservation of power, that is, the ability to retain the distinction between enemies and friends. According to this theory, a power virtuoso who succeeds in maintaining friends in a world full of enemies displays sovereignty. Machiavelli’s examples show that he considers those tyrants to have the strongest virtu who, despite occasional resorts to cruelty, enjoy the continuous loyalty and affection of their subordinates. The practice of power displays sovereignty as long as it goes beyond purely arbitrary practices and so relies upon an intelligent combination of self-preservation and generosity. This is why Machiavelli states that virtu necessitates a ‘‘grandezza dello animo,’’ which proves the sovereign to be an ‘‘eccelentissimo huomino.’’Ω Cassirer did not provide us with a detailed analysis of Machiavelli as a critical apologist of political realism. This analysis may, however, be obtained by reading Machiavelli in the way Cassirer suggested, who—with Fichte— summed it up in the statement: Machiavelli was not a Machiavellian.∞≠ This view helps us to answer the question of how Machiavelli’s anthropological pessimism related to the optimism of his humanitarian contemporaries. It also serves to help answer a second question concerning the unity of the Renaissance, which, according to Cassirer, qualifies as an epoch of Enlightenment. Philosophical humanism and political realism, or—to personify the abstractions—Pico della Mirandola and Niccolo Machiavelli, represent complementary positions. The humanist Pico refers to the ambiguity of self-liberation, which the political realist perceives in the sovereignty of his practice of power. Yet, more important—and here I perceive the fruits of a synthesis of Cassirer and Kantorowicz—these Renaissance thinkers both can be shown to separate the political from the theological. Based on his analysis of Machiavelli, Cas-

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sirer himself develops a model of political sovereignty which owes its historical and its practical impact on modern political thought and action to a secularization process that began with a departure from the Christologically defined dignity of the prince and was led via the twofold dialectical principle of legibus solutus–ratio alligatus to a completely nontheological conception of political sovereignty. The question arises whether it was Cassirer’s intention to claim that the success of political Enlightenment may only be achieved by sacrificing metaphysical, religious, or mythical justifications for the use of power. Would not such a sacrifice not extend a fatal invitation to new remythologizations of political power? This conclusion would be in line with the ambivalence of myth—myth as a cultural element and as a form of anticulture —as analyzed in The Myth of the State. Had German history taught Cassirer how easily Enlightenment may destroy itself, and was this one reason why he so readily found a corresponding genealogical confirmation? In any case, The Myth of the State provides Cassirer’s own highly distinctive ‘‘Dialectic of Enlightenment.’’ His analysis of this dialectic was not only valid in 1945, but also will be of future use to us. As far as the historical virulence of Machiavellianism is concerned, Cassirer made sure that Machiavelli does not qualify as an unambiguous mentor for protagonists and apologists of political totalitarianisms. Instead, the author of The Myth of the State recommends—for reasons he explicitly states—that we resort to a consultation of Hegel. In Cassirer’s analysis of Machiavelli he shows that the impassioned love of individual freedom, which provided the basic climate of Renaissance humanism, is corrected and given a realistic dimension. Like Machiavelli, Cassirer respects history as the supreme authority from which to learn. Machiavelli evokes historical memories of a united Roman Empire to hold up as a mirror to his contemporary Italy, whereas Cassirer for the same purpose calls upon post-Platonic political theories whose (partly negative) impact on life are undisputed. One reason for this effort perhaps was to make his contemporaries in wartime Europe aware of the hidden dialectics of enlightened sovereignty. Cassirer unfolds a genealogy of political behavior—a political anthropology. The implicit warning in this anthropology derives from its furnishing proud enlightened consciousness with an insight into the ambiguity of its autonomy. It could be described as an insight into the destructive logic of the political use of freedom. With this insight into the ambiguity of autonomy Cassirer corrects the autonomous ethics of Kant’s Enlightenment. As mentioned before, however, he offers no alternative ethical theory. He offers instead an analysis, which leads to a justified warning—a warning against a fatal underestimation of the dialectics of an enlightened autonomy of reason. Yet this criticism can hardly be accomplished

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within Kant’s conception of a pure transcendental morality. Like the authors of the Renaissance favored by Cassirer, he counted upon historical reason. Cassirer’s development from the cultural criticism of the 1920s to his later works, An Essay on Man and The Myth of the State, may be summed up as the move from a latent optimistic belief in cultural progress to a position which may be characterized as realistic liberalism.

Notes 1. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Brief über den Humanismus,’’ Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1967), 183. 2. The Davos debate between Cassirer and Heidegger is documented in an appendix to Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 4th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1973), 241–68. 3. See Birgit Recki, ‘‘Kultur ohne Moral? Warum Ernst Cassirer trotz der Einsicht in den Primat der praktischen Vernunft keine Ethik schreiben konnte,’’ in Ernst Cassirers Werk und Wirkung: Kultur und Philosophie, ed. Dorothea Frede and Reinhold Schmücker (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997), 58–78. 4. See Enno Rudolph, ‘‘Ernst Cassirers Rezeption des Renaissancehumanismus,’’ in Ernst Cassirers Werk und Wirkung, ed. Frede and Schmücker, 105–21. 5. See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), ix. There he refers explicitly to Cassirer. 6. Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität, 2d ed. (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1934), 64ff. 7. See MS, 128, where Cassirer says—referring to the misleading identification of Machiavelli’s political theory with the phenomenon of Machiavellism—not Machiavelli himself, but his readers created his fame, and they could only do so by entirely misunderstanding the meaning of his work. 8. Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, ed. Ezio Raimundi, 7th ed., I classici italiani, 5 (Milan: Mursia, 1976), chap. 8, 80. 9. Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, chap. 8, 78. 10. MS, 140.

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Speaking of Symbols: Affinities between Cassirer’s and Jung’s Theories of Language paul bishop

At first glance, the differences between the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer and the psychology of C. G. Jung would seem to outweigh any affinities.∞ To begin with, the one was a philosopher who taught in university departments, the other a psychologist with no philosophical training and a practice to run. (One of the most important philosophical sources for Jung was the second edition of the Allgemeines Handwörterbuch der philosophischen Wissenschaften [1832] by Wilhelm Traugott Krug [1770–1842], a distinctly popular, if famous, work.) As far as personal background and education are concerned, Cassirer was born of factory-owning, Jewish parents in Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland) in 1874 and studied law, then German literature, and finally philosophy at Berlin, Leipzig, Heidelberg, and then back in Berlin. Jung was born one year later in 1875 in Kesswil, on Lake Constance, in Switzerland, the son of Johann Paul Achilles Jung, a Protestant pastor, and Emilie Preiswerk Jung, the member of a long-established Basle family. Although he had considered studying history, philosophy, and archaeology, Jung studied at the medical school of Basle University, enjoying particularly anatomy and physiology. That said, his interest in his student days for occult matters anticipated his later interest in questions of theology, comparative religion, and mysticism, especially alchemy and astrology. If the major pedagogical influence on Cassirer was Hermann Cohen, professor of philosophy in Berlin and a founder of

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the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, the greatest influence on Jung (until his meeting with Sigmund Freud) was Friedrich Zschokke, the professor of zoology in Basle, who propagated the belief, popularized by Ernst Haeckel, that ‘‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.’’≤ From 1903 to 1919, Cassirer lived in Berlin, and from 1919 to 1933, in Hamburg. He was forced to leave Germany in 1933, living in England (1933– 35), Sweden (1935–41), and finally the United States until his death in 1945. Aside from a year studying at the Salpêtrière in Paris in 1902, Jung’s clinical experience was acquired exclusively in Zurich, a relatively provincial city, first at the Burghölzli Mental Clinic, and then in private practice. Jung never left his native, neutral, Switzerland; his numerous American clients came and visited him. He died in Küsnacht, outside Zurich, in the house where he had lived for more than half a century, in 1961. Closer examination, however, suggests there are important similarities between Cassirer and Jung in terms of interests, method, and cultural background. While it is true that Cassirer’s main concerns were philosophical, whereas Jung’s were psychotherapeutic, each maintained an interest in the professional area of the other. Jung, for example, frequently denied that there was any philosophical significance to his work, claiming he was no more than ‘‘an empiricist.’’ On two occasions, however, he suggested an important link between psychology and philosophy, while being careful to maintain what he saw as the priority of the former over the latter. In ‘‘General Aspects of Dream Psychology,’’ a paper written in 1916 and revised in 1948, he wrote: ‘‘It does not surprise me that psychology debouches into philosophy [daß die Psychologie an die Philosophie rührt], for the thinking that underlies philosophy is after all a psychic activity which, as such, is the proper study of psychology. I always think of psychology as encompassing the whole of the psyche, and that includes philosophy and theology and many other things besides. For underlying all philosophies and all religions are the facts of the human soul, which may ultimately be the arbiters of truth and error (CW, 8: § 525). Then again, with reference to such assertions of Nietzsche as the claim in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) that ‘‘psychology is now again the path to the fundamental problems,’’≥ alluded to by Jung in his introduction to ‘‘Psychology and Literature’’ (CW, 15: 84), Jung wrote in his paper ‘‘Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology’’ (1931) that ‘‘until recently psychology was a special branch of philosophy, but now we are coming to something which Nietzsche foresaw—the rise of psychology in its own right, so much so that it is even threatening to swallow philosophy.’’ He went on to lay out what he saw as the similarities between psychology and philosophy:

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The inner resemblance between the two disciplines consists in this, that both are systems of opinion about objects which cannot be fully experienced and therefore cannot be adequately comprehended by a purely empirical approach. Both fields of study thus encourage speculation, with the result that opinions are formed in such variety and profusion that many heavy volumes are needed to contain them all. Neither discipline can do without the other, and the one invariably furnishes the unspoken—and generally unconscious— assumptions of the other. (CW, 8: § 659)

In terms of method, Cassirer sought confirmation for his epistemological claims in pathology, turning in volume 3 of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to a consideration of aphasia, agnosia, and apraxia: ‘‘The philosophy of symbolic forms [is seeking] not so much common factors in being as common factors in meaning. Hence we must strive to bring the teachings of pathology, which cannot be ignored, into the more universal context of the philosophy of culture’’ (PSF, 3: 275). Discussing one particular case of an aphasiac, Cassirer wrote that ‘‘in Kantian terms, pathologists have found it necessary to distinguish between the image as ‘a product of the empirical faculty of the productive imagination’ and the schema of sensuous concepts as a ‘monogram of the pure imagination a priori’ ’’ (PSF, 3: 247–48).∂ Thus we move from the consulting room to the Transcendental Doctrine of the Power of Judgment, and one of the most problematic chapters in the first Critique, on the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding. As well as showing close acquaintance with the medical literature of the time on pathology, Cassirer observed patients suffering ‘‘psychic blindness’’ (amnesia with respect to universal color names) in the Frankfurt Neurological Institute at first hand. Similarly, Jung’s MD thesis was an investigation into ‘‘so-called occult phenomena,’’ and he later sought evidence of the existence of a ‘‘collective unconscious’’ in the experiences of his patients, discovering that one man had, in his dream of the world as a picture book, unknowingly drawn upon exactly the same way of seeing the world that informs Schopenhauer’s view of the world (CW, 7: § 228–29). Equally, the case of the so-called solar phallus man is a famous, if now controversial, case demonstrating collective unconscious influence.∑ More generally, both men tended to supplement causal explanations with final or teleological ones. For instance, in his introduction to the second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer wrote: ‘‘Critical epistemology looks on knowledge—with all the infinite diversity of the objects toward which it is directed and of the psychological forces with which it operates—as an ideal whole, the universal constitutive conditions of which it seeks, and the same approach applies to every spiritual unity of meaning. In

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the last analysis this unity must be established not in a genetic and causal but in a teleological sense—as a direction followed by consciousness in constructing spiritual reality’’ (PSF, 2: 20). In the case of Jung, he wrote in his paper ‘‘On Psychic Energy’’ (begun in 1912, published in 1928, revised in 1948) that the mechanistic (or causal) view, which sees the world in terms of a series of causes and effects, requires a supplementary view, the energic (or final) view, which sees the world in terms of a series of purposes. In other words, instead of seeing a posterior state b as an effect of a prior state a, the cause, Jung suggested that on this second view, a seeks b, and he linked this teleological perspective with the concept of the symbol: ‘‘What to the causal view is fact to the final view is symbol ’’; confusingly adding, ‘‘and vice versa’’ (CW, 8: § 45). As well as relying on external evidence and the testimony of other writers and thinkers, both men also used themselves in pursuit of their subject. In the case of Jung, this reliance on the evidence of his own experiences has become notorious. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, we are offered an account of his ‘‘breakdown’’ in 1913 that he later euphemistically interpreted as his ‘‘encounter with the unconscious’’: ‘‘It was during Advent of the year 1913—12th December, to be exact—that I resolved upon the decisive step. I was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears. Then I let myself drop’’ (MDR, 203). More generally, Jung was interested in cases which apparently showed the creative and inspiring influence of the unconscious, citing as examples a passage from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra; the discovery of the molecular structure of benzine by the nineteenth-century German chemist August Kekule von Stradonitz, thanks to a dream of a snake with its tail in its mouth; and Descartes’ vision of the ‘‘order of all sciences,’’ perceived in a revelatory dream.∏ According to Dimitry Gawronsky, a similarly instantaneous inspiration lay behind Cassirer’s conception of symbolic forms: Cassirer once told how in 1917, just as he entered a street car to ride home, the conception of the symbolic forms flashed upon him; a few minutes later, when he reached his home, the whole plan of his new voluminous work was ready in his mind, in essentially the form in which it was carried out in the course of the subsequent ten years. Suddenly the onesidedness of the KantCohen theory of knowledge became quite clear to Cassirer. It is not true that only the human reason opens the door which leads to the understanding of reality, it is rather the whole of the human mind, with all its functions and impulses, all its potencies of imagination, feeling, volition, and logical thinking which builds the bridge between man’s soul and reality, which determines and moulds our conception of reality.π

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In terms of method, both men emphasized the importance, not just of an object, but of the perception of an object. Cassirer, for example, frequently drew on the Goethean distinction between seeing with the ‘‘eyes of the body’’ and seeing with the ‘‘eyes of the spirit’’ (PSF, 3: 135; PSF, 4: 81). Jung’s later insistence on an archetypal Schau, which emphasizes the significance of an object or an event in terms of a process, goes back to his days as a student of anatomy, when, as Adolf Portmann has written: ‘‘Jung did not look at the reptile, a lizard say, in a concrete way, in terms of the behaviour that ethology has shown us. He looked at the lizard as a stage in the hierarchical evolution of our nervous system.’’∫ And for both men, historical perspective revealed significance in subjects frequently dismissed as unimportant. For example, Cassirer regarded alchemy and astrology as ‘‘different expressions of the same form of thought, a mythical identity-thinking in the form of substance’’ (PSF, 4: 66): Alchemy . . . looks on bodies as complexes of simple qualities from which they arise through mere aggregation. . . . In the course of its history, alchemy developed this addition and subtraction of attributes into a highly ingenious and intricate system. In these extreme refinements and sublimations we still clearly discern the mythical root of the whole process. All achemic[al] operations, regardless of their individual type, have at their base the fundamental idea of the transferability and material detachability of attributes and states. (PSF, 2: 66)

Here, Cassirer is concerned to show how mythological thinking is a necessary precursor to the conception of causality, and that ‘‘until this form of logical analysis is developed, ‘thing’ and ‘attribute’ cannot be sharply differentiated; the categorical spheres of the two concepts must inevitably move together and ultimately merge’’ (PSF, 2: 67). Likewise, Jung believed it was possible to see the evolution and development of industrialization emerging in medieval Europe through the evolution of alchemy (CW, 8: § 88–91), just as the fertility cults of the Wachandi tribes in Australia are said to represent the starting point of agriculture (CW, 5: § 213 and § 226).Ω In setting out these views, both Cassirer and Jung drew on the work of Konrad Preuss, and the intellectual and cultural sources used by Cassirer and Jung point to an important common inheritance.∞≠ For example, in An Essay on Man (1944), Cassirer laid out the Kantian context to his philosophy of symbolic forms,∞∞ and an approach to Cassirer via Kant and neo-Kantianism provides the basis for what John Michael Krois has called the ‘‘continental interpretation’’ of Cassirer.∞≤ In the first volume of The

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Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer gives ‘‘a new and amplified meaning’’ to the Copernican revolution of Kantian philosophy, writing that ‘‘it refers no longer solely to the function of logical judgment but extends with equal justification and right to every trend and every principle by which the human spirit gives form to reality’’; and concluding: ‘‘Thus the critique of reason becomes the critique of culture’’ (PSF, 1: 79–80). In the second volume, Cassirer explained that ‘‘the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms takes up this basic critical idea, this fundamental principle of Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ ’’—that is, ‘‘the object does not exist prior to and outside of synthetic unity but is constituted only by this synthetic unity’’—‘‘and strives to broaden it’’ (PSF, 2: 29). For his part, Jung claimed to take his stand epistemologically with Kant (see, for example, his letter to Josef Goldbrunner of 8 February 1941),∞≥ although this claim is, precisely because of Jung’s understanding and subsequent use of Kant, a highly problematic one.∞∂ For if, as Cassirer wrote in volume 2 of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, ‘‘critical analysis stands between metaphysical deduction and psychological induction’’ (PSF, 2: 11), then, with Jung, there was the tendency for the former to turn into the latter. (We can see this happening when he writes that ‘‘metaphysical assertions are statements of the psyche, and are therefore psychological’’ [CW, 11: § 835].) A statement of Jung’s own version of Kantian epistemology can be found in Psychological Types (1921), when he distinguished between the world an sich and the world als Erscheinung, emphasizing the constitutive function of the subject: The world exists not merely in itself but also as it appears to me. [Die Welt is nicht nur an und für sich, sondern auch so, wie sie mir erscheint.] Indeed, at bottom, we have absolutely no criterion that could help us to form a judgment of a world which was unassimilable by the subject [welche dem Subjekt unassimilierbar wäre]. If we were to ignore the subjective factor, it would be a complete denial of the great doubt as to the possibility of absolute cognition [eine absolute Erkenntnismöglichkeit]. . . . But what is the subject? The subject is man himself—we are the subject. Only a sick mind could forget that cognition must have a subject [daß das Erkennen ein Subjekt hat], and that there is no knowledge whatever and no world at all unless ‘‘I know’’ [Ich erkenne] has been said, though with this statement one has already expressed the subjective limitation of all knowledge. This applies to all the psychic functions: they have a subject which is just as indispensable as the object. (CW, 6: § 621–22)

Aside from positioning themselves around Kant, however, both men make reference to a wide, yet distinctive, range of thinkers, including Meister Eckhart, Nicolas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Leibniz, Hamann, Goethe, Schelling, Bachofen, and Ludwig Klages.∞∑ Just as Cassirer refers to ‘‘an unbroken chain

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of religious thought’’ running ‘‘from St. Paul to Eckhart and Tauler and thence to Hamann and Jacobi’’ (PSF, 2: 253), so Jung speaks of ‘‘the aurea catena which has existed from the beginnings of philosophical alchemy and Gnosticism down to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’’ (MDR, 213). Given this impressive range of intellectual reference points, it is surprising how little work has been undertaken to compare the approaches and themes of Cassirer and Jung. In 1945, Alexander Altmann examined both men’s conceptions of symbol and myth, noting that ‘‘the common denominator’’ of these two interpretations is ‘‘the fundamentally positive value which both attach to them.’’∞∏ Altmann attributed this positive attitude to their shared heritage of ‘‘the Romantic School’’ (163). Yet while ‘‘the common ground’’ between Cassirer and Jung is said to be ‘‘the Romantic tradition’’ (168), Altmann notes that ‘‘the great difference between Cassirer and Jung lies in the discrepancy of their fundamental approach to the problem of meaning. It is the difference between the psychologist and the idealist’’ (169), and it has the following important implication: It follows that mythical thinking has a different place in the estimation of Cassirer from that of Jung. Although Cassirer upholds the ‘‘objectivity’’ of mythical thinking, he does not put it on the same level with scientific and conceptual thought. The human mind has definitely outgrown the age of mythical thinking. Jung, on the other hand, sees in the rebirth of myth the reunion of Man with ultimate reality of Earth and Nature. In the conflict of these two views lies a great deal of the spiritual issue which confronts humanity to-day. (170)

Of course, the ‘‘spiritual issue’’ to which Altmann refers had taken on a particularly sharp relevance in the political context of the time in which he was writing. (Both Cassirer and Jung offered an explanation of the Second World War with reference to the return of myth, Cassirer warning that ‘‘mythical thought’’ was threatening ‘‘to rise anew and to pervade the whole of man’s cultural and social life,’’∞π while Jung seemed almost to believe that in the 1930s and 1940s, the old pagan god Wotan himself had begun to roam the continent again.)∞∫ In his alarmingly entitled book Imagination Is Reality, Roberts Avens writes from a Jungian perspective, heavily influenced by the school of James Hillman, about Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms.∞Ω Typically, for a Jungian, Avens sees Cassirer’s position as deficient, and he proposes to rescue it from these limitations: ‘‘Cassirer’s symbolic universe, for all its intellectual depth and comprehensiveness, is essentially confined to a humanly created realm of meaning from which all experience of things in their immediacy is, by defini-

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tion, excluded. In the following I propose to reground, as it were, this universe within the archetypal, imaginal and polymorphous psyche[,] thereby freeing it, on the one hand, from a merely humanistic orientation and, on the other, connecting it through psychic reality with the reality of the physical world’’ (49). One can easily imagine that Cassirer might not have felt at home in the mixed company of Jung, Hillman, and the writer and philosopher of language Owen Barfield (1898–1997) that he is forced, in Avens’s study, to keep. Nor would he have been happy to have been associated with the ‘‘way toward Western Nirvana’’ mapped out in the pages of this book. Most recently, and more fruitfully, Petteri Pietikäinen has, within the context of a rereading of Jung’s psychology as a ‘‘psychology of symbolic forms,’’ argued that the archetype, that major category of Jungian thought, can be understood in terms of Cassirer’s conception of ‘‘symbolic form.’’ ‘‘If archetypes are symbolic forms,’’ Pietikäinen claims, ‘‘then we can interpret them not as quasi-biological entities but as culturally determined forms, which operate functionally in the same way that other symbolic forms do’’: They give an organised and coherent structure to different manifestations of man’s cultural activity, and at the same time they express the irreducible ‘‘spirituality’’ of man. Cassirer’s symbolic forms are not transmitted genetically from generation to generation, because they are from their very nature cultural products; the medium that transmits symbolic forms is culture, not biology. . . . With my proposal of the cultural aspect of archetypes, I am trying to offer not a theory of my own to the ‘‘science of archetypes,’’ but a cultural ‘‘common sense’’ interpretation, which takes into account the structural and formal features of archetypes without yielding to the untenable theory of the genetic inheritance of archetypes.≤≠

Just as Pietikäinen is right to focus on the notion of ‘‘symbolic form’’ as the site of intersection between Cassirer’s philosophy and Jung’s psychology, it is also important to recognize that, more broadly, both men offer a set of arguments about three major issues—language, myth, art—and that the concept of the symbol provides the context for their respective arguments about these three themes. In this essay, I investigate Jung’s theory of language which is, in comparison with Cassirer’s, relatively unexplored. (For reasons of space, the discussion has been restricted to Jung’s Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido: Beiträge zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Denkens, published in English in a translation by Beatrice Hinkle as Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido: A Contribution to the History of the Evolution of Thought (1912) and Cassirer’s four-volume Philo-

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sophie der symbolischen Formen.) Rather than suggesting that Cassirer and Jung adopt an identical position, I hope to uncover a commonality of approach and interest while endeavoring to use the more striking contrasts in their respective positions to help illuminate the thought of both men.

Two Kinds of Thinking In his foreword to the fourth (Swiss) edition of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (i.e., Transformations and Symbols of the Libido), now entitled Symbole der Wandlung (Symbols of Transformation) (1950), Jung described this book as ‘‘a landmark, set up on the spot where two ways divided’’ (CW, 5: xxiv). ‘‘Written in 1911, in my thirty-sixth year,’’ the time when this book had been produced was, Jung added, ‘‘a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs. I was acutely conscious, then, of the loss of friendly relations with Freud and of the lost comradeship of our work together’’ (xxvi). Significantly, Jung uses the term ‘‘metanoia,’’ which carries strongly religious overtones of ‘‘penitence, repentance; reorientation of one’s way of life, spiritual conversion’’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Transformations and Symbols of the Libido is, accordingly, widely regarded as marking the moment when Jung made a decisive shift away from Freudian psychoanalysis, although there is a much greater divergence of interpretation regarding the reasons for this shift. Yet the work begins by restating, in a slightly modified form, Freud’s thesis in The Interpretation of Dreams that a dream is a fulfillment of a wish: ‘‘The dream arises from a part of the mind unknown to us, but none the less important, and is concerned with the desires for the approaching day’’ (PU, § 7).≤∞ The significance of Jung’s modification here lies in the emphasis on the prospective nature of the desire expressed in the dream. And just as Freud had written that some of his patients had retained an ‘‘architectural symbolism’’ for their body in general and their genitals in particular (extending to the use of kitchen apparatus and activities as a source for such symbolism),≤≤ so Jung cited a host of examples, including a poem by Mörike (‘‘Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens’’), that demonstrated the sexual nature of much dream symbolism (PU, § 9–10). Jung may also have found support for his view, expressed in his introduction, that ‘‘just as the psychoanalytic conceptions promote understanding of the historic[al] psychologic[al] creations, so reversedly historical materials can shed new light upon individual psychologic[al] problems’’ (PU, § 5),≤≥ in the following remark made by Freud apropos of snake imagery: ‘‘Wherever neuroses make use of such disguises they are following paths along which all humanity passed in the earliest periods of

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civilization—paths of whose continued existence today, under the thinnest of veils, evidence is to be found in the linguistic usages, superstitions and customs’’ (Standard Edition, 5: 347). The emphasis on linguistic formation is, in Freud, particularly important (and later in the century formed the basis of the appropriation of his thought by Jacques Lacan). Dismissing the objection that our account of a dream may fatally distort what it was we actually dreamt, Freud argues that the linguistic form of a dream account is, in fact, central to its interpretation: Examples could be found in every analysis to show that precisely the most trivial elements of a dream are indispensable to its interpretation and that the work in hand is held up if attention is not paid to these elements until too late. We have attached no less importance in interpreting dreams to every shade of the form of words in which they were laid before us. And even when it happened that the text of the dream as we had it was meaningless or inadequate—as though the effort to give a correct account of it had been unsuccessful—we have taken this defect into account as well. [Die gleiche Würdigung haben wir bei der Traumdeutung jeder Nuance des sprachlichen Ausdrucks geschenkt, in welchem der Traum uns vorlag; ja, wenn uns ein unsinniger oder unzureichender Wortlaut vorgelegt wurde, als ob es der Anstrengung nicht gelungen wäre, den Traum in die richtige Fassung zu übersetzen, haben wir auch diese Mängel des Ausdrucks respektiert.] In short, we have treated as Holy Writ what previous writers have regarded as an arbitrary improvisation, hurriedly patched together in the embarrassment of the moment. (Standard Edition, 5: 514)

In fact, Freud returns time and again to the theme of language in Die Traumdeutung, and given this emphasis in Freud’s theory of dream interpretation on language, it is not surprising that when Jung tries to discover what it is that makes a dream symbolic, he ends up discussing language. Nor is it surprising, given the imminence of the break in his discipleship to Freud, that he comes to a completely different set of conclusions about the significance and function of language. Language thus emerges as a central concern of Freudian and Jungian psychology alike, although with different emphases and interpretative models; and, of course, language forms the subject of the first volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. In the foreword to that work, Cassirer wrote that ‘‘the fundamental view on which this book rests’’ was ‘‘the conviction that language, like all basic functions of the human spirit, can be elucidated by philosophy only within a general system of philosophical idealism’’ (PSF, 1: 72). Although both the immediate context and the conceptual framework of Cassirer’s and Jung’s discussions are vastly different, a common starting point is their shared intellectual historical background.

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In the case of Jung’s discussion in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, that background is the development of language theory in German thought over the preceding two centuries and, in particular, the work of Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). In the section entitled Aesthetica in nuce, part of Die Kreuzzüge eines Philologen (1762), Hamann declared that the original state of language was poetry (‘‘Poesie ist die Muttersprache des menschlichen Geschlechts’’). Moreover, Hamann contended that the ‘‘entire treasure’’ of human knowledge took the form of images (‘‘In Bildern steht der ganze Schatz menschlicher Erkenntnis und Glückseligkeit’’).≤∂ One of his most important contemporaries, Goethe, summarized his main contribution as is well known when he wrote in Dichtung und Wahrheit that ‘‘the principle underlying all of Hamann’s utterances is this: ‘Everything a human being sets out to accomplish, whether produced by word or deed or otherwise, must arise from the sum of his combined powers; everything isolated is an abomination,’ ’’ a passage also known to Cassirer (PSF, 3: 34).≤∑ Clearly, Jung stands in this tradition of Hamann and Goethe≤∏ when he attacks ‘‘one-sidedness’’ (Einseitigkeit) as a souce of many a psychological ill.≤π For his part, Cassirer provided an analytical overview of Hamann’s theory of language in the first volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, quoting from Hamann’s correspondence and from the Aesthetica in nuce (PSF, 1: 150–52). Equally, by emphasizing the priority of language over thought, Hamann anticipated the central insight of the philosophy of language of Herder.≤∫ In On the Origin of Language (1771), Herder dismissed rival views, including the theory of the divine origin of language, put forward by Johann Peter Süßmilch (1707–67), and the theory, advanced by Condillac (1714–80), that language begins as an immediate expression of emotions and develops into a semiotic system. Instead, Herder proposes that language is bound up with the first emergence of conscious thought: ‘‘The moment of reflection was thus also the moment of the inner rise of language.’’ (So war auch das Moment der Besinnung, Moment zu innerer Erstehung der Sprache.)≤Ω And other works of Herder’s early years, such as his discussions of Winckelmann and Lessing in the three-volume Kritische Wälder (1769), anticipate the notion of the totality of the human personality that was to become central to the thought of Weimar classicism,≥≠ not to mention Jungian psychology. Nor was the influence of Hamann on Herder, or of Herder on subsequent thinkers, unappreciated by Cassirer, who discussed Herder at length in The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932) and in volumes one and three of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (PSF, 1: 151–53; 3: 31–34). For Cassirer, the significance of Herder’s essay on the origin of language was twofold. In gen-

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eral terms, it marked ‘‘the transition from the older rationalistic concept of ‘reflective form’, which dominated the philosophy of the Enlightenment, to the Romantic concept of ‘organic form’ ’’ (PSF, 1: 153). More particularly, Herder’s claims in this essay are said by Cassirer to represent ‘‘the earliest indication of a struggle which extends down to our own time and which has given all modern psychology its specific methodological imprint’’: This is the struggle between a psychology which takes its essential orientation from natural science, whose methods of observation and analysis it seeks to imitate as faithfully as possible, and another form of psychological inquiry which aims above all at providing a foundation for the cultural sciences. Herder did not arrive at his conclusions by way of empirical psychology; he was guided by his great intuition of cultural life as a whole, which, with all its concrete richness and diversity, he sought to derive ultimately from one fundamental force, from a common root in humanity. (PSF, 3: 33)

There can be no doubt that, in terms of such a dichotomy, Jung’s psychology is of the second kind described here by Cassirer. For Jung, such psychology was a psychology ‘‘with a soul.’’≥∞ In the footnotes to Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung refers on two occasions to Hamann,≥≤ although never to Herder, and he cites a wide range of other philosophers on language, including Christian Wolff (1679– 1754) (PU, § 15, n2), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) (PU, § 15, n4, and § 17, n5), Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817–81) (PU, § 15, n4), Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) (PU, § 23), Friedrich Jodl (1849–1914) (PU, § 24), Fritz Mauthner (1849–1923) (PU, § 17, n5), William James (1842–1910) (PU, § 13, n3), and James Mark Baldwin (1861–1934) (PU, § 17, n5, and § 24). Aside from the last two names, all these thinkers are central to, or emerge from, the German philosophical tradition, and several of them—Lotze (PSF, 3: 281–82; 115–16, 144–48), Wundt (PSF, 1, footnotes to pages 193–94, 210, 224, 51, 260, 265, 272–73, 304, 309–14; PSF, 3: 144, 159, 207, 297; PSF, 4: 40), Mauthner (PSF, 1: 189), and James (PSF, 3: 141, 155, 180–81)— are drawn on, in one way or another, by Cassirer in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Using concepts derived from these philosophers, Jung develops a distinction in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido between two kinds of thinking, ‘‘directed thinking’’ and ‘‘fantasy thinking.’’ Jung’s distinction between these two kinds of thinking, though by no means new, does form part of an important strand in twentieth-century thinking on language. On the one hand, it recalls the distinction made by Lucien LévyBruhl (1857–1939) between rational, objective thought and the mystical, prelogical mentality.≥≥ On the other, it anticipates the distinction made by Claude

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Lévi-Strauss (1908–) between the thinking of the modern theorist and the thinking in mythical terms (bricolage) of primitive societies,≥∂ and in its suspicion of the language of ‘‘directed thinking,’’ it can also been seen as an early attempt at a critique of ‘‘logocentrism.’’≥∑ As we shall see, however, Cassirer’s approach to language does not operate with this twofold division, but offers an account of the significance of language that is far richer than Jung’s.

Directed Thinking Let us begin with ‘‘directed thinking,’’ which Jung describes as ‘‘reality thinking’’ (ein Wirklichkeitsdenken), that is, as ‘‘a thinking which adjusts itself to actual conditions, where we, expressed in other words, imitate the succession of objectively real things, so that the images in our mind follow after each other in the same strictly causal succession as the historical events outside of our mind’’ (PU, § 15).≥∏ This, then, is ‘‘thinking with directed attention’’ (Denken mit gerichteter Aufmerksamkeit) (PU, § 16), and it is closely linked with language: ‘‘The material with which we think is language and speech concept [Sprache und sprachlicher Begriff ], a thing which has been used from time immemorial as something external, a bridge for thought, and which has a single purpose—that of communication. As long as we think directedly, we think for others and speak to others’’ (PU, § 17). (In this respect, Jung anticipates Lacan’s claims that language is bound up with the subject’s relationship to the Other.) Be this as it may, Jung is careful to distinguish between language in the sense of ‘‘speech’’ and a more general sense of the term: ‘‘Language should, however, be comprehended in a wider sense than that of speech, which is in itself only the expression of the formulated thought which is capable of being communicated in the widest sense.’’ (Sprache ist aber in einem weiteren Umfange zu fassen als zum Beispiel dem der Rede, welche an sich nur der Ausfluß des formulierten, der Mitteilung im weitesten Sinne fähigen Gedankens ist) (PU, § 23). To substantiate this point, Jung argues (in a variant of the so-called Molyneux Problem) that were speech identical with language, ‘‘the deaf mute would be limited to the utmost in his capacity for thinking, which is not the case in reality’’ (PU, § 23).≥π In terms of the origin of language, which is the medium of this kind of thinking, Jung accepts the argument that it derived from the imitation of natural noises and is closely bound up with the expression of emotion: Speech is originally a system of emotional and imitative sounds—sounds which express terror, fear, anger, love; and sounds which imitate the noises of the elements, the rushing and gurgling of water, the rolling of thunder, the

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Jung’s remarks here correspond to the schema representing ‘‘a functional law of linguistic growth’’ proposed by Cassirer in volume 1 of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, where he distinguishes between ‘‘the mimetic, the analogical, and the truly symbolical stage’’ (PSF, 1: 190). ‘‘The sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury philosophers of language still supposed,’’ Cassirer noted, ‘‘that phenomena of onomatopoeia offered the key to the basic and original language of mankind, the lingua adamica,’’ but he added: ‘‘Today, to be sure, the critical progress of linguistics has more and more dispelled this dream’’ (PSF, 1: 191). Further on in the 1911/12 version of Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung returns to the question of the origin of language, speculating as follows: We know that from the primitive sounds human speech has developed. Corresponding to the psychological situation, it might be assumed that language owes its real origin to this moment, when the impulse, repressed into the presexual stage, turns to the external in order to find an equivalent object there. The real thought as a conscious activity is . . . a thinking with positive determination towards the external world, that is to say, a ‘‘speech thinking.’’ This sort of thinking seems to have originated at that moment. It is very remarkable that this view, which was won by the path of reasoning, is . . . supported by old tradition and other mythological fragments. (PU, § 254)

In the later version of 1952, however, Jung omits this passage and replaces it with an empirical observation which, as well as revising his argument about language, pursues a now more overtly anti-Freudian line of argument: I once observed a year-old baby making a very peculiar gesture: it held one hand before its mouth and kept rubbing it with the other. It lost this habit after some months. Such cases show that there is some justification for interpreting a mythologem [such as that of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad] as being based on a very early infantile gesture. The baby’s gesture is interesting in another respect, too: it lays emphasis on the mouth, which at this early

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stage still has an exclusively nutritive significance. The pleasure and satisfaction it finds in feeding is localized in the mouth, but to interpret this pleasure as sexual is quite unjustified. Feeding is a genuine activity, satisfying in itself, and because it is a vital necessity nature has here put a premium on pleasure. The mouth soon begins to develop another significance as the organ of speech. The extreme importance of speech doubles the significance of the mouth in small children. The rhythmic activities it carries out express a concentration of emotional forces, i.e., of libido, at this point. Thus the mouth (and to a lesser degree the anus) becomes the prime place of origin. (CW, 5: § 228–29)

There is no equivalent of these kind of arguments or observations in Cassirer; indeed, arguably it is a deficit of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms that it pays relatively little attention to questions of childhood developmental theory. Returning to the opening chapter of the 1911/12 edition, we find that Jung, more romantically, refers briefly to the notion of Urworte (primal words), citing a passage from Wilhelm Wundt’s Grundriß der Psychologie (1896; 5th ed., 1902).≥∫ Yet it is likely Jung had in mind a closer source. In his paper on ‘‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words’’ (1910), Freud had taken a statement from The Interpretation of Dreams (Standard Edition, 4: 318) as his starting point for his discussion of the work of the philologist Karl Friedrich Abel (1723–87), who showed that in ancient Egyptian certain words had two opposite meanings. (Similarly, the term pharmakon, meaning both ‘‘poison’’ and ‘‘cure,’’ is an example of an Urwort that, in the meantime, has been discussed at length by Derrida in his philosophical commentary on Plato’s Phaedrus.)≥Ω In his paper of 1910, Freud concluded by suggesting an important link between historical linguistics and psychoanalysis: ‘‘We psychiatrists cannot escape the suspicion that we should be better at understanding and translating the language of dreams if we knew more about the development of language’’ (Standard Edition, 11: 161). What emerges from Jung’s discussion of language in the early pages of Transformations and Symbols of the Libido is the suggestion that there exist certain recurring ideas or archaic images, which Jung later calls ‘‘archetypes,’’ and hence the question then arises: Is there a link between language and the archetypes? After all, Jung’s earliest empirical work as a psychologist was a series of experiments in word association, now collected in volume two of the Collected Works.∂≠ In a footnote added to The Interpretation of Dreams in 1909, Freud paid tribute to Jung’s studies in word association, finding in them support for the ‘‘basic pillars’’ of his own psychoanalytic technique.∂∞ According to Paul Kugler, the most important of ‘‘Jung’s contributions to psycholinguistics’’ can be found in his discovery of ‘‘a fundamental law of imagination’’ that

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‘‘its mode of operation is sonorous, acoustic, phonetic,’’ as well as his insight into ‘‘an innate connection between logos and image, between word and fantasy, that words are fantasies in sound.’’∂≤ Or as Kugler goes on to argue: ‘‘Whatever we say about archetypes is already archetypally determined by the structures (‘images’) embodied in language. Hence the archetypal nature of linguistic relativity.’’∂≥ It is certainly the case that in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, and even more clearly in its revised version, Symbols of Transformation, Jung entertains a discussion of archetypal motifs from an etymological (or at any rate, phonetic) perspective. Discussing the ethnological connection between boring holes and fire-making, and the relationship between the Greek god Prometheus, who brought mankind fire, and the Indian term pramantha, the masculine piece of wood used to create fire, Jung first wrote in 1911/12, and clarified in 1952: The path from Pramantha to Prometheus passes not through the word, but through the idea [geht nicht durch das Wort, sondern durch die Anschauung], and, therefore, we should adopt this same meaning for Prometheus as that which Pramantha attains from the Hindoo fire symbolism. (PU, § 241) The line from pramantha to Prometheus does not go via the word, but more probably through the idea or image [durch die Anschauung respektive das Bild], so that Prometheus may in the end have the same meaning as pramantha. Only, it would be an archetypal parallel and not a case of linguistic transmission. (CW, 5: § 208)

Jung cited further examples of Hindu etymology linking speech and fire (PU, § 255–66; cf. CW, 5: § 229–35) and of the etymological connection in English between nightmare and horse; indeed, the phonetic resemblance between mar (Aryan, ‘‘to die’’), mère (French, ‘‘mother’’), meer (German, ‘‘sea’’) and mare (Latin, ‘‘sea’’) prompts Jung to wonder, ‘‘Might it refer back to ‘the great primitive idea of the mother’ who, in the first place, meant to us our individual world and afterwards became the symbol of all worlds?’’ (PU, § 381; cf. CW, 5: § 373). This provides a further linguistic context for Jung’s remark at the very end of Transformation and Symbols of the Libido where, with Friedrich Kluge’s Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache in hand, he makes a link between verstehen (‘‘to understand’’ via OHG antfriston ¯ ‘‘to stand round about something’’) and erfassen (‘‘to grasp, comprehend,’’ cf. comprehendere). ‘‘The factor common to all these terms is the idea of surrounding, embracing,’’ Jung writes, adding (in terms redolent of Goethe’s poem ‘‘Auf dem See’’): ‘‘The only one who really understands us is the mother. . . . And there is no doubt that there is nothing in the world which so completely enfolds us as the mother.’’ (Die einzige, die uns wirklich versteht, ist die

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Mutter. . . . Und es ist kein Zweifel, daß nichts in der Welt uns je so gänzlich umfaßt wie die Mutter [PU, § 700; cf. CW, 5 § 682].) For his part, Cassirer makes a similar point when, writing about ‘‘language as expressive movement,’’ he points out that ‘‘in the logical concept, in judgment and inference develops that mediate grasp which characterizes ‘reason.’ Thus both genetically and actually, there seems to be a continuous transition from physical to conceptual ‘grasping’ ’’ (PSF, 1: 181). The same point is recapitulated (in distinctly Schillerian terms) in the third volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as follows: In language as in the instrument, man gains a new fundamental trend of mediated behaviour that is specific and peculiar to him. In his representation of the world and in his action upon it he now becomes free from the compulsion of the sensory drive and the immediate need. [Er wird jetzt in seiner Vorstellung der Welt wie in seinem Wirken auf sie von dem Zwang des sinnlichen Triebes und des nächsten Bedürfnisses frei.] The direct grasp gives way to new and different types of acquisition, of theoretical and practical domination: man has entered the path from physical to conceptual ‘‘grasping’’ [der Weg vom ‘‘Greifen’’ zum ‘‘Begreifen’’ ist beschritten]. (PSF, 3: 276–77)

In fact, Cassirer is restating the argument advanced by Herder in one of the earlier chapters of Plastik, which posits a theory of childhood development in striking contrast to the model later developed by Lacan and his followers.∂∂ Further on, as part of his discussion of the mimetic, analogical, and symbolical stages of expression, Cassirer speaks of the shift that is effected in the development of language from ‘‘the concrete function of ‘designation’ to the universal and universally valid function of ‘signification’ ’’ (PSF, 1: 197). In the next chapter, he explains that ‘‘even the most abstract terms of language still reveal their link with the primary intuitive foundation in which they are rooted,’’ adding: Here again, ‘‘meaning’’ is not distinct from ‘‘sensibility’’; the two are closely interwoven. . . . It is the intuition of space which most fully reveals this interpenetration of sensuous and spiritual expression in language. . . . Even in the most highly developed languages we encounter this ‘‘metaphorical’’ rendition of intellectual conceptions by spatial representations [e.g., in German], vorstellen and verstehen, begreifen, begründen, erörtern, etc. (PSF, 1: 198– 99)

Cassirer seeks to substantiate his argument with reference to the fact that ‘‘the most elementary spatial terms known to language . . . are oriented both toward the ‘sensuous’ and the ‘intellectual’ ’’: ‘‘In the very first babblings of children a sharp distinction is evident between sound groups of essentially

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‘centripetal’ and essentially ‘centrifugal’ tendency. The m and n clearly reveal the inward direction, while the explosive sounds p and b, t and d reveal the opposite trend’’ (PSF, 1: 200–201). Similarly, Cassirer notes a few pages later that ‘‘a close connection has been almost universally observed between the expression of spatial relations and certain concrete nouns, among which once again words designating parts of man’s body are most prominent. ‘Inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘before’ and ‘behind’, ‘above’ and ‘below’ are associated with a specific part of one’s own body’’ (PSF, 1: 207; cf. PSF, 2: 90). In the case of Jung, however, the argument is taken much further when, in the revised version of Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, he claims that behind words lie the archetypes: ‘‘In considering etymology, therefore, we have to take into account not only the migration of the root-words, but the autochthonous revival of certain primordial images’’ (CW, 5: § 209). Elsewhere, in an Eranos lecture later published as ‘‘Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’’ (1934), Jung would explicitly argue that language had an archetypal foundation: Interpretations make use of certain linguistic matrices that are themselves derived from primordial images [urtümlichen Bildern]. From whatever side we approach this question, everywhere we find ourselves confronted with the history of language, with images and motifs that lead straight back to the primitive wonder-world. [Die Sinngebung bedient sich gewisser sprachlicher Matrizen, die ihrerseits wieder von urtümlichern Bildern abstammen. Wir können diese Frage anfassen, wo wir wollen, überall geraten wir in die Sprach- und Motivgeschichte, die immer stracks in die primitive Wunderwelt zurückführt.] (CW, 9/i: § 67)

At this point, for such followers of Jung as Paul Kugler, there opens up the possibility of an ‘‘archetypal linguistics.’’∂∑ Any affinity between Cassirer and Jung on this point must take into account the extent to which the concept of the ‘‘archetype’’ is assimilable to the concept of ‘‘symbolic form,’’ and we shall return to this point in the conclusion of this essay. An argument that is more obviously congenial to Cassirer’s outlook can be found in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido in a passage where, drawing on Baldwin’s Thought and Things or Genetic Logic (1901–11, translated into German 1908–14), Jung emphasizes the cultural achievements wrought by means of language: ‘‘Directed thinking, or as we might perhaps call it, thinking in speech, is the manifest instrument of culture, and we do not go astray when we say that the powerful work of education which the centuries have given to directed thinking has produced, just through the peculiar development of thinking from the individual subjective into the social objective, a practical application of the human mind to which we owe modern

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empiricism and technology, and which occurs for absolutely the first time in the history of the world’’ (PU, § 25, trans. modified). Thus a claim about language turns into a claim about history: that what distinguishes the moderns from the ancients is the ability to think in a directed way—to use language. Using a vocabulary that, in its implicit dichotomy of nature and art, recalls Schiller’s essay On the Naive and the Sentimental in Poetry (1795–96), Jung argues: The ancients almost entirely, with the exception of a few extraordinary minds, lacked the capacity to allow their interest to follow the transformations of inanimate matter to the extent necessary for them to be able to reproduce the process of nature, creatively and through their own art, by means of which alone they could have succeeded in putting themselves in possession of the force of nature. What they lacked was training in directed thinking, or, to express it psychoanalytically, the ancients did not succeed in tearing loose the libido which might be sublimated, from the other natural relations, and did not turn voluntarily to anthropomorphism. (PU, § 25, trans. modified)

When Jung writes that ‘‘the secret of the development of culture lies in the mobility of the libido, and in its capacity for transference’’ (das Geheimnis der Kulturentwicklung ist die Beweglichkeit und Verlagerungsfähigkeit der Libido) (PU, § 26), he is expressing an idea that he develops further in his paper ‘‘On Psychic Energy.’’∂∏ From the perspective of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, language forms one of those forms of the Geist, the development of which Cassirer, as part of his response to Hegel, attempts to trace: For like pure epistemology in particular, the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms in general inquires not into the empirical source of consciousness but into its pure content. Instead of pursuing its temporal, generating causes, the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is oriented solely towards what ‘‘is in it’’—towards apprehending and describing its structural forms. Language, myth, and theoretical knowledge are all taken as fundamental forms of the objective spirit, whose being it must be possible to disclose and understand purely as such, independently of the question of its ‘‘becoming.’’ (PSF, 3: 49)

And it is the cultural significance of language that, in the first volume, Cassirer is concerned to elucidate. As he explains in that volume, the true significance of language can only be understood in terms, albeit it unusually broad ones, of aesthetics: Language stands in a focus of cultural life, a point at which rays of quite diverse origin converge and from which lines of influence radiate to every sphere of culture. From this it follows that the philosophy of language can be

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From what we have seen so far of Jung’s argument, this dimension of language has been ignored. So we must turn to the second kind of thinking that Jung discusses in order to find an approach to language that would make sense within the framework of any ‘‘philosophy of symbolic forms.’’

Fantasy Thinking What, then, is the other kind of thinking that is available to us? Jung calls this ‘‘dream or fantasy thinking’’ (Träumen, Phantasieren) (PU, § 28). According to Jung, such ‘‘associative’’ thinking (as William James called it) can be characterized as follows: This sort of thinking does not tire us; it quickly leads us away from reality into fantasies of the past and future. Here, thinking in the form of speech ceases, image crowds upon image, feeling upon feeling; more and more clearly one sees a tendency which creates and makes believe, not as it truly is, but as one might indeed wish it to be. [Hier hört das Denken in Sprachform auf, Bild drängt sich an Bild, Gefühl an Gefühl, immer deutlicher wagt sich eine Tendenz hervor, die alles so schafft und stellt, nicht wie er wirklich ist, sondern wie man es wohl wünschen möchte, daß es wäre.] (PU, § 27)

Although he cites Oswald Külpe (1862–1915) as the source of the idea that directed thinking is ‘‘a kind of inner will action [eine Art ‘‘innerer Willenshandlung’’], the absence of which necessarily leads to an automatic play of ideas’’ (PU, § 26); and William James as the source of the idea that this other kind of thinking is, ‘‘in regard to adaptation, wholly unproductive’’ (PU, § 28), this second kind of thinking also recalls Kant’s description of what he termed ‘‘aesthetic judgment.’’ For in his third Critique, Kant wrote that in the aesthetic judgment of beauty, the imagination and the understanding were in a state of ‘‘free play’’; and that aesthetic judgments were characterized by ‘‘purposefulness without purpose.’’∂π Jung himself quite explicitly allies ‘‘nondirected thinking’’ with this conception of the aesthetic when, speaking of Greek antiquity, he writes: Antiquity preferred a mode of thought which was more closely related to a fantastic type. Except for a sensitive perspicuity towards works of art, not attained since then, we seek in vain for that precise and concrete manner of

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thinking characteristic of modern science. . . . That gives the explanation for the bewildering changes, the kaleidoscopic transformations and new syncretistic groupings, and the continued rejuvenation of the myths in the Greek sphere of culture. Here, we move in a world of fantasies, which, little concerned with the outer course of things, flows from an inner source, and, constantly changing, creates now plastic, now shadowy shapes. This fantastical activity of the ancient mind created artistically par excellence. (PU, § 31– 32)

In this passage, we find Jung not only identifying ‘‘nondirected thinking’’ with aesthetic perception, but also suggesting that aesthetic perception might be a way to unify both ‘‘directed’’ and ‘‘nondirected’’ thinking. Art, then, represents both the opposite of ‘‘directed’’ thinking, and the synthesis of these two kinds of thinking. Quoting Freud’s view that ‘‘in regression the fabric of the dream-thoughts is resolved into its raw material’’ (PU, § 34),∂∫ Jung goes on to emphasize the Haeckelian aspects of Freud’s discussion of regression, arguing that ‘‘the state of infantile thinking in the child’s life, as well as in dreams, is nothing but a reecho of the prehistoric and the ancient’’ (PU, § 36).∂Ω The kind of fantasy that Jung has in mind here is, however, also close to the artistic fantasy that Freud discussed in his paper ‘‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’’ (1907–8) (a copy of which Freud probably sent Jung at some stage in March 1908).∑≠ According to Jung, ‘‘the fantasy of modern humanity is nothing but a reecho of an old folk-belief, which was very widespread originally. The ambitious fantasy chooses, among others, a form which is classic [klassisch], and which once had a true meaning’’ (PU, § 44). Given the ‘‘archaic,’’ ‘‘mythological,’’ or what Jung later calls the ‘‘archetypal’’ nature of the sources from which such fantasy thought draws its material, Jung is able to revise his comments on the largely sexual nature of the imagery of many dreams. Earlier, Jung had cited the dream of the sexual assault as a particularly common one among women: ‘‘A girl sleeping after an evening happily spent in dancing, dreams that a robber breaks open her door noisily and stabs through her body with a lance’’ (PU, § 9). Now, Jung writes that ‘‘a robber who breaks into the house and commits a dangerous act’’ is ‘‘a mythological theme’’; but, while ‘‘in lawless prehistoric times’’ (in den rechtlosen prähistorischen Zeiten) such themes were ‘‘certainly a reality too’’ ( gewiß auch Wirklichkeit), which explains the existence—and persistence—of such imagery, it is their continuing mythological significance beyond the prehistoric period and ‘‘in cultivated epochs’’ (in kultivierten Epochen) that is most interesting to Jung. On the high cultural level of mythology (the capture of Proserpina by Hades in his chariot; the rescue of Deianira from Nessus, the Centaur, by her husband, Heracles;

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the seduction of Europa by Zeus in the form of a bull; the rape of the Sabine women by the Romans), and on the popular cultural level of folklore (regional marriage customs that recall the ancient custom of marriage by abduction), the appearance in a dream of this theme points beyond the desire of the individual who experiences it. As Jung puts it, ‘‘there is not set forth any account of the old events, but rather one such that it always reveals a thought common to humanity, and that is once more rejuvenated [es pflanzen sich nicht beliebige Berichte alter Ereignisse fort, sondern bloß solches, das einen allgemeinen und immer aufs neue sich wieder verjüngenden Gedanken der Menschheit ausspricht]. . . . The conscious fantasies tell us of mythical or other material of underdeveloped or no longer recognized wish tendencies in the soul’’ (PU, § 53 and § 56). This collective significance is what Jung sets out to discover in the fantasies of Miss Miller, which forms the rest of Transformations and Symbols of the Libido. And with the shift of focus to ‘‘nondirected’’ or ‘‘fantasy’’ thinking comes an emphasis, not on language, not on words, but on images. Such images are not subordinated to ‘‘directed thinking’’ but emerge in a state of free, ‘‘associative,’’ play. According to Jung’s conception of the psyche, it ‘‘consists essentially of images’’ (CW, 8: § 618). Indeed, Jung goes so far as to claim that ‘‘to the extent that the world does not assume the form of a psychic image, it is virtually nonexistent’’ (CW, 11: § 769). In Psychological Types, Jung explained the primarily visual functioning of the psyche in the following terms: ‘‘The organism confronts light with a new structure, the eye, and the psyche confronts the natural process with a symbolic image [dem Naturvorgang setzt der Geist ein symbolisches Bild entgegen], which apprehends it in the same way as the eye catches the light. And just as the eye bears witness to the peculiar and spontaneous creative activity of living matter, the primordial image [das urtümliche Bild] expresses the unique and unconditioned creative power of the psyche’’ (CW, 6: § 748). And in 1930, in an extraordinary passage, with Kantian, indeed Fichtean overtones, which nevertheless marks his characteristic shift from epistemology to the biological discourse of genetic inheritance, Jung writes: I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature. Its nonspatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism. My consciousness is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic nonego that fills them with nonspatial images. [Mein Bewußtsein ist wie ein Auge, das fernste Räume in sich faßt, das psychische Nicht-Ich aber ist das, was diesen Raum unräumlich erfüllt.] And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic

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factors. The most we may be able to do is misunderstand them, but we can never rob them of their power by denying them. Besides this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche. [Neben diesem Eindruck vermöchte ich nur noch den Anblick des gestirnten nächtlichen Himmels stellen, denn das Äquivalent der Welt innen ist nur die Welt außen, und wie ich diese Welt durch das Medium des Körpers erreiche, so erreiche ich jene Welt durch das Medium der Seele.] (CW, 4: § 764)∑∞

Likewise, in An Essay on Man, Cassirer provided the Kantian key to his philosophy of symbolic forms in terms of images. Drawing attention to the difference between the intellectus archetypus (which makes no distinction between reality and possibility) and the intellectus ectypus (which distinguishes between reality and possibility), Cassirer quotes Kant’s argument in the third Critique that we have ‘‘an intellect [i.e., understanding] which is in need of images’’ (ein der Bilder bedürftiger Verstand). At this point, Cassirer comments: ‘‘Instead of saying that the human intellect is an intellect which is ‘in need of images’ we should rather say that it is in need of symbols.’’∑≤ With reference to this passage, one of Cassirer’s early commentators, Charles Hendel, has observed: Cassirer does not mean that one is to dispense with images and substitute instead ‘‘symbols.’’ Both image and symbol are necessary to understanding. Both have a role in the symbolizing function. They are distinct, as Cassirer says in the Symbolic Forms, and the difference is precisely that between ‘‘passive images’’ of something given and ‘‘symbols’’ created by the intellect itself. Images are given but symbols are made. Made of what? Of the images, the content of perception and experience. The intellect takes images and makes them serve as symbols. This is quite plain in the case of language.∑≥

So it looks as if Jung may be, in some respects, closer to Kant than Cassirer is. Yet in order to understand what is at stake on those pages of An Essay of Man and, indeed, throughout The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, we need to examine another aspect of Cassirer’s view of language and, in particular, the following two claims: ‘‘Language shows itself to be at once a sensuous and an intellectual form of expression’’ (PSF, 1: 319); and ‘‘The very highest and purest spiritual activity known to consciousness’’—that is, art—‘‘is conditioned and mediated by certain modes of sensory activity’’ (PSF, 1: 88). In An Essay on Man, Cassirer hailed the work of the German diplomat and scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) as ‘‘more than a notable advance in linguistic thought,’’ describing it as marking ‘‘a new epoch in the

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history of the philosophy of language.’’∑∂ In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer refers repeatedly to Humboldt’s introduction to his groundbreaking, if unfinished, study of the Javanese language of Kawi, Über die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java (1836–40). With reference to this work, Cassirer writes that Humboldt’s ‘‘fundamental insight’’ was that ‘‘speech cannot be pieced together from words which preceded it, but that on the contrary words follow from speech as a whole’’ (PSF, 3: 211–12). Expressed in what have become the more familiar terms of Saussurian linguistics, this means that parole is dependent upon langue, each unit of speech on the entire system of signification. Humboldt’s work, Cassirer held, revealed ‘‘the power of linguistic formation’’: Humboldt defines language genetically as the eternally repeated effort of the spirit to make the articulated sound capable of expressing thought. But on the other hand, he leaves no doubt that this effort of thought is intimately bound up with the work of building the world of intuition and perception. By the same spiritual act through which man spins language out of himself he spins himself into it: so that in the end he communicates and lives with intuitive objects in no other manner than that shown him by the medium of language. (PSF, 3: 15).

In other words, what Humboldt, in Cassirer’s eyes, had uncovered was the link between perception and language and their dialectical relation. To those who would contend, along, say, Lacanian lines, that language, conceived as an abstract structure, is the decisive factor in determining perception, Cassirer argues instead that language is intimately bound up with the perception: The tendency toward the universal . . . is not proper to language alone but is already grounded and contained in the form of perception. If perception did not embrace an originally symbolic element, it would offer no support and no starting point for the symbolism of language. . . . Every conscious, articulated perception presupposes the great spiritual crisis which, according to the skeptics, begins with language. Perception is no longer purely passive, but active, no longer receptive, but selective; it is not isolated or isolating, but oriented toward a universal. Thus perception as such signifies, intends, and ‘‘says’’ something—and language merely takes up this first significatory function to carry it in all directions, toward realization and completion. The word of language makes explicit the representative values and meanings that are embedded in perception itself. (PSF, 3: 232)

Or, to return to the visual metaphor, as Cassirer does in volume 4 of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, ‘‘what is [in Empiricism and Skepticism] attributed to language as a deficiency, what is objected to as its fundamental

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limitation, holds instead the basis of its richness and greatest strength’’: ‘‘Only by this limitation is language able to prove its mastery. Not by shining its light evenly on all parts of the perceptual world, but by collecting it in certain focal points, language creates a ‘centering,’ an organization of this world. Whatever falls in this way under the beam of language emerges as a gestalt from a relatively undetermined background’’ (PSF, 4: 72). In Cassirer’s view, language is able to function in this qualitatively new way because, in language, ‘‘spiritual content and its sensuous expression are united’’: The former is not an independent, self-contained entity preceding the latter, but rather it is completed in it and with it. The two, content and expression, become what they are only in their interpenetration: the signification they acquire through their relation to one another is not outwardly added to their being; it is this signification which constitutes their being. Here we have to do not with a mediated product but with that fundamental synthesis from which language as a whole arises and by which all its parts, from the most elementary sensuous expression to the supreme spiritual expression, are held together. (PSF, 1: 178)

And it is precisely because ‘‘language shows itself to be at once a sensuous and an intellectual form of expression’’ (PSF, 1: 319) that it is a ‘‘symbolic form,’’ in the sense defined by Cassirer: The essential and characteristic achievement of all symbolic form—whether of language, myth, or pure cognition—does not lie simply in receiving given material impressions (which in themselves possess a fixed and definite character, a given quality and structure) and then grafting onto them, as though from outside, another form originating in the independent energy of consciousness. The characteristic achievement of the spirit begins much earlier than this. On sharper analysis even the apparently ‘‘given’’ proves to have passed through certain acts of linguistic, mythical, or logical-theoretical apperception. Only what is made in these acts ‘‘is’’; even in its seemingly simple and immediate nature, what is thus made proves to be conditioned and determined by some primary meaning-giving function. And it is this primary, not the secondary, formation which contains the true secret of all symbolic form, which must forever arouse new philosophical amazement. (PSF, 2: 94)

Thus it is the understanding of language in terms of the concept of the ‘‘symbolic form’’ that provides a key starting point for any comparison of the affinities between Cassirer and Jung.

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Conclusion Among Goethe’s later poems there is one called ‘‘Epirrhema’’ (1820), which opens with the following lines: Müsset im Naturbetrachten Immer eins wie alles achten: Nichts ist drinnen, nichts ist draußen; Denn was innen, das ist außen. So ergreifet ohne Säumnis Heilig öffentlich Geheimnis. [You must, when contemplating nature, Attend to this, in each and every feature: There’s nought outside and nought within, For she is inside out and outside in. Thus will you grasp, with no delay, The holy secret, clear as day.]∑∑

Referring to Goethe’s phrase ‘‘Denn was innen, das ist außen,’’ Cassirer writes of the symbolic forms that ‘‘their essential achievement is not that they copy the outward world in the inward world or that they simply project a finished inner world outward, but rather that the two factors of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, of ‘I’ and ‘reality’ are determined and delimited from one another only in these symbolic forms and through their mediation’’ (PSF, 2: 155–56).∑∏ Likewise, Jung quotes this same poem, but he goes on to emphasize the structuring effect of the psyche: ‘‘All that is outside, also is inside,’’ we could say with Goethe. But this ‘‘inside,’’ which modern rationalism is so eager to derive from ‘‘outside,’’ has an a priori structure of its own that antedates all conscious experience. It is quite impossible to conceive how ‘‘experience’’ in the widest sense, or, for that matter, anything psychic, could originate exclusively in the outside world. The psyche is part of the inmost mystery of life, and it has its own peculiar structure and form like every other organism. Whether this psychic structure and its elements, the archetypes, ever ‘‘originated’’ at all is a metaphysical question and therefore unanswerable. The structure is something given, the precondition that is found to be present in every case. And this is the mother, the matrix—the form into which all experience is poured. (CW, 9/i: § 187)

In terms of their view of language, Cassirer and Jung may be seen to differ in one important respect. For on one level, Jung draws a distinction between two different kinds of thinking, ‘‘directed’’ and ‘‘fantasy,’’ whereas Cassirer would also be able to show their interrelated nature, whereby the latter provided the precondition for the former (in his eyes, philosophically superior). On another

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level, however, the difference between Cassirer and Jung amounts to their divergent approaches to the question of the aesthetic. The importance of the aesthetic dimension, both with particular reference to language and in general, is, in Jung’s writings on analytical psychology, often implied but rarely explicitly stated, whereas Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms hints more frequently, and more insistently, at the significance of the aesthetic dimension of language and of the other ‘‘symbols.’’

Notes 1. In this essay the following abbreviations are used to refer to works by Jung: CW = Jung, Collected Works, ed. Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, and William McGuire, 20 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953–83), cited with references to volume and paragraph number; MDR = Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections: Recorded and Edited by Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (London: Collins/Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); PU = Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido: A Contribution to the History of the Evolution of Thought (trans. of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido), trans. Beatrice M. Hinkle (London: Routledge, 1991). 2. Ronald Hayman, A Life of Jung (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 30–31. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, § 23, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 222. 4. Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 181. 5. See Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 181–84. 6. C. G. Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (London: Aldus Books/Jupiter Books, 1964), 38. 7. Dimitry Gawronsky, ‘‘Ernst Cassirer: His Life and His Work,’’ in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1973), 3–37 (25). 8. Quoted in Hayman, Life of Jung, 31. 9. Similarly, in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung spoke of scholasticism as a precondition of science: ‘‘The great work of scholasticism . . . appears to be the foundation of firmly knitted intellectual sublimation, the conditio sine qua non of the modern scientific and technical spirit’’ (PU, § 30). Cassirer writes that ‘‘the transition to agriculture, to a regulated tilling of the fields, represents a crucial turning point in the development of the vegetation myths and cults’’ (PSF, 2: 201). 10. Particularly Preuss’s essay entitled ‘‘Der Ursprung der Religion und Kunst,’’ published in Globus 86 (1904): 355–63 and 87 (1905): 333–419. 11. EM, 56–57. 12. John Michael Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 6. 13. C. G. Jung, Letters, ed. Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffé, trans. R. F. C. Hull, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973–75), 1: 294.

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14. For further discussion, see Paul Bishop, ‘‘The use of Kant in Jung’s early psychological works,’’ Journal of European Studies 26 (1996): 107–40. 15. See PSF, 2: 250; and see James M. Clark, ‘‘C. G. Jung and Meister Eckhart,’’ Modern Language Review 54 (1959): 239–44. 16. Alexander Altmann, ‘‘Symbol and Myth,’’ Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy 20 (1945): 162–71 (162). 17. MS, 298. 18. See ‘‘Wotan’’ (1936) and ‘‘After the Catastrophe’’ (1945) (CW, 10: § 371–99 and § 400–443). 19. Robert Avens, Imagination Is Reality: Western Nirvana in Jung, Hillman, Barfield, and Cassirer (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1980). 20. Petteri Pietikäinen, C. G. Jung and the Psychology of Symbolic Forms (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 1999), 218–19. 21. See Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, gen. ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953– 74), 4: 121 and 160. 22. See Freud, Standard Edition, 5: 346 and 358–60. 23. Jung cites Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910) as an example of this interpretative reciprocity. See Jung’s enthusiastic response to this work in his letter to Freud of 17 June 1910 (see The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, ed. William McGuire, trans. Ralph Manheim and R. F. C. Hull [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988], 329). 24. See Stefan Majetschak, ed., Vom Magus im Norden und der Verwegenheit des Geistes: Ein Hamann-Brevier (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), 99. 25. Dichtung und Wahrheit, pt. III, bk. 12; see Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, From My Life: Poetry and Truth, Parts One to Three, trans. Robert R. Heitner, ed. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons, Goethe’s Collected Works (New York: Suhrkamp, 1987), 4: 380–81. 26. See R. H. Stephenson’s contribution to this volume, ‘‘ ‘Eine zarte Differenz’: Cassirer on Goethe on the Symbol.’’ 27. Two examples might serve to illustrate this debate. First, in On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind (1795), Schiller remarks: ‘‘One-sidedness in the exercise of his power must, it is true, inevitably lead the individual into error; but the species as a whole to truth’’ (Letter 6, § 13) (Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, 2d ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982], 41). To this, Jung responded: ‘‘The privileged position of the superior function is as detrimental to the individual as it is valuable to society. . . . But this one-sided development must inevitably lead to a reaction, since the suppressed inferior functions cannot be indefinitely excluded from participating in our life and development. The time will come when ‘the division in the inner man’ must be ‘abolished’ [cf. Letter 7, § 1], in order that the undeveloped may be granted an opportunity to live’’ (CW, 6 § 109 and § 112). Second, in his review of Ernst Stiedenroth’s A Psychology in Clarification of Phenomena from the Soul of 1824, Goethe wrote: ‘‘We are well enough aware that some skill, some ability, usually predominates in the character of each human being. This leads necessarily to one-sided thinking’’ (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sci-

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entific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller, Goethe’s Collected Works (New York: Suhrkamp, 1988), 12: 45. 28. For a discussion of Herder’s significance, see Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London: Hogarth Press, 1976); and, more recently, Charles Taylor, ‘‘The Importance of Herder,’’ in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 79–99. 29. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–), 1: 770. 30. For further discussion, see Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, ‘‘ ‘The Whole Man’ in Schiller’s Theory of Culture and Society: On the Virtue of a Plurality of Models,’’ in Essays in German Language, Culture and Society, ed. Siegbert S. Prawer, R. Hinton Thomas, and Leonard Forster (London: University of London, Institute of Germanic Studies, 1969), 177–210. 31. See Paul Bishop, Synchronicity and Intellectual Intuition: Kant, Swedenborg, and Jung (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edward Mellen, 2000), 307–9. 32. See PU, § 17, n5; and § 22, n8. 33. See Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (Paris, 1912), a copy of which was owned by Jung. 34. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962). 35. This term, now mainly associated with Jacques Derrida, was earlier used by Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869) in Über Lebensmagnetismus (1857), where he differentiated between a superficial, ‘‘logozentrisch’’ way and a richer, ‘‘biozentrisch’’ way of looking at the world (see Raymond Furness, Zarathustra’s Children: A Study of a Lost Generation of German Writers (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2000), 121); and later by Ludwig Klages (1872–1956), who uses the term extensively in Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (1929–32). 36. When, at this point, Jung inserts in a footnote a reference to Nietzsche, it is, rather than to refer to his famous critique of causality, to quote from § 179 of The Gay Science: ‘‘Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings—always darker, emptier and simpler’’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Vintage, 1974], 203). 37. Could a blind man, once his vision was restored, be able to coordinate sensory impressions and visual data by identifying a globe and a cube on a table in front of him? For Cassirer’s discussion, see The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 108–20; and for the eighteenth-century context of Herder and Goethe, see Elizabeth M. Wilkinson, ‘‘The Blind Man and the Poet: An Early Stage in Goethe’s Quest for Form,’’ in German Studies Presented to W. H. Bruford (London: Harrap, 1962), 29–57. 38. In addition, Cassirer knew Goethe’s ‘‘Urworte. Orphisch,’’ and it is highly likely Jung would have known it too. 39. See Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination, Collection ‘‘Tel Quel’’ (Paris: Seuil, 1972). 40. See William McGuire, ‘‘Jung’s Complex Reactions (1907): Word Association Experiments Performed by Binswanger,’’ Spring (1984): 1–34. 41. Freud, Standard Edition, 5: 531. 42. Paul Kugler, ‘‘Image and Sound: An Archetypal Approach to Language,’’ Spring (1978): 136–51 (139).

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43. Paul Kugler, ‘‘The Phonetic Imagination,’’ Spring (1979): 118–29 (120). Compare with Jung’s remark that ‘‘all knowledge of the psyche is itself psychic’’ (CW, 5: § 344). 44. For further discussion, see Paul Bishop, ‘‘An Herderian Perspective on Lacanian Psychoanalysis,’’ History of European Ideas 26 (2000): 1–18. 45. For further discussion, see Paul Kugler, The Alchemy of Discourse: An Archetypal Approach to Language (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1982). 46. For a discussion of the proximity of the argument in this essay to a Marxist analysis of culture, see Robert Currie, ‘‘Christopher Caudwell: Marxist Illusion, Jungian Reality,’’ British Journal of Aesthetics 18 (1978): 291–99. 47. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 9 (cf. § 26) and § 10. 48. Freud, Standard Edition, 5: 535. 49. Jung goes on to quote further from The Interpretation of Dreams (Standard Edition, 5: 567). In the 1919 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud added a paragraph (Standard Edition, 5: 549) which alluded to a passage from Nietzsche’s Human, All-Too-Human (vol. 1, § 12 and § 13)—exactly the same passage that Jung quotes here (PU, § 37) (cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 17–18). 50. See Freud/Jung Letters, 132n6. 51. From his introduction to Wolfgang Müller Kranefeldt’s Die Psychoanalyse: Psychoanalytische Psychologie (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1930); trans. by Ralph M. Eaton as Secret Ways of the Mind: A Survey of the Psychological Principles of Freud, Adler, and Jung (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1934). 52. EM, 57; cf. Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 77. 53. Charles W. Hendel, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in PSF, 1: 50. 54. EM, 121. 55. Goethes Gedichte in zeitlicher Folge, ed. Heinz Nicolai (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1982), 911; trans. by Christopher Middleton (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Selected Poems, ed. Christopher Middleton, Goethe’s Collected Works [Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1983], 1: 159). 56. For further discussion of the ‘‘inner-outer’’ problematic in Goethe, see R. H. Stephenson, Goethe’s Conception of Knowledge and Science (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), esp. 65–66; and see his essay in this volume.

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‘‘Eine zarte Differenz’’: Cassirer on Goethe on the Symbol r. h. stephenson

Durch Vernünfteln wird Poesie vertrieben, Aber sie mag das Vernünftige lieben. —Goethe, Sprüche, Hamburger Ausgabe (HA), 1, 325

Being ‘‘the very hinges of all thought,’’ the really important terms of discourse tend to be, as I. A. Richards pointed out some sixty years ago, highly ambiguous: ‘‘In general we will find that the more important a word is, and the more central and necessary its meanings are in our pictures of ourselves and the world, the more ambiguous and possibly deceiving the word will be.’’∞ The term ‘‘symbol’’ is a preeminently notorious example of such linguistic equivocation. It and its synonyms—like ‘‘beauty’’ and ‘‘meaning’’ itself (for both of which Richards and C. K. Ogden found sixteen discrete meanings in English in their monumental study of 1923 The Meaning of Meaning)—are amongst the most elusive and most multivocal of words.≤ They have assumed over the whole length of our intellectual and cultural history so many Protean connotations and associations that it has proved over and over again extremely difficult to identify, let alone define, precisely what ‘‘symbol,’’ ‘‘sign,’’ (whether ‘‘signifier’’ or ‘‘signified’’), ‘‘index,’’ ‘‘token,’’ ‘‘emblem,’’ ‘‘figure,’’ ‘‘image,’’ and so forth might mean. Nevertheless, despite the prevailing ambiguity of verbal usage, both com-

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mon and specialist, certain conceptual distinctions have been discerned, conventionally and traditionally. ‘‘Sign’’ and ‘‘symbol’’ are, it is true, often employed interchangeably: the notations of music or mathematics are referred to indifferently as ‘‘signs’’ or ‘‘symbols’’; words, too, are traditionally referred to, from Aquinas to Locke, as ‘‘signs’’ or ‘‘symbols’’ of ideas. But a differentiation between ‘‘sign’’ and ‘‘symbol’’ is equally traditional: ‘‘sign’’ is often used to denote phenomena that evoke other phenomena in an act of communication, while ‘‘symbol’’ is frequently reserved for something that functions as substitute or surrogate for something else. In respect of signs which in this former sense function indicatively, it has been standard practice, at least since Augustine, to distinguish further between ‘‘natural’’ signs (like smoke ‘‘pointing to’’ fire), on the one hand, and, on the other, ‘‘conventional’’ signs of human intention which (like words, gestures, and other nonverbal ‘‘symbols’’) ‘‘living beings mutually exchange for the purpose of showing, as well as they can, the feelings of their minds,’’ as Augustine beautifully formulates the point in De Doctrina Christiana.≥ Verbal similarities notwithstanding, ‘‘symbol,’’ sometimes as a term and consistently as a concept, signifies the yet different meaning of an individual instance somehow representing a more general, even a universal, case. At its most abstract, a letter or figure used in mathematics or music to represent a quantity, sound, operation, or function is—precisely because of its representational role—usually referred to nowadays as a ‘‘symbol.’’ Similarly, ‘‘the apple in European literature and folklore,’’ Robert Graves points out, ‘‘is the symbol of consummation, as the egg is of initiation’’—and the rose is of love.∂ In much the same way—though with much reduced historical relevancy—‘‘Fortuna’’ became a dominant symbol of the anxiety-ridden Reformation and, along with such symbols as the dove and the olive branch (signifying peace), became the almost obsessive concern of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century emblem books, containing such ‘‘concrete’’ symbolism typically accompanied by a series of mottoes, a pictorial representation, and a discursive moral ‘‘explanation’’ of the imagery. Alciati’s Emblematum Libellis of 1522 began a fashion for pictorial representations whose ‘‘symbolic’’ (i.e., representational) meaning is simultaneously presented in discourse, as if the symbol were no more than a condensed thought to be unpacked. The same representational principle is at work, in the sphere of religion, in the trinitarian symbolization of the inner life of God; and in metaphysics, where the ‘‘signs,’’ say, of the yin and yang are understood (at least in the West) as ‘‘symbols of all the fundamental dualities of life’’: ‘‘good and evil, beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood, male and female, night and day, sun and moon, heaven and earth, pleasure and pain, odd and even, left and right, positive and negative—the list is endless.’’∑

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The all-inclusive, indeed infinite, tendencies of symbolism conceived as representation have no doubt contributed to the age-old effort to systematize it. Astrology offers a good example of such symbolism in its extended sense as a sign system (see Paul Bishop, herein). And, on a rather more abstract level, underpinning Leibniz’s ambition to construct a characteristica universalis was nothing less than a system of symbolism envisaged as embracing the communication of thought, thinking itself, and a reflection of the structure of the world: ‘‘In order to carry out Leibniz’s programme, or any part of it, we should have to provide (a) symbols for all the notions to be taken as ultimate or unanalysable, and (b) suitable devices [special symbols called syncategorematic] for expressing such formal notions as predication, conjunction, disjunction, negation, conditional connexion, universality, and existence.’’∏ Some aspects of Leibniz’s interests have been continued into our own day (notably by Bolzano).π Like symbolic logic, structuralism has also sought a stable system of symbolic functions, in which meaning is a discursive construct of internally related ‘‘signs’’ (or, more properly—following de Saussure— ‘‘signifiers’’: acoustic images that refer to the ‘‘signified,’’ the conceptual component of the ‘‘sign’’). In fact, it has become a commonplace of our world of discourse that we inhabit a ‘‘symbolic order,’’ a totality of such signifying systems.∫ The distinction—adopted, more or less consciously, by layman and specialist alike—between ‘‘sign’’ as indicator and ‘‘symbol’’ as representational surrogate has, therefore, become at best a stipulative distinction of merely rhetorical, strategic convenience. Indeed, de Saussure’s principle that the relation between (linguistic) signifier and signified is arbitrary has led many to follow Derrida in exploiting the delights which this ‘‘free-play’’ offers in a deconstruction of texts revealing the dissemination and infinite referral of meaning which semiotic difference, and the resultant slippage of meaning, between the (illusorily fixed) components of the tangle of signs create:Ω ‘‘The structure of reference works and can go on working not because of the identity between [the] two so-called component parts of the sign; but because of their relationship of difference. The sign marks a place of difference.’’∞≠ And yet, as if in defiance of such sophisticated alembication—and transcending the commonplace distinction between indicative and representational signs (or symbols)—‘‘symbolism’’ persists in connating an a-rational mode of meaning, one in which more is said by and in a certain kind of symbol than can be reduced to discursive categories (whether as in the pedestrian commentary of the emblem books or as in the Akribie of deconstructivist criticism). At their center, it is generally agreed by theologians and most historians of religion alike, religious symbols are of this type. Just as cult, ritual, and liturgy may be seen as symbolic acts, so sacred places (indeed, the sacredness

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of the earth itself) can be read as symbolic objects. If they are viewed as externally efficacious—as in magic—such symbols may become objects of superstitious idolatry;∞∞ but working internally, they may relate the human sphere and the realm of the transcendent or ultimate reality in which the believer believes. In such contexts, a symbol is, paradoxically, a specific expression of an utterly ineffable reality, conveying something to faith which cannot be grasped by the mind. Nor is religious symbolism the only species of symbolism to challenge the hegemony of semiological conceptions. An analogous sense of symbol as (immanently) expressive—routinely dismissed in some quarters today as a naïve, nostalgic longing for an illusory (because impossible) ‘‘presence’’ of Being, forever unattainable in the symbolic order in which we are said to pass our whole existence—has as venerable a history as that of the religious symbol. The aesthetic symbol is, on this view, conceptually quite distinct from the deconstructed or systemically stable symbol-as-sign by virtue of its capacity to articulate more than thought. Aesthetic symbols do not mystically express the divine; they articulate, rather, what cannot otherwise be articulated: human feeling. Presumably Baudelaire’s experience of the depth of life revealed in some ordinary object, recorded in his Intimate Journals as its ‘‘symbol,’’ is an aesthetic experience in this sense. Repeated attempts—of which Northrop Frye’s ingenious concoction of a ‘‘royal metaphor’’ is an outstandingly brilliant example—to reduce such symbols to the infinite richness of the unsurpassable range of connotations generated by an interactive metaphor are fated to fail. For whether the relation between the ‘‘vehicle’’ and the ‘‘tenor’’ is ‘‘identification as’’ or ‘‘identification with,’’ it remains a logico-conceptual relation which, no matter how richly elaborated it may be in practice, implies in principle that it can be translated into discursive terms.∞≤ Even when the figure of speech, ‘‘metaphor,’’ is extended through a whole sentence and beyond into that figure of thought we call ‘‘allegory,’’ it remains a rhetorical form, dependent for its comprehension on the apprehension of the discursive meaning of the words deployed. Such metaphors, whether continuous and sustained as tale or condensed as personified abstraction in an allegorical masque, lack precisely the direct sensuous appeal of the true ‘‘poetic’’ symbol. This, at least, is Goethe’s and Schiller’s position. Unsurprisingly, Goethe frequently employs the term ‘‘symbol’’ in its familiar, traditional use as a synonym of indicative sign or representational token or type as in his famous letter to Schiller of 16 August 1797—and as in the following discussion of the magnet as a ‘‘primary phenomenon’’: ‘‘The magnet is a primary phenomenon the mere expression of which is already an explanation of it; that is how it becomes a symbol for everything else for which we do

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not seek either names or words.’’∞≥ This particular Urphänomen is a symbol of all other such primary phenomena by dint of representing the class of such phenomena. But the magnet, like other primary phenomena, is an aesthetic symbol as well if, and only if, it is so constituted that it can be—and is— apprehended by a human consciousness as an object onto which the felt particularity of subjective inner life can be projected and given embodied expression and thereby objectified. (Whether or not such true symbols reveal, too, in some mystical way, the divine reality, is a point Goethe left open, though he had his own, private religious convictions on that score. His concern, as a poet and thinker, is rather with their aesthetic significance, for the birth of intelligible meaning in human self-expression.) The fruitfulness of Weimar Classicism’s theory of the symbol was not lost on Ernst Cassirer’s pupil Susanne Langer (who, significantly, also counted that metaphysician of the aesthetic, A. N. Whitehead, as her other great intellectual mentor). She was thus well placed to develop her Philosophy in a New Key, culminating in the monumental, three-volume study, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967–70). But, whereas Langer tended to assimilate Goethe and Schiller’s key notions of aesthetic semblance (‘‘schöner Schein’’) to that of illusion tout court (and thus to conflate their notion of the aesthetic symbol with more traditional, discursive conceptions of symbol-as-‘‘image’’),∞∂ Ernst Cassirer himself, for all his acknowledged indebtedness to Goethe, is much more circumspect with regard to the complexity and subtlety of Goethe’s theory of the symbol.∞∑ Keenly aware that his own evolving conception of ‘‘symbolic form,’’ though influenced by and perfectly compatible with Goethe’s own idea of the symbol as ‘‘lebende Gestalt’’ (living form), was yet of a different, philosophico-discursive, order, Cassirer strove to ground his own general theory in what John M. Krois calls ‘‘a bio-medical model of semantics,’’ one which is very close indeed to what Goethe had in mind.∞∏ By comparison with Langer’s largely indirect acquaintance with Weimar thought, Cassirer’s intensive coming-to-terms with Goethe was a lifelong, direct, intimate preoccupation with every aspect of the oeuvre and the life—what has been eloquently dubbed an ‘‘eavesdropping’’ on Goethe. Throughout the elaboration of his own philosophy of symbolic form, Cassirer was, ‘‘as it were, in dialogue with Goethe’’—without ever confusing the distinct (albeit ultimately related) areas in Goethe’s thought of Anschauung (aesthetic perception) and Erkenntnis (intellectual perception).∞π The final fruit of Cassirer’s scrupulously meticulous attention to the fine nuances of Goethe’s thought—and style—was a distinction between ‘‘symbolic form’’ and ‘‘symbolic pregnance,’’ which brought him (and his reader) into the very heart of Goethe’s theory of the symbol.∞∫

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Recently the working out of this distinction by Cassirer over many years has been the subject of Barbara Naumann’s (1998) study of Cassirer and Goethe entitled Philosophie und Poetik des Symbols. Naumann’s brilliantly penetrative analysis, not only of Cassirer’s key concepts but of Goethe’s theory and practice, opens a new chapter in the scholarship on Goethe’s symbolism. For both in bringing out the conceptual difficulties that Cassirer’s coming to terms with Goethe posed for his philosophy of symbolic forms and in vividly evoking the intellectual drama of Cassirer’s attempts to resolve them, her work sets out with hitherto unsurpassed clarity precisely what the challenge is that Goethe’s conception of the symbol poses for a philosophical understanding of the symbol. Essential elements of Cassirer’s thought derive from Goethe’s reflections on the role of symbolism in the presentation of his science and in his poetic output, which Cassirer re-presented in a peculiarly effective way by blending his own commentary with Goethe’s distinctive voice, employing Goethe’s figures of speech and thought in a reciprocal interplay between Cassirer’s own theoretical positions and Goethe’s, to the mutual clarification of both. In his well-known essay of 1922/23, ‘‘Der Begriff der symbolischen Form,’’ there is no mistaking the emphatically (Kantian ‘‘critical’’) philosophical stance taken by Cassirer in respect to symbolic form: ‘‘Thus the question here is not about what the symbol in one specific sphere or other—in art, in myth, in language —means and accomplishes; but, rather, to what extent language as a whole, myth as a whole, art as a whole evinces the general character of symbolic formation.’’∞Ω Immediate, intuitive, knowledge is renounced by Kant and Cassirer alike: the philosophy of symbolic forms is to be a theory of meaning within the bounds of Kantian epistemology.≤≠ Even artistic form is thought of as ‘‘pure’’ and abstract: an artistic form in the strict sense only comes about once perception has cast off all connectedness with mere impression, has delivered itself up to pure expression.≤∞ And when, under Goethe’s influence, the concept of ‘‘style’’ becomes, in Naumann’s words, ‘‘zum alter ego der symbolischen Formen’’ (the alter ego of symbolic form), it, too, signifies the discursive movement of thought (‘‘die Bewegung des Denkens’’; Naumann, 34): ‘‘Cassirer identifies . . . style with the movement of thought (‘reciprocal determination’), by which he means discursiveness and, above all, linguistic performance.’’≤≤ ‘‘Symbol’’ comes to mean a sign in systemic relation to other signs (Naumann, 134) and ‘‘symbolic system’’ becomes synonymous with symbolic form (179): ‘‘Only by means of signs do we apprehend what we call ‘reality,’ and we only possess ‘reality’ in signs; for the highest objective truth that Mind opens itself to is ultimately the form of its own activity.’’≤≥ Here Cassirer seems to be closer to Derrida than to the supposedly naïve realist that Goethe is routinely described as in too many literary histories.

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One great benefit of Cassirer’s approach at this point is that in conscious opposition to contemporary trends emphasizing the authentic Erlebnis (experience) alleged (by such as Dilthey and George) to be expressed in Goethe’s works—and life—he is able to identify and elaborate Goethe’s interest in, and openness to, philosophical ideas (Naumann, 11). On closer scrutiny, Goethe’s utterances on philosophy and philosophers ‘‘convey the selfsame fundamental tendency which Goethe stuck to from the beginning to the end’’ (alle diese Äußerungen [bilden] ein und derselben Grundtendenz, die Goethe von Anfang bis zu Ende festgehalten hat): ‘‘He rejected philosophy when it would aim to offer him the yield and ‘quintessence’ of being in one single, fixed concept— but he honoured philosophy, and sought it out, as soon as he hoped to gain from it a clarification and differentiation of the various energies which worked together in his inner life.’’≤∂ For Cassirer, predominantly interested as he was in reconstructing Goethe’s intellectual biography (Naumann, 146), ‘‘it was the poet’s figures of thought that possessed actuality and vitality’’ (für Cassirer besitzen die Gedankenfiguren des Dichters Aktualität und Lebendigkeit; Naumann, 12). Though closer to Kant—for whom ‘‘symbols are always ‘indirect presentations of the concept’ ’’≤∑ —than to Goethe, for whom symbols can have an inherently sensuous meaning, Cassirer is respectful of the boundaries marking poetry off from science (Naumann, 73). Out of this subtle tension Cassirer conceives the notion of symbolische Prägnanz (symbolic pregnance): ‘‘ ‘Symbolic pregnance’ as reciprocal determination and movement is for Cassirer characterized by ultimate impenetrability and is to that extent apriori. It is inherent in every process of symbolization and, as a consequence, in Cassirer’s sense, inherent in every production of meaning.’’≤∏ In developing the theoretical and philosophical implications in Goethe’s position, Cassirer develops Goethe’s thought further than Goethe had himself, at least explicitly (Naumann, 94–96), aligning his own ‘‘basis phenomena’’ (Basisphänomene)—‘‘phenomena of symbolic pregnance’’—with Goethe’s concept of the Urphänomen (Naumann, 99). The upshot, as far as the light which Cassirer’s researches throw onto Goethe is concerned, is a view of the Urphänomen as an ultimate sign, and one, moreover, which brings home the Derridean insight into the self-referential play of deferred difference: it is, in a word, a ‘‘sign of the sign.’’≤π The orientation of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms toward a logic of différance reveals, too, such an orientation in Goethe’s theory and practice of symbolism (Naumann, 20): ‘‘The symbolic relation is developed by Cassirer along the lines of a logic of différance. The ‘independence’ of the symbolic lies precisely in that mediating function that constitutes the ‘very being of intellectual life itself.’ ’’≤∫ ‘‘Sign,’’ ‘‘symbol,’’ and ‘‘concept’’ can thus be synonymized by virtue of ‘‘the

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achievement of abstraction’’ inherent in every sign/symbol (Naumann, 137). Following up Cassirer’s (early) insight into the crucial role which the abstraction of the type-concept plays in Goethe’s scientific procedure (12), Naumann argues that Cassirer came to see Goethe’s Urphänomen as equally an abstraction, but one which in forgetting its originary difference (der ursprüngliche Unterschied; Naumann, 101) has the (precarious) status and presence of ultimate signifier, full of ‘‘symbolic pregnance’’: ‘‘then a reading of symbolic pregnance results which is not dissimilar to the description and critique of metaphysics of a Derrida.’’≤Ω Moreover—and this is the aspect of her argument that is of particularly exciting relevance to the understanding of Goethe—Naumann argues, very persuasively (116–23), that Goethe was well aware that meaning is generated within a self-deconstructing system of a nonidentical repetition of signifiers. So much is clear, she argues on the basis of an acute analysis of his (1823) essay on ‘‘repeated reflections’’ (wiederholte Spiegelung; HA 12, 322–23), where an infinite series of reflections, both diachronic and synchronic, with no given, only an arbitrary, point d’appui, is envisaged with sovereign irony on Goethe’s part. Equally perspicacious analyses of other writings by Goethe—above all, of the Wanderjahre, to which half her book is dedicated—make a very powerful case indeed for Goethe’s sophisticated awareness that any apparent point of stable centrality (the Urphänomen preeminently so) is only ever a (necessary) fiction, from which one can trace, and enjoy, an in-fact decentered, multiperspectival site of multiple self-referential significations. By contrast with Wilhelm Emrich’s atomistic approach to Goethe’s symbols (Naumann, 125–31), her own much subtler deconstructivist reading has, in addition, the not inconsiderable ‘‘positivistic’’ scholarly virtue of gaining confirmation from the very best of the most recent research on Goethe’s practice as a novelist (Naumann, 16).≥≠ The case for Goethe’s awareness of the inherent instability of discursive language—because of its intrinsic abstraction, even on its most (illusorily) ‘‘concrete’’ levels—is very well founded. Goethe’s rhetoric, as I have argued elsewhere, deconstructs itself blatantly, indeed, shamelessly.≥∞ His masterly deployment of evocative rhetoric does truly serve to expose the unreality of the abstractions of conceptual thought. They appear crude and imprecise against the foil of perceptual vividness conjured up before the reader’s inner eye by the ‘‘poetic’’ force of his simultaneously deployed aesthetic language. But, while it is true that the opening sentence of Goethe’s aphorism below (much quoted by Cassirer himself) does precisely articulate the self-referential, deconstructive aspect of Cassirer’s (and Goethe’s) conception of ‘‘symbolic form’’ in the way Naumann in citing it claims (137), it is also true that the aphorism as a whole

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does much more than this: ‘‘Everything factual is already theory: to understand this would be the greatest possible achievement. The blueness of the sky reveals to us the basic law of chromatics. But don’t go looking for anything behind phenomena: they are themselves what they teach, the theory.’’≥≤ Naumann is surely right to see the seemingly paradoxical play between the ‘‘fact’’ and ‘‘theory’’ here as a paradigmatic example both of Goethe’s deconstruction in general and of the ludic semantics of the Wanderjahre (from which the aphorism is taken) in particular, as the history of the scholarly controversy over this aphorism indicates.≥≥ On the other hand, the last sentence proposes a relation of symbolic identity (‘‘they are themselves the theory’’) between the phenomenal realm and the sphere of theory. The first sentence is no prestatement of this but proposes—as attention to the little word schon makes clear—the priority of discursive theory in all observation of socalled fact. What may appear to be naïve empiricism is, then, a much more complex proposition, embracing two quite distinct, if related, ideas. Moreover, not only do the first sentence and the last assert quite different relations between ‘‘theory’’ and ‘‘fact’’; so, too, does the sentence in the middle, for it is far more than a mere illustration of either of the other two propositions. On the contrary, it expresses yet another, and again quite different, relation between ‘‘fact’’ and ‘‘theory.’’ As is so often the case in Goethe’s writing, the structure of the syntax of the German sentence is such that we may take as subject either ‘‘die Bläue des Himmels’’ (the blueness of the sky), or, construing this as the object placed first for emphasis, we may, with equal justice, read the sentence with ‘‘das Grundgesetz der Chromatik’’ (the basic law of chromatics) as subject—an exploitation of syntactical relations that is wholly characteristic of Goethe’s style, especially in the highly rhetorical context of his Maxims and Reflections.≥∂ In other words, ‘‘fact’’ (the blueness of the sky) and ‘‘theory’’ (the basic law of chromatics) are expressed in a relation of reciprocity: now the one, now the other, coming to the fore, each in a mirror-relation to its counterpart—and to itself reflected in its counterpart—ad infinitum. And there is even more to the discursive content of this little aphorism. In addition to the distinctions already made, two different—indeed, opposing—ideas are expressed within the final sentence itself. For although the maxim closes on an assertion of the immanence of theory-in-fact, it is also important to note that, before the final colon, one is warned against yet another relationship between idea and world, that between transcendental ideas and perceptible phenomena; that is, against ideas lurking behind fact. Here, in nuce, is the full range of Goethe’s conception of symbolism: from the discursive theory (‘‘symbolic form’’) to the symbol proper (as datum of perception) to the ultimate limit of consciousness (pregnant with religious

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overtones). The question this complexity raises is this: because Goethe (in the Wanderjahre as elsewhere) delighted in elaborating the implications of the first proposition in this aphorism, as Naumann rightly argues, does it really follow that he did not, in that novel and elsewhere, also work with symbolism of the different kinds that are referred to in the same aphorism? In other words, does Goethe’s play with signification really ‘‘transcend all his theoretical and aphoristic statements about the symbol in a narrow sense’’ (Naumann, 137)? Or is it not the case that the evident anti-Platonism of his much-quoted definition of ‘‘true symbolism’’ is (further) evidence of a highly differentiated theory of symbolism which, while it embraces the symbol-as-(self-referential)-sign, does not exclude symbol as sturdy, concrete percept? ‘‘This is true symbolism, where the particular represents the general, not as dream or shadow, but as a living revelation in time of the unfathomable.’’≥∑ After all, Goethe claims that ‘‘even when expressed in all languages,’’ such a symbol ‘‘remains inexpressible’’ (MuR, 1113). The following maxim is cited by Naumann to make the point that for Goethe as for Cassirer ‘‘the ‘intrusion of reflection’ into the hermetic conception of the primary phenomenon is ineluctable’’ (100: für Cassirer ist der ‘‘Einbruch der Reflexion’’ in die hermetische Konzeption des Urphänomens unvermeidlich): ‘‘When basic primary phenomena appear unveiled to our perception, we feel a kind of timidity, even fear. Sensuous people take refuge in wonder; but reason comes along soon enough, that busy pander hurrying to mediate in its own way between the noblest and the most common spheres.’’≥∏ But far from unconditionally welcoming this intellectualization of sense perception, Goethe denigrates reason as a pander (Kuppler), dragging down the noble senses to the common level. Inevitable though it may be, such conceptual play with the implications of symbolic apprehension is, as the aphorism Goethe places immediately after the one quoted above makes unambiguously clear, inferior to the ‘‘true’’ symbolic mediation of art: ‘‘Art is the true mediator. To speak about art is to attempt to mediate the mediator, but all the same this brings us much benefit.’’≥π While acknowledging the advantages of intellection, Goethe leaves no one in any doubt that the concrete aesthetic response is the superior, ‘‘true,’’ response—aesthetic play (evidently distinct from the ‘‘free play’’ of semiotic undecidability), as the appropriate response, is a source of joy (in contrast to the depressive effect of reason-as-pander): ‘‘Immediate perception of basic primary phenomena makes us react with something akin to fear: we feel our inadequacy. It is only when they are brought to life by the unending play of the empirical that they fill us with joy.’’≥∫ One kind of symbolism—the aetiolated conceptual kind—does indeed in-

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volve the way of indirection (‘‘das Symbolische bedeutet Unwegigkeit’’; Naumann, 152); and the labyrinthine wanderings within the symbolic order are undoubtedly central to Goethe’s Wanderjahre, as Elisabeth von Thadden has also argued convincingly: ‘‘Goethe’s last novel presents a narrative, fictional example par excellence of the unfolding of differential cultural plurality. The generation, unfolding and progression of the symbolic process in the Wanderjahre grew from a particular epistemological problem that is described with impressive suggestiveness from the perspective of insight into the impossibility of totality.’’≥Ω Ever since Volker Neuhaus’s pioneering analysis of the novel’s narrator figure(s), critics have seen both in the Lehrjahre and the Wanderjahre a structural principle of ‘‘internal mirroring’’ at work—a variant of Goethe’s ‘‘wiederholte Spiegelung’’—the perception of which has brought a sense of meaning into what to many an honest commentator hitherto seemed to be a chaotic jumble.∂≠ It is also important to note, however, that in the midst of this dynamic interplay there are many moments of peace and wholeness of experience insistently brought to the attention of the reader of the novel. The structuring of ordinary, daily life around one central idea is, for instance, the strikingly recurrent feature of those various communities with which Wilhelm comes into contact in the course of his wanderings. When Lenardo tells Wilhelm about the Pedagogic Province for the first time, it is characterized as a (somewhat bewildering) collection of ideas, proposals and precepts given concrete expression (HA 8, 141); but, on his arrival in the Province, the collections of paintings he is shown depict actions and events that are subsumed under one governing idea, ‘‘symphronistically,’’ as his guide has it; that is, they share the same meaning (HA 8, 159). The habit of collecting significant and venerable truths is practiced in various ways, whether it be in the form of meaningful physical objects or in cataloguing ideas. The appropriate way to achieve a unitary understanding of such assemblages of significance is indicated over and over again in the novel by repeated references to the effect of symbolic, ritual action. For example, Nachodine reports the effect of a church service held by her father: ‘‘ ‘They were familiar sayings, rhymes, expressions and turns of phrase,’ she said, ‘which I had heard a hundred times over and which had irritated me as hollow sounds; but this time they flowed in a style that was so movingly fused together, so quietly flowing and as free from dross as molten metal which we see pouring in its channel.’ ’’∂∞ In a similar moment of living revelation (‘‘lebendig-augenblickliche Offenbarung’’) in the first part of the novel—the encounter between Wilhelm Meister and the enigmatic Harpist—the narrator likewise has recourse to symbolic ritual in an attempt to articulate the charm of the event. Evoking the gathering

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together of nonchurchgoing believers, the narrator emphasizes the sense of unique wholeness that emerges out of the participants’ individual contributions to the impromptu worship: ‘‘each passage becomes new and individual by means of the new association, as if it had been invented at that very moment; and as a result of this there arises out of a familiar circle of ideas, out of familiar songs and sayings, for this particular society, for this moment, a specific whole through the enjoyment of which this society is enlivened, fortified and refreshed.’’∂≤ This ‘‘specific whole’’ that arises is clearly a new pattern perceived in the assemblage of familiar cultural materials: juxtapositon in varying contexts and modes encourages comparison and contrast until a particular configuration, pregnant with meaning, emerges, distilled from contingent dross, ‘‘von Schlacken rein.’’ The Wanderjahre certainly evince ‘‘the culturally mediated process of symbolization’’ (der kulturell vermittelte Prozeß der Symbolisierung, Naumann, 128); but it also shows how this process yields on not infrequent occasion to a different kind of symbolization, one which has for the participants particularity and momentary presence. The double structure theorized by Goethe in his analyses of the symbol as both abstract and concrete, absent and present, is apparently at work, too, in this great symbolic novel. Undue emphasis on the philosophical implications of Goethe’s theory of symbolism runs the risk of obscuring the stubborn fact that he really did hold that the Urphänomen—‘‘als aesthetisches Phänomen,’’ in Nietzsche’s famous phrase—is a unitary symbol without ontological difference. The symbolic doubling in the Wanderjahre, as in Goethe’s writings as a whole, is yet more than a simultaneity of ‘‘figural imaging,’’ on the one hand, and the free play of signifiers (Naumann, 128), on the other. Both of these discursive aspects are offset for Goethe by the symbol as a unique figuraton of reality. In that sense, his position is close to that of the radical realist: ‘‘All significant statements about nature and the cosmos rest upon the assumption that concepts represent more than merely logical structure—are not merely a symbolism of relations but a symbolism as things in relations.’’∂≥ Here as elsewhere in Goethe’s thought, polarity operates to enable him to accept (and to investigate) the endless interplay inherent in the (subjective) ‘‘symbolism of relations,’’ while cherishing the crucial formative influence of what to his mind was its necessary co-implicate: the (objective) ‘‘symbolism of things in relations.’’ In flat contradiction of one of the most pervasive cultural commonplaces of our age—namely, the proposition that discursive language is ‘‘the primary and always central context of . . . meaning’’∂∂ —Goethe seeks to get beyond language as a symbolic form in order to encounter living reality. As he told Hegel (in a letter of 7 October 1820), he was constantly aware of the severe limita-

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tions of discourse for expressing natural process; and he frequently draws attention to his own inability to communicate in words what he has enjoyed in interaction with things (e.g., HA 13, 103). Hence his recommendation of irony in the unavoidable employment of theory in perception (Foreword to the Theory of Colour; HA 13, 317). ‘‘If we are to be able to give expression to the particularity of our experience of particulars, the symbols used will themselves have to be particular.’’ As he notes in an autobiographical sketch of 1815, ‘‘we love only what is individual’’ (‘‘Wir lieben nur das Individuelle’’; HA 10, 536). If such specific, felt attachment to real phenomena is to be given symbolic articulation, the symbols we choose (or make) will also need to be objects of emotional attachment in order to contain our ‘‘felt’’ life. The complex—part mental, part physical—of our inner life projected (‘‘thrown,’’ as in the etymological root of symballein) onto the outward object requires that same ‘‘bodily tenderness which is a prerequisite of all artistic symbolization.’’∂∑ For Goethe, as for Whitehead, ‘‘the animal body is the great central ground underlying all symbolic reference.’’∂∏ Since every occasion of experience is dipolar, integrating mental experience with physical experience, even at its most primitive, is itself inherently symbolic: for each pole, the mental and the physical, signifies the other. The question of which we dub ‘‘symbol’’ and which ‘‘meaning’’ is a matter of perspectival emphasis at every level of symbolization: ‘‘When two species are correlated by a ‘ground’ of relatedness, it depends upon the experiential process constituting the percipient subject as to which species is the group of symbols, and which is the group of meanings. Also it equally depends upon the percipient as to whether there is any symbolic reference at all.’’∂π All symbolism is, then, a synthesis; and all synthesis a symbol—a point that Goethe on occasion dramatically articulated by means of a seemingly paradoxical identification of the subjective mental process of symbolization with the objective phenomenal product thereof: ‘‘What is a higher synthesis other than a living being?’’ (HA 13, 51). A beautiful symbol, he told Riemer in conversation (3 December 1808), is a synthesis of ‘‘given’’ physical material and mentality, which yields a bodily form, pregnant with life: ‘‘Light, in the way it creates colour in collaboration with darkness, is a beautiful symbol of the soul, which gives formative life to the body in collaboration with matter.’’∂∫ The symbolic relation of Self and World is, for Goethe, a simultaneity (by virtue of the logical mutuality of symbolic reference); but in practice, because of the perceptual shift at any given moment between symbol and object symbolized, it is never symmetrical, and its development through ever more complex levels of consciousness is, too, necessarily a sequence of asymmetric emphases.∂Ω Impressions of the external world ‘‘weave themselves into our feel-

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ing,’’ as Goethe put it in his famous July letter of 1772 to Herder, with the result that the inner life of ‘‘living feeling’’ (das lebendige Gemüt; MuR, 217) symbolizes, as a mirror image, the outer world to which it is polaristically related, which in turn reproduces ‘‘the inner world, which grasps, links, re-creates, kneads and reproduces in its own form and manner.’’∑≠ The primal scene of such symbolic interaction with reality is the encounter with the Urphänomen, a basic instance of reciprocal, two-way symbolism in which both the external mirroring-image of the self-regulating object reflects the inner life of the subject and the inner life of the subject reflects the external mirror image. By contrast with Jacques Lacan’s account of the child’s encounter with its own image in the stade du miroir, Goethe holds (to paraphrase one of his famous sayings) that the child sees itself in the mirror and the mirror reflection in itself: the reality of the Self is necessarily present by dint of the bipolar structure of all symbolism.∑∞ For the mirror reflection, too, needs must be symbolized (that is, related to the Self). The symbolic subject (the ‘‘Self’’ or ‘‘Soul’’ of tradition) is not to be confused with the semiotic subject (the Ego) of the symbolic order, and certainly not with the social, dramaturgical persona. If in discursive language the relation between signified and signifier is arbitrary, the relation between subject and symbol is not, because it consists in the ‘‘repeated reflection’’ of the ‘‘true illusion’’ (wahrer Schein) of aesthetic perception, grounded in itself and making no reference to any ultimate signifier. Although such symbolization can be of inconceivable—and unimaginable— complexity, its principle can be grasped and its effect enjoyed. And such aesthetic jouissance is, as Herder taught Goethe, not an accompaniment to the channeling of feeling through received, conventional forms. It is rather the joy attendant on self-expression by means of a unique, physically apprehensible Gestalt.∑≤ For Goethe, as for Whitehead, ‘‘an actual fact is a fact of aesthetic experience.’’ And ‘‘all aesthetic experience is feeling arising out of the relation of contrast under identity.’’∑≥ Only the literal, never the merely ‘‘metaphorical,’’ is truly symbolic, for the Many must be given expression in a concrete, graspable form, which is itself not a mental abstraction like, for example, the concept that Socrates held embraces the One and the Many, or like the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers that performs the same service.∑∂ The Urphänomen embodies in One precisely such palpable relations aesthetically perceived within what would otherwise merely be objects of everyday, practical interest; for it is a Gestalt, a transient concrescence, experienced perhaps for only a brief moment but for that moment an epitome of any and all such similar experiences. Symbols in this sense are thus the things of greatest value in life, for they hold up to us the significances of life which, but for the constant renewal of

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symbols in aesthetic practice, would constantly escape our notice. On the one hand, symbols are always in danger of losing their originary power by being translated into the entropic, semiotic order, becoming in the end a dead letter. But, on the other, they can always be revived by being reintegrated into an aesthetic context. For Goethe, symbolization is an ongoing transfiguration of the trivial. Just as ordinary practical pursuits become symbolic in rite and ritual, so the common round of everyday life is transformed by the handsome behavior of the pleasing forms of civilized social intercourse (‘‘schöner Umgang’’). Above all, symbolization counters the deplorable cultural tendency fostered by one-sided intellectual development to see real life and the real world as unbearably inadequate: ‘‘from the heights of reason the whole of life looks like a serious illness,’’ Goethe told C. G. Voigt in conversation (19 December 1798) ‘‘and the world looks like a madhouse’’ (von der Vernunfthöhe sieht das ganze Leben wie eine böse Krankheit aus und die Welt einem Tollhaus gleich). Although Goethe often uses such terms as Gleichnis (likeness), Sinnbild (symbol), Symbol, and Bild (picture) interchangeably, in some contexts the last word takes on connotations of both Gebilde (objective, three-dimensional construction/formation) and the verb bilden (to form, mould concretely). This reflects the fact that, for him as for Schiller, ‘‘Gestalt always connotes formal relations as they are perceived in some actual [literal] phenomena,’’ whereas ‘‘Form, by contrast, . . . connotes formal relations after they have been abstracted from particular phenomena, or as they are conceived in the mind prior to their embodiment in some medium.’’∑∑ The kind of aesthetic symbolism Goethe has in mind is really very different from the kind of ‘‘form’’ which, since Aristotle, has interested philosophers and which has access to actuality only via the high abstractions of the Categories.∑∏ The kind of art—and, by extension, symbolism—that is merely formalistic Goethe had protested against as early as 1772 in his review of J. G. Sulzer’s philosophy of art (HA 12, 15–21), opposing such formalism with (true) art expressive of feeling (‘‘characteristic art’’), rather than merely demonstrative of symmetry and proportion. The true artist’s finesse consists in the exploitation of the detail of his chosen medium for the sake of self-expression. Of course, general forms, such as the ‘‘sonnet,’’ the Novelle, and conventional metrical schemes, will be employed by any writer; but only as a gross structure, as it were, for preliminary orientation for reader and writer alike. The artist’s—and the connoisseur’s— focus is the ‘‘fine structure’’—the bodiliness of his medium made eloquent by expressive manipulation. The same applies to all aesthetic symbolism: like the momentary revelations vouchsafed by perception of the Urphänomen,∑π symbolic life expression is a matter of crafting, in a specific time-space context, a

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real configuration of concrete elements into pregnantly significant shape. For that reason abstract notions such as ‘‘symbolic form’’ and ‘‘sign-as-form’’ can gain very little purchase on Goethe’s aesthetic symbolization.∑∫ A true symbol is an ‘‘offenbares Geheimnis’’ (open secret) because for all its publicity, it is only virtually meaningful. Unless a particular structure, in nature as in art, arouses the positive evaluation of love, no symbol proper will be recognized and no meaning generated. This much is evident in the opening lines of the tenth poem in Goethe’s late cycle, ‘‘Chinesisch-Deutsche Tagesund Jahreszeiten’’ of 1830: Als Allerschönste bist du anerkannt, Bist Königin des Blumenreichs genannt . . . Du bist es also, bist kein bloßer Schein, In dir trifft Schaun und Glauben überein.∑Ω

The rose addressed here is known for her beauty, as well as being the familiar, conventional representative of earthly love and perfection. This rose is, however, not just ‘‘a mere illusion’’ (a phrase redolent per contrarem of the key concept of Weimar Classicism, ‘‘wahrer Schein,’’ the ‘‘true illusion’’ of aesthetic experience): in her case, seeing her beauty fills the percipient with conviction. In other words, what we have here is the, for Goethe characteristic, double structure of symbolism: on the one hand, symbol-as-representation; on the other, symbol as expression of the inner life (here Glauben, ‘‘conviction’’). This same doubling is also evident in Goethe’s letter to Schubart (3 April 1818; quoted by Naumann, 143): ‘‘Everything that happens is symbolic, and at one and the same time as it presents itself as itself, it points to the rest.’’∏≠ The complete self-determination of a true symbol, Goethe is saying (in German very emphatically, by use of the conjunction indem), may serve—at one and the same time—as a type-concept, representing the rest of its class of objects. Similarly, in the following extract from his essay ‘‘On the Objects of the Plastic Arts’’ of 1797, Goethe is again making the point that expressive symbolism and representational symbolism can function simultaneously: ‘‘The objects presented appear merely to stand for themselves and are nonetheless deeply meaningful and that on account of their import, which always entails a degree of universality. If the symbolic has any meaning outside their presentation it always comes about in an indirect way.’’∏∞ This is not the familiar juxtaposition of the concrete signifier and the abstract signified. What Goethe has in mind, rather, is the way in which the import of a work of art, though fully expressible only in that work of art, nonetheless stimulates the intellect to attempt an (inevitably) inadequate analysis and exposition of it (see MuR, 413, quoted above). If for Lacan ‘‘there is

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no such thing as a prediscursive reality,’’∏≤ for Goethe there most certainly is a codiscursive reality: one sustained by true symbolism and so entirely compatible with the discursive symbolic forms which the intellect derives from subjecting true symbolism to logical analysis. Aware though he is that the discrepancy between symbol proper, on the one hand, and semiosis, on the other, is a source of irony, even comedy, Goethe clearly sees the seed of discursive meaning in Reason’s (inevitably reductionist) ‘‘translation’’ of symbols into signs. What he protests against is not the process itself, but rather the mistaking of the derivative phenomenon of the sign for the real, originary symbol. The intellectual alchemy by means of which a symbol becomes a proposition is embodied (as Cassirer made clear) in Goethe’s scientific method. The sensuous symbol is first fixed as an image in the mind (the ‘‘geistige Schönheit’’—‘‘moral beauty’’—of the eighteenth century), then it is verbalized as a metaphor, which in turn yields to practical, experimental, thought a model, finally conceptualized, in combination with other concepts, as a theory, a process that is given (precarious) stability in the memory. Because originary symbolism expresses the Many-in-the-One, discourse derived from it tends to be metonymic, one concept displacing another in an unending chain of signification that makes up a semiotic logistic: symbolic identity of the One and the Many becomes, once construed logically, the part-whole relation of a type to the class of entities which it ‘‘represents.’’∏≥ In the historico-mythical ‘‘Klassische Walpurgisnacht’’ in act 2 of the second part of Faust we are treated to a vivid and amusing evocation of this double structure which Goethe held to be characteristic of symbolism. For we are presented there with a representative sample of the cults, myths, and theories of growth and development that have constituted the long Western preoccupation with ‘‘Eros, der alles begonnen’’ (Eros, with which everything began, l. 8479).∏∂ For the ‘‘Classical Walpurgisnight’’ represents the universal groping of the mind after embodiment (ll. 7114–15) that Cassirer called ‘‘symbolic form,’’ in which the decisive ‘‘synthesis of Mind and World’’ (MuR, 562) is undertaken. Nowhere is this clearer—and from two diametrically opposed positions—than in the intellectual debate between the pre-Socratic philosophers, Thales and Anaxagoras, on the one hand, in the scene ‘‘Am obern Peneios, wie zuvor’’ (On the Upper Peneios, as before) and, on the other, in the little, test-tube-bound mannikin Homunculus’s search throughout the act for physical incarnation. The aspect of natural formation expounded by Anaxagoras is the violent, revolutionary eruption from below (ll. 7570, 7865–68). Thales’ theory, by contrast, is emphatically evolutionary (ll. 7861–64).∏∑ And all this intellection about becoming is comically juxtaposed to Homunculus’s increasingly desperate search for a body. As Thales puts it:

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Homunculus ‘‘really would like to be embodied’’—quite literally (l. 8252). This contrast between two fundamentally different modes of conceiving becoming, one discursive, the other sensuously actual, lies at the very root of Goethe’s ironical, symbolic Weltanschauung. True symbolism provides a sense of basic solid stability (what Goethe called Behagen): an appreciation of aesthetic synthesis brings with it ‘‘the most blissful assurance of the eternal harmony of being’’ (‘‘von der ewigen Harmonie des Daseins die seligste Versicherung’’; MuR, 562). And from this perspective of feeling-at-home in this world, human symbolism appears Janus-faced. It articulates the most earthly feelings (when the symbols are aesthetic objects), and it is also open to an intellectual interpretation, which, once embarked on, turns out to be an unending, labyrinthine semiotic adventure. Indeed, these two tendencies constantly interact to produce ever higher levels of aesthetic symbolization and ever-renewed sources of intellectual inspiration.∏∏ But there is, too, a further symbolic dimension. Aesthetic expressibility, subject like everything else to polarity, evokes its opposite: ineffability. Any aesthetic symbol, marking an ultimate limit of articulation, necessarily evokes what may lie beyond, the transcendental. Aesthetic consciousness cannot, in the nature of things, vouchsafe insight into what lies beyond the little patch of order presented to it. An aesthetic symbol embodies an experience of presence; the absence which hovers about it is a matter for religious symbolism. The following statement has the authentic ring of Goethe’s reserve on this threshold between immanence and transcendence, when he (or Carl Philipp Moritz) couches the possibility of grasping the whole of which we are but a part in the heavily marked conditional: ‘‘The connectedness of the whole of nature would be for us the highest level of beauty, if we could for a moment grasp it in its entirety.’’∏π In Goethe’s view neither intellect nor aesthetic consciousness can penetrate further. It is a matter of faith, rather, to decide whether structures symbolic for this life can be drawn out to frame analogies between the Beautiful and the Sacral. Like Thomas Traherne in his poem ‘‘Amendment,’’ Goethe’s instinct is to stop short of mystical transcendence, before A Deity That will for evermore exceed the end Of all that creature’s wit can comprehend.

Such delicate balance, between full acceptance of the rich significance of this world and a reticent abstinence in respect of what may lie beyond, is what informs the famous closing lines of Faust:∏∫

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All that is transitory Is but a symbol [Alles Vergängliche Ist nur ein Gleichnis] (ll. 12104–5)

The real world of process symbolizes the inner life of human beings; whether it also symbolizes divinity is left entirely open. Far from agreeing that Cassirer abandoned his theory of ‘‘symbolic pregnance’’ in the fourth volume of his Philosophie der symbolischen Formen in favor of a theory of cultural signs as conventional and arbitrary (Naumann, 101), John M. Krois has argued that for Cassirer, as he began to leave behind ‘‘the ambivalence of his earlier writing,’’ the symbolic pregnance of expressive symbolism—the most original aspect of Cassirer’s theory—remained the foundational idea of his whole theory.∏Ω In attempting to answer the question of how something sensuous becomes a carrier of meaning, Cassirer developed a theory of symbolism which is remarkably close, at all major points, to Goethe’s (and, in some ways, to Whitehead’s) conception set out above. The body-soul relation is the prototype for Cassirer (as for Goethe—and Herder) of symbolization: the body (as for Goethe and Whitehead) is ‘‘the seat of meaning.’’π≠ Taking his cue from Gestalt-psychology (itself indebted to Goethe), Cassirer develops a general theory of the image in its most basic sense, the perceptual Gestalt, in barely translatable terms that are redolent of Goethe’s formulations of the ‘‘living form’’ of the aesthetic symbol: ‘‘die spezifische Besonderung der Prägnanz begründet und ermöglicht erst die spezifische Verschiedenheit der ‘Gestalten’; alle Vergegenwärtigung ist immer Vergegenwärtigung [literally ‘‘making present’’] in einem bestimmten Sinne.’’π∞ And like Goethe, Cassirer saw language and other ‘‘symbolic forms’’ as derivative from such expressive symbols proper. Indeed, the double structure of Goethe’s theory is also to be found in Cassirerπ≤; and Goethe’s implication that symbolism is ‘‘transmuted’’ through a hierarchy of ever-greater refinement is matched, and surpassed, by Cassirer’s fully fledged development of his philosophy of symbolic forms: ‘‘In perception, the sensory attains different degrees and varieties of symbolic pregnance; it appears as a sign so that the sensory ‘presents’ itself [‘sich darstellt’] as something more than it is.’’π≥ Cassirer is also close to Goethe in his awareness of the limits of discursive language; in his belief in a more fundamental, ‘‘natural’’ symbolism; in his interest in the expressive symbol’s sensory body containing ‘‘a meaning which it presents’’; and in his taking bodily feelings to be ‘‘symbolically pregnant’’—in Goethe’s sense of ‘‘full of import’’ (Gehalt).π∂ The following résumé of Cassirer’s position could be equally well applied to Goethe’s: ‘‘perception is originally expressive. . . . Hence the feeling of the body, our basic self-awareness, is an understanding of meaning. This is the prototype of all symbolic relations.’’π∑

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And Goethe’s remark to Riemer, in connection with Schiller’s Wallenstein, which aphoristically sums up the double structure of his theory of symbolism, namely, that a symbol can be ‘‘at the same time a representative figure’’ (‘‘zugleich eine repräsentative [Figur]’’), may be accurately glossed by the following summary of Cassirer’s distinction between the expressive and the representational (if we take ‘‘image’’ in the concrete sense Goethe gives the term): ‘‘As soon as an image is regarded as depicting something else, that is, as having a referential relationship to something else, its function is representational.’’π∏ Whether the (deconstructive) logic of the theory of symbolic forms is stressed, or the sensory presence of ‘‘symbolic pregnance,’’ in either case Cassirer’s achievement in making Goethe his own is unmistakable. The striking similarities between Cassirer’s and Goethe’s thinking seem less remarkable, perhaps, when one recalls what a sensitive—and critical—reader of Goethe Cassirer was.ππ Cassirer’s openness to Goethe’s interest in the aesthetic aspects of nature enabled him to appreciate Goethe’s science in a way that was not available to predominantly positivistic-minded nineteenthcentury commentators, in particular in respect of both Goethe’s Anschauung (which Cassirer rightly understood as a process) and his conception of the Urphänomen (as a self-regulating activity).π∫ But perhaps most crucially, Cassirer is rare among German commentators of his era in his empathetic understanding for what Goethe called ‘‘tender empiricism’’ (zarte Empirie; MuR, 565), a loving regard for the smallest detail of life—a quality Cassirer brings out with great delicacy in a lecture he gave in 1941 in Sweden, entitled ‘‘Goethes geistige Leistung’’ (Goethe’s Intellectual Achievement): ‘‘The smallest object, the most fugitive of moods can be treated and given form aesthetically, so long as the artist succeeds, not only in expressing the object or the mood itself but in making manifest in and through the object or mood the wholeness of his personality, the depth of his individuality. Only what flows in this way from the inner life of the artist has truth—and with it genuine beauty.’’πΩ Such empathy on Cassirer’s part clearly enabled him to grasp that for Goethe, nature, like art, is much subtler than intellect, an insight that seems to have inspired him to ground his own powerful, cultural intellection in ‘‘natural,’’ earthy, symbolic action. In acknowledging her own debt to Cassirer, Elizabeth M. Wilkinson noted that he was an heir of a tradition in aesthetics ‘‘which had survived from the eighteenth century outside the philosophical systems.’’ The articulatedness of Cassirer’s philosophical argumentation in thinking through so many of these inherited ideas with rigor and critical acumen is his original contribution to the tradition in which he stood: ‘‘If this is circularity then it is the circularity Goethe had in mind when he said that ‘everything worth thinking has already been thought’—but continued: ‘what

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we have to do is to think it through again.’ ’’∫≠ Cassirer, in thinking through Goethe’s ideas on symbolism, has alerted those who have followed him to highly significant aspects of Goethean thought that might otherwise have been overlooked or neglected by (or merely conflated with) currently orthodox semiotic conceptions.

Notes 1. I. A. Richards, How To Read A Page: A Course in Effective Reading with an Introduction to a Hundred Great Words (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967 [1943]), 24. 2. See Harold Osborne, ‘‘The Contextual Meaning of ‘Meaning,’ ’’ Dialectics and Humanism 2 (1981): 77–84 (78). The terms ‘‘sign’’ and ‘‘symbol’’ in most contexts are— and have traditionally been—synonyms in the strict sense used in modern linguistics: ‘‘Two expressions or sentences are marked as synonyms (on a sense) just in case they are assigned the same semantic representation.’’ Jerrold J. Katz, ‘‘Semantics and Conceptual Change,’’ Philosophical Review 88 (1979): 327–65 (338); see, too, 344. 3. Quoted in Osborne, ‘‘Contextual Meaning,’’ 80. The terminological and conceptual difficulties involved in talking about symbols may be gauged by considering the following statement (Mark Schneider, ‘‘Goethe and the Structuralist Tradition,’’ Studies in Romanticism 18 [1979]: 453–78 [478]): ‘‘Whereas propositional thought attempts to convey one meaning, with maximum clarity by a sequential ordering of symbols, appositional thought attempts to convey a variety of meanings, without precision, by a complex layering of juxtaposed symbols which are not sequentially ordered.’’ ‘‘Symbol’’ on its first appearance here seems to mean ‘‘sign’’ in its indicative sense, while, on its second, it seems to mean ‘‘representation.’’ By ‘‘appositional thought,’’ Schneider seems to have in mind what Marshall McLuhan famously analyzed as symbolism proper: ‘‘symbolism by definition—a collocation, a parataxis of components representing insight by carefully established ratios, but without a point of view or lineal connection or sequential order’’ (The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Topographic Man [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967], 267). For elaborations of a structuralist theory of symbolism, see M. Titzmann, ‘‘Allegorie und Symbol im Denksystem der Goethezeit,’’ in Formen und Funktionen der Allegorie, ed. Walter Haug (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979), 642–65; Tzvetan Todorov, Théories du symbole (Paris: Seuil, 1977). 4. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), 253. 5. Martin Gardner, The Ambidextrous Universe: Mirror Asymmetry and TwiceReversed Worlds (New York: Scribner’s, 1979), 210. 6. William and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 328. Cf. Robert Adamson and W. R. Sorley, A Short History of Logic (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1911), 106–7: ‘‘The logical calculus [of Leibniz] implies . . . the employment of a definite set of symbols, both of data and of modes of combination, subject to symbolic laws arising from the laws under which combination is possible.’’ 7. Kneale, Development of Logic, 360–71.

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8. David Robey, ed., Structuralism: An Introduction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 1, 2, 11–12, 20–29; Umberto Eco, ‘‘Social Life as a Sign System,’’ in Structuralism, ed. Robey, 57–71; Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 3, 11, 16, 30, 43, 53, 202, 264. 9. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albrecht Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966 [1915]), 67–70; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), xix, xxxix, xliii, xlvi, lxv, lxxvii, 44, 45, 49–50, 62, 70, 216; R. H. Stephenson, ‘‘Theorizing to Some Purpose: ‘Deconstruction’ in the Light of Goethe and Schiller’s Aesthetics—the Case of Die Wahlverwandtschaften,’’ Modern Language Review 84 (1989): 381–92 (381–87). 10. Spivak, Grammatology, xvi. 11. See Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (London: Vintage Books), 281: ‘‘Sacramental efficacy works internally; magical efficacy works externally.’’ For evidence of the persistent relevance of such sacred symbolism, see Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Glasgow: Collins, 1980), 38: ‘‘the right hemisphere [of the brain] regards the flag as sacramentally identical with what it represents. So ‘Old Glory’ is the U.S. If somebody steps on it, the response may be rage.’’ 12. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 87–88. Frye’s conception of ‘‘royal metaphor’’ is very close to the (hermeneutic) ‘‘transference’’ theory developed by Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creations of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, SJ (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). Cf. Ernst Cassirer’s distinction between ‘‘symbolic form’’ and the conventional association of metaphor and representational symbolism, ‘‘Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften,’’ Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983 [1956]), 169–200. 13. Peter Hutchinson, ed., Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Maxims and Reflections, trans. Elizabeth Stopp (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 56 (adapted by the author). ‘‘Der Magnet ist ein Urphänomen, das man nur aussprechen darf, um es erklärt zu haben; dadurch wird es denn auch ein Symbol für alles Übrige, wofür wir keine Worte noch Namen zu suchen brauchen.’’ (Maximen und Reflexionen, ed. Max Hecker [Weimar: Schriften der Goethegesellschaft, 21, 1907], no. 434. Henceforth referred to as MuR.) 14. See Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (New York: Mentor Books, 1951 [1942]); Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (London: Scribner’s, 1953); Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967– 70), vols. 1–3. Langer’s own dissatisfaction with her theory of illusion up to and including Feeling and Form is made quite explicit in Mind, 1: 230, where she discusses her (to my mind, vague) distinction between ‘‘primary’’ and ‘‘secondary’’ illusion. The difficulty stems from the fact that for all her acknowledged indebtedness to Schiller’s discussion of illusion (Schein), she fails to articulate the distinction that he insists upon between ‘‘logical,’’ abstract illusion and ‘‘beautiful,’’ sensuous illusion. See Feeling and Form, where she

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speaks of a symbol as ‘‘any device whereby we are enabled to make an abstraction’’ (x); of the ‘‘nonsensuous’’ appearance of the artist’s idea’’ (49); and—in terms redolent of merely rhetorical, as distinct from aesthetic, form—of the ‘‘sensory vehicle’’ of art (150 and 302). The upshot is that Langer is unable to pinpoint, in the way Goethe and Schiller succeeded in doing, the precise difference between art on the one hand and mere fictionality on the other. (For further discussion, see Stephenson, ‘‘Theorizing to Some Purpose,’’ 380–85.) 15. See John M. Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 176–81; ‘‘Urworte: Cassirer als Goethe-Interpret,’’ in Kulturkritik nach Ernst Cassirer, ed. Enno Rudolph and Bernd-Olaf Küppers (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1995), 297–324. 16. John M. Krois, ‘‘Cassirer’s ‘Prototype and Model’ of Symbolism: Its Sources and Significance,’’ Science in Context 12 (1991): 531–47 (531). 17. Barbara Naumann, Philosophie und Poetik des Symbols: Cassirer und Goethe (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1998), 14. 18. Krois, ‘‘Cassirer’s ‘Prototype and Model,’ ’’ 532, 534, 539–40; Cassirer, 5–9. 19. Cassirer, ‘‘Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften,’’ Wesen und Wirkung, 174; quoted in Naumann, Philosophie und Poetik, 15: ‘‘Nicht also was das Symbol in irgendeiner besonderen Sphäre, was es in der Kunst, in Mythos, in der Sprache bedeutet und leistet, soll hier gefragt werden: sondern vielmehr wie weit die Sprache als Ganzes, der Mythos als Ganzes, die Kunst als Ganzes den allgemeinen Charakter symbolischer Gestaltung in sich tragen.’’ 20. Naumann, 18, where Krois’s work on ‘‘die bedeutungstheoretische Dimension der Cassirerschen Kunstphilosophie’’ (the semantic-theory dimension of Cassirer’s theory of art) is cited: ‘‘Cassirer, Neo-Kantianism, and Metaphysics,’’ Il cannochiale Rivista di studi filosofice 172 (1999): 561–68 (562–65); and ‘‘Problematik, Eigenart und Aktualität der Philosophie der symbolischen Formen,’’ in Ernst Cassirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, ed. H. J. Braun, H. Holzhey, and E. W. Orth (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 15–44. 21. Cassirer, ‘‘Der Begriff der symbolischen Form,’’ Wesen und Wirkung, 182; quoted in Naumann, 29: ‘‘Eine künstlerische Form im eigentlichen Sinne entsteht erst dort, wo die Anschauung sich von jeder Gebundenheit im bloßen Eindruck gelöst, wo sie sich zum reinen Ausdruck befreit hat.’’ 22. ‘‘[Cassirer] identifiziert . . . Stil mit der Bewegung des Denkens (‘Wechselbestimmung’) unter der Diskursivität und vor allem sprachliche Performanz versteht’’ (Naumann, 50). For a different analysis of Goethe’s conception of Stil, as set out in his 1789 essay ‘‘Einfache Nachahmung, Manier und Stil’’ (Simple Imitation, Manner and Style), on which Cassirer is drawing (Naumann, 30ff.), as altogether a more concrete one, see R. H. Stephenson, Goethe’s Conception of Knowledge and Science (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 66–67 and 80–81. 23. PsF, 1: 47: ‘‘Durch [die Zeichen] allein erblicken wir und in ihnen besitzen wir das, was wir die ‘‘Wirklichkeit’’ nennen: denn die höchste objektive Wahrheit, die sich dem Geist erschließt, ist zuletzt die Form seines eigenen Tuns.’’ 24. Cassirer, Freiheit und Form: Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1916), 252: ‘‘Dennoch bilden alle diese Äußerungen, näher betrachtet,

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nur den Ausdruck ein und derselben Grundtendenz, die Goethe von Anfang bis zu Ende festgehalten hat. Er verwarf die Philosophie, wenn sie ihm den Ertrag und die ‘Quintessenz’ des Seins in einem einzelnen festen Begriff darbieten wollte—aber er würdigte sie und suchte sie auf, sobald er von ihr eine Klärung und Scheidung der verschiedenen Energien erhoffte, die in seinem geistigen Wesen zusammenwirkten.’’ 25. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Karl Vorländer, Die philosophische Bibliothek, vol. 39a (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1974), B256; quoted by Naumann, 61. 26. Naumann, 94: ‘‘ ‘Symbolische Prägnanz’ als Wechselbestimmung und Bewegung ist für Cassirer einmal durch Unhintergehbarkeit charakterisiert und ist insofern apriorisch. Sie ist jedem Symbolisierungsprozeß und damit in Cassirers Sinn jedem Bedeutungsprozeß inhärent.’’ 27. Cited by Naumann, 124: Jacques Derrida, Die Schrift und die Differenz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 49: ‘‘Zeichen des Zeichens.’’ 28. Naumann (quoting Cassirer, ‘‘Der Begriff der symbolischen Form,’’ Wesen und Wirkung, 176): ‘‘Die [symbolische] Relation wird von Cassirer differenzlogisch entwickelt. Die ‘Selbständigkeit’ des Symbolischen liegt also gerade in jener vermittelnden Funktion, die ‘das Wesen des Geistigen selbst’ ausmacht.’’ 29. Naumann, 101: ‘‘denn dann ergibt sich daraus eine Lesart der symbolischen Prägnanz nicht unähnlich der Metaphysiksbeschreibung und -kritik Derridas.’’ 30. Cf. Barbara Naumann, ‘‘The Genesis of Symbolic Forms: Basis Phenomena in Ernst Cassirer’s Works,’’ Science in Context 12 (1999): 575–84; Krois, ‘‘Cassirer’s ‘Prototype and Model,’ ’’ 542–43; Cassirer, 61–62. 31. See R. H. Stephenson, Goethe’s Conception of Knowledge and Science, 69–71 and 80–81; ‘‘Goethe’s Prose Style,’’ Publications of the English Goethe Society, n.s. 46 (1996): 33–42; ‘‘The Poem as Presentational Symbol,’’ in Poetic Knowledge: Circumference and Centre, ed. Roland Hagenbüchle and Joseph T. Swann (Bonn: Bouvier, 1980), 114–21. 32. Hutchinson, Maxims and Reflections, 76 (adapted by the author); MuR, 575: ‘‘Das Höchste wäre zu begreifen, daß alles Faktische schon Theorie ist. Die Bläue des Himmels offenbart uns das Grundgesetz der Chromatik. Man suche nur nichts hinter den Phänomenen: sie selbst sind die Lehre.’’ 33. For L. A. Willoughby the dictum is a formulation of the characteristic Kantian insistence that one must distinguish between things-in-themselves and the world of appearances. (‘‘On Editing and Commenting: Reflections Prompted by Two Recent Volumes of the Schiller Nationalausgabe,’’ German Life and Letters 26 (1973): 93–111 (108–9). Willoughby points out that ‘‘it seems unlikely in view of Schiller’s prompt, and never shaken, recognition of the ‘rightness’ of Kant’s epistemology, that he should have been unaware of the historian’s ‘construing’ activity vis-à-vis the recorded events of the past,’’ reinforcing this view by pointing to Kant’s influence on Goethe as reflected in the opening sentence of Hecker, 575. By contrast, for Günther Müller, the maxim is an emphatic statement, not of Kant’s influence upon Goethe, as Willoughby has it, but—on the contrary—of the ‘‘deep-seated divergence’’ between their respective epistemological positions (Günther Müller, ed., Goethe Maximen und Reflexionen: Neu geordnet, eingeleitet und erläutert [Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1943], lxviii).

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34. Cf. MuR, 91 and 616; cf. also Goethe’s expression of the baffling complexity of ‘‘the Problem of Evil’’—of Mephistopheles’ relation to the light—in the famous lines of Faust. ‘‘Ich bin ein Teil des Teils, der anfangs alles war, / Ein Teil der Finsternis, die sich das Licht gebar’’ (ll. 1349–50). In this self-definition, the feminine relative pronoun may be taken as either the subject of the verb gebären or as its object. In the first case, ‘‘darkness gives birth to light’’ (Mephisto’s conscious preference); in the second, ‘‘light gives birth to darkness’’ (something Mephisto strenuously seeks to deny). Similarly, in the poem ‘‘Vermächtnis,’’ the line ‘‘ . . . denn Gesetze / Bewahren die lebendigen Schätze’’ (‘‘living treasures . . . by laws abide and are maintained’’), may be read with either ‘‘laws’’ or ‘‘treasures’’ as either subject or object; as so often, Goethe manages to say two things at once: that universal laws preserve living particulars, and that living particulars preserve universal laws. 35. Hutchinson, Maxims and Reflections, 37 (adapted by the author); MuR, 314: ‘‘Das ist die wahre Symbolik, wo das Besondere das Allgemeine repräsentiert, nicht als Traum und Schatten, sondern als lebendig-augenblickliche Offenbarung des Unerforschlichen.’’ 36. Hutchinson, 51 (adapted by the author); MuR, 412: ‘‘Vor den Urphänomenen, wenn sie unseren Sinnen enthüllt erscheinen, fühlen wir eine Art von Scheu, bis zur Angst. Die sinnlichen Menschen retten sich in’s Erstaunen; geschwind aber kommt der tätige Kuppler Verstand und will auf seine Weise das Edelste mit dem Gemeinsten vermitteln.’’ 37. Hutchinson, 51 (adapted by the author); MuR, 413: ‘‘Die wahre Vermittlerin ist die Kunst. Über Kunst sprechen heißt die Vermittlerin vermitteln wollen, und doch ist uns daher viel Köstliches erfolgt.’’ 38. Hutchinson, 56 (adapted by the author); MuR, 433: ‘‘Das unmittelbare Gewahrwerden der Urphänomene versetzt uns in eine Art von Angst: wir fühlen unsere Unzulänglichkeit; nur durch das ewige Spiel der Empirie belebt, erfreuen sie uns.’’ 39. Quoted by Naumann, 16; Elisabeth von Thadden, Erzählen als Naturverhältnis— ‘‘Die Wahlverwandtschaften’’: Zum Problem der Darstellbarkeit von Natur und Gesellschaft seit Goethes Plan eines ‘‘Roman über das Weltall’’ (Munich: Fink, 1993), 49. 40. Volker Neuhaus, ‘‘Die Archivfiktion in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre,’’ Euphorion 62 (1968): 13–27; G. H. Lewes, Life of Goethe (London: Methuen, 1855), 525; William G. Lillyman, ed., Goethe’s Narrative Fiction (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1983). 41. HA 8, 429: ‘‘Es waren, sagte sie, bekannte Sprüche, Reime, Aussprüche und Wendungen, die ich hundertmal gehört und als an hohlen Klängen mich geärgert hatte: diesmal flossen sie aber so herzlich zusammengeschmolzen, ruhig glühend, von Schlacken rein, wie wir das erweichte Metall in der Rinne dahinfließen sehen.’’ 42. HA 7, 138: ‘‘jede Stelle [wird] durch die neue Verbindung neu und individuell, als wenn sie in dem Augenblicke erfunden worden wäre; wodurch denn aus einem bekannten Kreise von Ideen, aus bekannten Liedern und Sprüchen, für diese besondere Gesellschaft, für diesen Augenblick ein eignes Ganzes entsteht, durch dessen Genuß sie belebt, gestärkt und erquickt wird.’’ 43. W. M. Urban, Language and Reality: The Philosophy of Language and the Principles of Symbolism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1939), 537. 44. Osborne, ‘‘Contextual Meaning,’’ 78. 45. L. A. Willoughby, ‘‘Wine That Maketh Glad’’ . . . : The Interplay of Reality and Symbol in Goethe’s Life and Work, the first Bithell Memorial Lecture (London: Institute

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of Germanic Studies, 1975), 2; reprinted in Publications of the English Goethe Society, n.s. 47 (1976–77): 68–133 (69). 46. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay on Cosmology, corrected edition by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 170. 47. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 181–82. Cf. Susanne Langer’s reformulation of Whitehead’s point: ‘‘Usually, the decisive reason [for deciding which is the symbol of the other] is that one [‘‘the symbol’’] is easier to perceive and handle than the other [‘‘the object symbolized’’].’’ (Philosophical Sketches [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962], 27). 48. Gedenkausgabe 22, 525: ‘‘das Licht, wie es mit der Finsternis die Farbe wirkt, ist ein schönes Symbol der Seele, welche mit der Materie den Körper bildend belebt.’’ 49. Cf. Langer, Mind, 1: 25: ‘‘The exchange of matter [between organism and the world] is . . . not really a neutral transaction, but one in which the inanimate world has the gross control, while the fine control rests with the organism.’’ 50. ‘‘Sieh, Lieber, was doch alles Schreibens Anfang und Ende ist—die Reproduktion der Welt um mich, durch die innere Welt, die alles packt, verbindet, neuschafft, und in eigner Form, Manier, wieder herstellt’’ (letter to Jacobi, 21 August 1774). Cf. Langer, Mind, 1: 282–83: ‘‘if [an external event] invades the [organic] system, that importation falls at once under the sway of the vital processes, and becomes an element in a new phase of the organism.’’ 51. HA 13, 38: ‘‘Der Mensch kennt nur sich selbst, insofern er die Welt kennt, die er nur in sich und sich nur in ihr gewahr wird.’’ (Human beings only know themselves in as far as they know the world, which they are aware of only in themselves—and themselves in the world.) 52. See Paul Bishop, ‘‘An Herderian Perspective on Lacanian Psychoanalysis,’’ History of European Ideas 26 (2000): 1–18, where he argues that Herder offers ‘‘a richer account of human development than Lacan’’ (5), principally because of Herder’s theorization of the physically apprehending sense of touch in combination with distanced, abstracted sight (7). What is a two-dimensional figure in Lacan’s mirror becomes, in Herder’s account, a full-bodied, three-dimensional shape (7)—or Gestalt. For Herder’s decisive influence on Goethe’s development as thinker and poet, see Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, ‘‘The Blind Man and the Poet: An Early Stage in Goethe’s Quest for Form,’’ German Studies Presented to W. H. Bruford (London: Harrap, 1962), 29–57. See, too, for a quite different perspective, Derrida’s critique of Lacan on similar grounds, of a drastic reduction of meaning (Of Grammatology, lxii–lxvi, 32, 324); and cf. John M. Krois, ‘‘Cassirer’s ‘Prototype and Model,’ ’’ 540–41, for a discussion of touch in connection with Cassirer’s theory of ‘‘symbolic pregnance.’’ 53. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 280. 54. Adamson and Sorley, 27 and 24–25. 55. See Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982 [1967]), 309. Cf. Cassirer, Freiheit und Form, 278 (quoted by Naumann, 74): ‘‘[A poet] only comes to understand himself in the thing he has created’’ (‘‘begreift sich selbst erst in seinem Gebilde’’). 56. Adamson and Sorley, History of Logic, 35.

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57. See Stephenson, Goethe’s Conception of Knowledge and Science, 2, 13–15, 48, 70–71, 78, and 89. 58. Niklas Luhmann, ‘‘Zeichen als Form,’’ in Probleme der Form, ed. Dirk Baecker (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 45–69. 59. HA 1, 389: ‘‘As the most beautiful of all you are recognized, Called queen of the flower-kingdom . . . So it is you, you are no mere illusion, In you Seeing and Believing coincide.’’ 60. ‘‘Alles, was geschieht, ist Symbol, und indem es vollkommen sich selbst darstellt, deutet es auf das übrige.’’ 61. HA 13, 122–25 (124): ‘‘dargestellte Gegenstände scheinen bloß für sich zu stehen und sind doch wieder im Tiefsten bedeutend, und das wegen des Idealen, das immer eine Allgemeinheit mit sich führt. Wenn das Symbolische außer der Darstellung noch etwas bezeugt, so wird es immer auf indirekte Weise geschehen.’’ Ideal here, not in the sense of ‘‘ideal’’ but of ‘‘pertaining to the Idee (‘idea’),’’ and thus in this context meaning the ‘‘import’’ of works of art. See Wilkinson and Willoughby, Aesthetic Letters, 317. 62. Quoted in Bishop, ‘‘Herderian Perspective,’’ 9: ‘‘Il n’y a aucune réalité prédiscursive.’’ 63. See Stephenson, Goethe’s Conception of Knowledge and Science, 21–33. 64. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, a Tragedy, trans. Walter Arndt, ed. Cyrus Hamlin (New York: Norton, 2001 [1976]), Interpretive Notes, 440: ‘‘a symbolic event in which fire and water are united, which thus signifies literally an elemental, cosmic sexual climax, through which Homunculus achieves the fulfilment of his quest for life through the procreative power of Eros.’’ 65. Cf. Hamlin, ed., Faust, Interpretive Notes, 430–32. 66. See Stephenson, Goethe’s Conception of Knowledge and Science, 83–89. 67. ‘‘Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen’’ (1788), GA, 71–75 (73): ‘‘Der Zusammenhang der ganzen Natur würde für uns das höchste Schöne sein, wenn wir ihn einen Augenblick umfassen könnten.’’ (The essay is widely considered to be the fruit of Goethe’s collaboration with Moritz.) 68. Cf. Hamlin, ed., Faust, Interpretive Notes, 489–90. 69. Krois, ‘‘Cassirer’s ‘Prototype and Model,’ ’’ 543 and 534. Krois notes that ‘‘the notion of ‘Prägnanz’ and ‘the pregnant moment’ has a long history in German literary theory, in Lessing, Herder, and Goethe.’’ See R. H. Stephenson, Goethe’s Conception of Knowledge and Science, 8, 10, and 13, for a discussion of the role of this concept in Goethe’s thinking. 70. Krois, ‘‘Cassirer’s ‘Prototype and Model,’ ’’ 532 and 537. 71. Quoted by Krois, ‘‘Cassirer’s ‘Prototype and Model,’ ’’ 535 from ‘‘an as yet unpublished text,’’ and translated by him as follows: ‘‘the specific particularization of ‘Prägnanz’ is what first founds and makes possible the specific differences among ‘Gestalten’; all representation is always representation in a specific ‘sense.’ ’’ 72. Ibid., 538. 73. Ibid., 539. See R. H. Stephenson, Goethe’s Conception of Knowledge and Science, 88–90, for a discussion of Goethe’s view of symbolic progression. 74. Krois, ‘‘Cassirer’s ‘Prototype and Model,’ ’’ 539; 532; 540; 534. See, too, Krois, Cassirer, 5–9, 53–54, 57–62, 80–81, 86–88.

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75. Krois, Cassirer, 57. 76. Goethes Gespräche ohne die Gespräche mit Eckermann. In Auswahl herausgegeben von Flodoard Freiherr von Biedermann (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1969), 730; Krois, Cassirer, 81. 77. See Krois, Cassirer, 176–81. 78. Freiheit und Form, 208–9 and 242–56. 79. Cassirer, Goethe-Vorlesungen, ed. John M. Krois, Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, vol. 11 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2004), cited from MS, 305–6: ‘‘Der kleinste Gegenstand, die flüchtigste Stimmung kann künstlerisch behandelt und geformt werden —sofern es nur gelingt, nicht nur sie selbst auszusprechen, sondern an ihr und durch sie das Ganze der Persönlichkeit, die Tiefe der Individualität sichtbar zu machen. Nur was in dieser Weise aus dem inneren Leben des Künstlers quillt, hat Wahrheit—und hat damit echte Schönheit.’’ 80. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson, In Praise of Aesthetics, inaugural lecture delivered at University College London, 25 October 1962 (London: H. K. Lewis, 1963), 25–26; MuR, 441: ‘‘Alles Gescheite ist schon gedacht worden, man muß nur versuchen, es noch einmal zu denken.’’ For my own indebtedness to Cassirer’s work, see R. H. Stephenson, Goethe’s Conception of Knowledge and Science—for which Cassirer furnishes the motto.

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Goethe as Model for Cultural Values: Ernst Cassirer’s Essay on Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar cyrus hamlin

‘‘Each of us reads his own Goethe; and each has formed in the course of years a specific image of Goethe, which he is rather unwilling to revise.’’∞ This sentence occurs in the essay that Ernst Cassirer wrote in February 1940, in immediate response to Thomas Mann’s Goethe novel Lotte in Weimar.≤ Cassirer was then living in Sweden, in the sixth year of his voluntary exile from Hitler’s totalitarian regime in Germany. Five months earlier, at the beginning of September 1939, Thomas Mann had returned to Princeton, New Jersey, following a summer trip to Europe. Mann’s return preceded by a few weeks the publication of his novel in Stockholm and followed by only a few days the German invasion of Poland, which signaled the start of the Second World War. In writing his statement concerning the different images of Goethe constructed by separate readers, Cassirer no doubt had in mind the contrast between his own view of Goethe and the radical image of the poet—for Thomas Mann a purposeful mixture of ‘‘poetry and truth’’ (Dichtung und Wahrheit), following the example of the poet’s own autobiography—which the novel Lotte in Weimar creates in the course of its narrative. Yet the fact of this difference does not in any way distress the philosopher of symbolic forms. ‘‘Thomas Mann’s presentation,’’ so Cassirer continues, ‘‘requires us to forget for a moment the image [of ‘‘our’’ Goethe] and to sacrifice it in order to witness the rebirth of another, more artistic Goethe.’’≥ On the basis

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of such tolerance, I allow myself to use Cassirer’s assertion as motto for this essay with regard to Goethe’s own concept of culture, even though I wish to test that concept against the argument of Cassirer’s essay to the extent that Thomas Mann’s Goethe novel served as the occasion for it. A great deal has been published, discussed, and debated about Goethe recently, above all on the 250th anniversary of his birth, celebrated on 28 August 1999. Little has been offered, however, that contributes to an authentic understanding of Goethe’s cultural achievement. On the one hand, much that is negative has been released—as in the article for the birth date published in Der Spiegel under the general heading, ‘‘Who Still Reads Goethe?’’ or as in the somewhat ironic title of an essay by Geoffrey Hartman for the Goethe Colloquium at Yale in autumn 1999, ‘‘Who Needs Goethe?’’ On the other hand, one has the impression—above all from reports about tourism in Weimar during that same year, when the city was celebrated as Kulturstadt Europas—that Goethe still draws in a large public of curious visitors, which generates a significant income for the industries of culture. Weimar, one gathers, has been renovated and largely rebuilt to constitute what might be called a Goethe theme park, though perhaps not quite so extreme as in the more famous example of Disneyland. Goethe’s Gartenhaus on the Ilm has been constructed alongside the original with such loving precision that no detail is missed. It is of course a very different business to celebrate Goethe today than was the case in former times. The monumental achievement of his poetic work and his presence in the general consciousness of our culture can no longer be taken for granted. That is not necessarily a disadvantage for the serious study of Goethe’s writings, especially in other countries and in other languages than his own, where every aspect of his influence must be established as it were from total ignorance. It is often claimed today, especially by prophets of gloom in the United States, that the study of literature is in permanent decline and the legacy of the past is dying out in our culture. If that were truly the case, then the task of literary studies within our institutions of higher learning would largely consist of a holding operation. To celebrate Goethe at the end of the twentieth century would involve an appeal to discover his importance anew, as it were from scratch, above all through an encounter with his poetic work in the seminars and lecture halls of our universities. To a large degree, where students in the English-speaking world are unlikely to have encountered this work on their own, such a discovery may include an excitement and freshness that avoids any prejudice or misconception about the poet’s status and achievement. Sixty years ago, when Thomas Mann published his novel about Goethe and Ernst Cassirer first read it in his Swedish exile, was the situation any more favorable for the study and appreciation of Goethe? The author of the novel

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and also the philosopher of culture, both of them well into their sixties, were known to have enjoyed a long and productive relation to Germany’s greatest writer. Goethe had accompanied both of them, it may be said, through half a century of their development, respectively, as one of Europe’s leading authors and as one of Europe’s leading philosophers. One need only consider their respective publications on the occasion of the Goethe year in 1932, marking the centennial of the poet’s death. Thomas Mann produced one of his most seminal essays, ‘‘Goethe as a Representative of Bourgeois Culture’’;∂ and Ernst Cassirer offered a collection of essays, Goethe and the Historical World, along with the independent essay ‘‘Goethe’s Idea of Human Development and Education.’’∑ Yet how radically different the conditions of culture had become by 1940! Both these distinguished representatives of German culture, however different their respective family backgrounds, were among the earliest to choose, in the first months of 1933, voluntary exile from the tyranny of the Nazi regime. Thomas Mann’s Goethe novel was conceived in exile, composed for the most part in the United States, and published with Bermann Fischer, who had by then also gone into exile, as part of the so-called Stockholm Collected Edition of his works. Ernst Cassirer, then professor of philosophy in Göteborg, no doubt received a copy immediately upon its publication in Sweden and responded within the space of about three months by drafting his important essay on Thomas Mann’s image of Goethe. The original manuscript of Cassirer’s essay is contained in the papers of the philosopher, now part of the Cassirer Archive in the Beinecke Library at Yale University, where the dates of composition are noted by the author as 1 February to 7 February 1940. The essay was only published five years later, shortly after Cassirer’s death, in the Germanic Review (vol. 20, pp. 244–64), the journal of German studies at Columbia University, where Cassirer was a visiting professor at the time of his sudden death on 13 April 1945. A copy of the essay, however, presumably written by hand, was sent by Cassirer directly to Thomas Mann from Göteborg in spring 1940 as a gift of friendship to celebrate the sixty-fifty birthday of the novelist. Mann apparently wrote a detailed letter of gratitude to Cassirer in Sweden—as he asserts in a later letter—which never arrived and was irretrievably lost in the confusions of wartime. The war had broken out before the novel was published and before Cassirer could have read it. The German army was in the process of launching its blitzkrieg against all of Europe. In such a dark time how could anyone devote attention to Goethe? Yet on the contrary, with regard to the concept of culture that had been appropriated and proclaimed by both Mann and Cassirer on the example of Goethe, it may be asked whether any more effective defense of this idea of culture could have been found in such dark times than through an

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intensive and spirited affirmation of everything that Goethe’s life and work signified for both of them. It is thus no mere antiquarian scholarly exercise to reconsider the essay that Cassirer wrote in response to Lotte in Weimar. My purpose here is to assess the general concept of culture appropriated by Cassirer from Goethe as it was reaffirmed for him by Thomas Mann’s novel. This concept was developed by Cassirer during his years of exile into a comprehensive philosophy of culture that is only now becoming known through the edition of his late unpublished writings. My brief remarks in this essay are intended to serve as a preliminary inquiry into the rich and urgently needed theory of culture reflected in Cassirer’s essay. The remarkable achievement of Mann’s Lotte in Weimar, a work not easily appreciated by non-German readers who may be only distantly familiar with Goethe’s life and work, may with Cassirer’s help also be once again called to mind. Cassirer’s essay on Lotte in Weimar, written in close proximity to his initial reading of the novel, was intended in part to present the novel to other readers, to report on its unusual agenda, and to outline its contents. In this regard it may be considered a review essay in the broadest sense of the word. This aspect of the essay, after so many years and so much else that has been written about Thomas Mann, interests me only peripherally here, even though the essay demonstrates brilliantly how precise and perceptive Cassirer was as a reader. At one point he uses the image of movement on the surface of water to describe the manner in which the novel represents Goethe through the views of others, specifically with regard to what is said about the poet in the sequence of encounters between Charlotte and the several characters who approach her in the course of the narrative. Such movement remains of course on the surface and tends to conceal and obscure the deeper and more important movement that occurs almost invisibly in the depths. The same can be said about Cassirer’s essay. The movement that truly concerns him pertains to a general sense of the poetic activity as such, as it applies both to Goethe and to Thomas Mann. This activity, as I read Cassirer, is central to his theory of culture and education, especially to the extent that this theory applies to the creativity of the individual self. Cassirer’s theory, insofar as it is here referred to Thomas Mann’s fictional presentation of Goethe, derives in large measure from his lifelong study of Goethe’s work. His assessment of Thomas Mann’s presentation of Goethe in the novel, in other words, reflects Cassirer’s philosophy of culture to the extent to which that theory derives from Goethe’s poetic practice and may even be said to be dependent upon it. On the basis of Cassirer’s essay on Lotte in Weimar, his philosophy of culture may be interpreted as Goethean. In the first part of his essay Cassirer attempts to outline the process through

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which progressively an image of Goethe develops by indirection in the course of the encounters between Charlotte Kestner—the original model for Lotte in Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther—and those who are close to the poet in Weimar: Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer, Adele Schopenhauer, and Goethe’s son August. From the several subjective viewpoints of these characters, a diversity of reports, each equally authentic, yet all of them fraught with a sense of irony for the novel, is presented to this visitor from the poet’s remote past. For Lotte as well, who has not seen Goethe for forty-four years, the question of his identity becomes increasingly urgent: ‘‘Who in truth may Goethe be?’’ Even the eventual meeting depicted in chapter 8 of the novel, where Charlotte in response to Goethe’s invitation attends a dinner at his house on the Frauenplan, fails to provide—so Cassirer notes—a satisfactory answer to the question. Nor can the great interior monologue of the poet as he awakens in the early morning—a tour de force of Thomas Mann’s narrative technique that fills the famous chapter 7—provide the reader of the novel with more than a fragmented image of Goethe as he himself is presumed to have viewed himself within the context of his life, work, and thought at that specific time when the visit of Lotte to Weimar actually occurred. Cassirer introduces a model borrowed from Goethe’s Farbenlehre (Theory of Color) with which he attempts to explain the indirect and pluralistic manner of representation in Thomas Mann’s Goethe novel. It is, he asserts, similar to the entoptic colors, where from the innermost depths of a crystal a play of different colors is produced through a variety of different reflecting surfaces. The light must pass through this complex of surfaces in order to manifest itself with particularity, energy, and diversity (132f.). Cassirer also quotes a brief verse by Goethe entitled ‘‘Entoptische Farben,’’ where this phenomenon in nature is presented in poetic terms: Spiegel hüben, Spiegel drüben, Doppelstellung, auserlesen; Und dazwischen ruht im Trüben Als Krystall das Erdewesen. Dieses zeigt, wenn jene blicken, Allerschönste Farbenspiele, Dämmerlicht, das beide schicken, Offenbart sich dem Gefühle. Und der Name wird ein Zeichen, Tief ist der Krystall durchdrungen: Aug in Auge sieht dergleichen Wundersame Spiegelungen.

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Cyrus Hamlin [Mirror here, mirror there, Doubly placed and chosen; And between resides in dimness Substance of earth as in a crystal. This reveals, when those behold, Most beautiful the play of colors, Twilight, as dispensed by both, Reveals itself to feeling. And the name becomes a sign, Deep is the crystal permeated: Eye in eye beholds in such like Wonderfully mirrorings.]

Cassirer here addresses a central feature of Mann’s narrative technique in the novel through the analogy to this natural phenomenon as Goethe defines it in his scientific work and as he evokes it in this poem. Yet Cassirer also goes beyond the model of entoptic colors in his claim—also derived from sources in Goethe, though he has his own cultural theory in mind—that this phenomenon from nature has a spiritual and ethical significance within the novel, whereby a deeper symbolic meaning is expressed. ‘‘The inner reflection of objects or events, a kind of spiritual coming into presence, appears before us as if flooded or permeated by a new and stronger light.’’∏ How does this transformation into symbolic form occur? Cassirer again turns to Goethe in order to place at the center of his argument a familiar concept from the poet: ‘‘multiple ethical mirroring’’ (wiederholte sittliche Spiegelung), quoting a somewhat extensive passage from Goethe’s essay entitled ‘‘Wiederholte Spiegelungen’’: ‘‘If one considers that such multiple ethical mirroring not only keeps alive what is past, but even raises it to a higher life, then one will understand these entoptic phenomena, which do not fade from one mirroring to another but indeed take fire one from another and thus become a symbol for that which in the history of the arts and sciences, of the church and the political world, has often been and continues daily to be repeated.’’π Cassirer then formulates his own thoughts in relation to this idea in a way that opens up a general theory of cultural creation. He asserts the following: ‘‘Goethe thus viewed this capacity of the human spirit through ‘multiple ethical mirroring’ to revive what is past to a new life as nothing less than a spiritual organon of truly universal significance. In the life of the spirit as in the life of world history, all ‘renaissances’ as we know them are based on this capacity and without it there could be for us no continuing development of artistic consciousness. No genuine renaissance can and will content itself with merely

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repeating once again an earlier form of existence; each attempts to raise up what has been to a higher life.’’∫ The application by Cassirer of this view concerning the process of symbolization through ‘‘repeated mirroring’’ (wiederholte Spiegelung) to Thomas Mann’s novel has perhaps only indirect relevance for a discussion of his general theory of culture. He proposes that Mann provides through the sequence of different figures in the novel just such a repeated mirroring of the poet as demanded by the theory of entoptic colors. Goethe appears in the novel, argues Cassirer, as a crystal that shines only in reflected light. Even the great inner monologue in chapter 7 functions as a similar repetition, where a colorful series of details, borrowed seemingly at random from Goethe’s life and work, constitutes in its totality a form of reproductive memory. In this way Mann finally achieves by the end a general, if only implicit ‘‘resurrection’’ (138) of the poetic process within the mind of the self—that is, within Goethe as character in the novel who speaks with and thinks about himself through this monologue. This process is realized or manifested in language and thus represented as a symbolic form, which is accessible and comprehensible to the reader of the novel. Nothing less than such a resurrection of the poetic process on a symbolic level defines for Cassirer the purpose and the goal of Thomas Mann’s novel. I offer on this point the concluding statement of the first section of Cassirer’s essay, where this claim is repeated in a more elegant formulation than I could manage: Goethe as crystal proved to be in a specific sense for every light that was sent up against him from without to be inaccessible and impenetrable; he remained ‘‘at rest in dimness.’’ But now out of the inwardness of this crystal a light of another kind and origin begins to take fire. And thereby not only is the dimness illuminated, but there occurs within itself—to use a phrase from the West-easterly Divan—a ‘‘resonating play of color.’’ The true poetic sensibility (its feeling and substance) will only become accessible to one who can become aware of this ‘‘resonating play of color’’ as something that fully reverberates within himself and as such is sustained for a long time as a kind of echo.Ω

Such a positive, optimistic view of the symbolic content of Lotte in Weimar shows how closely Cassirer’s concept of symbolic form was aligned to central ideas from Goethe, above all from his scientific writings. This theory of the symbol was also a crucial determining factor for Cassirer’s general philosophy of culture, as is apparent from the implied hermeneutics of his reading. The message of the novel is considered to be identical with an understanding of Goethe’s mode of poetic creation. Yet would it not be presumptuous of Cassirer, not to mention Thomas Mann himself, to expect that this novel about

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Goethe could convey an authentic understanding of the creative, poetic process, which in the end remains essentially unconscious and inexplicable, even to the poet himself? Cassirer implicitly acknowledges this to be the case toward the end of his essay, where he turns to the negative and ironic aspects of the novel. This portion of his argument can be readily summarized and made clear, yet it also offers an insight into the essential paradox presented by this novel with regard to Goethe as poet. For both Thomas Mann as author and Ernst Cassirer as reader Lotte in Weimar functions essentially as a Künstlerroman, in which the figure of the artist remains enigmatic and incomprehensible. This paradox may also reflect the mood of an era at the outset of the Second World War, which offered little hope for the role of poetry in the service of humanity and the history of culture. If we today, a full sixty years after the publication of Mann’s novel and the composition of Cassirer’s essay, reread both the novel and the essay in the light of the conditions of exile which both of them shared in the face of the destructive powers of the Nazi regime in Germany, an implicit tragic dimension becomes apparent specifically with regard to Goethe’s view of culture as symbolic process. Cassirer does not mention or even hint at his situation in exile at that time; nor does Thomas Mann include even indirectly a sense of Goethe’s situation in the novel in relation to the era of crisis in which the novel was written. The contrast between the complex celebration of the poet within the novel and the condition of exile and indeed existential danger in which both author and philosopher were then living is never openly acknowledged either in Mann’s novel or in Cassirer’s essay, though this very silence assumes a powerful significance when the historical context in which both were written is taken into account. Two separate, though related criteria for the negative effect of Lotte in Weimar on its reader are mentioned by Cassirer. Both involve a singular mixture of contrary artistic modes. On the one hand, argues Cassirer, the three fundamental forms of artistic representation enumerated by Goethe in his most famous theoretical essay—‘‘Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier und Stil’’ (Simple Imitation of Nature, Manner and Style)—are all programmatically present in the novel. Cassirer offers specific examples of all three, but he emphasizes above all that the three modes are everywhere mixed together through the conscious intention of the author, who functions as amused and ironic observer and witness to everything that transpires. This ironic presence is said to be essential for the effect of the novel: ‘‘It forms to an extent the emotional-spiritual ‘fluid’ that permeates the entire presentation.’’∞≠ This ironic mixture of modes, so Cassirer maintains, also affects directly the image of Goethe that is conveyed to the reader, an ‘‘image immediately visible and

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comprehensible.’’∞∞ The issue is how we come to know Goethe in a way that results from the experience of reading and understanding the novel. Cassirer attempts to show that with regard to the construction of this image the novel problematizes and complicates its own purpose. Goethe is presented in all too human a form, a captive to all the physical and moral limitations that are delineated within the narrative (148–49). The second aspect of this ironic problematizing is delineated by Cassirer with reference to the famous assertion by Socrates at the end of Plato’s Symposium, namely, that the same poet should be capable of writing both tragedies and comedies. Cassirer argues that modern literature consistently demonstrates— as in the drama of Shakespeare or in Cervantes’s Don Quixote—that the qualities of the tragic and the comic are intimately connected to each other and are presented simultaneously and blended together. Precisely such a paradoxical mixture of generic modes—so he claims—is achieved in Lotte in Weimar. We may again quote from his own formulation at some length: It is thus the more difficult for this poetic work to observe the boundaries, as defined by aesthetic theory, between the ‘comic’ and the ‘tragic,’ the more universal the subject matter that it seeks to present. It is therefore understandable that in a novel about Goethe the tones must be mixed in a different way than what we are otherwise accustomed to and would demand of other subjects. Goethe himself cannot otherwise be made accessible than as a ‘coincidentia oppositorum’; and this coincidence of contrasts must be made manifest not only in the object but also in the style.∞≤

How does Cassirer explain this negative, indeed tragic aspect of Thomas Mann’s Goethe novel? In the last few pages of his essay he addresses in rather laconic terms a familiar stance on the part of Goethe himself, referring to a well-known comment by the poet in his conversations with Eckermann, namely, that he was too ‘‘conciliatory’’ as personality and that he therefore always avoided tragic situations. But Cassirer’s own personal qualities of tolerance and humanity also play a role here, I believe. Everything in the novel that may be viewed as negative is referred to the essential loneliness of the artist and to the incapacity of human society to comprehend the complexity and the inexplicability of the genuine poet. Once again Cassirer’s formulation merits quotation: But in the image that Thomas Mann drafts in his novel we feel with an almost painful clarity that this goal essentially remained unattainable and why so. Goethe is here placed in the midst of his immediate surroundings and he is connected to it by hundreds and thousands of threads. Yet on the whole in his human and spiritual being he remains nonetheless alone. He stands by himself

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Cyrus Hamlin in tragic greatness and solitude. But this solitude was not created by his own will. Here everything is bound by a simple but strict and uncompromising necessity.∞≥

As a sign of this negative stance with regard to the great poet, Cassirer cites the ultimate resignation and sadness with which Charlotte in the novel comes finally to recognize the impossibility of re-establishing a genuine relationship with the poet and achieving a valid sense of his greatness. ‘‘She takes leave of Goethe in deep sadness,’’ so Cassirer comments, ‘‘but this sadness includes no trace of personal bitterness.’’∞∂ I am not persuaded that this assertion by Cassirer is valid. The deeply ironic stance of Thomas Mann’s narrative, especially in the brilliantly ruthless depiction of the social banter among the guests invited to dine with Goethe in chapter 8, conveys an implicit judgment against an attitude toward the discourse at such an event that may well reflect the author’s experience in exile from Germany during the Nazi regime. As evidence in support of this surmise I shall quote a somewhat longer passage from that chapter in the novel—almost a page long—where a sense of alienation is carried ultimately to grotesque extremes. The behavior of the guests at table demonstrates an attitude toward Goethe as supreme representative of the culture of poetry that is otherwise just barely suppressed beneath the conventions of civility. The effect of this moment on Charlotte, who witnesses it as one of the guests, may be regarded as symptomatic of the ethical conflict within the novel between the genius of the poet and the society in which he lives. In the midst of a rambling speech by Goethe—reported in the narrative through the distancing medium of indirect discourse—the Germans are compared with the Jews, specifically because the general hatred exhibited by so many peoples toward the latter corresponds surprisingly with a general antipathy toward the former due to their predestined role (Schicksalsrolle) in world history. The day might well come, suggests Goethe, when this concealed hatred (der gebundene Welthaß) might break out in a ‘‘historical uprising’’ (in einem historischen Aufstand), compared to which the pogroms against the Jews during the Middle Ages would seem pale. (A reader aware now in retrospect of the Holocaust can only ask what Thomas Mann might here have had in mind.) Goethe then reports that an inscription on a globe contained in the ducal library in Weimar makes the claim that the Germans are a people who exhibit a great similarity to the Chinese. He adds that this comparison seems rather arbitrary and could equally well be said of the French, whose cultural self-sufficiency and mandarinlike self-scrutiny, not to mention a democratic tendency, also resemble the Chinese. After all, he concludes, it was the com-

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patriots of Confucius who coined the phrase, ‘‘a great man is a public disaster’’: ‘‘Der große Mann ist ein öffentliches Unglück’’ (380). This juxtaposition of the Germans and the Jews, as expressed by the fictional Goethe in Thomas Mann’s novel written on the brink of the Second World War, seems to intend an allusion to the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis—insofar as Mann was aware of this from his position in exile—as it also anticipates the consequences likely to result for the Germans from the catastrophe still to come. Such surmise benefits of course from the hindsight of reading. Yet the irony of attributing these remarks to Goethe in the narrative context of Lotte’s visit to Weimar in the early nineteenth century is all too apparent. This applies even further to the bizarre comparison of the Germans to the Chinese, for which this fictional Goethe takes no credit. The general aphorism attributed to the compatriots of Confucius, however, can only be intended—at least by Thomas Mann, if not by Goethe in the novel—to apply to Goethe himself. What can such irony possibly convey to us with reference to the implicit response to the novel by its initial readers, as in the case of Ernst Cassirer, thinking about Thomas Mann, thinking about Goethe, thinking about Germany, in the fall and winter of 1939/40? The response of Goethe’s guests to the aphorism he attributes to the Chinese is remarkable. The entire paragraph describing it in the novel—including the perspective of Charlotte as witness—deserves consideration: Here came another outburst of laughter, even more boisterous than before. That word, from these lips, caused a perfect storm of merriment. They threw themselves back in their chairs, they bowed over the table, they struck it with the flat of their hands—shocked into self-abandonment by this nonsensical dogma and possessed by the wish to show their host they could appreciate his quoting it and at the same time to convince him what a monstrous and blasphemous absurdity they considered it. Charlotte alone sat on the defensive, stiffly upright, her forget-me-not eyes wide with alarm. She felt cold. She had actually lost colour, and a painful twitching at the corners of her mouth was her only contribution to the general merriment. She seemed to see a spectral vision: a scene with many roofs, towers with little bells, and in the street beneath, a train of people, repulsively sly and senile, in pigtails and sugar-loaf hats and coloured jackets; they hopped first on one foot and then on the other, then lifted a shrunken long-nailed finger and in chirping voices pronounced words that were utterly, fatally, and direfully the truth. This nightmare vision was accompanied by the same dread as before, running cold down her back, lest the too loud laughter round the board might be hiding an evil something that threatened in a reckless moment to burst forth: somebody might spring up, overturn the table, and scream out: ‘‘The Chinese are right!’’∞∑

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This description of the response by Goethe’s guests to his remark about great men goes beyond the limits of social decorum or even ethical values. The acute embarrassment felt by Charlotte is presumably meant to be shared by us as Thomas Mann’s readers. We ask ourselves whether Goethe could possibly deserve such excess, even if ‘‘the Chinese are right.’’ The novel must have more in mind than the challenge of Goethe’s greatness for the circle of his dinner guests in Weimar, and we surmise that the irony of the account, characteristic perhaps of Thomas Mann generally, extends to a scene of grotesque inhumanity—all too familiar to the writer in exile on the brink of the Second World War—which is implicated in the threat of violence in response to the ‘‘world historical destiny’’ of Germany (Schicksalsrolle, as Mann formulated it in his narrative) by the rest of the world. Cassirer recognized the negative implications of Thomas Mann’s irony in the novel—though he does not directly address the passage here under discussion—but he does not go further than the suggestion that the unavoidable existential isolation of the artist signifies the inability of the world to understand such greatness. I surmise that Cassirer would not agree with Charlotte’s thought in response to the grotesque laughter of the dinner guests that perhaps the Chinese are correct in their aphorism about the great man, at least insofar as Goethe here serves as instance. At the end of his essay Cassirer addresses the strange meeting at the conclusion of the novel between Charlotte and Goethe in his carriage, following her visit to the theater. He recognizes that this scene goes beyond the limits of what can be regarded as realism. The conversation between Goethe and Lotte achieves a reconciliation and an understanding that can only be viewed as imaginary and completely unreal. For Cassirer, however, this meeting constitutes for the character of Charlotte an idealized vision of the true Goethe, which also constitutes a concluding peripety for the novel as a whole. She comes to recognize, so Cassirer writes, that the existential isolation of the artist, even in its tragic dimension, is a necessity. He indicates that this recognition may be regarded as the final message of the novel for us as well: The reader also—if I interpret Thomas Mann’s intention correctly—should experience this feeling of understanding grow and ripen within himself. Only then will it be possible for him to extract fully the authentic ‘‘spiritual’’ meaning of the novel. What separates Goethe from Lotte, and must separate him from her, is the specific manner in which the poet, as poet, stands not only toward the lives of others, but also toward his own life. In the last words that Goethe speaks we are able to grasp at least an intuition of this particularity of the poetic feeling for both life and time.∞∏

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Cassirer alludes here to Goethe’s last speech to Lotte before the carriage arrives back at the hotel. It is a remarkable pastiche by Mann of many familiar passages from Goethe’s poetic writings, concerned above all with the concept of metamorphosis and transformation. ‘‘Metamorphosis,’’ so argues Mann’s Goethe, ‘‘is your friend’s most precious and most inward thing, his greatest hope and his deepest desire.’’∞π This image of death and transfiguration— ‘‘Stirb und Werde!’’—as it is expressed above all in the famous lyric from Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan, ‘‘Selige Sehnsucht,’’ is the guiding symbol for this idea. Und so lang du das nicht hast, Dieses: Stirb und werde! Bist du nur ein trüber Gast Auf der dunklen Erde. [And so long as you do not have it, This: to die and be reborn! You will remain but a dreary guest Upon this hostile planet.]

Cassirer accepts this concept as valid for the poetic process and for the status of the poetic self in its specific existential condition: alone and transient (vergänglich); yet capable through the power of poetic creation of being transformed and shaped into an image or symbol that transcends time, mortality, and all the conflicts of life. The poetic spirit is thus through such metamorphosis constantly reborn to a new life. I have here paraphrased only one aspect of Cassirer’s final paragraph in his essay on Lotte in Weimar, which contains at least as many allusions to ideas derived from Goethe as the final speech of Goethe to Lotte in the novel. Both these texts constitute an eloquent tribute to the preserving and sustaining power of poetry, a power which these two singular representatives of the best in German culture—Thomas Mann and Ernst Cassirer—found in the writings of Germany’s greatest poet. Such an affirmation of cultural value, however, could have provided but small consolation for the conditions of exile imposed on both the novelist and the philosopher by such a barbaric time as that in which they then lived. Yet the example of Goethe nonetheless offered both the author of the novel and one of its first and finest readers a form of reassurance through writing, a reaffirmation of the spirit through symbolic transformation, that remains valid even for us today, a full half-century after both are dead and gone. Cassirer would perhaps have resisted any such pathos with regard to his defense of Goethe and the culture of poetry that Goethe symbolized for his philosophy of culture. Yet the appearance of Lotte in Weimar at

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the exact moment that the armies of Hitler were invading Europe served as a signal of reassurance for everything to which Cassirer had dedicated his life and teaching at precisely the time when the outcome for both must have seemed most in doubt.

Notes 1. ‘‘Jeder von uns liest seinen eigenen Goethe; und jeder hat sich im Laufe der Jahre ein bestimmtes Goethe-Bild geformt, an das er nur ungern rührt.’’ 2. The original typescript of the essay, dated February 1940, is in the Cassirer papers in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. I have consulted this text, as well as the original publication in the Germanic Review 20 (1945). Quotations from the essay are given in my own translations with the original German in footnotes. The references are by page number to the reprint of the essay in Geist und Leben: Schriften zu den Lebensordnungen von Natur und Kunst, Gechichte und Sprache, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1993). 3. ‘‘Thomas Manns Darstellung verlangt von uns, daß wir dies Bild für einen Augenblick vergessen und aufopfern, um statt dessen einer anderen und neuen künstlerischen Wiedergeburt Goethes zuzusehen’’ (148). 4. Goethe als Repräsentant des bürgerlichen Zeitalters. 5. Goethe und die geschichtliche Welt, ‘‘Goethes Idee der Bildung und Erziehung.’’ 6. ‘‘Die innere Wiederspiegelung von Gegenständen oder Ereignissen,’’ as Cassirer formulates this point, ‘‘eine Art der geistigen Vergegenwärtigung, [tritt] . . . wie von einem neuen und stärkeren Licht durchflutet vor uns hin’’ (132). 7. ‘‘Bedenkt man . . . daß wiederholte sittliche Spiegelungen das Vergangene nicht allein lebendig erhalten, sondern sogar zu einem höheren Leben empor steigern, so wird man der entoptischen Erscheinungen gedenken, welche gleichfalls von Spiegel zu Spiegel nicht etwa verbleichen, sondern sich erst recht entzünden, und man wird ein Symbol gewinnen davon, was in der Geschichte der Künste und Wissenschaften, der Kirche und wohl der politischen Welt sich mehrmals wiederholt hat und noch täglich wiederholt’’ (132). 8. ‘‘In der Fähigkeit des menschlichen Geistes, sich ein Vergangenes durch ‘wiederholte sittliche Spiegelung’ zu neuem Leben zu erwecken, sah daher Goethe nichts Geringeres als ein geistiges Organon von schlechthin-universeller Bedeutung. Im geistigen Leben und im Leben der Weltgeschichte beruhen auf dieser Fähigkeit alle ‘Renaissancen’, die wir kennen und ohne welche es für uns keine stetige Entwicklung des Kunstbewußtseins geben könnte. Keine echte Renaissance kann und will sich damit begnügen, eine frühere Form des Daseins noch einmal zu durchlaufen; jede versucht das Gewesene zu einem höheren Leben emporzusteigern’’ (132–33). 9. ‘‘Der Kristall Goethe erwies sich für alles Licht, das von außen gegen ihn entsandt wurde, in gewissem Sinne als unzugänglich und undurchdringlich; er blieb ‘im Trüben ruhen.’ Nun aber beginnt sich aus dem Innern dieses Kristalls ein Licht von anderer Art und Herkunft zu entzünden. Und damit erhellt sich das Trübe nicht nur, sondern es wird in ihm, nach den Worten des West-östlichen Divan, ein ‘erklingend Farbenspiel’ ent-

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wickelt. Der eigentliche poetische Stimmungsgehalt wird sich nur dem erschließen, der dieses ‘erklingende Farbenspiel’ als solches gewahr werden kann, der es voll ausschwingen und lange in sich nachhallen läßt’’ (141). 10. ‘‘Sie bildet gewissermaßen das seelisch-geistige Fluidum, das die gesamte Darstellung durchdringt’’ (146). 11. ‘‘in sichtbarer und greifbarer Gestalt’’ 12. ‘‘So wird es für die Dichtung um so schwieriger, die Schranken, die die ästhetische Theorie zieht, die Schranken zwischen dem ‘Komischen’ und ‘Tragischen’ innezuhalten, je universeller der Gegenstand ist, den sie darstellen will. Es ist daher verständlich, daß in einem Goethe-Roman sich die Töne anders mischen müssen, als wir es sonst gewohnt sind und als wir es anderen Themen zubilligen würden. Goethe selbst kann nicht anders denn als eine ‘coincidentia oppositorum’ sichtbar gemacht werden; und diese Koinzidenz der Gegensätze muß sich nicht nur im Object, sondern auch im Stil bemerkbar machen’’ (155). 13. ‘‘Aber in dem Bilde, das Thomas Mann in seinem Roman entwirft, fühlen wir mit fast schmerzlicher Deutlichkeit, daß und warum dieses Ziel im Grunde unerreichbar blieb. Goethe ist hier mitten in seine nächste Umwelt versetzt und er ist mit ihr durch hundert und tausend Fäden verknüpft. Aber im Ganzen seines menschlichen und geistigen Seins bleibt er nichtsdestoweniger allein. Er steht für sich, in tragischer Größe und Einsamkeit. Es ist nicht sein Wille, der diese Einsamkeit geschaffen hat. Hier herrscht eine schlichte und strenge, eine unerbittliche Notwendigkeit’’ (156–57). 14. ‘‘Sie scheidet von Goethe in tiefer Trauer, aber diese Trauer enthält nichts mehr von persönlicher Bitterkeit’’ (158). 15. Thomas Mann, The Beloved Returns, trans. Helen Lowe-Porter (New York, 1940), 418f. 16. ‘‘Auch der Leser soll—wenn ich Thomas Manns Absicht recht deute—dieses Gefühl des Verstehens in sich emporwachsen und reifen lassen. Dann erst läßt sich für ihn der eigentliche, der ‘geistige’ Sinn des Romans ausschöpfen. Was Goethe von Lotte trennt und trennen muß, das ist die besondere Art, in der der Dichter, als Dichter, nicht nur zum Leben der anderen, sondern auch zu seinem eigenen Leben steht. In den letzten Worten, die Goethe spricht, soll uns eine Ahnung von dieser Besonderheit des dichterischen Lebens- und Zeitgefühls ergreifen’’ (158). 17. ‘‘Metamorphose ist deines Freundes Liebstes und Innerstes, seine große Hoffnung und tiefste Begierde’’ (410).

P A R T

Cassirer’s Philosophical Outlook

IV

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The Missing Core of Cassirer’s Philosophy: Homo Faber in Thin Air gideon freudenthal

The Argument The title of this essay is intended to express, first, the claim that Cassirer’s project is indeed philosophical and systematic (and not merely historical); second, that this philosophy has a core principle; and third, that this core is not elaborated nor applied to the cultural material which it was supposed to explain. Thus Cassirer’s oeuvre shows, on the one hand, the blueprint of a systematic historical epistemology and, on the other hand, the material which should have been interpreted and explained by this epistemology. The material is ordered so as to suggest a progressive epistemic development, but Cassirer nowhere applies the core of his historical epistemology—his concept of symbol—to demonstrate and explain this epistemic development.

Critical Idealism vs. Empiricism Cassirer’s unchanging philosophy is his declared ‘‘critical idealism.’’∞ He typically formulates this philosophy in reference to a criticism of empiricism. Critical idealism maintains that human knowledge is not based on passive sense perception, which reflects the ‘‘given.’’ What is considered to be ‘‘given’’ is rather constructed by the forming activity of the subject. ‘‘Construction’’

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means in Cassirer a rule-guided operation by which objects are generated from simpler constituents. Cassirer’s ‘‘construction’’ stands in the tradition of ‘‘genetic’’ or ‘‘real’’ definitions in early modern philosophy (especially in Leibniz), that is, the endeavor to replace inventory taking of ‘‘given’’ objects (especially in mathematics) with a rule for generating these objects. The paradigm of such a rule of construction for Cassirer is a function, which is independent from the enumeration of its values but rather generates them. ‘‘Idealism’’ and ‘‘construction’’ thus stand for the activity of generating objects, and in contrast to ‘‘empiricism’’ and ‘‘abstraction,’’ which stand for passively accommodating to the ‘‘given.’’ This is the gist of Cassirer’s contrasting ‘‘substance’’ with ‘‘function’’ (so in the title of his first systematic philosophical book: Substance and Function, 1910).≤ In his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer generalizes this approach and attempts to work out a comprehensive constructive philosophy of culture. This seeks to interpret all domains of culture (symbolic forms) as constructed by the active subject, who uses means specific to each of these areas. When applied to the history of human culture, the constructionist approach takes the form of a historical constructionist epistemology and involves an order in time, both within the different forms of culture as well as an order of the subsequent emergence of these forms themselves. I submit that Cassirer correctly saw that a successful constructionist approach depends on the dual—material and ideal—nature of the procedure of construction and of the constructions (‘‘Works’’), namely, that the elements from which construction proceeds as well as its products have objective existence (in space and time) as well as meaning, and that, accordingly, he characterized his key notion of ‘‘symbol’’ as having this dual nature, but that his deeply entrenched ‘‘idealism’’ (in more than the technical philosophical sense) undermined the elaboration of this insight. As I will show, Cassirer was in agreement with the constructionist program of two philosophers who are unknown today: Lazarus Geiger and Ludwig Noiré. Their program stressed the material nature of human productive and linguistic practice. I claim further that Cassirer’s idealism thwarted his attempts to implement his program. Critical idealism, which gave rise to his constructionist approach, also set its limits and doomed it to failure. Finally, I suggest that the program itself is still of value.

Cassirer’s Philosophical System It is not self-evident to speak of Cassirer’s systematic philosophy. Often, especially in the English-speaking world, he is read as a historian of philosophy or of culture in general. On the other hand, those interpreters, mainly

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Europeans, who read Cassirer as a philosopher see in him a successor of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, hence, primarily as an epistemologist.≥ I suggest that, whether successful or not, Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms was intended as a ‘‘system’’ of philosophy (see PsF, 1: 7, 12, 14, 25; PSF, 1: 77, 80–81, 82, 91), which was in fact as ambitious as traditional metaphysics. Indeed, Cassirer does not criticize traditional metaphysics for its construction of ‘‘systems.’’ On the contrary, if a system of cultural forms is not attempted, says Cassirer, then the particular forms ‘‘simply stand side by side [and] . . . the philosophy of these forms would then necessarily amount to their history’’ (PsF, 1:16; PSF, 1:84). Cassirer’s criticism of dogmatic metaphysics is rather that it generalized a principle taken from one domain of culture, formed it into a ‘‘metaphysical hypostasis,’’ and forced it upon all other areas. Thus traditional metaphysics could not allow for a plurality of cultural forms (PsF, 1: 32; PSF, 1: 97–98). Moreover, since the principles considered were traditionally ‘‘logical’’ (i.e., cognitive), metaphysics tended to narrow the scope of culture to scientific or rational discourse. Cassirer therefore looked for a metaprinciple, for a ‘‘basic formative principle’’ (PsF, 1: 51; PSF, 1: 113), which would both guarantee the unity of the system and yet allow for significant peculiarities of its individual components.∂ The sought-after principle was conceived as being higher than the different areas and yet close enough to remain informative, ‘‘a standpoint situated above all these forms and yet not merely outside them: a standpoint which would make it possible to encompass the whole of them [the forms of culture] in one view, which would seek to penetrate nothing other than the purely immanent relation of all these forms to one another, and not their relation to any external, ‘transcendent’ being or principle. Then we could have a systematic philosophy of human culture in which each particular form would take its meaning solely from the place in which it stands, a system in which the content and significance of each form would be characterized by the richness and specific quality of the relations and concatenations in which it stands with other spiritual energies and ultimately with their totality’’ (PsF, 1: 14; PSF, 1: 82)? Cassirer’s solution to this dilemma between monolithic dogmatic philosophy, on the one hand, and empirical pluralism of membra disjecta, on the other, is to ‘‘discover a factor which recurs in each basic cultural form but in no two of them takes exactly the same shape’’ (PsF, 1: 16; PSF, 1: 84), and this factor is the very construction of ‘‘symbolic forms.’’ The key to the pluralistic unity of culture is hence the symbol, the root both of the recurrent construction of symbolic forms and also of their difference according to the character of the symbols involved. If this were all there is to it, then Cassirer would not have satisfied his own

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claim to have constructed a system of symbolic forms. The symbolic forms would then indeed form a ‘‘rosette,’’ to use Oswald Schwemmer’s metaphor. ‘‘Myth,’’ the common origin and material for all further formation would take up the center, the different leaves would be the various other symbolic forms.∑ But on this interpretation there would be no connection among the different symbolic forms themselves. Their connection would consist solely in the fact that they all are connected to the center, that they all are symbolic forms, that they are members of the same set, but there would be no necessary connection between the different symbolic forms themselves. They would not form a system. How then would Cassirer meet his demand to establish a system in which ‘‘each particular form would take its meaning solely from the place in which it stands, a system in which the content and significance of each form would be characterized by the richness and specific quality of the relations and concatenations in which it stands with other spiritual energies and ultimately with their totality’’ (PsF, 1: 14; PSF, 1: 82).∏ I suggest that the connection required among symbolic forms consists in that one symbolic form uses for its constructions the products of others, either as material or as means of construction. It is the fact that one symbolic form furnishes the prerequisites of the other in which their concatenations (‘‘Verflechtung’’) and unity consist. It is an essential unity because the different symbolic forms cannot even exist without one another or some others. They indeed form an organic whole, a system.π The connection among the different symbolic forms as well as among different products within each of them, however, establishes among them an order, in fact a hierarchical order of development. We here see the common ambition and yet the crucial difference from Hegel—at least in Cassirer’s view. Both Hegel and Cassirer attempted to construct an ‘‘organic’’ hierarchical system of ‘‘development.’’ In Hegel the connection among different areas is guaranteed through their development out of a common source and according to a common pattern with necessity. Cassirer does not ask what must follow from a given constellation, but rather what the necessary conditions for a given constellation are. Whatever develops is dependent on the previous stage, but no stage determines the development of the following. Put differently: we may find necessary conditions for something to emerge, but not necessary and sufficient conditions. The development of ‘‘spirit’’ could stop at each of the levels reached. Put in yet another formulation: Cassirer’s conception is not teleological.∫ The task of the philosopher who wishes to demonstrate this character of a system is therefore to reconstruct its internal fabric, showing how the products of one stage serve as the essentials of the next. This reconstruction reveals an

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order: there are primary and subsequent, elementary and advanced, simple and complex stages. If the thesis of construction is successful, if one product indeed supplies the material and means for the next, then in more cases than not the order is not reversible. But the order is not linear. This means that it is not the case that all symbolic forms can be ordered, beginning with myth and ending with science in one series. Rather, a certain level of one symbolic form enters as material or the means of construction into the construction of another and vice versa.Ω Thus a certain level of language may enter as the means of construction at a certain level of religion, and a certain stage of religion may shape the ‘‘natural world-view’’ presented in language (on a certain level, for there is no ‘‘language as such’’). Thus connections exist among the symbolic forms and yet the distance at each point in each of them from the common origin in myth is meaningful. No more distant point enters into the construction of a less distant one, but the contrary does take place, and this is the essence of construction. The constructive approach is true for every step within a symbolic form, and it is true for the order of the very general forms of construction called ‘‘symbolic forms.’’ Thus, it is not necessary that myth will develop into discursive concrete thought, nor that discursive thought develop into symbolic abstract scientific thought; but scientific thought could not have developed ex nihilo nor even ab ovo, it was dependent on prerequisites prepared by discursive prescientific thought, and this in turn is dependent on prerequisites produced by mythical thought. Also here the necessity is limited: the existence of appropriate prerequisites is necessary, but whether these prerequisites are produced by myth and discursive linguistic thought or by other means is irrelevant and contingent. The general order of construction cannot be reversed, however: mythical thought cannot be constructed by the further elaboration of elements of science. In other words, it is not necessary that the expressive function (Ausdrucksfunktion) develop into the function of representation (Darstellungsfunktion) and this into the function of signification (Bedeutungsfunktion), but the function of signification depends on the function of representation and this depends on the expressive function, and the order cannot be reversed. ‘‘Constructivism’’ is a program which can inform a cluster of theses, each of them specific to an area.

Construction and History Constructivism is committed to an order; but it is not committed to a temporal-historical order. Cassirer’s version of constructivism commits him to

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a hierarchy of symbolic forms and to a hierarchical order within the forms themselves, and both commitments put logical constraints on possible claims concerning historical development. In fact, Cassirer’s constructive order also attempts to reproduce history’s general order. On the other hand, since everything real is also possible, historical development may suggest an order of construction.∞≠ Moreover, Cassirer’s radicalization of the constructionist program involves the emergence of rational faculties, so that construction and the historical order coincide. Cassirer’s radicalization consists in the fact that he not only reconstructs the products of the subject’s activity employing materials and means, but also inquires into the very construction of the subject and of the objects as distinct from and opposed to each other. Cassirer does not adopt a traditional philosophical concept of the subject (the ‘‘cogito’’ or similar conceptions) but inquires into the development of Man as an animal rationale. The biological development of animal rationale is not the philosopher’s concern, but those faculties which are a historical product and are not ‘‘given’’ with the existence of the biological race should be constructed. This is central to the constructionist program because Cassirer’s version of animal rationale, animal symbolicum, seeks to account for the unity of symbolic construction (this is the ‘‘symbolic function’’) and also for the variety of symbolic forms and for their hierarchal order. This hierarchy, on the one hand, and the conception of a system, on the other, imply that the subject, too, has to develop in the process of construction such that the construction of more advanced forms is not possible in initial stages but becomes possible in the process of construction and due to this very process. According to the widely held view, shared by Cassirer, the direction of development runs from myth to science in culture and also in the human ‘‘faculties’’ and cultural means which produce these symbolic forms. As in all construction, so also here Cassirer prefers such theories that explain the existence of entities as a result of activity, hence also the existence of the human subject as the result of its own activity. These statements on the development of the ‘‘subject’’ and the ‘‘object’’ are of major importance to Cassirer; in fact, they are at the core of his mature philosophy, from the first volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to the manuscript on Basisphänomene. And here, at the core of Cassirer’s mature philosophy, he insists more than anywhere else on construction. The ‘‘I’’ (Ich) and the ‘‘object’’ (Gegenstand) are constructed through ‘‘effecting’’ (Wirken). Now, the subject, the object, and the subject’s activity are basis phenomena (Basisphänomene) because they are not produced by more primitive entities. This is the rock bottom of constructivism. All three are ‘‘primitive,’’ and yet although they do not

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emerge, they do develop in their differentiation (Auseinandersetzung). All three entities are constructed interdependently, and Wirken plays the key role. Every form of Wirken produces corresponding subjects and objects. ‘‘Every new specification which language gives to the world of objects is also reflected in the specification of the subjective world. For we are dealing with correlative spheres of intuition, which determine each other’s limits’’ (PsF, 1: 212–13; PSF, 1: 249; see also PsF, 1: 225; PSF, 1: 259). And the motive power behind this changing relation of subject and object is Wirken.∞∞ ‘‘For the most important factor in the growth of the consciousness of personality is and remains the factor of action. But here the law that every action equals reaction applies in a purely spiritual as well as a physical sense. . . . the I does not simply impress his own form, a form given to it from the very outset, upon objects; on the contrary, it acquires this form only in the totality of the actions which it exerts upon objects and which he receives back from them’’ (PsF, 2: 239; PSF, 2: 199–200). Cassirer’s radicalization of the philosophical program, extending to the demand to construct the ‘‘subject’’ and the ‘‘object’’ themselves, thus merged his constructionist philosophy of culture finally with a historical, anthropological question. The basis of philosophical construction coincides with the emergence of culture, with the emergence of man out of nature. Cassirer had a clear view as to what the factors are by which man emerged out of nature on the basis of the biological potential: language and tool use. These determine the process of development away from nature (including man’s own ‘‘nature’’) as an ever more mediated contact between man and nature. Culture consists largely in such forms of mediation, in ever more developed tool use, linguistic technique, techniques of reasoning, techniques of expressing and exciting emotions, and so on (PsF, 3: 324; PSF, 3: 276–77; Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften, 26–27; Eng. 25–27). The development of human culture is hence conceived of as leading from reflex to reflection (PsF, 1: 134; PSF, 1: 186), from the pragmatic to the theoretical, from physical to ideal activity (PsF, 1: 127; PSF, 1: 180), from ‘‘grasping’’ to ‘‘indicating’’ and ‘‘demonstrating,’’ from Weisen to Beweisen (PsF, 1: 129; PSF, 1: 181–82), from concrete to abstract language.

The Synthesis: Cassirer’s Notion of ‘‘Symbol’’ Tool use and language are not merely the important factors in the emergence of humans, but according to Cassirer they are also determinant in further human development. Cassirer, however, does not explain why and how they are supposed to enable development. Whereas the problem of explaining development is more conspicuous in the case of language, or more general in

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the case of the symbol, the key to its solution is more obvious in the case of the tool. I shall turn to these in what follows. In his chapter devoted to the concept of ‘‘symbol,’’ ‘‘Symbolic Pregnance’’ (Symbolische Prägnanz), Cassirer ventures to defend the thesis that a symbol is both material-sensual and spiritual-meaningful. He first criticizes sensualism with Kant and Husserl and then turns against Husserl’s separation of the ‘‘noetic’’ and the ‘‘hyletic’’ factors. For Cassirer, the traditional opposition of the mundus intelligibilis of pure action and the mundus sensibilis of receptivity and passivity of the senses is surpassed by a new conception. ‘‘For the senses and the spirit are now joined in a new form of reciprocity and correlation. . . . The pure function of the spirit itself must seek its concrete fulfillment in the sensory world. Within the sensory sphere, a sharp distinction must be made between mere ‘reaction’ and pure ‘action,’ between ‘impression’ and ‘expression’ ’’ (PsF, 1: 19; PSF, 1: 87). There is no ‘‘sense’’ without sensory material and no sensory perception which is devoid of meaning.∞≤ The unity of perception and meaning is what Cassirer dubbed ‘‘symbolic pregnance.’’ The concept of ‘‘symbolic pregnance’’ seems to offer a solution to the problem of development. For symbols and signs, the problem of development can be reformulated as whether work with a system of symbols can yield more knowledge than was invested into it. Since every sensual experience is also endowed with meaning, this question pertains to perception and to other forms of experience as well as to systems of signs. Cassirer maintains that indeed all knowledge goes beyond the ‘‘given.’’ This is so because even the single and seemingly isolated perception ‘‘contains at the same time a certain nonintuitive meaning which it immediately and concretely represents. . . . It is the perception itself which by virtue of its own immanent organization, takes on a kind of spiritual articulation—which, being ordered in itself, also belongs to a determinate order of meaning. . . . It is this ideal interwovenness, this relatedness of the single perceptive phenomenon, given here and now, to a characteristic total meaning that the term ‘pregnance’ is meant to designate’’ (PsF, 3: 235; PSF, 3: 202). Cassirer elucidates the relation of the single perception to its meaning with various metaphors, among them the relation of the single given value to the general function—a metaphor he favored throughout his career to express his basic philosophical position that, pace empiricism, real knowledge is not knowledge of isolated single entities (substance), but of relations.∞≥ Whereas Cassirer maintains that every content of human knowledge is linked and refers beyond itself, his elucidations and the term he chose for this new conception raise doubts as to whether it can indeed be the basis for explaining development. Today’s reader may immediately associate the preg-

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nance of Gestalt with ‘‘symbolic pregnance,’’ and it may well be that the term suggested itself to Cassirer also because of these connotations. But this is neither the origin of the term nor the usage alluded to by Cassirer. Cassirer introduces the term with reference to its origin, namely, Leibniz’s philosophy: ‘‘The now is filled and saturated with the future: praegnans futuri, as Leibniz called it’’ (PsF, 3: 235; PSF, 3: 202).∞∂ Now the problem is that in Leibniz’s philosophy the substance is ‘‘pregnant’’ with the future precisely because all future states of the substance are already presently involved in it. And since this is the case, the complete concept of the individual substance contains all the predicates which may be predicated of it. True propositions are hence those which attribute to the substance those predicates contained in its complete concept ( praedicatum inest subjecto). From this it follows that all true knowledge is, strictly speaking (‘‘à la rigeur métaphysique’’), analytic, and Leibniz of course drew exactly this consequence. Analyticity and development of knowledge and its forms (as distinct from the mere accumulation of true propositions) exclude each other. Leibniz’s praegnans futuri is hence the wrong metaphor for the symbol, if this is to explain conceptual development. In fact, the problem is deeper than the choice of a metaphor. It consists of conceiving the symbol as embodying already existing mental content rather than as playing a role in its production. Concerning content, no real difference is shown between the symbol and its meaning: Cassirer speaks of an existing ‘‘spiritual’’ ( geistig) content which takes on material-sensual form. For example: ‘‘In every linguistic ‘sign,’ in every mythical or artistic ‘image,’ a spiritual content, which intrinsically points beyond the whole sensory sphere, is translated (umgesetzt) into the form of the sensuous, into something visible, audible or tangible’’ (PsF, 1: 42; PSF, 1: 106). Thus if the spiritual content ‘‘points beyond’’ itself, so will the symbol, but ‘‘pointing beyond’’ is not dependent on the sensuous symbol but on the spirit. In all of Cassirer’s statements about the interwovenness of the material and spiritual, this is consistently the message conveyed: the spirit must embody itself in matter, but this embodiment does not change its content.∞∑ If this is so, however, then the symbol itself does not contribute anything new, and therefore no real development ensues from symbolization. But if ‘‘development’’ is not reduced to the unfolding of a concept in time, then the sensuous-material nature of the concept is essential to the development of knowledge. Thus if symbolization does not explain development, then the conception of development is obscure and Cassirer’s entire philosophical program endangered, unless the other major cultural means— tool use—proves more prolific.

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Synthesis The claim that genuine development takes place, that is, that new determinations emerge, and yet that these can be explained and are not simply created ex nihilo, is tantamount to the claim that genuine synthesis takes place. In Kant and in the tradition following him, the possibility of genuine synthesis was explained by the existence of two independent orders and their integration. When the forms of intuition and of understanding produce a synthetic product in cognition, a new determination can arise which would not follow from either of them separately. The crucial point in this conception is the genuine independence of intuition and understanding. The conception fails if, as in the case of Leibniz, intuition turns out to be reducible to understanding.∞∏ In Cassirer, the requirement of having at least two independent orders which together can produce a new synthetic product takes the form that all human action, that all human products, are both sensuous and ideal. This requirement is also seen in the determination that the symbol must be material, sensible. On the other hand, whatever fulfills this requirement is also a symbol. Symbol, namely, ‘‘the totality of those phenomena in which the sensuous is in any way filled with meaning, in which the sensuous content, while preserving the mode of its existence and facticity, represents a particularization and embodiment, a manifestation and incarnation of a meaning’’ (PsF, 3: 109; PSF, 3: 93). The requirement of material existence is obviously fulfilled by tools and it is also obvious that their material character is essential to them. This is no less true but perhaps less obvious with language. In fact, while Cassirer often has to repeat the claim that language exists only in its material media, he does not even have to mention this in the case of technology, but rather the opposite, that is, that technology also has an ideal component. This is so because in the philosophical study of language, emphasis was traditionally put on meaning rather than on the medium, thus the relevance of its material existence could be overseen, at times explicitly denied. Language does exist of course in a material medium—be it in the physical agents of sound or of script—but the ideal content represented in this medium is determined as that which is invariant in the transformation from one medium into another (the same ‘‘proposition’’ may be expressed by different ‘‘sentences’’). And, in fact, this nature of language led many philosophers to suggest that meanings, thoughts, are immaterial and that their linguistic-material form of existence is not essential to their content. Things are very different with tools. Technology usually stands for material practice, and prejudice would rather overlook the fact that tools embody ideas

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than affirm their ideal content and doubt their materiality. Thus, if Cassirer wishes to suggest that genuine development and genuine synthesis exist and if he suggests that the new emerges because the relevant entities are syntheses of material and ideal factors, then the development of technology and tool use offers a model for cognitive development preferable to language in reconstructing human cognitive development.

The Mechanism of Development as Modeled on Tool Use It is remarkable that Cassirer’s views on the role of tool use and language, their interconnection and their role in the development of human culture did not change throughout his career, that is, from his first discussion of the topic in the first volume of Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923) through his ‘‘Form und Technik’’ (1930) until the 1940s, when he discussed the problem again both in his Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften (1942) and in his manuscript on Basisphänomene (and in The Myth of the State).∞π Not only his views, but also his references did not change. In both early and later works Cassirer refers to the books of Ludwig Noiré on the origin of language, especially to his book on tool use: Das Werkzeug und seine Bedeutung für die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Menschheit of 1880.∞∫ This, however, is astounding because Cassirer knew from the very beginning that Noiré’s views and those of Noiré’s admired precursor, Lazarus Geiger, were considered false and outdated in the profession, and Cassirer accepted this verdict. Hence, Cassirer believed that their theories were wrong and yet he obviously also believed— and said so!—that they capture something essentially right and important. What they captured, however, cannot be found in their empirical claims, which were falsified, but rather in a principle. I have already explained why a constructivist theory of human development is essential to the systematic character of Cassirer’s philosophy: the development of one form out of products of the other guarantees the organic coherence of his philosophy, which otherwise would appear as a collection of membra disjecta. In fact, I shall argue that because Cassirer did not turn Noiré’s program or an alternative of his own into a research program, his oeuvre indeed falls short of his ambition. Cassirer’s references to Noiré show that his approval refers to different points covering almost the entire extent of Noiré’s thesis. Noiré is first quoted in support of the thesis that language is rooted in rhythmic labor. As such it squarely belongs to the ‘‘material-sensible realm’’ and yet does not support empiricist philosophy: it does not reflect ‘‘passive sensation’’ but even as ‘‘a simple sensory activity, it is already on its way to surpassing this sphere.’’∞Ω The

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purely sensible origin is already endowed with the force of development. The fact that this sensory activity is a ‘‘communal action’’ ( gemeinschaftliches Tun) guarantees that language is not private but social and serves as a ‘‘sensorium commune.’’≤≠ Moreover, tool use is the means to transcend myth. When man first employs tools, even though he may hold to a mythical worldview, ‘‘he has undergone an inner crisis.’’≤∞ ‘‘The omnipotence of the mere desire is ended: action is now subject to certain objective conditions,’’ and appropriate means have to be applied to fulfill the sensory drive. Thus ‘‘a true distance between subject and object is for the first time achieved. It is only from the intermediation of action that there results the articulation of being, by virtue of which it is divided into separate, mutually related and dependent elements.’’≤≤ In his essay ‘‘Form und Technik,’’ Cassirer approvingly quotes Noiré to support the thesis that the action with tools brings about not only the differentiation of ontology and the control over causality, but also the development of language and reason: Especially Ludwig Noiré in his book Das Werkzeug und seine Bedeutung für die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Menschheit (Mainz 1880), emphasizes, that the real meaning, in purely spiritual sense, of the tool is that it is the basic means in the process of ‘‘objectification,’’ out of which arises the world of ‘‘language’’ and of ‘‘reason.’’ ‘‘The great importance of the tool’’—so he emphasizes—‘‘lies mainly in two issues: first in the resolution and separation of the causal relation, by means of which the latter attains a great, continuously increasing clarity in human consciousness, and secondly in the objectification or projection of the function of one’s own organs, which previously was only present in dark consciousness of instinctive function.’’≤≥

Noiré maintains that the main contribution of the tool to causal thinking, the above-mentioned ‘‘resolution and separation of the causal relation,’’ is that it embodies a causal agent taken out of the context in which it usually appears. The tool is, so to say, a reified abstraction: ‘‘The tool enters the sphere of abstraction, whereby things are separated from the context of their surrounding and of phenomena which everywhere merge into each and whereby they can be thought, i.e., come into being for human thought.’’≤∂ Now ‘‘objectification’’ also has a subjective effect, namely, the emergence of subjective consciousness and reflection. This idea is developed in the discussion of ‘‘organ-projection,’’ an idea which Cassirer adopts from Ernst Kapp and which was further developed by Noiré, who introduced also the term ‘‘Semi-Projektion.’’ The general idea is this: ‘‘semi-projection’’ refers to the first ‘‘projection’’ of functions satisfying basic needs and drives to the external

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human limbs. This already brings two advantages. First, for example, in the case of the acquisition of food, the transference of the function from the teeth to the hand creates a distance between the action and the consumption, between the organ of action and the ‘‘nerves which represent and localize the drive of the need or nurture.’’ Second, the action of the hand can be controlled by the eye and thus becomes the object of reflection.≤∑ The following ‘‘organ projection’’ transfers the action of the hand to the action of the hand armed with a tool. It enables the distinction of different functions which were all performed by the same hand and are now performed by different tools. It also enables the separate objectification of these functions and the transmission of the relevant tool from person to person, which again reinforces the differentiation of the different functions. Moreover, it also enables the development of the hand as a ‘‘universal’’ organ and thus lays the foundation for the formation of general concepts.≤∏ The functions attributed to semi-projection and projection depend of course on Noiré’s general view that knowledge depends upon reflection on action, not on passive observation. Needless to say this approach is most congenial to Cassirer’s.≤π The special importance of the tool is based on the fact that it mediates between the subject and the object and embodies human intelligence, on the one hand, and properties of the object, on the other. But the tool can fulfill this role because it is material: ‘‘The main idea is this: The animal is dependent in his action on his natural organs, man has attained tools by reason, and his action is mediated. The peculiarity and enormous importance of the tool lies in that it is at the same time both part of the subject and yet an object.’’≤∫ Moreover, since the tool is a material object, it can serve as the substrate of tradition, facilitating transmission and development: ‘‘The second, infinite advantage of the tool lies in its being an object. As such it can be changed in a thousand ways and is thus capable of whatever improvement in reaching new, ever more extended and mighty effects.’’≤Ω The knowledge of the ‘‘objective conditions’’ of work with tools, of causal connections, can now be applied to explain the function of the human body itself: ‘‘Through the implements and artifacts which he builds man learns to understand the nature and structure of his own body.’’≥≠ Moreover, this selfknowledge leads to self-consciousness.’’≥∞ Man learns to know his own nature through the study of his products. Thus it is through tool use that both the objective and the subjective worlds are constructed. This mechanism of development, however, is not restricted to technology. In fact, Cassirer adopts this model and generalizes it to form the general mechanism of development in the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.

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Gideon Freudenthal The fundamental argument of the philosophy of Symbolic Forms has shown that the concept which Kapp designates as ‘‘organ projection’’ holds a meaning which extends far beyond the technical mastery and knowledge of nature. While the philosophy of technology deals with the immediate and mediated bodily organs by which man gives the outside world its determinate form and imprint, the philosophy of Symbolic Forms is concerned with the totality of spiritual expressive functions. It regards them not as copies of being but as trends and modes of formation, as ‘‘organs’’ less of mastery than of signification. . . . The I creates for itself a kind of opposite in its own products which seem to it wholly objective. And it can contemplate itself only in this kind of projection.≥≤

We have seen that all the essentials of Cassirer’s notion of development were already introduced by Geiger, Kapp, and Noiré as pertaining to the early development of humans on the basis of tool use. Cassirer explicitly modeled his conception of Wirken, of constructing the sphere of objectivity and subjectivity, as the core of human development, on tool use as analyzed by these scholars

Homo Faber in Thin Air—The Principle of Construction The core of Cassirer’s system of philosophy is the principle of development. This principle forms a system of all the different areas of culture, material and spiritual alike. It does this, first, by showing that the very same principle of construction produces the various ‘‘symbolic forms’’ and, second, by showing that products of one stage serve as the material and the means of constructing another. Thus all symbolic forms are interdependent and form a system. I have suggested that Cassirer attempts a very ambitious constructionist philosophical system. Unlike other similar attempts, Cassirer chose his point of departure with reference to the course of history. Cassirer did not endeavor to explain or describe the development from primates to humans, but he chose to begin at a point when human equipment was still minimal: primitive, expressive language and primitive tools. A theory which attempted to satisfy similar intentions to Cassirer’s was Lazarus Geiger’s and Ludwig Noiré’s. Both attempted to push their constructionist explanation even further back. They offered also a theory of the origin of language. Cassirer knew that the specific claim made by this theory—that language developed out of a primitive stage in which it consisted of so-called Sprachwurzeln—was untenable. ‘‘The empirical demonstration by which Noiré strove to justify this speculative thesis has to be sure been discredited.’’≥≥ But Cassirer believed that he could retain

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their general argument that language developed in the context of a primitive horde engaged in common work and that this fact also explains the social and not private character of language. Moreover, he adopted the general theory of human development as it was expressed in Kapp and Noiré. Cassirer therefore approvingly quoted the idea that ‘‘objectification’’ in language and tool use facilitates reflection, that reflection in particular and ever-growing ‘‘mediation’’ in general are exactly what distinguishes humans from the instinctive behavior of animals (and lower stages of human development from higher). Much in the same way, Cassirer also adopts and generalizes Ernst Kapp’s idea of ‘‘organ projection’’ and maintains that reflection on the products (Werke) develops man’s self-consciousness in that he recognizes his own nature as it is embodied in his products.≥∂ But Cassirer does not restrict the validity of this principle of development to the first stages of human emergence out of nature. Thus he explicitly attributes to tool use the key role in introducing the most important principle into human objective practice and thought, that is, causal thinking. The importance of this development cannot be overestimated. The fact that it implies the overcoming of magic and of myth in general is merely a side effect. Moreover, Cassirer maintains that development consists exactly in a series of such acts of objectification, contemplation and reflection, development of subjectivity and knowledge, new objectification, and so on. It is important to realize that Cassirer not only adopted Kapp’s, Geiger’s, and Noiré’s ideas on human development, but that he generalizes them to form the general mechanism of development, applying them also to practices of ‘‘ideal culture.’’ Moreover, Cassirer’s main idea concerning symbols is based on the seminal idea of Noiré: the emergence of the new depends on the dual nature of human means, be they tools, language, or symbols in general. They all are material and sensible and yet embody an ideal content. This dual nature allows for genuine synthesis, for a development which is not merely the unfolding of a previously existing idea. Cassirer’s debt to Geiger, Kapp, and Noiré is obvious but of no interest here. Rather, I want to suggest that Noiré’s theory offered Cassirer the essential mechanism of development which Leibniz could not offer him. Noiré formulated a theory of reflection by which the ‘‘objectification’’ in tools and subsequent reflection enabled new syntheses, the growth of knowledge and conceptual development, whereas in Leibniz the concept was ‘‘pregnant with the future’’ exactly because the future was not new but merely the unfolding of the determinations of the complete concept. Little wonder then that Cassirer adopted Noiré’s theory for the first stages of human development and retained it even though he knew that important empirical support for this ‘‘speculative’’

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theory, the linguistic theory of Sprachwurzeln, was already untenable when he first referred to the theory in the first volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Moreover, Cassirer generalized the principle of development offered in this theory to form the mechanism of development and thus the core of his philosophy of symbolic forms. But as I will argue in the next section, Cassirer’s idealistic prejudices had two negative effects on the realization of his program. First, Cassirer concentrated exclusively on ‘‘spiritual culture’’ and completely neglected material culture. Second, he focused exclusively on the ‘‘spiritual’’ aspects and content of cultural products and neglected the material-sensuous character of symbolism, thus forsaking the mechanism of development it was dependent upon. The system of philosophy which Cassirer set out to develop thus resembles a collection of materials and means necessary for this edifice, but the construction itself has not yet been achieved.

Missing Construction Cassirer’s unequivocal statements on the analogous role of language and technology in human development and in human cognition and his indiscriminate use of either definition of man—as a ‘‘speaking’’ and as a ‘‘tool-making’’ animal—arouse of course the expectation that his presentation will give similar weight to both language and technology.≥∑ This is obviously not the case. We do find in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms a volume dedicated to language, but no volume, not even a chapter, dedicated to technology. Moreover, not one development is explained with reference to technology. In fact, no specific tools and no specific kind of work are mentioned in Cassirer’s three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, nor, to my knowledge, anywhere else. The sole references we find are those general declarative statements already quoted on the crucial importance of technology, and these statements are usually taken from other authors. This in itself should cause astonishment. Cassirer must have been the most erudite philosopher of the twentieth century, and he wrote on an extremely wide range of topics in very different fields, ranging from contemporary physics to primitive myths, from ancient philosophy to the Fascist technique of rule. And yet he did not ever write anything on a topic which he considered at least as important for cognition as language. Cassirer’s essay on technology (‘‘Form und Technik’’) seems to be proof to the contrary, yet it rather confirms his disregard for technology and for tool use in general. Although Cassirer opens this essay with the declaration that technology has the strongest impact on culture compared to all other areas, he avoids all examples and all discussion of some real piece of technology, let

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alone references to technological innovations of his time. His discussion reads like an extensive appeal to gentlemen of ‘‘Bildung’’ not to despise technology. The general motif is that technology is not the other of spiritual culture, but rather a different form of the appearance of ideas. Material culture is acknowledged as culture after being purified of matter and shown to be ‘‘Geist.’’ Thus technology is now adduced as an argument for idealism. The following lines faithfully represent the tendency of the entire paper: ‘‘The power of the ‘materialistic’ vein of thought and of the materialistic Fragestellung has been broken for a long time now also in technology. Whenever its basis and justification are scrutinized, this question is ever more clearly and consciously posed in the direction of the ‘idea’ which it embodies, of the essential spiritual determination which is fulfilled by it,’’≥∏ and so on and so forth. Not a word is said here on technology as something material. Cassirer forfeits the possibilities opened by the seminal principle of synthesis: genuine synthesis, the emergence of the new, was thought possible because practice ‘‘synthesized’’ two independent and irreducible factors, the ideal and the material. In his essay on technology, Cassirer’s idealism thus tempts him to give up precisely the very idea which he introduced as the principle of development into his philosophy. The fabric of Cassirer’s system depends on an adequate mechanism of development, and this he found in the dual nature of human means, their material and spiritual determinations. Cassirer’s idealism made him emphasize the spiritual and neglect the material nature of human ‘‘works.’’ Cassirer was primarily concerned with the refutation of empiricism and materialism (which he considers to be equivalent and best represented in history by Aristotle), and therefore with the proof that even the crudest human practice embodies an ‘‘idea’’ and transcends the empirically given. He repeats this point over and over again—but says nothing of the material aspect of technology. As a result, work with tools and technology are conceived as just another appearance of pure ‘‘ideas,’’ notwithstanding the explicit declarations to the contrary. These turn out to be mere declarations which do not inform Cassirer’s discussions of concrete development. Devoid of the dual material and spiritual nature, Cassirer’s idea of symbol cannot carry the burden of explaining development which would be different from the unfolding of an already existing implicit content. This plainly has fatal consequences for the core of Cassirer’s program and indeed renders his philosophy of symbolic forms as it stands a mere aggregate and not a system. The appearance of a system is given by the ordered presentation of the topics (both within a symbolic form and of the symbolic forms among themselves) in the volumes carrying the title The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, by the use of ordering adjectives (‘‘higher’’ vs. ‘‘lower,’’ ‘‘mediated’’ vs. ‘‘immediate,’’ ‘‘abstract’’ vs. ‘‘concrete,’’ etc.), and by declarations of

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principles. All this suggests the existence of a formative principle producing the different cultural products out of each other and thus tying them up into a system. The reader may supplement the missing bond (perhaps inadvertently) so as to give the collection an insinuated coherence and turn it into a system, but the unifying principle is not really at work there. It is not easy to prove the absence of something, and it is therefore not easy to show that Cassirer does not do what he undertook to do. Quoting each development referred to by Cassirer and showing that either its construction is not shown or else is given in terms of ‘‘Geist’’ and the like would require the replication of Cassirer’s oeuvre. I will therefore have to adduce more general evidence. Consider the place of Cassirer’s essay ‘‘Form und Technik.’’ The very existence of the essay seems to refute my theses on the neglect of technology by Cassirer. But Cassirer had written on the crucial importance of tool use and language in the first volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923), and he published the third volume of this magnum opus in 1927, three years before the essay ‘‘Form und Technik.’’ At least in these three volumes, tool use is mentioned in a declaratory manner, but it is not adduced as an explanatory principle. Neither in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms nor after the publication of ‘‘Form und Technik’’ is the declaration on the formative role of tool use in conceptual development turned into an analysis of a real case. Moreover, when the duality of declaration and practice is overcome, it is in favor of the idealistic practice. In the last presentation of his philosophy, in his Essay on Man (1944), Cassirer again explicitly refers to ‘‘Werke’’: ‘‘Man’s outstanding characteristic, his distinguishing mark, is not his metaphysical or physical nature—but his work. It is this work, it is the system of human activities, which defines and determines the circle of ‘humanity.’ Language, myth, religion, art, science, history are the constituents, the various sectors of this circle’’ (68). This list of ‘‘works’’ simply duplicates the various symbolic forms appearing in the titles of the chapters in part 2 of the Essay on Man. It is striking that technology was not given a chapter in spite of its being acknowledged as a symbolic form in ‘‘Form und Technik.’’ But more important is the fact that in the definition of man by means of ‘‘work,’’ ‘‘work’’ proper and tools are omitted and ‘‘work’’ and culture turn out to be exclusively spiritual. Technology and tool use are not mentioned at all in this systematic presentation (the best, to my mind) of Cassirer’s philosophy. In fact, not only does tool use disappear from sight, but also the dual material and ideal nature of the cultural means and products discussed by Cassirer. Thus, in his treatment of language, we find not a word on the special contribution of written as opposed to oral tradition, on print as opposed to handwrit-

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ten manuscripts. It is merely the ideal ‘‘meaning’’ which is discussed. The same disregard for material nature shows also in Cassirer’s treatment of his main general thesis concerning symbols. This shows best at places where specific systems of signs are used. Thus we find a general declaration of the importance of symbols in science, but not a single analysis of the role of specific symbols, not even in mathematics.≥π

Conclusion What is the consequence of these observations? It seems to me that nothing less than Cassirer’s philosophical project is at stake. Cassirer rarely explicitly defines his philosophical program. He usually immediately shifts to a criticism of empiricism. This, no doubt, is a philosophical motivation, but it is not a positive program itself. Yet in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Cassirer does present an agenda of his own. In his introduction, he presents his program as a critical variation on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Moreover, the order of topics discussed (both within each symbolic form and of the symbolic forms among themselves) and Cassirer’s qualifications which place them on scales ranging from simple and immediate, expressive, undifferentiated and concrete, and so on, to complex and mediated, symbolic, differentiated and abstract, and so on, all implicitly and explicitly convey the message that a ‘‘phenomenology of spirit’’ in Hegel’s sense is intended. And it is indeed with reference to Hegel that Cassirer characterizes his work: ‘‘Thus, although myth, language, and art interpenetrate one another in their concrete historical manifestations, the relation between them reveals a definite systematic gradation, and ideal progression toward a point where the spirit not only is and lives in its own creations, its self-created symbols, but also knows them for what they are. Or, as Hegel set out to show in his Phänomenologie des Geistes: the aim of spiritual development is that cultural reality be apprehended and expressed not merely as substance but ‘equally as subject.’ ’’≥∫ Now, this philosophical program would coincide with Hegel’s if it were to present the unfolding of the logical content encapsulated in ‘‘spirit.’’ Cassirer’s alternative program depends on his claim that symbolic forms are genuinely pluralistic, that is, essentially different from each other and not merely in the form of presentation of the same content. This character of symbolic form depends on the ‘‘Werke’’ being products of genuine synthesis. Genuine synthesis is synthesis of elements irreducible to each other; in Kant these are sensibility and understanding, in Cassirer these are more generally sensibility and meaning. Wherever one of the factors is missing, no real synthesis occurs. And since the materiality of symbols plays no role in Cassirer’s actual presentation of conceptual development (pace the declaration in abstracto that it does), he

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does not show that the ‘‘works’’ of culture are the result of genuine synthesis. It is therefore that Cassirer falls back on Leibniz and on Hegel and practically reduces development to the unfolding of an already existing content. I have argued that this is so because Cassirer lacks the second independent factor, the material nature of all symbols and of course of tool use, which he considers the most important factor in human development, together with language. But why is this so? Why didn’t Cassirer follow his insight, why didn’t he ever take seriously the material nature of symbols, and why didn’t he pay any attention to technology in spite of the crucial role he attributed to it? This question cannot be answered here, and I presume that the answer is not philosophical but sociological, perhaps even psychological. All plausible answers can serve as legitimate hypotheses. Thus Cassirer’s idealist neo-Kantian background can be made responsible, or the social milieu of the grande bourgeoisie where all talk of ‘‘material’’ matters was considered vulgar and ‘‘Geist’’ was respected.≥Ω A discussion of these and other possible explanations for the strange phenomenon of Cassirer’s disregard for his main principle is no longer part of an interpretation of the philosophy but an explanation of the person. And this is not the issue here. It is, however, of philosophical importance to realize that Cassirer’s neglect of the material character of cultural means and products, whether symbolism or tools, is not simply a question of emphasis, of a stronger or weaker accent on pragmatic considerations. In Cassirer’s philosophy the dual character of human action and products was the key to explaining development, and this was the principle unifying his philosophy. What separates success from failure in Cassirer’s philosophy, what distinguishes the history of ideas from a system of developmental-constructivist philosophy in his case, is exactly the successful application of his principle of development, and this depends on the dual, spiritual and material nature of human practice. Cassirer’s philosophical enterprise may be considered a failure precisely because he excluded the material nature of human action from his considerations. Nowhere did he seriously attempt such a reconstruction based on the dual material and ideal nature of the symbol. I maintain that this very promising program has not yet failed but awaits a serious attempt at its realization.

Notes 1. Cassirer’s recurrent criticism of empiricism always presupposes—usually as a matter of course—the vantage point of ‘‘critical idealism.’’ Cassirer’s own position is generally expressed in such a manner that it has to be gathered from his presentation and criticism of another view. A rare exception in which Cassirer explicitly characterizes himself as an idealist is in the foreword to the PSF, where he first speaks of the ‘‘erkennnt-

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iskritische Grundgedanke’’ (PsF, 1: viii; PSF, 1: 71: the English uses the misleading ‘‘epistemological’’ for ‘‘erkenntniskritisch’’) by which his work is oriented and names Ernst Hoffmann and Emil Wolf, who share with him the ‘‘fundamental conviction on which this book rests: . . . that all basic functions of the human spirit can be philosophically elucidated only within a general system of philosophical idealism’’ (PsF, 1: ix; PSF, 1: 72). 2. See also the numerous entries under ‘‘Konstruktion’’ in the index to volume 2 of Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer 1907). 3. On the continental neo-Kantian philosophical interpretation of Cassirer as opposed to the Anglo-American historical interpretation, cf. John Michael Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 2–13. 4. Very much in the language of his early work, Cassirer uses here the simile of the relation of a differential equation to individual values: the general law is contained in each element and exists only in the elements (PsF, 1: 40; PSF, 1: 104–5). 5. Oswald Schwemmer, Ernst Cassirer: Ein Philosoph der europäischen Moderne (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), 40–41. ‘‘Wenn nämlich alle symbolischen Formen im Mythos gründen, so wäre für deren Entwicklung . . . eher das Bild einer Rosette zu wählen, aus deren Mythos-Mitte die Blätter der anderen symbolischen Formen herauswachsen: durch den Mythos bleibend miteinander verbunden und doch in eigenen Richtungen und eigenständigen Gestaltungen’’ (41). I believe that this interpretation does not capture either the presentation of the symbolic forms in PSF or Cassirer’s characterization of their relation. The symbolic form of science, e.g., is connected to the center only through the mediation of symbolic forms other than myth. Its direct origin is not myth but rather the ‘‘natural world-view,’’ i.e., in the rational discourse and practice of early modern Western civilization, and this worldview is constructed by the representational level (Darstellungsfunktion) of natural language (itself a symbolic form). Discussing science, Cassirer names but one ‘‘mythical’’ element, the concept of ‘‘force,’’ which still shows traces of its mythical origin—not more. But even if Schwemmer’s interpretation could be defended, the connection among the symbolic forms would be reduced to a historical one, i.e., to their having grown out of the same mythical ‘‘Mutterboden’’ (Cassirer, ‘‘Sprache und Mythos,’’ Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969], 112). This would not justify the thesis that they form a ‘‘system.’’ Schwemmer believes that a hierarchical order of symbolic forms corresponding to the order ‘‘Ausdruck-, Darstellungs- und Bedeutungsfunktion’’ is a neoKantian relic in Cassirer (‘‘Rest-Neukantianismus,’’ Schwemmer, 40). This hardly does justice to Cassirer’s recurrent announcement of this principle, but it seems to me that this ‘‘relic’’ is common ground to all philosophy in the tradition of the Enlightenment from Kant via Hegel to Marx and neo-Kantianism and until this very day. 6. Thus Cassirer explicitly formulates both demands of construction—concatenations of the different products and their hierarchy—in connection with Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes: ‘‘Thus, although myth, language and art interpenetrate one another in their concrete historical manifestations, the relation between them reveals a definite systematic gradation, an ideal progression’’ (PsF, 2: 34; PSF, 2: 26). 7. As far as I see, Cassirer’s claim that the symbolic forms form a system has hitherto not been taken seriously nor has it been suggested in what their unity consists. 8. ‘‘Critical idealism puts itself a different and more modest task than the absolute

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idealism of Hegel. It does not pretend to be able to understand the contents and the scope of culture so as to give a logical deduction of all its single steps and a metaphysical description of the universal plan according to which they evolve from the absolute nature and substance of mind. But in spite of this critical reserve, it does not think that the single stages and process by which the universe of culture is built up lack true and real unity, that they are nothing but disjecta membra/scattered fragments.’’ This clear presentation of the problem gives place in the attempt toward a solution to an oddly vague appeal to a ‘‘dynamic sense.’’ ‘‘We cannot define and we cannot explain the unity . . . it must be understood in a dynamic sense. It must be produced.’’ Cassirer, ‘‘Critical Idealism as a Philosophy of Culture’’ (1936), in Cassirer, Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935–1945, ed. Donald Phillip Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 64–92, quotation 89–90. 9. A major problem in Cassirer’s elaboration of his philosophy is that he neglects the difference between ‘‘material’’ and ‘‘means.’’ Thus when discussing language, it is often unclear whether he thinks of linguistic structures or of the content expressed by these structures, the so-called ‘‘natürlicher Welt-Begriff.’’ 10. For an old and very thoughtful discussion of the relation between historical and philosophical analysis in the ‘‘critical’’ tradition, see Wilhelm Windelband’s ‘‘Kritische oder genetische Methode?’’ (1883), Präludien, 7th and 8th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1921), vol. 2, 99–135. Here and elsewhere Cassirer ignores Windelband. 11. This of course raises the question of what the causes for the change of ‘‘action’’ are. This question is dealt with in Noiré’s theory and will be mentioned below. 12. See Schwemmer, 46–49. 13. Full documentation would include Cassirer’s entire oeuvre. The title of Cassirer’s Substanzbegriff and Funktionsbegriff (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1910) may suffice. 14. See, e.g., Leibniz’s Essais de Theodicée, # 360: ‘‘C’est une des regles de mon systeme de l’harmonie generale, que le present est gros de l’avenir.’’ See also the so-called Monadology # 22 and the letters to Bayle of 1702. 15. To my knowledge, there is no exception to this kind of formulation, and indeed they express Cassirer’s view very well. Cf. Schwemmer, 46–49, for a collection of such statements. 16. The Marburg school of neo-Kantianism is of course another case in point, since one of its main concerns was to reduce as much as possible the share of intuition in cognition. Cassirer revises his formerly neo-Kantian position exactly in this point, the recognition of the independent role of sensuality. However, in practice he did not really overcome this heritage, and in my view this is also the source of his failure. 17. ‘‘Form und Technik’’ (1930), Symbol, Technik, Sprache: Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1927–1933, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and John Michael Krois with the assistance of Josef M. Werle (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1985), 39–90. 18. Ludwig Noiré, Das Werkzeug und seine Bedeutung für die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Menschheit (Mainz: Diemer, 1880). 19. PsF, 1: 133; PSF, 1: 185. 20. PsF, 1: 259; PSF, 1: 286–87. 21. In tool use ‘‘kündigt sich die Götterdämmerung der mystisch-mythischen Welt an’’ (‘‘Form und Technik,’’ 63). Note that here also Cassirer presupposes not merely the

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supremacy but also the antecedence of ‘‘spirit’’ (myth) over ‘‘matter’’ (labor and tools). It is difficult to believe that such a view may be taken literally, and yet Cassirer repeats it to his very last days and even in the same book where he approvingly quotes the opposite view: The Myth of the State. There, Cassirer approvingly quotes Malinowski’s view that ‘‘When the native has to produce an implement, he does not refer to magic. He is strictly empirical, that is, scientific, in the choice of his material, in the manner in which he strikes, cuts, and polishes the blade’’ (MS, 278). Here tool use appears as the diametrical opposite of myth, as the origin and the area of rationality. And yet Cassirer also writes: ‘‘Man began as homo magus; but from the age of magic he passed to the age of technics. The homo magus of former times and of primitive civilization became a homo faber, a craftsman and artisan’’ (MS, 281). In short, Cassirer’s prejudices concerning the supremacy of spirit surface even when he is approvingly quoting the opposite view. 22. PsF, 2: 256; PSF, 2: 214–15. 23. ‘‘Form und Technik,’’ 65n, referring to Noiré, 34. 24. ‘‘Denn das Werkzeug tritt in die Sphäre der Abstraktion, durch welche allein Dinge, losgelöst von dem Zusammenhang der Umgebung und der allenthalten ineinander fließenden Erscheinungen, gedacht werden, d.h. für das menschliche Denken entstehen können’’ (Noiré, 37). 25. ‘‘Denn die Zähne selbst stehen nur wenig unter der Controlierenden Herrschaft des Gesichtssinns. Ihre nahe Verbindung mit den Nerven, die den Trieb des Nahrungsbedrüfnisses vertreten und localisieren, lassen auch eine ruhige und leidenschaftslose Tätigkeit nicht wohl zu’’ (Noiré, 90). 26. ‘‘Organ-Projection ist das Versetzen des inneren Mechanismus in die Außenwelt, wo derselbe sichtbar, phänomenal wird, und in seiner rein mechanischen Wirkung aufgefaßt, vervollkommnet und so das Mittel einer stets klareren Erkenntnis wie auch einer stets fortschreitenden Krafterhöhung werden kann’’ (Noiré, 53). 27. ‘‘Also nur aus der objektiven Welt entzündet und erleuchtet sich das Selbstbewußtsein: aber nicht aus der objektiven Welt als solcher, wie sie uns rings umgibt und entgegenstarrt und ja wohl auch von dem Thiere angestarrt d.h. verständnislos gesehen wird, sondern insofern sie von dem menschlichen Willen der menschlichen Tätigkeit, d.h. dem subjectiven Factor verändern, modificiert, umgestaltet wird’’ (Noiré, 61, 62). 28. Ibid., 106. 29. Ibid., 108. 30. PsF, 1: 257; PSF, 1: 216. 31. PsF, 1: 258; PSF, 1: 216. 32. PsF, 2: 258–59; PSF, 2: 216–17. Cassirer formulates in the manuscript on ‘‘Basisphänomene’’ much in the same vein: ‘‘Daher ist es auch richtig, daß das ‘Sein’ uns zunächst nicht als ein völlig abgelöstes So-Sein (‘Ausser uns’-Sein) gegeben ist, sondern daß es uns gegeben ist, in dem Medium des Werks—es ist (beharrendes) Werkzeug . . . Der Übergang zum ‘bleibenden’ Werk (Produkt) und zum ‘immer in gleicher Weise anwendbaren’ Werkzeug schließt dem Menschen die ‘objektive’ Sphäre—die Sphäre der ‘Sachen’ erst eigentlich auf -’’ (ECN 1, 137). 33. PsF, 1: 259–60; PSF, 1: 287; see ‘‘Form und Technik,’’ 65n. 34. Cassirer expresses his reservation concerning Kapp’s metaphysical underpinnings of his thesis (‘‘Form und Technik,’’ 72).

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35. ‘‘Form und Technik,’’ 51–52. 36. Ibid., 43. 37. Cassirer does not even mention Cajori’s A History of Mathematical Notations, which was published as early as 1925. 38. PsF, 2: 34; PSF, 2: 26. 39. The classical example for such an attitude are of course Walter Rathenau’s books, one of which is quoted by Cassirer in his essay on technology. See the caricature of Rathenau in Robert Musil’s figure of Arnheim in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

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The Davos Disputation and Twentieth-Century Philosophy michael friedman

The Davos disputation between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer in 1929 is of course well known to all students of Cassirer. What is perhaps not so well known is the way in which the Davos disputation can be seen as a watershed in the development of twentieth-century philosophy more generally and, in particular, in the evolving split between analytic and continental philosophical traditions. For it turns out that Rudolf Carnap (a leading representative of the Vienna Circle of logical empiricists) attended the Davos disputation, took a very serious interest in Heidegger and Being and Time when he returned to Vienna, and wrote (and delivered) drafts of his famous paper ‘‘Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Syntax der Sprache’’ (where he criticizes Heidegger over ‘‘Nothingness itself nothings’’ [Das Nichts selbst nichtet]) directly in the wake of this experience. This paper appeared in Erkenntnis, the official journal of the Vienna Circle, in 1932. Shortly after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 (during which, as is well known, Heidegger assumed the rectorship at Freiburg while publicly embracing the new regime), both Cassirer and Carnap emigrated to the New World, and Heidegger was the only philosopher of the first rank to remain on the Continent. This, in both temporal and geographical terms, represents the beginning of the analytic/ continental divide. In my recent work A Parting of the Ways I attempt to examine the nature

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and origin of this analytic/continental divide through the lens of this one especially important defining episode: the Davos encounter between Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger.∞ It emerges, in particular, that Cassirer is an especially important figure in appreciating the present prospects for overcoming this divide because it is he, and he alone, who continued the original Kantian project of comprehending, within a single philosophical framework, both the achievements of scientific knowledge and those in other cultural realms. What I hope to do here is sketch some of the basic ideas presented in A Parting of the Ways, especially concerning the roots of all three thinkers in the neo-Kantian tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and concerning Cassirer’s special ‘‘mediating’’ role. At the time of the Davos disputation Cassirer and Heidegger were arguably the two leading philosophers in Germany. Cassirer was the most eminent active Kant scholar and the editor of the then standard edition of Kant’s works, and he had just completed his own magnum opus, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Heidegger had recently published Being and Time and was in the process of taking Edmund Husserl’s place as the leader of the phenomenological movement. The interpretation of Kant that Heidegger presented there (in explicit opposition to Marburg neo-Kantianism) aimed to show that the Critique of Pure Reason does not present a theory of mathematical natural scientific knowledge. The real contribution of the Critique is rather to work out, for the first time, the problem of the laying of the ground for metaphysics. On this reading, Kant argues (in remarkable agreement with the main argument of Being and Time) that metaphysics can only be grounded in a prior analysis of the nature of finite human reason. Moreover, Kant’s introduction of the so-called transcendental schematism of the understanding has the effect of dissolving both sensibility and the understanding in a ‘‘common root,’’ namely, the transcendental imagination, whose ultimate basis (again in remarkable agreement with the argument of Being and Time) is temporality. And this implies, finally, that the traditional basis of Western metaphysics in logos, Geist, or reason, is definitively destroyed. Cassirer, for his part, strongly opposes such a renunciation of reason. Although man as the ‘‘symbolic animal’’ must begin with the transcendental imagination and thus with finitude, it is nevertheless clear, as Kant himself has shown, that the finite human creature can nevertheless break free from finitude into the realm of objectively valid, necessary, and eternal truths both in moral experience and in mathematical natural science. Carnap’s criticism of Heidegger, although not expressed in the same language, brings up closely related issues. The main problem with ‘‘Nothingness itself nothings,’’ for Carnap, is a violation of the logical form of the concept of

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nothing. Heidegger uses the concept both as a substantive and as a verb, whereas modern logic has shown that it is neither—its logical form is constituted solely by existential quantification and negation. Yet Carnap clearly recognizes, at the same time, that this kind of criticism would not affect Heidegger himself in the slightest; the real issue between the two lies in the circumstance that Heidegger denies while Carnap affirms the philosophical centrality of logic and the exact sciences. Carnap accordingly refers explicitly to such Heideggerian passages as the following: Nothingness is the source of negation, not vice versa. If the power of the understanding in the field of questions concerning nothingness and being is thus broken, then the fate of the dominion of ‘‘logic’’ within philosophy is also decided therewith. The idea of ‘‘logic’’ itself dissolves in a vortex of more original questioning. The supposed soberness and superiority of science becomes ridiculous if it does not take nothingness seriously. Only because nothingness is manifest can science make what exists itself into an object of investigation. Only if science takes its existence from metaphysics can it always reclaim anew its essential task, which does not consist in the accumulation and ordering of objects of acquaintance but in the ever to be newly accomplished disclosure of the entire expanse of truth of nature and history. Therefore no rigor of a science can attain the seriousness of metaphysics. Philosophy can never be measured by the standard of the idea of science.≤

Moreover, Heidegger, in what looks like a response to Carnap in 1943, reiterates the same point in even stronger terms: The suspicion directed against ‘‘logic,’’ whose conclusive degeneration may be seen in logistic [modern mathematical logic], arises from the knowledge of that thinking that finds its source in the truth of being, but not in the consideration of the objectivity of what exists. Exact thinking is never the most rigorous thinking, if rigor [Strenge] receives its essence otherwise from the mode of strenuousness [Anstrengung] with which knowledge always maintains the relation to what is essential in what exists. Exact thinking ties itself down solely in calculation with what exists and serves this [end] exclusively.≥

It is clear, then, that Heidegger and Carnap are actually in remarkable agreement. ‘‘Metaphysical’’ thought of the type Heidegger is trying to awaken is possible only as the basis of a prior overthrow of the authority and primacy of logic and the exact sciences. The difference is that Heidegger eagerly embraces such an overthrow, whereas Carnap is determined to resist it at all costs. The philosophical issues between Carnap and Heidegger, and also between

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Heidegger and Cassirer, are thus based, in the end, on a stark and profound disagreement over the nature and centrality of logic, mathematics, and the mathematical exact sciences. For both Carnap and Cassirer these are of central philosophical significance indeed, whereas Heidegger is self-consciously looking for a source of philosophical significance lying at a much ‘‘deeper’’ and less ‘‘rational’’ level. In tracing out the roots of this fundamental disagreement, it turns out, we need to return to the issues about neo-Kantianism and the ‘‘transcendental schematism of the understanding’’ raised in the CassirerHeidegger disputation at Davos. The first point to notice is that all three men—Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger—were philosophically trained within the neo-Kantian tradition that dominated the German-speaking world at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. At the time, there were two main distinguishable versions: the Marburg school founded by Hermann Cohen and then continued by Paul Natorp and (at least until about 1920) Cassirer himself, and the Southwest school founded by Wilhelm Windelband and systematically developed by Heinrich Rickert. Heidegger completed his habilitation under Rickert at Freiburg (before the latter succeeded Windelband at Heidelberg). Carnap, for his part, studied Kant at Jena with Bruno Bauch—another student of Rickert’s from Freiburg—and, in fact, wrote his doctoral dissertation under Bauch. It is clear, moreover, that Carnap carefully studied both versions of neo-Kantianism, including the writings of Natorp, Cassirer, and Rickert. Common to both versions is a certain conception of epistemology and the object of knowledge inherited from Kant. Our knowledge or true judgments should not be construed as representing objects or entities that exist independently of our judgments, whether these independent entities are the ‘‘transcendent’’ objects of the metaphysical realist existing somehow ‘‘behind’’ our sense experience or the naked, unconceptualized sense experience itself beloved of the empiricist. Rather, following Kant’s ‘‘Copernican revolution,’’ the object of knowledge does not exist independently of our judgments at all. On the contrary, this object is first created or ‘‘constituted’’ when the unconceptualized data of sense are organized or framed within the a priori logical structures of judgment itself. In this way, the initially unconceptualized data of sense are brought under a priori ‘‘categories’’ and thus first become capable of empirical objectivity. Yet there is a crucially important difference between this neo-Kantian account of the object of knowledge and judgment and Kant’s original account. For Kant, we cannot explain how the object of knowledge becomes possible on the basis of the a priori logical structures of judgment alone. We need additional a priori structures that mediate between the pure forms of judg-

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ment comprising what Kant calls general logic and the unconceptualized manifold of impressions supplied by the senses. These mediating structures are the pure forms of sensible intuition, space and time. Thus the pure logical forms of judgment become categories only when they are ‘‘schematized’’—when they are given a determinate spatio-temporal content in relation to the pure forms of sensible intuition. The pure logical form of a categorical judgment, for example, becomes the category of substance when it is schematized in terms of the temporal representation of permanence; the pure logical form of a hypothetical judgment becomes the category of causality when it is schematized in terms of the temporal representation of succession; and so on. For Kant, then, pure formal logic (general logic) must, if it is to play an epistemological role, be supplemented by what he calls transcendental logic—with the theory of how logical forms become schematized in terms of pure spatio-temporal representations belonging to the independent faculty of pure intuition. And it is precisely this account of schematization, in fact, that forms the heart of the transcendental analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason—the so-called metaphysical and transcendental deductions of the categories. But both versions of neo-Kantianism, following the tradition of postKantian idealism more generally, entirely reject the idea of an independent faculty of pure intuition. The a priori formal structures in virtue of which the object of knowledge becomes possible must therefore derive from the logical faculty of the understanding and from this faculty alone. Since space and time no longer function as independent forms of pure sensibility, the constitution of experience described by ‘‘transcendental logic’’ must now proceed on the basis of purely conceptual—and thus essentially non-spatio-temporal—a priori structures. And it is this last feature of their epistemological conception, moreover, that associates the neo-Kantians with the nineteenth-century tradition of ‘‘pure logic’’ (reine Logik) represented by Herbart, Bolzano, and Lotze, a tradition culminating with the polemic against the psychologism of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900). How, then, do we explain the constitution of the object of empirical knowledge within this revised form of Kantianism? Here the two different traditions—Marburg and Southwest—fundamentally diverge. On the so-called genetic conception of knowledge favored by the Marburg school, the object of empirical knowledge is explained as the never completed ‘‘X’’ toward which the methodological progress of mathematical natural science is converging. In Cassirer’s sophisticated presentation of this conception in Substance and Function (1910), for example, pure mathematics is represented by the totality of what we now call relational structures (the number series, the structure of Euclidean space, and so on) described by the modern logical theory of relations

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developed in Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics (1903). In mathematical natural science, however, we develop a particular ordered sequence of such structures—representing the historical-methodological evolution of this science—which is never complete but yet converging. The empirical object itself is then simply defined as the ideal limit structure (or limit theory) toward which this historical-methodological sequence is converging. The Marburg school thus advocates what we might call a ‘‘logicization’’ of the object of empirical knowledge, and it is no wonder, then, that this view becomes known as ‘‘logical idealism.’’ In the tradition of the Southwest school, by contrast, logic is identified with traditional Aristotelian syllogistic and is sharply and explicitly distinguished from mathematics. Moreover, we also follow Kant, in this tradition, in separating the logical forms of judgment, on the one side, from the unconceptualized manifold of sense-impressions, on the other. (In the Marburg tradition there is no such unconceptualized manifold.) Yet, since we have deliberately rejected the mathematical intermediary between these two sides developed by Kant himself—the pure forms of sensible intuition—overwhelming problems arise within the Southwest school in explaining how the pure forms of judgment can possibly serve to constitute the object of empirical knowledge. These problems become especially sharp and explicit in the work of Emil Lask, a brilliant student of Rickert who perished in the Great War in 1915. What Lask does, in essence, is entirely reject the project of Kant’s metaphysical deduction aiming to derive the categories constitutive of experience from the logical forms of judgment. For Lask, what is fundamental is the concrete, already categorized, real object of experience itself, and the subject matter of formal logic only arises subsequently in an artificial process of abstraction, by which the originally unitary categorized object is broken down into form and matter, subject and predicate, and so on. Moreover, since this comes about due to a fundamental weakness or peculiarity of our human understanding—our inability to grasp the unitary categorized object as a unity—the entire realm of ‘‘pure logic’’ is nothing but an artifact of our subjectivity possessing no explanatory power whatsoever. Now Carnap, in the Aufbau, can be seen as continuing, and radicalizing, the Marburg epistemological tradition. Carnap makes this kinship particularly explicit, in fact, when he first introduces the basic relation of what he calls his ‘‘constitutional system’’: Cassirer ([Substanzbegr.] 292ff.) has shown that a science having the goal of determining the individual through lawful interconnections [Gesetzeszusammenhänge] without its individuality being lost must apply, not class (‘‘spe-

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cies’’) concepts, but rather relational concepts; for the latter can lead to the formation of series and thereby to the establishing of order-systems. It hereby also results that relations are necessary as first posits, since one can in fact easily make the transition from relations to classes, whereas the contrary procedure is only possible in a very limited measure. The merit of having discovered the necessary basis of the constitutional system thereby belongs to two entirely different, and often mutually hostile, philosophical tendencies. Positivism has stressed that the sole material for cognition lies in the undigested [unverarbeitet] experiential given; here is to be sought the basic elements of the constitutional system. Transcendental idealism, however, especially the neo-Kantian tendency (Rickert, Cassirer, Bauch), has rightly emphasized that these elements do not suffice; order-posits [Ordnungssetzungen] must be added, our ‘‘basic relations.’’∂

Carnap then develops, by an elaborate series of logical constructions, a sequence of definitions ordered in the type-hierarchy of Whitehead’s and Russell’s Principia Mathematica (1910–13), proceeding from the private or autopsychological realm of a single cognitive subject, to a world of public external objects constituting the physical realm, and finally to the intersubjective and thus cultural realities belonging to the heteropsychological realm. In this way, all objects of empirical science (starting with empirical psychology and ending with sociology and history) are stepwise constructed or ‘‘constituted’’ by logical means, and this conception, as Carnap himself notes, is indeed closely analogous to that of the Marburg school: Constitutional theory and transcendental idealism agree in representing the following position: all objects of cognition are constituted (in idealistic language, are ‘‘generated in thought’’); and, moreover, the constituted objects are only objects of cognition qua logical forms constructed in a determinate way. This holds ultimately also for the basic elements of the constitutional system. They are, to be sure, taken as basis as unanalyzed unities, but they are then furnished with various properties and analyzed into (quasi-) constituents (§ 116); first hereby, and thus also first as constituted objects, do they become objects of cognition properly speaking—and, indeed, objects of psychology.∑

Indeed, there is one important respect in which Carnap’s conception is even more radical than that of the Marburg school. Cassirer’s Substance and Function, for example, retains a significant element of dualism between pure thought and empirical reality—the contrast between the pure relational structures of pure logic and mathematics, on the one side, and the historical sequence of successor theories representing the methodological progress of empirical natural science, on the other. For Carnap, by contrast, empirical reality simply is a particular logical structure, a type-theoretic structure (representing

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the epistemological progress of an initial cognitive subject) erected on the basis of a single primitive nonlogical relation—a structure, moreover, in which each empirical object is completely defined or constructed at a definite finite level within the hierarchy of logical types. Just as Carnap, in the Aufbau, can be seen as attempting to realize the philosophical ambitions of the Marburg school using the new mathematical logic of Principia Mathematica, Heidegger can be seen as attempting to resolve the outstanding problems of the Southwest school using the new phenomenological method due to Husserl. Thus Heidegger, in Being in Time, explicitly rejects the ‘‘Copernican revolution’’ favored by both neo-Kantian schools in favor a ‘‘direct realist’’ conception of truth and relation to an object derived from the Husserlian notion of ‘‘identification’’ and the work of Emil Lask. Objects, in their ‘‘disclosedness,’’ are prior to all valid judgments and thus prior, in particular, to the notion of logical form. Indeed, Dasein’s most fundamental relation to the world is not cognitive at all, but rather one of either ‘‘authentic’’ or ‘‘inauthentic’’ existence, in which Dasein’s own peculiar mode of being (that is, ‘‘being-in-the-world’’) is itself either disclosed or covered over. In this way, Heidegger further radicalizes Husserlian phenomenology by incorporating the historically oriented Lebensphilosophie of Wilhelm Dilthey, according to which the true ‘‘living subject’’ (in contrast to Husserlian ‘‘pure consciousness’’) is both concrete and fundamentally historical. Heidegger’s version of ‘‘direct realism’’ is thus only possible on the basis of what he calls the ‘‘historicity’’ of Dasein, and so all truth, in the end, must be seen as historically relative. Just as pure formal logic, for Lask, has lost all explanatory power even to begin the constitution of any actual empirical object, pure formal logic, from Heidegger’s point of view, is similarly irrelevant to the ‘‘existential analytic’’ of Dasein. This analytic must rather rest on a deeper, existential-hermeneutic analysis wherein both logic in particular and the notion of valid judgment in general emerge as decidedly secondary and ‘‘derivative’’ phenomena. Logical objectivity itself must be subordinated in principle to the analytic of Dasein and its historicity. I hope I have now conveyed a sense of how the fundamental disagreement between Carnap and Heidegger can be traced back to the deep fissures that had appeared (and were philosophically expressed in diverging directions in the two leading schools of neo-Kantianism) in Kant’s original conception of how the pure logical activities of the understanding meet the given empirical data supplied by the senses. Cassirer’s further development, throughout the 1920s, of his philosophy of symbolic forms is similarly framed within, and ultimately severely challenged by, this same post-Kantian predicament. Cassirer’s Substance and Function (1910) is perhaps the most sophisticated

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expression of the classical Marburg tradition. Kant’s ‘‘transcendental method’’ is seen as beginning with the ‘‘fact of science’’—the fact, that is, of the existence of mathematical exact science—and then seeking, by a regressive argument, for the conditions of the possibility of this fact. No longer exclusively tied to the Newtonian mathematical physics which provided Kant himself with his only model, however, science is now seen as an essentially dynamical process in which the fundamental mathematical structures employed in physics are continually revised without end. There is, nonetheless, a necessary element of convergence in this process of continual revision; and it is precisely this convergence that now underwrites the objectivity of the entire developmental sequence and also serves to ‘‘constitute’’ the empirical correlate to which it ‘‘corresponds’’—this is now simply defined, according to the genetic conception of knowledge, as the ideal limit structure toward which the sequence in question is converging. In the late teens and early twenties, however, Cassirer became convinced that this classical Marburg conception of knowledge is much too narrow. And he attempted to extend it, accordingly, to include the place of mathematical natural science in particular within a much wider conception of the development of human culture as a whole. Science, along with language, art, myth, religion, and so on is now seen as just one ‘‘symbolic form’’ among others, with no exclusive claim to objective validity. On the contrary, the notion of objective validity itself can now be properly understood only when we appreciate the differing claims to such validity expressed in the different symbolic forms, and when we then further grasp how the totality of symbolic forms are related. The task of transcendental philosophy is now no longer simply oriented to the fact of science, but rather to the much more general ‘‘fact of culture’’ as a whole. It is important to be clear about the precise nature of Cassirer’s break with neo-Kantianism here. For the Marburg neo-Kantians, like Kant himself, in no way limited philosophy to the study of scientific knowledge. Just as Kant himself had done, for example, Cohen wrote works on ethics, aesthetics, and religion as well as philosophy. Indeed, because of their overarching focus on the genetic conception of knowledge, it was especially natural for the Marburg school to incorporate ethics, aesthetics, and religion within a broadly Kantian framework. For Kant, scientific knowledge is framed by what he calls the regulative use of reason, through which reason is guided but not constrained by the idea of the unconditioned in pursuing the never-to-be-attained goal of an ideally complete scientific description of the world. In the Critique of Judgment (1790) Kant then incorporates aesthetics within this framework as a distinctive exercise of ‘‘reflective judgment’’ (which is closely connected with

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the regulative use of reason) and secures the unity of practical and theoretical reason by arguing that the idea of the unconditioned, which is wholly indeterminate as far as theoretical reason is unconcerned, first receives determinate meaning and content through the moral law as a product of pure practical reason. The full realization of the moral law in the ‘‘idea of the highest good’’ thereby secures the unity of theoretical, practical, and aesthetic judgment (and religion as well) as a ‘‘focus imaginarius’’ or ‘‘infinitely distant point.’’ Ethics, aesthetics, and religion thus emerge via a teleological extension, as it were, of the never ending genetic procedure characteristic of natural scientific knowledge. The philosophy of symbolic forms, however, is distinguished from traditional Kantian and neo-Kantian attempts to incorporate both scientific and nonscientific modes of thought within a single philosophical framework by its emphasis on more primitive forms of world-presentation—on the ordinary perceptual awareness of the world expressed, for Cassirer, primarily in natural language, and, above all, on the mythical view of the world lying at the most primitive level of all. These more primitive forms do not arise through any kind of extension or completion of the scientific form. On the contrary, they lie at a deeper level of spiritual life, which then gives rise to more sophisticated forms by a developmental process taking its starting point from this given basis. From mythical thought develop religion and art, from natural language develops theoretical science. In place of a teleological structure, therefore, we have what has been aptly called a ‘‘centrifugal’’ structure, as the more primitive forms give birth to the more sophisticated forms arranged around a common origin and center.∏ And it is precisely here, in particular, that Cassirer appeals to ‘‘romantic’’ philosophical tendencies lying outside the Kantian and neo-Kantian traditions—to speculations about the origins of language and human culture in Vico and Herder, to the pioneering work in the comparative study of languages and cultures by Wilhelm von Humboldt, to the naturphilosophisch and aesthetic ideals of Goethe. It is here that he supplements Kant with an historical dialectic self-consciously derived from Hegel (the title of the third volume is The Phenomenology of Knowledge, which, as Cassirer carefully explains, is taken from Hegel rather than modern Husserlian phenomenology), and it is here that he comes to terms with the contemporary Lebensphilosophie of Dilthey, Bergson, Scheler, and Simmel. Cassirer’s dialectical development of more sophisticated symbolic forms from more primitive forms runs through three fundamental types or ‘‘functions’’ of symbolic meaning. The expressive function (Ausdrucksfunktion) of symbolic meaning characterizes the most primitive level of mythical thought. Here we experience events in the world around us as charged with affective

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and emotional significance, as desirable or hateful, comforting or threatening. We thereby experience reality as a fleeting complex of events bound together by their affective and emotional ‘‘physiognomic’’ characters, rather than as a world of stable and enduring substances manifesting themselves from various points of view and on various occasions. In mythical thought, therefore, there is no essential distinction between appearance and reality. This distinction only emerges at the next stage, that of the representative function (Darstellungsfunktion) of symbolic meaning, which then has the task of precipitating out of the original mythical flux of ‘‘physiognomic’’ characters a world of stable and enduring substances, distinguishable and reidentifiable as such. And it is primarily through the medium of natural language, according to Cassirer, that we construct what he calls the ‘‘intuitive world’’ of ordinary sense perception, on the basis of what he calls intuitive space and intuitive time. We distinguish the enduring thing-substance from its variable manifestations from different points of view (in intuitive space) and on different occasions (in intuitive time), and we thereby arrive at a fundamental distinction between truth and falsehood, appearance and reality, which is expressed in its most developed form, for Cassirer, in the propositional copula. This distinction between appearance and reality, as expressed in the propositional copula, then leads naturally to a new task of thought, the task of theoretical science, of systematic inquiry into the realm of truths. Here we encounter the third and final function of symbolic meaning, the significative function (Bedeutungsfunktion), which is exhibited most clearly, according to Cassirer, in the ‘‘pure category of relation.’’ For it is precisely here, in the theoretical view of the world, that the pure relational concepts characteristic of modern mathematics, logic, and mathematical physics are finally freed from the bounds of sensible intuition. Mathematical space and time arise from intuitive space and time, for example, when we abstract from all demonstrative relation to a ‘‘here-and-now’’ and consider instead the single system of relations in which all possible ‘‘here-and-now’’ points are embedded; the mathematical system of the natural numbers arises when we abstract from all concrete applications of counting and consider instead the single potentially infinite progression wherein all possible applications of counting are comprehended; and so on. The result, in the end, is the world of modern mathematical physics described in Cassirer’s earlier scientific works—a pure system of mathematical relations where, in particular, the intuitive concept of substantial thing has finally been replaced by the relational-functional concept of universal law. In constructing this mathematical-physical world of pure significance, moreover, we need a fundamentally new type of symbolic instrument, namely,

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that which Leibniz had much earlier envisioned in the form of a ‘‘universal characteristic’’: This task would not be achievable if thought, in posing it, did not simultaneously create a new organ for it. It can no longer remain with those formations that the intuitive world brings to it ready made, as it were, but it must rather make the transition to constructing [aufzubauen] a realm of symbols in complete freedom, in pure self-activity. . . . A complex of signs now underlies the system of relations and of conceptual significance—a complex of signs that is built up in such a way that the interconnections holding between the individual elements of the latter system can be surveyed and read off from it. . . . Alongside of the ‘‘Scientia generalis’’ a ‘‘Characteristica generalis’’ is required. The work of language continues in this characteristic, but it simultaneously enters into a new logical dimension. For the signs of the characteristic have divested themselves of everything merely expressive, and, indeed, of everything intuitively-representative: they have become pure ‘‘signs of significance’’ (Bedeutungszeichen). We are thereby presented with a new type of ‘‘objective’’ meaning relation that is specifically different from every kind of ‘‘relation to an object’’ subsisting in perception or in empirical intuition.π

The language of mathematical-physical theory thereby transcends the ‘‘expressive’’ and ‘‘representative’’ stages of symbolic meaning exhibited in the mythical and intuitive worlds, and we thereby finally attain the stage of ‘‘purely symbolic’’ or ‘‘significative’’ meaning. All ‘‘picturing,’’ that is, must be replaced by the purely logical coordination (Zuordnung) described in Helmholtz’s theory of signs, and this project, as first clearly envisioned by Leibniz, finds its most precise and exact fulfillment in modern mathematical logic. By here endorsing a purely formal characterization of mathematicalphysical representation in the tradition of Leibniz’s ‘‘universal characteristic,’’ and Helmholtz’s theory of signs, Cassirer has moved quite far indeed from the original Kantian point of view and has come extremely close, in fact, to the position of Carnap and the logical positivists. The difference, however, is that this kind of mathematical-physical representation (what Cassirer calls ‘‘significative’’ or ‘‘purely symbolic’’ meaning) is, for Cassirer, only one type of objective symbolic meaning among others. And it can only be properly understood, according to Cassirer, when it is placed in the developmental or dialectical process we have just described—as something that necessarily evolves from the more primitive stages of expressive and representative meaning. Indeed, it is only in this way, according to Cassirer, that we can properly understand the respective claims to objective validity and truth within both the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften—which Cassirer himself prefers to refer to as the Kulturwissenschaften.

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It is precisely here that we encounter the sole critical remarks on Carnap’s philosophy that Cassirer ever published, in Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften (1942). Cassirer argues that expressive perception (Ausdruckswahrnehmen) (based on the expressive function of symbolic meaning) is just as fundamental as thing perception (Dingwahrnehmung) (based on the representative function of symbolic meaning). Neither can be reduced to the other, both are ‘‘primary phenomena’’ (Urphänomene). Moreover, whereas the physical sciences take their evidential base from the sphere of thing perception, the cultural sciences take theirs from the sphere of expressive perception and, more specifically, from the fundamental experience of other human beings as fellow selves sharing a common intersubjective world of ‘‘cultural meanings.’’ And it is at this point that Cassirer explicitly challenges the ‘‘physicalism’’ of the Vienna Circle, as articulated, in particular, in Carnap’s Pseudoproblems in Philosophy (1928) and The Unity of Science (1932). What Cassirer wants to oppose, of course, is the idea (originally developed in the Aufbau) that the domain of the ‘‘heteropsychological’’ must be constructed or constituted from the domain of the physical, from the purely physical phenomena of bodily motion, sign production, and the like. After citing a claim from Carnap to the effect that the language of physics is the only intersubjective language, Cassirer suggests that this conclusion, if strictly carried through, would entail the elimination of the genuinely cultural sciences. The only escape from this dilemma is to acknowledge, on the contrary, the independence and autonomy of all symbolic functions: ‘‘We must strive, without reservation or epistemological dogma, to understand each type of language in its own particular character—the language of science, the language of art, of religion, and so on; we must determine how much each contributes to the construction of a ‘common world.’ ’’∫ Acknowledging the autonomy of the expressive function, in particular, then allows us to grant the cultural sciences their own authority and autonomy. When we see that all ‘‘cultural meaning’’ is based, in the end, on the equally fundamental ‘‘primary phenomenon’’ of expression, there is no longer any reason to question the legitimacy of the cultural sciences from the point of view of the physical sciences, which are themselves based on the ‘‘primary phenomenon’’ of representation. Now Carnap, in the Aufbau, has no intention of questioning the legitimacy of the cultural sciences. These sciences acquire their own, relatively autonomous domain immediately after the construction of the heteropsychological realm. At the same time, however, Carnap does maintain the privileged position of the physical sciences, and he does say, in particular, that only the world of physics provides for the possibility of a ‘‘univocal, consistent intersubjectiv-

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ization.’’ But Carnap does not base this claim on any ‘‘naive empiricist’’ prejudice privileging ‘‘thing perception’’ over ‘‘expressive perception.’’ Carnap has no such philosophical views on the ultimate nature of perception at all. Rather, the language of physics is privileged because its exactness and precision of mathematical representation make it an exemplary vehicle for the kind of purely formal (purely structural) meaning Carnap hopes to capture in his fundamental method of logical construction: ‘‘Every scientific statement can in principle be so transformed that it is only a structural statement. But this transformation is not only possible, but required. For science wants to speak about the objective; however, everything that does not belong to structure but to the material, everything that is ostended concretely, is in the end subjective. In physics we easily recognize this desubjectivization, which has transformed almost all physical concepts into pure structure concepts.’’Ω Mathematical physics is privileged for Carnap because it provides the most highly developed example of what Cassirer calls the significative function of symbolic meaning. Cassirer himself of course agrees completely with this idea. He, too, holds that modern mathematical physics, as expressed especially within the language of modern mathematics and mathematical logic, presents us with the most highly developed form of the significative function of symbolic meaning. But the whole point of the philosophy of symbolic forms is that objectivity as such, intersubjective validity and communicability, is by no means confined to the significative function. Physical science has its own characteristic type of objectivity, expressed in universally valid mathematical laws holding for all times and all places. In the cultural sciences, however, we have access to a different but analogous type of objectivity, expressed in our ability continually to interpret and reinterpret human products or ‘‘works’’ from our own particular point of view within the historical development of culture: The constancy required for this purpose is not that of properties or laws, but rather that of meanings [Bedeutungen]. The more culture develops, the more particular domains [there are] in which it disperses itself, the more richly and variously this world of meanings forms itself. We live in the words of language, in the forms of poetry and plastic art, in the forms of music, in the structures of religious representation and religious belief. And only within these forms do we ‘‘know’’ one another. . . . The goal [of cultural science] is not the universality of laws, but neither is it the [mere] individuality of facts and phenomenon. In contrast to both it establishes its own ideal of knowledge. What it wishes to know is the totality of forms in which human life is realized. These forms are infinitely differentiated, but they do not lack unified structure. For it is ultimately the ‘‘same’’ human being that we always continually encounter in the development of culture, in thousands of manifestations and in thousands of masks.∞≠

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The constancy and objectivity in question, however, are not given, as it were, in the facts and phenomena of human cultural history itself. They are rather made by the philosophical history of culture, as it interprets those phenomena from precisely this point of view. The problem for Cassirer, however, is to explain more fully how the totality of symbolic forms in fact has a ‘‘unified structure’’ making possible a common claim to universal validity. In what precise sense is it the ‘‘same’’ human being encountered in all the symbolic functions? This problem is especially challenging and urgent for Cassirer because he continues to maintain, in good Marburg style, that the clearest and, as it were, ‘‘highest’’ form of universal validity is given by the language of mathematical exact science: And with this transition [to pure significative meaning] the realm of proper or rigorous ‘‘science’’ first opens up. In its symbolic signs and concepts everything that possesses mere expressive value is extinguished. Here there is to be no longer any individual subject, but only the thing itself is to ‘‘speak.’’ . . . However, what the formula [of this language] lacks in closeness to life and in individual fullness—this is now made up, on the other side, by its universality, by its scope and its universal validity. In this universality not only individual but also national differences are overcome. The plural concept of ‘‘languages’’ no longer holds sway: it is pushed aside and replaced by the thought of the characteristica universalis, which now enters the scene as ‘‘lingua universalis.’’ And now we hereby first stand at the birthplace of mathematical and mathematical natural scientific knowledge. From the standpoint of our general problem we can say that this knowledge begins at the point where thought breaks through the veil of language—not, however, in order to appear entirely unveiled, to appear devoid of all symbolic clothing, but rather in order to enter into an in principle different symbolic form.∞∞

This commitment to the originally Leibnizean ideal of a truly universal, transnational and transhistorical system of communication, exemplified by the logical-mathematical language of exact scientific thought, is enthusiastically embraced by Carnap as well. It constitutes, in fact, the very core and basis of Carnap’s whole philosophical orientation. The crucial difference between the two is that, whereas Carnap limits such truly universal intersubjective communicability to precisely that which is expressible in rigorous logical notation, Cassirer wants to extend it to all the other symbolic forms as well. But there are deep systematic difficulties standing in the way of this ambition. In the original Kantian architectonic, what Kant himself calls pure general logic (traditional Aristotelian formal logic) frames the entire system at the highest level, in that the traditional logical theory of concepts, judgments, and inferences supplies the formal systematic scaffolding on which Kant’s com-

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prehensive synthesis is constructed. The logical forms of concepts and judgments, when schematized by the faculty of sensibility, generate both the table of categories and the system of principles, which in turn underlie Kant’s ‘‘constitutive’’ theory of human sensible experience of the phenomenal world as made possible in pure mathematics and pure natural science. These same logical forms, considered independently of the faculty of sensibility, then generate the concept of the noumenon, which remains merely ‘‘problematic,’’ however, from a theoretical point of view. Moreover, the basic logical forms of (syllogistic) inference, again considered independently of sensibility, generate the idea of the unconditioned, which also remains ‘‘indeterminate’’ from a theoretical point of view, although, nonetheless, it possesses positive guiding force in the ‘‘regulative use of reason.’’ This same faculty of reason, finally, when applied to the determination of the will, also generates the moral law as a product of pure practical reason. Here the idea of the unconditioned receives positive ‘‘constitutive’’ content, which can then set a definite teleological goal (the ideal of the highest good) as the highest guiding principle of all regulative activity, both practical and theoretical. The most fundamental problem created by the post-Kantian rejection of the central Kantian distinction between sensible and intellectual faculties, then, lies in the destruction of this intricate architectonic. It is no longer possible, in particular, to view pure formal logic as the most clearly and uncontroversially universal form of human thinking and also as the framework for a comprehensive philosophy of the whole of our intellectual and cultural life. Cassirer’s herculean efforts to construct a similarly comprehensive philosophy of symbolic forms make this problem especially clear. For, whereas Cassirer perseveres in the idea that pure formal logic (in its modern, post-Kantian guise as a sufficient and adequate language for all of mathematics and exact science) provides us with the paradigm of truly universal intersubjective communicability as well, he also wants to maintain a complementary but still universal intersubjective validity in the essentially nonmathematical cultural sciences. He never satisfactorily explains, however, how these two characteristically different types of validity are related, and he never makes clear, in particular, how truly universal, transcultural validity is possible outside the mathematical exact sciences. Thus, if Cassirer cannot make good on the idea of an underlying unity for the totality of symbolic forms, it appears that we are finally left with the fundamental philosophical dilemma presented by Carnap and Heidegger after all. We can either, with Carnap, hold fast to formal logic as the ideal of universal validity and confine ourselves, accordingly, to the philosophy of the mathematical exact sciences, or we can, with Heidegger, cut ourselves off from logic and ‘‘exact thinking’’ generally, with the result that we ultimately renounce the ideal of truly universal validity itself.

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If I am not mistaken, then, it is precisely this dilemma that lies at the heart of the twentieth-century opposition between analytic and continental philosophical traditions, which thus rests, from a philosophical point of view, on the systematic cracks which had meanwhile appeared in the original Kantian architectonic. And, whereas the philosophies of Carnap and Heidegger represent the best efforts we have seen at rigorously working out the two diverging directions arising from these systematic cracks—the divergence, more generally, between the ‘‘scientific’’ and the ‘‘humanistic’’ strands in Kant’s original synthesis—it is Cassirer, more than any other thinker of our century, who nevertheless tries to hold these two strands together. Cassirer does not completely pull off this most delicate and difficult of balancing acts. Those interested in finally beginning a reconciliation of the analytic and continental traditions, however, can find no better starting point than the rich treasure of ideas, ambitions, and analyses stored in his astonishingly comprehensive body of philosophical work.

Notes 1. Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000). ÜF 2000, Open Court Publishing Company. I am indebted to Open Court Publishing Company for permission to publish the present paper here. 2. Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? (Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1929), 14, 18; translated as ‘‘What Is Metaphysics?’’ in Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 107, 111–12. 3. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Nachwort’’ to (4th ed. of) Was ist Metaphysik? (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1943), 104; translated as ‘‘Postscript’’ to ‘‘What Is Metaphysics?’’ in Existence and Being, ed. W. Brock (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949), 356. 4. Rudolf Carnap, Der logische Aufbau der Welt (Berlin: Weltkreis, 1928), § 75; translated from the 2d ed. (1961) as The Logical Structure of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). (The reference is to Cassirer’s Substance and Function.) 5. Carnap, Der logische Aufbau der Welt, § 177. 6. For this terminology, see John Michael Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 7. PsF, 3: 331–32; PSF, 3: 285. 8. KW, 48; translated as The Logic of the Humanities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 97. Cf. CS, 42. 9. Carnap, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt, § 16. 10. PsF, 3: 84; PSF, 3: 143–44. 11. PsF, 3: 394; PSF, 3: 339.

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Why Did Cassirer and Heidegger Not Debate in Davos? john michael krois

Limits of Argument In March 1929, when Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer met to debate at academic conferences held in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos, the situation had the potential for a dramatic confrontation.∞ Here were two philosophers with reputedly antithetical views, separated by a generation gap (Cassirer was fifteen years older), one came from a modest background in provincial Germany (and intentionally stayed away from the city) while the other stemmed from a wealthy family whose name was synonymous with modernism in the arts and the metropolis of Berlin, where he had lived so long.≤ Eyewitnesses called attention to the fact that even their pronunciation differed, the one speaking with a regional accent and the other in high German.≥ Finally, one was Catholic and the other was Jewish. In light of subsequent history, the Davos meeting has often been interpreted as foreshadowing political struggles to come, and early on there was a readiness to find analogies between the views of the proponents and those expressed by figures in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.∂ But the audience experienced nothing of the kind. A reporter from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote: ‘‘Instead of seeing two worlds collide, one enjoyed at most a theater performance, in which a very nice person and a very ardent one, who tried his best to be nice, spoke to one

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another in monologues. Despite this, everyone in the audience acted as though this was very gripping and afterwards congratulated one other for having been there.’’∑ Today, reading the Ritter-Bollnow protocol of the encounter, one cannot fail to get the impression that Cassirer and Heidegger did not really debate at Davos.∏ Each made statements, but there was no real debate; their remarks give the impression of two ships passing one another in the night. Cassirer in particular seemed evasive. Why? Some things are not the subject for debate. Theoretical positions are easy to revise, but this is not so with the narrative we call our life’s history. We cannot change what has happened to us and so we cannot overthrow personal loyalty and allegiance the way we can change the premises in an argument. We are most free to argue about things that do not concern us personally and least free when debate touches upon the question of who we are. This feature of personal existence needs to be considered when we examine the Davos debate. Naturally, neither Cassirer nor Heidegger recited his life’s history at Davos, but that does not mean that this history was therefore unimportant. The Davos debate came at a time when Cassirer had been publishing statements about how his thought had undergone a transformation since Substance and Function appeared in 1910. In an important essay from 1927 he wrote that he no longer thought that philosophy could start with the theory of knowledge and truth: these problems were only particular cases of the more fundamental problem of meaning.π A year later, in an article published in the Kant-Studien, he explained that he no longer believed philosophy could proceed upon the basis of the study of the concept because logic and the concept had to be subsumed under the phenomenon of meaning.∫ Again, in 1928, but unknown until its publication in 1995—fifty years after his death—Cassirer wrote a text on the question of ‘‘the metaphysics of symbolic forms.’’Ω Cassirer’s investigations therein led him to develop a doctrine of ‘‘Basisphänomene’’ (basis phenomena).∞≠ Cassirer had already made liberal use of this doctrine in his philosophy in the 1920s before actually justifying his use of it— it was already prominent in the third volume of the The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms where Cassirer used Goethe’s term ‘‘Urphänomen’’ (primary phenomenon).∞∞ This doctrine is more fundamental than the ‘‘transcendental method’’ for we cannot, by definition, offer conditions of the possibility of primary phenomena (Urphänomene), or else they would no longer be primary. Why did Cassirer not refer to any of these developments in Davos, especially when Heidegger criticized neo-Kantianism (and so, supposedly, Cassirer’s philosophy) for being just a theory of knowledge? Why did Cassirer oddly claim that he did not know of any neo-Kantians, a term which he said was being used for scapegoating?∞≤ It was obvious in the first two volumes of The Philos-

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ophy of Symbolic Forms (1923 and 1925) that he had already reinterpreted the constructivism of the Marburg school, giving it a new pragmatic shape in which bodily and technical activity were treated on a par with abstracter, intellectual activities.∞≥ By 1929 Cassirer’s philosophy of embodied, social subjectivity had moved closer in some ways to Georg Simmel’s Lebensphilosophie than it was to Cohen’s conception of Reinheit (purity).∞∂ Moreover, Cassirer no longer asserted the systematic centrality of science as found in Cohen’s system but rather the preeminence of pretheoretical understanding. In one point, however, Cassirer remained most committed to Cohen’s philosophy: both shared an ethical conception of culture.∞∑ This can help us to understand the breach between Cassirer and Heidegger, but it does not fully explain their lack of communication.∞∏ For Heidegger, cultural symbolism was not, as it was for Cassirer, ‘‘the way to civilization,’’∞π but this difference was not discussed at Davos. Neither did they explicate their views about phenomenology, which Heidegger said in Being and Time they had already spoken about and agreed upon as early as 1923.∞∫ Moreover, later that year (1929) Cassirer published volume 3 of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, in which his adoption of phenomenology was most evident, and he stated at the end of the preface that the book had already been completed in 1927. When Cassirer and Heidegger met to debate in March 1929 there was actually considerable philosophical agreement between them. In 1934 Cassirer sent a letter to a number of his former students to thank them for their congratulations on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. In this letter he made a significant comment about his view of philosophical schools. He wrote that he did not believe either in their possibility or their necessity.∞Ω It cannot be surprising, therefore, that Cassirer came to hold very different conceptions than his teacher did, who most certainly did believe in the possibility of philosophical schools. Why then was Cassirer so reluctant in Davos to be more forthcoming about his own philosophical position? By the time of Cohen’s death in 1918 it was no longer possible for Cassirer to publicly speak about what was particular to his own philosophy as distinguished from his teacher’s—about what he once, much later, privately referred to as his Loslösung from the leader of the Marburg school.≤≠ Cassirer’s loyalty to Cohen involved more than the matter of ‘‘school unity,’’ something which by Cassirer’s own admission was, to him, not important. Even during Cohen’s lifetime, criticisms of the Marburg school were often only veiled (and sometimes even explicit) antisemitism directed against the person of Hermann Cohen. A particularly malicious instance of this was the so-called Bruno Bauch affair in 1916.≤∞ Bruno Bauch, then an editor of the Kant-Studien, claimed in a völkisch political periodical that because Cohen was Jewish, he was not really

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a German and not able to understand Kant.≤≤ Cassirer’s written reply, intended for the Kant-Studien, went through different drafts as he tried to accommodate the editors of that journal and respond to the irrational and insulting nature of Bauch’s views.≤≥ For this he drew upon intellectual and moral arguments and even humor. The Bauch affair ended with Bauch resigning his post as editor of the Kant-Studien, so Cassirer’s reply went unpublished. But this affair created an atmosphere in which the discussion of even ordinary philosophical divergences from Cohen were surely anathema for Cassirer. This climate prevailed even after Cohen’s death and progressively became worse. I cannot here rehearse the history of the antisemitic attacks against Cohen or Cassirer, but one example can show how close the problem was at the time of the Davos debate.≤∂ On 23 February 1929, not long before Cassirer and Heidegger met in Davos, the Viennese philosopher Othmar Spann (1878–1950) gave a lecture sponsored by the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur in the Auditorium Maximum of the University of Munich, which according to the published proceedings was ‘‘filled to bursting’’ for his talk.≤∑ The sponsoring organization, which claimed Alfred Rosenberg and Winfried Wagner among its supporters,≤∏ was led by the editor of the Munich edition of the Völkischer Beobachter, the National Socialist newspaper. Spann’s lecture on the topic ‘‘the contemporary cultural crisis’’ was the first public lecture given by the group and had a programmatic character. The Frankfurter Zeitung, the nationally circulated, much-respected liberal newspaper that was widely read in academic circles, gave a detailed report of this lecture, which they regarded as setting a precedent because the university thereby permitted a political event to take place on its premises. Their report described the atmosphere at this academic lecture: ‘‘The moving force behind everything we discovered when Mr. Adolf Hitler entered the auditorium and his numerous supporters, decorated in swastikas, gave him a loud ovation by stamping their feet and applauding, for which he thanked them.’’≤π In the summary of Spann’s lecture which followed, the newspaper emphasized that Spann’s assessment of the German ‘‘crisis in culture’’ began with an attack on ‘‘neo-Kantianism,’’ which he identified with Cohen and Cassirer, whom he called ‘‘foreigners’’: ‘‘His [Spann’s] characterization of neo-Kantianism should be mentioned, in which he said that it was sad to think of how the German people were being reminded of their own Kantian philosophy by foreigners (Fremden); among these ‘Foreigners’ he understood philosophers of such rank as Hermann Cohen and Cassirer.’’≤∫ Spann’s presentation of the ‘‘cultural crisis’’ in Germany repeated Bruno Bauch’s attack of twelve years before, claiming that Jews were ‘‘foreigners’’ unable to correctly interpret Kant, but whereas Bauch’s denunciation was

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directed against Cohen, Spann also added Cassirer’s name, ominously noting that Cassirer was ‘‘still teaching in Hamburg.’’≤Ω Bauch’s attack on Cohen in 1916 appeared in a letter to the editor of an obscure Völkish journal, but Spann’s insults were stated in public, in the auditorium of a German university before a cheering crowd, and reported upon nationally in the country’s most prominent newspaper. Moreover, the Frankfurter Zeitung was not alone in calling attention to the event or reporting on Spann’s remarks. The liberal Berliner Tagesblatt and at least eight other newspapers, many of them right wing, also reported on the event, and Spann’s talk itself also was published.≥≠ Slander on this scale, aimed at Cassirer and Cohen, could neither have escaped Cassirer’s notice nor left him unaffected at the Davos Hochschulkurse. When Cassirer met Heidegger for their debate, the first topic of discussion was Heidegger’s criticism of neo-Kantianism. It was no doubt impossible at this time for Cassirer to react publicly to criticisms of neo-Kantianism or Cohen except with solidarity, no matter in what spirit these criticisms were offered. Heidegger mentioned ‘‘Cohen, Windelband, Rickert, Erdmann, Riehl,’’ but in his reply Cassirer referred only to Cohen.≥∞ Cassirer’s loyalty to and affection for his teacher did not permit him to criticize any aspect of Cohen’s philosophy publicly, even if he himself diverged from him on the points in question. As I indicated above, Cassirer deviated from Cohen on a number of topics. His theory of ‘‘symbolic forms’’ did not just diverge from neo-Kantianism, it went beyond the entire framework of traditional idealism by emphasizing (without falling back into psychologism) the concrete, historical emergence of form in symbolisms.≥≤ Most significant, he broke with the Marburg school’s credo that nothing is given to thinking except thinking itself. Writing about his theory of the basis phenomena, Cassirer stated that these phenomena ‘‘are prior to all thought and inference and are the basis of both.’’≥≥ These phenomena—life (the real process of living in a world), action, and the works which result from action—are, for Cassirer, more fundamental than ‘‘thinking.’’≥∂ What was really at stake for Cassirer, however, was something else: Cohen’s ethical orientation.≥∑ Here Cassirer felt his differences from Heidegger were greatest. According to Hans Jonas, Cassirer had a much stronger reaction to Heidegger’s philosophy at Davos than was apparent there. Jonas said: ‘‘I was later told that Cassirer was deeply repulsed (tief angewidert) [at Davos] and naturally had also felt that the hearts, the feelings of the audience were definitely with Heidegger.’’≥∏ What ‘‘deeply repulsed’’ him was Heidegger’s constant emphasis at Davos on the finitude of Dasein. This is what Cassirer criticized in Heidegger.≥π The reason for Cassirer’s repulsion was not a matter of theory, but the ethical implications of Heidegger’s view. For Cassirer the

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notion of a universal ‘‘humanity’’ could not and should not be conceived the way Heidegger does, as an example of the inauthentic ‘‘they’’ (das man).≥∫ For Cassirer and Cohen, humanity was a cultural achievement, but it was not something abstract or general; it was what made true ‘‘Eigentlichkeit’’ or authenticity possible: human individuality.≥Ω In one of Cassirer’s last public addresses in Germany, held 22 January 1933, at the Synagogue in Prinzregentenstraße in Berlin, he spoke on the topic ‘‘Hermann Cohen’s philosophy of religion and its relationship to Judaism.’’∂≠ In this lecture Cassirer emphasized that in mythic thought the congregation is always just the tribe or clan, but in true monotheism a fundamental change occurs. ‘‘Here,’’ Cassirer said, ‘‘every appearance of ‘Particularism’ is diminished— every limitation of the idea of God to a merely tribal or national god.’’ This distinguishes religion from mythic thought: ‘‘For with mankind as such, its universal idea, Myth has nothing in common.’’ ‘‘Judaism made the first step from a mythological to an ethical Religion.’’∂∞ Such religion is ethical because it treats all people as individuals rather than as representatives of a local conception of life. Cassirer believed that Heidegger’s notion of Dasein abolished this universal ethical conception of humanity and revived a mythical, tribal view of ethos as fate.∂≤ Heidegger claimed at Davos that Cassirer was interested in a philosophy of culture instead of the question of Being, and that this was their chief difference. But for Cassirer, Heidegger’s interpretation of the meaning of Being, the ‘‘Sinn vom Sein’’ as Dasein was a further development of Scholasticism, a temporization of substance metaphysics. In Davos Cassirer said: ‘‘In the older metaphysics, Being was Substance—that which is at the bottom of things. In the newer metaphysics [Cassirer refers here to himself ], Being is—in my language—no longer Being as substance, but Being, from which there proceeds multifold functional determinations and meanings. And here, it seems to me, lies the essential point distinguishing my position from Heidegger’s.’’∂≥ Cassirer later clarified his position this way: ‘‘Life, reality, being, existence are nothing but different terms referring to one and the same fundamental fact. . . . These terms do not describe a fixed, rigid, substantial thing. They are to be understood as names of a process.’’∂∂ Even at Davos Cassirer spoke of the problem of naming this process when he asked: ‘‘How does it come about, how is it conceivable, that we are able to convey anything from Dasein to Dasein in this Medium [of language]? . . . This question must be worked out. Perhaps not all questions of philosophy can be answered then. . . . But it is necessary that we at least first pose this question. And I believe that only then, after this question has been raised, will the way be made clear to Heidegger’s question [Fragestellung = the question of Being].’’∂∑ For Cassirer, culture was

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the mode of human existence whereas even when Heidegger, years after the Davos debate, took up language it was not a cultural phenomenon for him but ‘‘the language of Being.’’∂∏ But Cassirer’s phenomenological approach to culture led him to reconsider the fundamental reality of symbolism.

Fundamental Philosophy Instead of a fundamental ontology, Cassirer developed a fundamental semiology. His notion of ‘‘symbolische Prägnanz’’ in the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms provides perhaps the directest, but not the only way to approach this question.∂π ‘‘Symbolic pregnance’’ is not an act of interpretation, it is more fundamental than intentionality or conventional signs. It explicates an aspect of Cassirer’s conception of Reality, which, he says in his study of the metaphysics of symbolic forms, must get ‘‘outside’’ itself, must be beside itself to find itself.∂∫ That sounds Hegelian, but Cassirer means it in a semiotic sense. Culture is not merely a ‘‘cultural’’ phenomenon but the nature of human existence. In his text on the metaphysics of symbolic forms he speaks metaphorically of the ‘‘rupture in existence’’ or ‘‘Riss im Dasein.’’∂Ω There is no immediateness but a split in existence. There is always symbolic perspective or, as he usually put it: never presentation without representation.∑≠ For Cassirer, existence is never ‘‘present’’ but always displays a complex multitude of irreducibly different forms. This is why it is so difficult to fit Cassirer’s thought into a fixed scheme. His writings have always posed one problem in particular to readers: again and again Cassirer speaks through the texts of others. Cassirer recites passages from a vast array of works taken from empirical and philosophical fields of study, so the question arises: what voice is Cassirer’s own? It would be inconsistent for a philosopher of symbolic forms to write monologues, yet the following six quotations taken from a number of Cassirer’s writings show that they nonetheless reflect a unified project of thought. Each [of us] speaks his [own] language, and it is unthinkable that one person’s language can be translated into the language of the other. And nevertheless we understand each other through the medium of language.∑∞ It is the task of systematic philosophy, which extends far beyond the theory of knowledge, to free the idea of the world from one-sidedness.∑≤ The genuine teacher does not just tolerate opposition, rather he looks for it, yes, he demands it.∑≥ We do not have to bind ourselves here [in our view of the state] to a Dogma, we can create room for the variety of insights and creeds and grant them

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liberty, provided that throughout all these oppositions, dedication to the state as such remains undiminished and unbroken, and that means a Will to the whole.∑∂ More than ever, our age must remain aware, that in order to truly possess the true legacy of Democracy it must first acquire it, and that this acquisition can only be accomplished in a conscious way if we reflect again upon the final intellectual requirements and ideals of the Idea of Democracy and dedicate ourselves to these.∑∑ The unity of knowledge and truth does not stem from the convergence of various images made from different standpoints, but from the efficacy, from the living Synergy of various cultural energies which in themselves are different.∑∏ Instead of eliminating the oppositions we encounter by letting thought simply assert what is to be (Machtspruch) or attempting to resolve them by means of mere compromise, we should rather make these differences visible in all their severity and in all their seriousness.∑π

All these quotations reflect how Cassirer thinks about the notion of truth. In his 1929 lecture on the philosophical concept of truth, he stated that theories of truth traditionally have been based upon either existence claims (assuming an absolute object), rational certainty (assuming universal human reason), or sensory facticity (assuming sensation as certain).∑∫ He rejects all these assumptions, and for the same reason: they all make the mistake of postulating a homogeneity in what he calls the ‘‘space of thought,’’ a homogeneity which does not exist.∑Ω Instead, the plurality of symbolic forms requires conceiving truth as a functional, cultural concept.∏≠

Cultural Theory These examples of Cassirer’s way of thinking have one thing in common: they show that in Cassirer’s fundamental semiology ‘‘culture’’ is the process of gaining perspectives. Unlike those philosophers who, as Rorty once expressed it, want to place literature instead of science ‘‘at the center of culture,’’ Cassirer wants philosophy to be ‘‘decentralized.’’∏∞ For Cassirer, favoring a single perspective, no matter what kind, is misrepresentation. Tolerance is therefore not just the cardinal moral virtue in Cassirer’s philosophy, it is a hermeneutical imperative.∏≤ True realism must recognize the autonomy of the different symbolic forms and different cultures, and a philosophy of these forms cannot declare any one of them to be its ‘‘center.’’ Cassirer never appealed to psychological or sociological explanations in his writings on cultural history. This is why Foucault was an enthusiastic reader of Cassirer’s Philosophy of the Enlightenment.∏≥ Foucault emphasized in Kant’s definition of Aufklärung the

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term Ausgang, man’s ‘‘leaving’’ or ‘‘going out’’ from a state of self-imposed minority.∏∂ This Ausgang is neither a matter of origins nor of teleology.∏∑ Cassirer’s description of culture as the process of human ‘‘self-liberation’’ seems to agree with this. Cassirer prescribes no specific universal aim as the end of culture, self-liberation is always ‘‘liberation from.’’ But Cassirer has more in mind when he speaks in An Essay on Man about the symbol as the ‘‘way to civilization.’’ A brief comparison with Rousseau and Nietzsche can help to bring out Cassirer’s view. Rousseau contrasted human ‘‘progress’’ with perfectibility. Rousseau’s proclaimed goal of returning to ‘‘nature,’’ man’s condition before society created the conditions of his inequality, was not meant in a literal, historical sense of returning to some better time, which he realized ‘‘perhaps never existed.’’∏∏ It was an ideal to be striven for, a state in which Rousseau said humanity possessed a bonté naturelle, a natural goodness, in which pain was not inflicted groundlessly.∏π For Nietzsche, this was not ‘‘nature’’ but rather the particular, historical point of view of Christianity. Nietzsche left no doubt about how he regarded Rousseau’s outlook: ‘‘I hate Rousseau in the [French] Revolution. . . . What I hate it for is its Rousseauean morality . . . with which it attracts everything that is superficial and mediocre. The doctrine of equality! But there is no more poisonous poison.’’∏∫ For Nietzsche, human perfectibility was to be found in the opposite extreme: ‘‘The aim of history is . . . to give the motive and power to produce the great man. The aim of mankind can lie ultimately only in its highest examples.’’∏Ω Nietzsche’s negative judgment about the mass of mankind itself partook of an idea from the Christian tradition. The basic Protestant contention that most of the human race is damned means that mankind consists, with few exceptions, of worthless examples. Salvation will come only to a few, just as for Nietzsche salvation, in the sense of perfectibility, becomes a matter for a few. Cassirer never speaks of human ‘‘perfectibility’’ but of ‘‘self-liberation.’’π≠ This is concrete and individual, yet it has a universal dimension. Everyone must act in a unique and individual way, for each person has a unique situation and life in which ‘‘self-liberation’’ takes on different shapes as liberation from fear, injustice, and ignorance. From this point of view, the theory of symbolic forms is (among other things), to use Norbert Elias’s term, a theory of ‘‘the civilizing process.’’π∞ This is not a linear march of events but an unending task assuming ever new forms. Here Cassirer follows neither Rousseau nor Nietzsche, but Goethe.π≤ Symbolic forms are not so much storehouses for the accumulation of culture as they are the means of its production.π≥ This means that language does not just serve social communication, it is also a ‘‘principle of individuation’’ serv-

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ing to create human identity. But because everyone speaks ‘‘their own language,’’ cultural differences easily become entrenched conflicts.π∂ Some proponents of ‘‘cultural studies’’ appear even to want to return to tribal conceptions of humanity, a tendency which fits with the reception of Heidegger and neglect of Cassirer.π∑ Cassirer’s theory of culture shows that symbolic forms offer an alternative to defacing differences that does not require their absolutization. The absolutization of perspectives is a permanent mythical possibility in culture. Myth has the greatest power to move people of any symbolic form of culture, but it has a serious limitation. Mythic beliefs are deadly serious and tolerate no deviation or dissent. Myth is impervious to argument,π∏ but it is not impervious to criticism. The solemnity of a particular image can provide continuity and even arrest change, but it can never stop the process of semiosis or changes in perspective. Cassirer often refers to the emergence of new perspectives as a metabasis eis allo genos, but he says little about how this ‘‘going over into a new category’’ comes about. Technological knowledge can dispel myth —Cassirer once called the rise of technology the Götterdämmerung of myth— but in the twentieth century we also find the use of technology for the creation and dissemination of political myths.ππ The Myth of the State, written in reaction to this development, says little about how the modern use of myth in politics can be counteracted. Mythic thought has the power to eliminate the possibility of discussion and mutual understanding. In a sense, Cassirer’s entire philosophy can be regarded as an attempt to provide an answer to this problem. The clearest illustration of how Cassirer understood new perspectives to emerge can be found in his book on the enlightened religion of the Cambridge Platonists. The Cambridge Platonists, who developed their views in opposition to the solemnity of the English Puritans, demonstrated that even in the most earnest of all things, religion, liberality in matters of doctrine is possible.π∫ The book ends with a remarkable discussion of humor focusing on the English Renaissance and Enlightenment, with Shakespeare and Shaftesbury as the main figures. The ability to abruptly see things in a new light is essential to humor.πΩ The key to surmounting the limits imposed by any symbolic form is the ability to overcome the solemnity of the single perspective. Cassirer’s philosophy begins and ends with an account of moods. His theory of myth is rooted in an analysis of moods: the ‘‘malevolent,’’ the ‘‘friendly,’’ and so on can assume the aspect of demonic spirits. But Cassirer’s analysis of this process is not just historical or phylogenetic. Insofar as things or situations appear to us today as ‘‘menacing’’ or ‘‘benign,’’ they can assume the emotionality of mythic thought, which personalizes threats or benefits.∫≠ In contrast to this analysis of the primordial moods in myth, Cassirer also developed

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in his discussions of Renaissance literature a theory of the modern mood. He meant something quite definite by this, something he said arose from a broadening of life’s horizons: in particular, from a fusion of the antithetical moods of humor and the sublime, as found in the works of Cervantes or Shakespeare. Unlike the basic moods of mythic thought—fear and awe—the modern ‘‘coincidentia oppositorum’’ of moods affords a total vision in which having different perspectives poses no barrier to understanding.∫∞ The philosophy of symbolic forms was not intended simply to show the limits and differences between symbolic forms, nor was its purpose to unify them, which is impossible. Rather it was supposed to help us avoid confusing the limits of one symbolic form with the limits of the others. By attaining a vision of all these differences, the philosophy of symbolic forms creates a modern philosophical mood which prohibits succumbing to any one of them as the single solemn truth.

Notes 1. The debate took place as part of a series of lectures by numerous professors from various countries lasting from Sunday, 17 March, to Saturday, 6 April 1929. They were held at the Grand Hotel and Belvedere at Davos-Platz. For a historical account of the Davos debate see Karlfried Gründer’s essay ‘‘Cassirer und Heidegger in Davos 1929’’ in Über Ernst Cassirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, ed. Hans-Jürg Braun, Helmuth Holzhey, and Ernst Wolfgang Orth (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988), 280–302. The most comprehensive treatment of the debate is the essay collection Cassirer—Heidegger: 70 Jahre Davoser Disputation, ed. Dominic Kaegi and Enno Rudolph, Cassirer-Forschungen, vol. 9 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2002). That volume includes an abbreviated German version of this essay, plus a transcription of the Frankfurter Zeitung article mentioned below. 2. See Georg Brühl, Die Cassirers: Streiter für den Impressionismus (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1991), and Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980) with its references to the Cassirers. Ernst Cassirer lived in Berlin with interruptions from 1892 on, and continuously from 1903 until 1919, when he assumed the chair of philosophy in Hamburg. 3. See, e.g., Hendrik J. Pos, ‘‘Recollections of Ernst Cassirer,’’ in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul A. Schilpp, (New York: Tudor Press, 1949), 61–72, esp. 67f. 4. This comparison was already made by Kurt Riezler in ‘‘Davoser Hochschulkurse 1929,’’ Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Saturday, 30 March 1929, Morgenausgabe, no. 609. 5. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, no. 617, 10 April 1929: ‘‘Anstatt zwei Welten aufeinander prallen zu sehen, genoß man höchstens das Schauspiel, wie ein sehr netter Mensch und ein sehr heftiger Mensch, der sich auch furchtbare Mühe gab, nett zu sein, Monologe redeten. Trotzdem taten alle Zuhörer sehr ergriffen und beglückten sich gegenseitig dazu, dabei gewesen zu sein.’’ 6. See ‘‘Davoser Disputation zwischen Ernst Cassirer und Martin Heidegger,’’ the

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protocol of their debate, first published in the 4th ed. of Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1973), 246–68. 7. See Cassirer, ‘‘Erkenntnistheorie nebst den Grenzfragen der Logik und Denkpsychologie,’’ Jahrbücher der Philosophie 3 (1927): 31–92, esp. 34: ‘‘Denn immer deutlicher drängt sich uns die Einsicht auf, daß jenes Gebiet theoretischen Sinnes, das wir mit dem Namen ‘Erkenntnis’ und ‘Wahrheit’ bezeichnen, nur eine, wie immer bedeutsame und fundamentale, Sinnschicht darstellt.’’ He continues by terming ‘‘das Erkenntnisproblem’’ and ‘‘das Wahrheitsproblem’’ as ‘‘Sonderfälle des allgemeinen Bedeutungsproblems’’ and contrasts ‘‘Erkenntnistheorie’’ with a philosophy of symbolic forms. Truth is secondary in the sense that it depends upon meaning. Not even the one-word sentences ‘‘Yes’’ and ‘‘No’’ have a univocal meaning, for they can be used propositionally or interjectionally (PsF, 3: 244), i.e., to make falsifiable assertions or to express wishes. 8. See Cassirer, ‘‘Zur Theorie des Begriffs,’’ Kant-Studien 33 (1928): 129–36, esp. 130: ‘‘Denn weit enger als in der früheren Darstellung der Fall war, erscheint jetzt für mich das logische Problem des Begriffs mit dem allgemeinen Bedeutungsproblem verküpft.’’ 9. See ECN 1; PSF, 4. 10. See PSF, 4, pt. 2: ‘‘On Basis Phenomena,’’ 115–90. 11. Cassirer uses the notion of a primary phenomenon in reference to the expressive function of symbolism (PSF, 3: 87), symbolic pregnance, the experience of the living human body (PSF, 3: 99–103), and time (PSF, 3: 205). The primary phenomenon idea is cited in many other works as well, e.g., in Cassirer, ‘‘William Stern, Zur Wiederkehr seines Todestages,’’ Acta Psychologia 5 (1940): 9. There Cassirer calls the notion of a ‘‘person’’ a primary phenomenon. 12. Cassirer said: ‘‘Der Neukantianismus ist der Sündenbock der neueren Philosophie. Mir fehlt aber der existierendene Neukantianer.’’ (Neo-Kantianism is the scapegoat of recent philosophy. But I don’t even see an existing neo-Kantian.) See ‘‘Davoser Disputation,’’ 246. 13. This emphasis on embodiment is found in Cassirer’s discussions of myth and technology as symbolic forms. See esp. ‘‘Form und Technik’’ (1930), in Symbol, Technik, Sprache: Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1927–1933, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and John Michael Krois with the assistance of Josef M. Werle (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1985), 39–91 and in PSF, 2: 215. 14. See the special issue of the Simmel Newsletter 6, no. 1 (summer 1996), ed. Willfried Geßner, on the topic ‘‘Simmel und Cassirer.’’ 15. For an account of this, see the Cassirer chapter in William Kluback, The Idea of Humanity: Hermann Cohen’s Legacy to Philosophy and Theology, Studies in Judaism (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987), 91–114. Cf. Cassirer’s similar response to Schweitzer’s ethical conception of culture in ‘‘Philosophy and Politics,’’ in Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935–1945, ed. Donald Philip Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 230–32. 16. Although Heidegger wrote no ethics, he made it clear in his ‘‘Letter on Humanism’’ that he did not think human culture could be a source of morality. 17. EM, 26. 18. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 490, note xi.

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19. Cassirer wrote: ‘‘Ich selbst bin vielleicht niemals ein guter und eigentlicher philosophischer ‘Lehrer’ gewesen—denn mir fehlte der Glaube an die Möglichkeit und Notwendigkeit schulmässiger Bindungen im Gebiet der Philosophie.’’ See Cassirer to Paul Oskar Kristeller, 29 July 1934, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York. I thank Professor Kristeller for his permission to quote from this letter. 20. When asked to provide an autobiography for the Library of Living Philosophers Series volume on his thought, Cassirer told his wife: ‘‘Nun werde ich mein Verhältnis zu Cohen endlich doch für die anderen klarmachen, und darauf freue ich mich. Meine Bindung an ihn und meine spätere Loslösung von ihm—beides ist wichtig.’’ See Toni Cassirer, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1981), 94. Literally: ‘‘Now I will finally make clear for the others my relationship to Cohen, and I look forward to doing that. My tie to him and my later loosening from him—both are important.’’ The tie with Cohen which remained, I think, is their ethical conception of culture. 21. See the article by Ulrich Sieg, ‘‘Deutsche Kulturgeschichte und jüdischer Geist: Ernst Cassirers Auseinandersetzung mit der völkischen Philosophie Bruno Bauchs. Ein unbekanntes Manuskript,’’ Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts 88 (1991): 59–71. For details about the deep effects of the Bauch affair, see the correspondence relating to Bauch collected in Helmut Holzhey, Cohen und Natorp, 2 vols. (Basel: Schwabe, 1986), esp. 2: 449–51, 460–64, 469. 22. See Bruno Bauch, ‘‘Leserbrief,’’ Der Panther (Jahrgang 4, Heft 6: June 1916): 742– 46; cf. Bauch’s essay ‘‘Zum Begriff der Nation,’’ Kant-Studien 21 (1917): 139–62. 23. The final draft has been published; see ‘‘Zum Begriff der Nation: Eine Erwiderung auf den Aufsatz von Bruno Bauch,’’ Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts 88 (1991): 73–87. 24. For an account of the situation as Cassirer experienced it, see Peter Freimark, ‘‘Juden an der Hamburger Universität,’’ in Hochschulalltag im ‘Dritten Reich,’ ed. Eckart Krause et al. (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1991), 3 vols., 1: 125–47, esp. 128, on Cassirer’s inauguration as rector of the university. Cf. Hans Wilhelm Eckardt, ‘‘Akademische Feiern als Selbstdarstellung der Hamburger Universität im ‘Dritten Reich,’ ’’ ibid., 179–200, esp. 186f. Numerous other articles in this three-volume reference work contain information about the antisemitic climate in the 1920s. The index in volume 3, 1517, gives references to discussions relating to Cassirer. 25. See Othmar Spann, ‘‘Die Kulturkrise der Gegenwart,’’ Mitteilungen des Kampfbundes für deutsche Kultur 1, no. 3 (March 1929): 33–44. The introductory note (p. 33) states that the lecture was given ‘‘bei brechend vollem Saale.’’ 26. A list of supporters is given in Mitteilungen des Kampfbundes für deutsche Kultur 1, no. 1 (January 1929): 6. 27. ‘‘Nationalsozialistische Propaganda in der Münchner Universität’’ (Drahtmeldung unserers Korrespondenten), Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt, Abendblatt, Montag 25. 1929, no. 150: 2: ‘‘Wer die treibende Kraft ist, erfuhr man, als Herr Adolf Hitler den Hörsaal betrat und seine zahlreich verteilten und mit Hakenkreuzen geschuckten Anhänger ihn durch Trampeln und Klatschen eine lärmende Ovation bereiteten, für die er dankte.’’ 28. Ibid.: ‘‘Wer die treibende Kraft ist, erfuhr man, als Herr Adolf Hitler den Hörsaal

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betrat und seine zahlreich verteilten und mit Hakenkreuzen geschmuckten Anhänger ihn durch Trampeln und Klatschen eine lärmende Ovation bereiteten, für die er dankte. . . . Zu erwähnen ist seine Kennzeichnung des Neu-Kantianismus, in der er sagt, es stimme trauig, daß das deutsche Volk sich an seine eigene Kantische Philosophie von Fremden habe erinnern lassen müssen; unter den ‘Fremden’ verstand er Philosophen vom Range Hermann Cohens und Cassirers.’’ 29. Spann, ‘‘Die Kulturkrise der Gegenwart,’’ 34: ‘‘Das deutsche Volk mußte sich die Kantische Philosophie wie eine fremde Kunst und auch von Fremden abermals erklären lassen.’’ 30. The organization sponsoring Spann’s address, the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur, reported on the press reaction to Spann’s talk in the same issue of their Mitteilungen that carried the publication of the lecture (see note 25, above). There they indicate that while the reports in the Frankfurter Zeitung and Berliner Tagesblatt were the work of ‘‘enemies,’’ ‘‘objective’’ (sachliche) reports were published in the Münchner Zeitung, München-Augsburger-Abendzeitung, the Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten, Völkischer Beobachter, Bayerische Umschau, Fränkische Kurier, Bayerische Staatszeitung, and Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung. See Mitteilungen des Kampfbundes für deutsche Kultur 1, no. 3 (March 1929): 47: ‘‘Die Gegner an die Arbeit.’’ 31. See ‘‘Davoser Disputation,’’ 246. 32. Cassirer begins with the unity of mind and body and never mentions ‘‘Reinheit’’ in his discussions of knowledge. Cf. Cassirer, ‘‘Was ist Subjektivismus?’’ Theoria 5 (1939): 111–40. 33. PSF, 4: 137. Cf. ECN 1, 132: ‘‘sie sind ‘vor’ allem Denken und Schließen, liegen diesem selbst zu Grunde.’’ 34. Further texts on the doctrine of basis phenomena will appear in the edition of Cassirer’s unpublished papers. 35. Cassirer’s distinction between the perception of things and the perception of expression (see ‘‘The Perception of Things and the Perception of Expression,’’ CS, 34–55) provided the basis for his theory of the Other. I have expanded upon this in an essay ‘‘Cassirer und die Politik der Physiognomik,’’ in Der exzentrische Blick, ed. Claudia Schmölders (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996), 213–26. See Cassirer’s statements about ethics at the end of his book on Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics: Historical and Systematic Studies of the Problem of Causality, trans. O. Theodor Benfey, with a preface by Henry Margenau (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), 197–213. 36. Hans Jonas, ‘‘Heideggers Entschlossenheit und Entschluss,’’ in Martin Heidegger im Gespräch, ed. Günter Neske and Emil Kettering (Pfullingen: Neske Verlag, 1988), 221–29, quote from 227: ‘‘Man hat mir später erzählt, daß Cassirer tief angewidert war und natürlich auch gefühlt hat, daß die Herzen, die Gemüter der Zuschauer durchaus bei Heidegger waren.’’ I thank Dominic Kaegi for bringing this quote to my attention. 37. See esp. PSF, 4: 200–208, where Cassirer criticizes Heidegger’s conception of finitude. 38. See PSF 4: 204f., where he constrasts the time of Dasein and the time of humanitas. 39. See esp. Cassirer, ‘‘Naturalistic and Humanistic Philosophies of Culture,’’ published as an introduction to The Logic of the Humanities, trans. Clarence Smith Howe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 3–38, esp. 25.

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40. Cassirer, ‘‘Hermann Cohens Philosophie der Religion und ihr Verhältnis zum Judentum,’’ Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin: Amtliches Organ des Gemeindevorstandes 4 (1933): 91–94. Cassirer spoke at the synagogue in the Prinzregentenstraße 69–70. Cf. the announcement of Cassirer’s talk in the Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 1 (1933): 16. 41. Cassirer, ‘‘Hermann Cohens Philosophie der Religion und ihr Verhältnis zum Judentum,’’ 92: ‘‘Hier schwindet jeder Schein des ‘Partikulärismus’; jede Einengung der Gottesidee auf einen bloßen Stammes- oder Nationalgott. . . . Denn mit der Menschheit als solcher, mit ihrer universalen Idee, hat der Mythos nichts gemein. . . . Das Judentum machte den ersten Schritt von einer mythologischen zu einer ethischen Religion.’’ See also Cassirer’s essay ‘‘Judaism and the Modern Political Myths,’’ Contemporary Jewish Record (1944): 115–26. Another version can be found in Cassirer, Symbol, Myth, and Culture, 233–41. On Cassirer and Judaism, see Arthur Hertzberg, ‘‘A Reminiscence of Ernst Cassirer,’’ Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 15 (1970): 245; cf. Steven Schwarzschild: ‘‘Judaism in the Life and Work of Ernst Cassirer,’’ Il cannocchiale: Rivista di studi filosofici, 1/2 (1991): 327–44. 42. Cf. Cassirer’s similar comments about Heidegger in MS, 292f. and in ‘‘Philosophy and Politics,’’ Symbol, Myth, and Culture, 229f. 43. ‘‘Davoser Disputation,’’ 266: ‘‘Das Sein der alten Metaphysik war die Substanz, das eine Zugrundeliegende. Das Sein in der neuen Metaphysik ist in meiner Sprache nicht mehr das Sein einer Substanz, sondern das Sein, das von einer Mannigfaltigkeit von funktionellen Bestimmungen und Bedeutungen ausgeht. Und hier scheint mir der wesentliche Punkt der Unterscheidung meiner Position gegenüber Heidegger zu liegen.’’ 44. This phenomenon, he says ‘‘is accessible to everyone; but it is incomprehensible in the sense that it admits of no definition, no abstract theoretical explanation. We cannot explain it, if explanation means the reduction of an unknown fact to a better-known fact, for there is no better-known fact.’’ Both quotes are from ‘‘Language and Art II’’ (1942), Symbol, Myth, and Culture, 194. 45. ‘‘Davoser Disputation,’’ 295: ‘‘Wie kommt es, wie ist es denkbar, daß wir uns von Dasein zu Dasein in diesem Medium [der Sprache] verständigen können? . . . Diese Frage muß gelöst werden. Vielleicht sind von hier aus nicht alle Fragen der Philosophie zu lösen. . . . Aber es ist notwendig, daß man diese Frage zunächst einmal stellt. Und ich glaube, daß erst, wenn man diese Frage gestellt hat, man sich den Zugang zu der Fragestellung Heideggers [die Seinsfrage] frei macht.’’ 46. See Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Brief über den Humanismus,’’ Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1967), 145–94, esp. 194: ‘‘Die Sprache ist so die Sprache des Seins, wie die Wolken die Wolken des Himmels sind.’’ 47. See PSF, 3, pt. 2, chap. 5: ‘‘Symbolic Pregnance.’’ 48. PSF, 4: 61; ECN 1, 59. 49. PSF, 4: 61; ECN 1, 59. 50. This is the same as Peirce’s criticism of Descartes’ notion of immediate or ‘‘intuitive’’ knowledge first given in his 1868 essay ‘‘Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,’’ Collected Papers, vol. 5, par. 213–63. Put positively, Peirce says: ‘‘the idea of manifestation is the idea of a sign’’ (Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 1, par. 346). 51. See ‘‘Davoser Disputation,’’ 292f.: ‘‘Jeder [von uns] spricht seine [eigene] Sprache,

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und es ist undenkbar, daß die Sprache des einen in die Sprache des anderen übertragen werde. Und dennoch verstehen wir uns durch das Medium der Sprache. . . . Wir [betreten] hier einen gemeinsamen Boden.’’ 52. See Ernst Cassirer, ‘‘Einstein’s Theory of Relativity’’ (1921) in Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, authorized trans. by William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (New York: Dover, 1953), 447. Cf. Cassirer, Zur Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie (1921), in Zur modernen Physik (Darmstadt, 1957), 109–10: ‘‘Es ist die Aufgabe der systematischen Philosophie—die über diejenige der Erkenntnistheorie weit hinausgreift—das Weltbild von dieser Einseitigkeit zu befreien. Sie hat das Ganze der symbolischen Formen, aus deren Anwendung für uns der Begriff einer in sich gegliederten Wirklichkeit entspringt—kraft deren sich für uns Subjekt und Objekt, Ich und Welt scheiden und in bestimmter Gestaltung gegenüber treten,—zu erfassen und jedem Einzelnen in dieser Gesamtheit seine feste Stelle anzuweisen.’’ 53. Cassirer, ‘‘Goethes Idee der Bildung und Erziehung,’’ Pädagogisches Zentralblatt 12 (1932): 340–58, 347: ‘‘Der echte Erzieher darf sich eben hierin dem Weltgeist verwandt fühlen; denn er duldet nicht nur den Gegensatz, sondern er sucht ihn auf, ja er fordert ihn.’’ 54. Cassirer, ‘‘Wandlungen der Staatsgesinnung und der staatstheorie in der deutschen Geistesgeschichte,’’ Address delivered on the occasion of Hamburg University’s Celebration of the Constitution, 22 July 1930, Enge Zeit: Spuren Vertriebener und Verfolgter der Hamburger Universität im Auditorium Maximum, Von-Melle-Park, 23. Februar–4. April 1991, ed. Angela Bottin with the assistance of Rainer Nicolaysen (Hamburg, 1991), 161–69, 169: ‘‘Wir brauchen uns auch hier nicht an ein Dogma zu binden, wir können der Mannigfaltigkeit der Erkenntnisse und der Bekenntnisse Raum schaffen und Freiheit gewähren, wenn nur durch alle diese Gegensätze hindurch, der Wille zum Staat als solchem, und das heißt nichts anderes, als der Wille zum Ganzen, unverkümmert und ungebrochen bleibt.’’ 55. This is from an undated lecture on democracy, Cassirer Papers, Beinecke Library, box 38, folder 735, p. 19: ‘‘Mehr als je wird sich unsere Zeit gegenwärtig halten müssen, daß sie die eigentlichen Güter der Demokratie erst zu erwerben hat, wenn sie sie wahrhaft besitzen will—und daß dieser Erwerb sich nur dann im geistigen Sinne vollziehen lässt, wenn sie sich wieder auf die letzten geistigen Voraussetzungen der Idee der Demokratie besinnt und sich entschlossen zu diesen Voraussetzungen bekennt.’’ This lecture will appear in Cassirer, Zur Philosophie und Politik (ECN 9). 56. ‘‘Nicht aus einem Zusammenfluß mannigfaltiger, von verschiedenen Standorten aufgenommenen Bildern, sondern aus der Wirksamkeit, aus der lebendigen Synergie an sich verschiedener geistiger Kräfte geht die Einheit und die Wahrheit der Erkenntnis hervor.’’ Ibid., 19f. 57. ‘‘Statt die Gegensätze durch ein Machtspruch des Denkens aufzuheben oder den Versuch zu machen, sie durch ein bloßes Kompromiß zu versöhnen, soll sie vielmehr in ihrem ganzen Ernst und in ihrer ganzen Schwere sichtbar machen.’’ Ibid., 22. 58. ‘‘Formen und Formwandlungen des philosophischen Wahrheitsbegriffs,’’ In Hamburgische Universität: Reden gehalten bei der Feier des Rektorwechsels am 7. November 1929 (Hamburg: C. Boysen, 1929): 17–36. 59. Cassirer, ‘‘Formen und Formwandlungen des philosophischen Wahrheitsbegriffs,’’

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Hamburgische Universität: Reden gehalten bei der Feier des Rektorwechsels am 7. November 1929 (Hamburg: C. Boysen, 1929), 17f. 60. Ibid., 20. 61. See Rorty, ‘‘Idealism and Textualism,’’ Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972– 1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 141: ‘‘whereas nineteenthcentury idealism wanted to substitute one sort of science (philosophy) for another (natural science) as the center of culture, twentieth-century textualism wants to place literature in the center, and to treat both science and philosophy as, at best, literary genres.’’ Rorty has since assumed a more Cassirerian outlook. See his 1993 preface to a German edition of his essays Eine Kultur ohne Zentrum: Vier philosophische Essays (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1993), 5–12, where he explicates culture ‘‘without a center.’’ 62. See Cassirer, ‘‘Goethes Idee der Bildung und Erziehung,’’ Pädagogisches Zentralblatt 12 (1932): 347. Cf. Goethe’s letter to Karl Friedrich v. Reinhard, 12 May 1826, Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, IV. Abt.: Briefe, 41: 30: ‘‘Der Weltgeist ist toleranter als man denkt.’’ 63. See Foucault’s review of the French translation of Cassirer’s Philosophie der Aufklärung (Philosophie des Lumières, 1966): ‘‘Une histoire restée muette,’’ La Quinzaine littéraire 8 (July 1966): 3–4. Foucault praises Cassirer’s noncasual approach to history, its avoidance of individual motivations and economic or other social determinations as explanations for historical events. 64. See Kant, ‘‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was heißt Aufklärung?’’ Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, herausgegeben von der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1. Abt. Werke (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1923), 8: 35. There ‘‘Aufklärung’’ is defined as ‘‘der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit.’’ 65. Michel Foucault, ‘‘What Is Enlightment?’’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 32–50, esp. 34. 66. See Rousseau, ‘‘Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts,’’ in The First and Second Discourses, ed. Roger D. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 93. 67. See Rousseau, ‘‘Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality,’’ in The First and Second Discourses, ed. Roger D. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 150. 68. Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung oder wie man mit dem Hammmer philosophiert, Werke in drei Bände, ed. Karl Schlecta (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1977), 2: 939–1032, 1024 (§48): ‘‘Ich hasse Rousseau noch in der Revolution: . . . was ich hasse ist ihre Rousseausche Moralität . . . mit denen sie alles Flache und Mittelmäßige zu sich überredet. Die Lehre von der Gleichheit! Aber es gibt gar kein giftigeres Gift.’’ 69. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Colins (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 59. Cf. Nützen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, Werke in drei Bände, ed. Karl Schlecta (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1977), 1: 209–85, 270 (§9): ‘‘Die Aufgabe der Geschichte ist es . . . zur Erzeugung des Großen Anlaß zu geben . . . das Ziel der Menschheit kann nicht am Ende liegen, sondern nur in ihren höchsten Exemplaren.’’ 70. This notion is conspicuous in An Essay on Man, 228: ‘‘Human culture taken as a whole may be described as the process of man’s progressive self-liberation,’’ but it is present from the earliest beginnings of Cassirer’s thought. See Krois, Symbolic Forms and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 176–81.

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71. On Cassirer and Elias, see Benjo Maso, ‘‘Elias and the Neo-Kantians: Intellectual Backgrounds of the The Civilizing Process,’’ Theory, Culture & Society 12 (1995): 43– 79; Richard Kilminster and Cas Wouters, ‘‘From Philosophy to Sociology: Elias and the Neo-Kantians (A Response to Benjo Maso)’’ Theory, Culture & Society 12 (1995): 81– 120; Johan Goudsblom, ‘‘Elias and Cassirer, Sociology and Philosophy,’’ Theory, Culture & Society 12 (1995): 121–26; Benjo Maso, ‘‘The Different Theoretical Layers of The Civilizing Process: A Response to Goudsblom and Kilminster & Wouters,’’ Theory, Culture & Society 12 (1995): 127–45. Jürgen Habermas has published an essay in which he interprets Cassirer’s philosophy as a theory of the civilizing process. See Habermas, ‘‘Die befreiende Kraft der symbolischen Formung: Ernst Cassirers humanistische Erbe und die Bibliothek Warburg,’’ in Ernst Cassirers Werk und Wirkung: Philosophie und Kultur, ed. Dorothea Frede and Reinhold Schmücker (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997), 79–104. 72. Cassirer’s affiliation with Goethe goes much further than his conception of selfliberation; cf. my essay ‘‘Urworte: Cassirer als Goethe-Interpret,’’ in Kulturkritik nach Ernst Cassirer, ed. Enno Rudolph and Bernd-Olaf Küppers (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1995), 297–324. 73. At the beginning of the first volume of the PSF we read that ‘‘representation’’ is no mirror image of the world, but rather its ‘‘constitutive condition,’’ and Cassirer argues thereafter against the ‘‘copy theory’’ (Abbildtheorie) of knowledge (PSF, 1: 75–78, 107– 8). 74. Every encounter between different cultures is a test of the limits of Tolerance: See Cassirer, Axel Hägerström: Eine Studie zur Schwedischen Philosophie der Gegenwart, special issue of Göteborgs Högskolas Årsskrift 45 (1939:1): 78f. 75. This tribal orientation of contemporary ‘‘cultural studies’’ has led to a selective canon of thinkers whose works rank as contributions to cultural theory. For example, a reference work on the subject (A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, ed. by Michael Payne [Oxford: Blackwell, 1996]) contains an article about Heidegger, who rejected culture as a topic for philosophy, as well as an article on Frege, whose conception of language had no cultural dimension, unlike Cassirer’s. Yet it includes no articles on Cassirer or on John Dewey (despite Rorty’s insistence upon his importance) whose philosophies brought out localism and universalism in culture. 76. MS, 296: ‘‘It is beyond the power of philosophy to destroy the political myths. A myth is in a sense invulnerable. It is impervious to rational arguments; it cannot be refuted by syllogisms.’’ 77. See MS, 282: ‘‘It has been reserved for the twentieth century, our own great technical age, to develop a new technique of myth. Henceforth myths can be manufactured in the same sense and according to the same methods as any other modern weapon—as machine guns or airplanes. That is a new thing—and a thing of critical importance.’’ On technology as the ‘‘Götterdämmerung’’ of myth, see ‘‘Form und Technik,’’ 39–90. 78. Speaking through Shaftesbury, Cassirer says: ‘‘Good humour is not only the best security against Enthusiasm, but the best foundation of piety and true Religion.’’ See Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England, trans. James E. Pettegrove (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1953), 184 (Cassirer cites Shaftesbury’s ‘‘Letter Concerning Enthusiasm,’’ sect. iii, in Characteristicks, 1: 22ff.).

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79. Cassirer, Platonic Renaissance in England, 167–91. 80. On the importance of moods, see Stanley Cavell, ‘‘Thinking of Emerson,’’ The Senses of Walden, expanded ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 124–26. Cavell refers only to Heidegger on moods, but Heidegger knew Cassirer’s investigations of moods in the second volume of the PSF, having reviewed that work prior to the appearance of Being and Time. Cf. the translation of Heidegger’s review in The Piety of Thinking, trans. James G. Hart and John C. Muraldo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976). 81. On the ‘‘coincidentia oppositorum’’ of moods, see Cassirer, ‘‘Thomas Manns Goethe-Bild: Eine Studie über ‘Lotte in Weimar,’ ’’ Germanic Review 20, no. 3 (October 1945): 166–94.

Appendix: How the Cassirer Papers Came to Yale vincent giroud

The history of the Ernst Cassirer papers at Yale has been told several times.∞ It is not a simple history and some of its episodes remain unclear; nor is it, at the time of this writing, complete. Before attempting to recapitulate it, one should explain that the word ‘‘papers’’ is used here to designate both Cassirer’s philosophical manuscripts, which constitute the Nachlass now in process of being published, and his personal papers: correspondence, either received or retained; personal documents; private files; and so on. The clarification is not without importance in the case of one who, in his life as in his writings, observed a scrupulous separation between the public and the private spheres. When Cassirer sailed for America in May 1941 to teach at Yale at the invitation of Charles Hendel, then chairman of the Philosophy Department, he left most of his papers in Göteborg, where he had been living since September 1935, in the care of his son Georg. In her memoir, Toni Cassirer recalls his unwillingness to bring any books or artwork with him.≤ It was, indeed, not to have been a permanent move but a two-year appointment as visiting professor. New circumstances created by the United States entering the war made it necessary to prolong the stay, first at Yale for another year, then at Columbia in 1944–45. The same circumstances made shipping the papers from Sweden both difficult and risky. It was only after Cassirer’s sudden death on 13 April 1945 that his widow was able to arrange for the remainder of the archive to be brought to America: this was done in 1946 when she visited Sweden. Then she tried to enlist the help of some of Cassirer’s friends and former colleagues

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to organize her husband’s manuscripts, but the task was never completed, nor was it carried very far, as would appear from the arrangement of the papers as they eventually came to Yale. The transfer of the manuscripts to Yale was largely due to the efforts of one of those friends, Charles Hendel, Clark Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics at Yale from 1940 until his retirement in 1959 at the age of sixty-nine. Born in 1890, he died in 1982 one month short of his nintieth birthday. A specialist first in Rousseau, then in Hume, he devoted a large part of his later career to Cassirer’s work: he edited the posthumously published Myth of the State in 1946, cotranslated, with William H. Woglon; prefaced The Problem of Knowledge in 1951; and wrote to an introduction to The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms in 1953. It was to him that Cassirer dedicated An Essay on Man. Hendel’s devotion to Cassirer’s oeuvre, as well as the fact that Yale University Press was Cassirer’s main Englishlanguage publisher, must have contributed to Toni Cassirer’s reported willingness to consider entering into a formal agreement with the university regarding the physical disposition of and literary rights to her husband’s Nachlass. When Toni Cassirer died in January 1961, no such agreement, however, had been concluded. The manuscripts appear to have been moved to New Haven shortly afterwards, presumably as a result of an understanding between Hendel and Toni Cassirer’s three children. This must have been seen as a provisional arrangement because the manuscripts were not made available to scholars until three years later. On 20 February 1964 an agreement was signed by Richard Auerbach, executor of Toni Cassirer’s estate, and Chester Kerr, director of Yale University Press; it also bears the signatures, as witnesses, of Charles Hendel, by then professor emeritus, and John Smith, chairman of the Philosophy Department. The agreement does not specifically address the question of the physical ownership of the manuscripts, probably because they were de facto in Yale’s possession. It transferred to Yale University Press, as a department of Yale University, ‘‘the entire Literary Property of every nature, both published and unpublished, of the late Ernst Cassirer, together with all his rights, title, interest in and to all of such Literary Property.’’ It was at that point that the manuscripts were entrusted to the care of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which had opened its doors in October of the previous year. The fact that the agreement failed to mention the Yale University library or the physical property of the manuscripts had the unfortunate consequence of creating one of those administrative voids that can occur in such large institutions. Housed in the Beinecke, where they were made available to researchers according to the library’s normal policies, the manuscripts were considered ‘‘on deposit,’’ that is, still ‘‘owned’’ by the press rather than part of the library’s general collection (the phrase ‘‘Cassirer Deposit’’ was in fact routinely used by Yale University Press until the early 1990s). This distinction was reflected geographically by the papers being shelved separately from the Beinecke collections in an area known as the ‘‘deposit cage.’’≥ Nor did the library feel it had the authority to take any steps concerning their processing

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or preservation. This state of affairs lasted until January 1987, when it was formally understood between the press and the Beinecke that the latter would henceforth assume full responsibility for the care of Cassirer’s manuscripts. By 1989, then, when the cataloguing of the collection was undertaken, the manuscripts had remained for nearly twenty years in the same condition as when they were delivered to the university in the early 1960s. They were housed in manila mailing envelopes or wrapped in heavy brown paper bundles tied with strings. The whole formed 220 units, which ranged in thickness from that of a small folder to the size of two archival boxes or more. A large number of the mailing envelopes had originated in Göteborg and were probably as arranged by Cassirer before his departure from Sweden. Many of them also bore brief annotations regarding their contents in the hand of either Cassirer or his widow. When the manuscripts were delivered to Yale University Press, the envelopes were assigned numbers in red ballpoint pen. These numbers clearly do not reflect more than the order in which the envelopes were removed from their shipping crates. Indeed, to take one example, the research notes, drafts, and manuscript of An Essay on Man were dispersed in envelopes numbered 1, 2, 3, 10, 25, 35, 43, 57, and 75; and, to take a counterexample, envelope 83 contained five contemporary but otherwise unrelated items: a holograph draft of Sprache und Mythos; a holograph draft and a typescript of the 1927 article ‘‘Die Bedeutung des Sprachproblems für die Enstehung der neueren Philosophie’’; a holograph entitled ‘‘Die Erkenntnistheorie nebst den Grenzfragen der Logik und Denkpsychologie’’; a holograph draft of the lecture ‘‘Mythischer, aesthetischer und theoretischer Raum,’’ delivered in 1930 at the fourth Kongress für Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft; and a typescript and manuscript draft of ‘‘Die Sprache und der Aufbau der Gegenstandswelt,’’ delivered in 1931 in Hamburg at the twelfth Kongress der deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychologie, and for which another draft was to be found in envelope 148 and research notes and a corrected offprint in envelope 62. Soon afterwards, a survey was prepared for the press by John Bacon, then a graduate student in philosophy, who briefly summarized the contents of each envelope: these descriptions were typed on large index cards, which were filed according to the envelope numbers.∂ The numbering stopped at 219. As noted by Donald Verene in 1979, there was in fact one more envelope, containing a typescript of the essay ‘‘Die Philosophie Pico’s della Mirandola und ihre Stellung in der allgemeinen Ideengeschichte,’’ which both the list’s compiler and whoever marked the envelopes had overlooked: it was subsequently numbered 220. Those numbers, arbitrary and partly misleading though they may have been, were used for twenty years as call numbers to identify Cassirer’s manuscripts. As noted by Verene in his 1979 account, one Cassirer manuscript, evidently not part of the lot received through the press, came to Yale through a different route: that was a longhand draft of Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, presented to the Yale University Library by Charles Hendel on 2 July 1979 and soon transferred to the Beinecke. It can be surmised that it had been either given to Hendel by Cassirer himself or entrusted to him by Toni Cassirer

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separately from the rest of the manuscripts. This manuscript was first catalogued as part of the Yale Collection of German Literature but has since been reclassified and is filed with the rest of the manuscripts relating to Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, with its provenance duly mentioned on the folders.∑ It should be noted that the Beinecke Library is not the only repository of Cassirer manuscripts at Yale: the archives of Yale University Press, deposited in Manuscripts and Archives, a department of the Sterling Memorial Library, include the typescript of An Essay on Man used by the press for typesetting (it contains annotations and corrections, some but not all in the hand of Cassirer) and a similar typescript for The Myth of the State, in which the corrections in Cassirer’s hand are very few.∏ At the end of his appendix, Verene noted that the Cassirer papers contained no correspondence, save for the occasional letter to Cassirer which found its way into his manuscripts because he jotted down notes of drafts on the clean side: thus an 1896 letter from his father, Eduard Cassirer, is preserved in one of Cassirer’s early student notebooks, while a June 1938 letter from his cousin Bruno Cassirer turned up among research notes for the essay ‘‘Descartes und Königin Christina von Schweden,’’ later collected in Descartes: Lehre—Persönlichkeit—Wirkung.π The history of Cassirer’s personal papers would seem simple at first but has turned out to be nearly as complicated as that of his philosophical manuscripts. After the death of Toni Cassirer, those personal papers passed into the custody of her daughter Anne. Born in 1908, she was married to the pianist Kurt Appelbaum in 1933 and emigrated to America in 1938. She practiced psychoanalysis and by the early 1960s was living in the Eldorado at 300 Central Park West, which remained her residence until her death in May 1998. In early December 1986, the New York rare book dealer Lucien Goldschmidt offered to the Beinecke Library, which purchased them, a group of eighteen letters written to Cassirer by ten different correspondents. These included Leon Brunschwicg, Albert Einstein (six letters), Edmund Husserl, Thomas Mann (two letters), Erwin Panofsky, and Albert Schweitzer. They clearly originated from the papers in Mrs. Appelbaum’s possession and had been selected, possibly with Goldschmidt’s advice, on account of their high market value. It is impossible to tell how many such letters may have been disposed of over the years on the autograph market, but the quantity is probably not very large. We are aware of at least two other letters from Einstein to the Cassirers, the first dated 16 April 1944 and the other one, presumably a letter of condolence to Toni Cassirer, 18 May 1945; and of one other from Thomas Mann, dated 14 June 1941.∫ As recently as January 1998, a Swiss manuscript dealer was offering for sale another letter from Panofsky to Cassirer, dated 18 November 1933, as well as a letter from Hermann Cohen, dated 4 March 1902, and two letters written to Toni Cassirer in 1945 after Cassirer’s death, one from Gertrud Hindemith and one from Werner Jaeger. The first contacts between Mrs. Appelbaum and the Beinecke Library were made, through the intermediary of Yale University Press, in January 1992. The result was a substantial gift of books from Cassirer’s library, most notably his beloved Goethe,

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which we know from Toni Cassirer he never wanted to be without; he brought it with him to America along with his Kant and his Shakespeare as some of his most precious possessions.Ω Together with it came fifty titles by Cassirer, both offprints and separate publications, which have all been added to the Beinecke collections. With the exception of two wartime and five posthumous items, they all predate Cassirer’s departure to America, the earliest being his article ‘‘Aristoteles und Kant,’’ published in 1911 in Kant-Studien. Six are in French, one is in Italian, and one in Russian (the translation of Zur Einstein’schen Relativitätstheorie published in 1922 in Petrograd, inscribed to Cassirer by one of the two translators, E. S. Berlovich). The story of Cassirer’s library is not our topic, but it intersects with that of his papers and should be summarized briefly. In spite of his reluctance to bring many books with him to America, it appears that by the time he left Yale in 1944, Cassirer had in his possession, both in his office and at his Bishop Street apartment, a library of about 2,500 volumes.∞≠ He brought only a small quantity of books to New York, leaving the rest for temporary safekeeping in the Philosophy Reading Room on the sixth floor of the Sterling Memorial Library. There they remained until after Toni Cassirer’s death. Yale declined to acquire them from her heirs, presumably on account of the high rate of duplication with its own holdings. It was thanks to the intervention of Ruth Barcan Marcus, a former student of Cassirer’s at Yale, who was then chair of the Philosophy Department of the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, that the books were sold to that institution through a New York dealer in 1966.∞∞ Cassirer’s library is therefore for the most part in Chicago, with a smaller portion at Yale. But it should be noted that Mrs. Appelbaum still had another several hundred volumes in her possession at the time of her death. Those we assume were among the books shipped to America from Sweden in 1946, as were the volumes that came to Yale in 1992 through Mrs. Appelbaum’s generosity. In the summer of 1992, Mrs. Appelbaum informed Yale that she was prepared to part with some of her father’s personal papers, which I examined in her apartment at the end of November. It took nearly two years to agree on financial terms, and it was thus only in November 1994 that this new portion of Cassirer’s archive became for the first time available to scholars. It included personal correspondence from Hermann Cohen (more than fifty letters from 1901 to 1914), Raymond Klibansky (ca. twenty letters, 1933–38), and Aby Warburg (ten letters, 1923–29). Among the material purchased in 1994 were also several of Cassirer’s manuscripts that, for some reason, had been omitted from what had been transferred to Yale after Toni Cassirer’s death. Two predated the move to America: a corrected typescript of the essay ‘‘Der junge Goethe,’’ dated from Göteborg, 2 October 1940, and about 500 pages of notes for five lectures on Goethe delivered in Lund, Sweden, in March 1941. There was also the manuscript of a talk delivered on 14 April 1942 to the Germania Club of New Haven, entitled ‘‘Bemerkungen zum Faust-Fragment und zur Faust-Dichtung’’; one envelope labeled ‘‘Lose Blätter gefunden im Schreibtisch, April 1945’’ contained an incomplete manuscript draft of the same talk. At the same time as these papers were purchased, Mrs. Appelbaum donated to

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Yale another cache of books and offprints of articles by Cassirer that came from his library as well as a number of posthumous editions, reprints, and translations of his works, including several early editions of Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, among them a first edition (Berlin, 1906–7) inscribed by Cassirer and with pencil markings by him in the margins. In July 1996, Mrs. Appelbaum approached Yale again and I was invited to examine a new portion of her father’s personal papers, which were purchased soon afterwards: some were in fact included in the small exhibition held that autumn in the Beinecke Library to mark the international conference on Cassirer held at Yale on 4–6 October. This new addition to the archive contained a group of letters from the young Cassirer to his parents, sisters, brothers, and cousins (Bruno and Paul), all dating from the early or mid-1890s. In the correspondence were letters from Dimitri Gawronsky (1911–33), Axel Hägerström, Paul Hensel of the Kantgesellschaft (1906–31), Ernst Hoffmann (1924, the rest undated), Malte Jacobsson, Theodor Litt, Fritz Saxl, and Gertrud Bing (from 1921 onwards), and Edgar Wind, as well as various letters of administrative character, such as the letter from Hendel officially inviting Cassirer to teach at Yale. Memorabilia included course completion certificates from Cassirer’s student days in Breslau or Marburg and diplomas and honorary doctorates conferred on him by various universities. In the papers are a number of drafts or retained copies of letters by Cassirer himself, such as one he wrote in April 1933 to the dean of the faculty of philosophy at Hamburg University. They also contain letters of condolence received by Toni Cassirer in 1945 and a number of photographs. This purchase was combined with Mrs. Appelbaum’s gift of a large number of letters from Cassirer to his wife, correspondence spanning the years 1902 to 1943, the bulk of it dating from 1902 to 1906. The earliest letter, dated 9 April 1902, is numbered 36 in Toni Cassirer’s hand: the current whereabouts of the previous thirty-five letters, some of which are quoted in Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer, are not known. In keeping with the donor’s wishes, these letters are closed for twenty-five years and will only be made available to researchers on 30 August 2021.∞≤ In May 1998, only a few weeks before her death, Mrs. Appelbaum called the library to indicate that she wanted to dispose of yet another group of papers of her parents. These apparently included a large number of letters, both to Ernst and Toni Cassirer throughout their lives, especially family correspondence, and many photographs. Although Mrs. Appelbaum’s death made it impossible to finalize this transaction, it is to be hoped that these last additions to the papers will soon join the rest of the Beinecke archive for the benefit of scholars studying the life and work of the great philosopher. Notes 1. The three main accounts are those of Donald Phillip Verene in the appendix of his edition of Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935–1945

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(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 293–98; of Michael Womack in the finding aid to the Ernst Cassirer papers, New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 1990, updated 1999; and finally of John Michael Krois in his edition of Cassirer’s Zur Metaphysik der symbolischen Formen (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1995), Editorische Hinweise, 279–84. 2. Toni Cassirer, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1981), 279. 3. In spite of this forbidding designation, the area was simply a reserved space in the library stacks; it should go without saying that it benefited from the same temperature and humidity control. 4. Bacon defended his Ph.D. thesis, ‘‘Being and Existence: Two Ways of Formal Ontology,’’ in 1966. He has since published Universals and Property Instances: The Alphabet of Being (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) (Aristotelian Society Series, volume 15), as well as being coeditor with Keith Campbell and Lloyd Reinhardt of Ontology, Causality, and Mind: Essays in Honor of D. M. Armstrong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). The preface to the first title indicates that he was teaching in Sydney. 5. Its YCGL call number was Zg20. It is now housed in GEN MSS 98, box 22, folders 411–22. 6. Yale University Press, Author Manuscripts. Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives, YRG 34-B, boxes 9–10. Boxes 11 and 12 in the same series contain the press’s typescripts for the English translations of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and The Problem of Knowledge. 7. The letter from Eduard Cassirer can be found in GEN MSS 98, box 57, folder 1125; the one from Bruno Cassirer is in box 38, folder 736. 8. Those three letters were in Mrs. Appelbaum’s possession in November 1992. 9. See Toni Cassirer, Mein Leben, 279. The Goethe comprises in fact two sets, the Berlin edition of 1868–79 in 30 volumes (bound in 21) and the Weimar edition of 1887– 1919 in 132 volumes (bound in 142). The latter lacks only volume 4 of the correspondence. These two titles are now catalogued in the Beinecke under the call numbers 1994 890 and 891. 10. That is the figure given by Verene in Symbol, Myth, and Culture, appendix, 297. 11. I am grateful to Professor Marcus for sharing with me her recollections of this transaction. 12. The 1994 and 1996 acquisitions are now catalogued as Ernst Cassirer Papers— addition, GEN MSS 355.

Contributors

Paul Bishop is professor of German at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Jung’s ‘‘Answer to Job’’ (2002), Synchronicity and Intellectual Intuition (2000), and The Dionysian Self (1995); he is coeditor of Goethe 2000: Intercultural Readings of Goethe’s Works (2000) and of Jung in Contexts: A Reader (1999). Louis Dupré is T. Lawrason Riggs Professor in the Philosophy of Religion, emeritus, at Yale University. He is the author of Marx’s Social Critique of Culture (1983); Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (1993); Metaphysics and Culture (1994); Symbols of the Sacred (2000); and The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (2004). Gideon Freudenthal is professor of philosophy of science at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas of Tel Aviv University. He is the author of Atom and Individuum in the Age of Newton: On the Genesis of the Mechanistic World View (1986); coauthor with P. Damerow, P. McLaughlin, and J. Renn of Exploring the Limits of Preclassical Mechanics: A Study of Conceptual Development in Early Modern Science (1992); author of Perpetuum Mobile: The Leibniz-Papin Controversy (1999) and of ‘‘Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff als Zivilisationstheorie bei Georg Simmel und Ernst Cassirer,’’ in Gesellschaft denken, ed. Leonhard Bauer and Klaus Hamberger (Berlin: Springer, 2002), 251–76. 271

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Michael Friedman is Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of Humanities at Stanford University. He is the author of Foundations of Space-Time Theories (1983), Kant and the Exact Sciences (1992), and A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (2000). He has also published extensively on the history of logical positivism. Vincent Giroud was formerly curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. He edited Les extravagants: Scenes de la vie de boheme cosmopolite: Roman by Paul Morand (1986). Cyrus Hamlin is professor of German and Comparative Literature at Yale University. He is the author of Hermeneutics of Form: Romantic Poetics in Theory and Practice (1998); the editor of the Norton critical edition of Goethe’s Faust (2d ed., 2000); and coeditor of Goethe’s Early Verse Drama and Prose Plays (1988) and his Verse Plays and Epic (1995). He serves as general editor for the Suhrkamp edition of Goethe in English. Michael Holquist is professor of Slavic languages and literatures and of comparative literature, emeritus, at Yale University. He is the author of Mikhail Bakhtin (1986) and Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (1990). He is coeditor of M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (1981) and other works of Bakhtin. John Michael Krois is professor of philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. He is the author of Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (1987); He is coeditor of Edgar Wind: Kunsthistoriker und Philosoph (1998); a coeditor of Ernst Cassirer’s Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte (1995ff.); and coeditor and translator of Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms (1996). Steve Lofts is assistant professor of philosophy at King’s College, University of Western Ontario. He is the author of Ernst Cassirer: La vie de l’esprit, essai sur l’unite systematique de la philosophie des formes symboliques et de la culture (1997) and Ernst Cassirer: A ‘‘Repetition’’ of Modernity (2000). Barbara Naumann is professor of modern German literature at the University of Zurich. She is the author of Philosophie und Poetik des Symbols: Cassirer und Goethe (1998) and Musikalisches Ideen-Instrument: Das Musikalische in Poetik und Sprachtheorie der Frühromantik (1990). She edited Vom Doppelleben der Bilder: Bildmedien und ihre Texte (1993). Ernst Wolfgang Orth is professor of philosophy emeritus at the University of Trier, Germany. He is the author of Von der Erkenntnistheorie zur Kulturphilosophie: Studien zu Ernst Cassirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1996). He is the editor of Ernst Cassirer, Geist und Leben: Schriften zu den Lebensordnungen von Natur und Kunst, Geschichte und Sprache (1993).

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Brian Poole studied in Toronto, New York, Poitiers, and Moscow and has taught at the University of Marburg and the Free University of Berlin. His publications include essays on neo-Kantianism, Bakhtin, Kagan, German and Russian philosophy, Russian and Jewish emigration to Germany, and eastern Jewish studies; he is now on leave to write a study of Bakhtin’s thought. Enno Rudolph is professor of philosophy at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. He is the author of Odyssee des Individuums: Zur Geschichte eines vergessenen Problems (1991); his book Ernst Cassirer im Kontext appeared in 2003. He edited Die Renaissance als erste Aufklärung, 3 vols. (1998), and is coeditor of the Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie (1992ff.). Oswald Schwemmer is professor of philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He is the author of Ernst Cassirer: Ein Philosoph der europäischen Moderne (1997) and of Die kulturelle Existenz des Menschen (1997). He is a coeditor of Ernst Cassirer, Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, 20 vols. (1995ff.). R. H. Stephenson is William Jacks Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow, founding director of its Centre for Intercultural Studies, and founding head of its School of Modern Languages and Cultures. He has published extensively on various aspects of German and comparative literature and thought, including Goethe’s Conception of Knowledge and Science (1995), Goethe’s Wisdom Literature: A Study in Aesthetic Transmutation (1983), and The Cultural Theory of Weimar Classicism (forthcoming). He was coeditor of Goethe 2000: Intercultural Readings of Goethe’s Works (2000). Donald Phillip Verene is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Emory University. He is the author of Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (1997). He edited Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935–1945 (1979). He is coeditor of Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms (1996).

Index

Abel, Karl Friedrich, 141 abstraction, 204 activity, 13, 19, 215 Adorno, Theodor W., xii advertisements, xv aesthetics, 83, 145–146, 176, 235–236 aesthetization, 7–8, 9, 11 agnosia, 129 agriculture, origins of, 131, 153n9 alchemy, 127, 131 Alciati, Andrea, 158 algebra, 52 alienation, 8, 62, 67, 194 allegory, 160 Allgemeines Handwörterbuch der philosophischen Wissenschaften (Krug), 127 alter ego, 25, 69 Altmann, Alexander, 133 ambivalence, 103–104, 118 ‘‘Amendment’’ (Traherne), 174 Analytic of Principles (Kant), 50

274

animal fear, 104 animals, 32, 76n35; human distinction from, 217, 218; instincts of, 63, 64; relation to nature, 35–36; tool-use and, 215; totem animals, 68 animal symbolicum, human being as, 7, 22, 31, 32, 63, 208 animism, 56 anthropology, xvi, 29, 209; cultural, 28; nature-culture distinction and, 22; negative, 72; philosophical, 31; political, xxi, 125 antisemitism, 246–248 ‘‘Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words, The’’ (Freud), 141 aphasia, 129 Appelbaum, Anne Cassirer, 266, 267–268 Appelbaum, Kurt, 266 apraxia, 129 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 44, 158 archetypes, xxii, 69, 131, 134, 141–142, 144

Index ‘‘Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’’ (Jung lecture), 144 Aretino, Pietro, 65 ‘‘Aristoteles und Kant’’ (Cassirer), 267 Aristotle, 30, 38, 44, 105, 113n36, 171 art, 16, 53, 118; art history, xi; catharsis of subject and, 73–74; directed thinking and, 147; distance from immediacy, 66; existential isolation of artist, 193–194, 196; language and, xxii, 68– 69, 81, 239; meaning and, 36; mythical consciousness and, 68, 236; as myth recalled, 23–24; signs and, 79; as symbolic form, 235; as symbolic mediator, 166; symbolism and, 172; as union of myth and science, 58 astrology, 104–105, 127, 131, 159 astronomy, 106 Atlas of Images--Mnemosyne (Warburg), xiv, xv Auerbach, Erich, 111 Auerbach, Richard, 264 Aufbau (Carnap). See Logische Aufbau der Welt, Der (Carnap) ‘‘Auf dem See’’ (Goethe), 142–143 Aufhebung (Hegelian doctrine), 20 Augustine, Saint, 39, 89, 158 authority, legitimation of, 121 Avens, Roberts, 133–134 Bachelard, Gaston, 52 Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 132 Bacon, Francis, 8 Baden school, xiii Bakhtin, Mikhail, xii, xxi, 99, 110–111; on astrology, 104–105; Cassirer’s influence on, 100, 101; on Cusanus, 106–107, 109; on grotesque body, 99– 101; on Heraclitus, 101–102; on medieval cosmos, 105; on sympathetic magic, 103–104 Baldwin, James Mark, 138, 144 Barfield, Owen, 134 Barthes, Roland, xii

275

‘‘Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology’’ (Jung), 128 basis phenomena (Basisphänomene), xvii, 25, 29, 30, 40, 163, 245; construction and, 208; development of human culture and, 213; reason and fear in, 166; thought and, 248 Bauch, Bruno, 230, 233, 246–247 Baudelaire, Charles, 160 Beaufret, Jean, 117 becoming, harmony of, 101–102 ‘‘Begriff der symbolischen Form, Der’’ (Cassirer), 162 Beinecke Library (Yale University), 187, 198n2, 264–265, 266 being, 76n35, 88; action and, 6; culture and, 30; Heidegger’s view of, 249– 250; historicity of, 40; metaphysical, 35; symbolic order and, 160; transcendent, 205 Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) (Heidegger), 3, 39, 227, 228, 234, 246 Benjamin, Walter, xii Bergson, Henri, xviii, 3, 62, 236 Berlin, University of, xiii Berliner Tagesblatt (liberal newspaper), 248, 257n30 Berlovich, E. S., 267 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 128 Bible, 118 Bing, Gertrud, 268 biology, 62, 134, 208 Birke, Lynda, 55 Birmingham school, xi Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche), xiv Bishop, Paul, xxi–xxii, 159 Blanshard, Brand, 19, 20 body: body-soul dualism, 31–32; grotesque body, 99–101; meaning and, 175; time and, 102 Bolzano, Bernhard, 159, 231 Bopp, Franz, 52 Bourdieu, Pierre, xii Bruno, Giordano, 106, 132

276

Index

Brunschwig, Leon, 266 Buddhism, 101–102 Burckhardt, Jacob, 65, 75n22 Byron, Lord, 59 Calvinism, 109 Campanella, Tommaso, 106 Cardano, Geronimo, 106 Carnap, Rudolf, xxiv, 227, 228–230, 241–243; Cassirer’s critical remarks on, 239–241; Marburg school and, 232–233, 234 Carr, David, 39 Cassirer, Ernst: antisemitic attack on, 247–248; Bakhtin and, 99–111; comparative studies and, xx–xxiii; correspondence of, 266, 268; crisis of cultural representation and, 57–59; cultural theory of, xii–xvii, 61–74, 251–254; Davos disputation with Heidegger and, 117, 227–228, 244–245, 248–249; ethics and, 117–126; exile from Germany, xvi, 185, 186–187, 188, 192, 197; Goethe’s theory of symbol and, 161–177, 191, 192; Hegel and, 20–21, 206; historicization of philosophy and, 35–44; Kant and, 50– 53, 79, 228; language theory compared with Jung’s, 127–153; life and organic being in, 62–63; life of, 128; personal papers at Yale, 263–268; philosophical outlook of, xxiii–xxv, 3– 16, 204–207; philosophy of culture and, xix–xx, 19–26; stylistic effect in writing of, 78–92; ‘‘symbol’’ notion of, 209–211 Cassirer, Toni, 263–264, 265, 267, 268 causality, 22, 131, 214, 231 Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies, xi Cervantes, Miguel de, 74, 110, 193, 254 childhood development theory, 141, 143 ‘‘Chinesisch-Deutsche Tages und Jahreszeiten’’ (Goethe), 172

Christianity, 118, 121, 252 Christology, 122, 125 City of God, The (Augustine), 39 civilization, xxiii, 136, 225n21, 246, 252 cognition, 50–51, 53–54, 132 Cohen, Hermann, 5, 36, 41, 127; correspondence with Cassirer, 266; Marburg school and, 230, 235; targeted by antisemitism, 246–248 Columbia University, xvi, 263 communication, 239–241, 242 community, 9, 16, 69, 70 ‘‘Concept of Symbolic Form in the Construction of the Human Sciences, The’’ (Cassirer), 79 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 137 Confucius, 195 consciousness: aesthetic, 58, 174; being and, 42; functions of, 21; mythic, 101, 103, 118; objectification and, 214; selfconsciousness, 215, 217; signs and, 15; symbolism and, 165, 169; time and, 38–39 construction/constructivism, 203–204, 213, 246; history and, 207–209; missing, 218–221; as principle, 216–218 Conversations with Goethe (Eckermann), 85 cosmos/cosmology, medieval, 6, 105– 106, 113n36 ‘‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’’ (Freud), 147 creativity, 5, 8, 11, 40, 188 Critique of Judgment, The (Kant), 235– 236 Critique of Pure Reason, The (Kant), 42, 51, 149, 228, 231 cultural studies, xi–xii, 54–55, 253, 261n75 culture: active subject and, 204; basis of, xv; crisis of representation and, 56–57; critique of, 53, 61, 92; cultural theory, xi–xii, xxiii; ethics and, 119; freedom and, xxi, 120; functions of spirit and,

Index 24; as indicator of metaphysical problem, 28–34; industries of, 186; language as mask of, 72; multiplicity of, 40; myth in, xiv; nature distinguished from, 22; as philosophical concept, xviii–xix; relation to nature, 25, 36, 63, 70; ritual festive forms of, 102; as symbolic process, 192; technology and, 219 culture, philosophy of, xviii, xix–xx, 19– 26, 28, 39; constructionism and, 209; cultural studies and, 54; discursive style of, 88–90; hermeneutic principle and, 42; literary dimension of, 87; metaphysical unification and, 43, 44; style and, 83; totality and, 16 culturology, 31 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 111 Cusanus. See Nicolaus Cusanus custom, 70, 71 death, 8, 197 deconstruction, xii, 111, 164, 165, 176 De Doctrina Christiana (Augustine), 158 De immortalitate animi (Pomponazzi), 106 democracy, 251 Derrida, Jacques, xii, 141, 155n39, 159, 162, 164 Descartes, René, 42, 43, 89, 90, 92, 130 De Subtilitate (Cardano), 106 development, principle of, 212–213, 216–218; symbol and, 209–211; technology and, 219; tool-use and, 213– 216 De visione Dei (Cusanus), 115n54 dialectics, 20, 25, 26, 84, 118; of appropriation, 91; autonomy of reason and, 125; religion and myth, 71; symbolic forms and, 236 Dichtung und Wahrheit (Goethe), 137 Dickens, Charles, 74 ‘‘Diderot’s Essays on Painting’’ (Goethe), 82 différance (Derridean concept), 163

277

Dilthey, Wilhelm, 39, 163, 234 directed thinking, 139, 144–145, 152 Discorsi (Machiavelli), 123 Discours de la Methode (Descartes), 89, 90 ‘‘Does Consciousness Exist?’’ (James), 3 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 74, 193 dreams, xxxii, 8, 135–136 Dreams of a Final Theory (Weinberg), 56 dualism, 56, 58, 122, 233 Dupré, Louis, xviii, xix Eckermann, Johann Peter, 85, 193 Eckhardt, Meister, 132, 133 Eco, Umberto, xii economics, 21 education, 188 ‘‘Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier und Stil’’ (Goethe), 192 Einstein, Albert, xvi, 56, 266 Elias, Norbert, 252 Emblematum Libellis (Alciati), 158 emotion, 4, 9, 209; language and, 137; mythical thought and, 237; spirituality and, 14; symbolization and, 11, 169 empiricism, 4, 109, 221; critical idealism versus, 203–204; directed thinking and, 145; origin of language and, 213; perception and, 240 Emrich, Wilhelm, 164 Enlightenment, xiv, xviii, 5, 75n23, 223n5; ethics and, 119; mythic thought and, xxi; Platonic idealism and, 109; reflective form and, 138; Renaissance as epoch of, 124; spontaneity of, 6 ‘‘Entoptische Farben’’ (Goethe), 189–190 ‘‘Epirrhema’’ (Goethe), 152 epistemology, 80, 129, 145; biology and, 148–149; empiricist, 4; historical constructionist, 203, 204; hypertext and, 88; Kantian, 40, 132, 162, 180n33, 230; neo-Kantian, 83; style and, 86 Erdmann, Benno, 248

278

Index

Erkenntnisproblem, Das (Cassirer), 37 ‘‘Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens’’ (Mörike), 135 Essai sur le données immédiates de la conscience (Bergson), 3 Essay on Man, An: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Culture (Cassirer), xxi, 19, 73, 126; dedication to Hendel, 264; human being as ‘‘animal symbolicum,’’ 31; on intellect and symbols, 149; intended introduction to, 86; Kantianism and, 131; research notes and draft of, 265; Socratic tradition and, 20; on symbol as ‘‘way to civilization,’’ 252; on work, 220 ethics, 61, 70–71, 117, 196, 235; Cassirer-Heidegger disagreement and, 248–249; culture and, 119; natural scientific knowledge and, 236; religion and, 118 ethnology, 30, 80 Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Kluge), 142 event, structure and, 52 evil, moral, 119, 120 existence, human, 4, 29, 58; aesthetization of, 7–8, 9; alienation in, 8; consciousness and, 43; expression (‘‘feeling of life’’) and, 66; historical character of, 38; rupture in, 250 experience, 32, 40, 50, 73, 86, 210 expression, 7, 21, 41, 66, 87, 207; style and, 90; symbolic pregnance and, 210 exteriorization principle, 9 fantasy thinking, xxii, 8, 146–151, 152 Farbenlehre (Theory of Color) (Goethe), 189 Fascism, 218 fatalism, 117 Faust (Goethe), 173–175 fear, 117, 166 Felix Meiner Verlag, xxv feminism, 55

Ficino, Marsilio, 65, 106 First World War (Great War), xiii, 232 Fischer, Bermann, 187 folklore, 147–148 ‘‘Form und Technik’’ (Cassirer), 213, 214, 218, 220 Fortuna, 158 Foucault, Michel, xii, xx, 75n23, 251– 252, 260n63 Frankfurter Zeitung (liberal newspaper), 247, 248, 257n30 Frederick the Second (king of Prussia), 122, 123 freedom, 64, 120 Frege, Gottlob, 261n75 Freiheit und Form (Cassirer), 117 French Revolution, 252 Freud, Sigmund, xxii, 128, 135–136, 141, 147 Freudenthal, Gideon, xxiii–xxiv Friedman, Michael, xxiv Frye, Northrop, 160 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 91 Galileo Galilei, 81, 92 Gawronsky, Dimitry, 130 Geertz, Clifford, xii Geiger, Lazarus, 204, 213, 216, 217 ‘‘General Aspects of Dream Psychology’’ (Jung), 128 Germanic Review (journal), 187, 198n2 Germans and Germany: relation to Jews, 194–195; ‘‘world historical destiny’’ of, 196 Gestalt-psychology, 175 gesture, xv, 140–141, 158 Giroud, Vincent, xxv Goethe, August, 189 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 6, 59, 91, 92, 132, 252; aesthetic ideals of, 236; on creativity, xviii, 5; cult of, 87; on Hamann, 137; on imitation, 84; Kant’s influence on, 180n33; Mann’s Lotte in Weimar and, 185–198; on one-sided

Index thinking, 154n27; as philosophical poet, 21; poems, 142, 152, 172, 189– 190, 197; on representation, 81, 83; on style, xx, 65, 80, 82–83, 85; symbolic knowledge and, 88; symbol theory of, xxii–xxiii, 160–177 Goethe and the Historical World (Cassirer), 187 ‘‘Goethe as a Representative of Bourgeois Culture’’ (Mann), 187 ‘‘Goethe’s Idea of Human Development and Education’’ (Cassirer), 187 Goldbrunner, Josef, 132 Goodman, Nelson, xv, xvii, 30, 33, 90 Graves, Robert, 158 Grimm, brothers, 52 Grundregel (‘‘basic rule’’), 9 Grundriß der Psychologie (Wundt), 141 Haeckel, Ernst, 128 Hägerström, Axel, 268 Hamann, Johann Georg, 132, 133, 137 Hamburg, University of, xiii, xvi Hamlin, Cyrus, xxiii Haraway, Donna, 55 Harding, Sandra, 55 harmony, ideal of, 24, 26 Hartman, Geoffrey, 186 Hegel, G. W. F., 44, 125, 221, 222; critical idealism of, 224n8; Goethe and, 168–169; historical dialectic of, 236; logic of, 10, 25; phenomenology of spirit, 21; speculation and, 20; Spirit as historical idea, 37, 38; on spirit as substance and subject, 66; teleological development and, 206 Heidegger, Martin, xvi, xviii, xix, 3, 29; Davos meeting with Cassirer, xxiv– xxv, 31, 117, 227–228, 244–245, 248–249; on existential alienation, 8; historicity of being and, 40; on historicity of truth, 234; on Kant’s theory of reason, 42; Nazi regime and, 227 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 53, 54, 92, 238

279

Hendel, Charles, 50, 149, 263, 264 Hensel, Paul, 268 Heraclitus, 20, 101–102, 117 Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 231 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 36, 39, 137, 143, 236; Goethe and, 170, 175; sense perception theory of, 182n52 hermeneutics, 28, 37, 42, 43 Hertz, Heinrich, 53–54 Hillman, James, 133, 134 Hindemith, Gertrud, 266 Hindu etymology, 142 Hinkle, Beatrice, 134 historicism, 3 history, 24, 233; construction and, 207– 209; historical transformation, 37; Jews’ role in, 194; progress of human mind and, 38 Hitler, Adolf, xvi, xxiii, 185, 198, 247 Hoffmann, Ernst, 268 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 92 holism, 57 Holocaust, 106, 194 Holquist, Michael, xix homology, 86 Hopi Indians, xv human being: as ‘‘animal symbolicum,’’ 31, 208; individual and humanity, 64; tribalism and, 253, 261n75 humanism, 117, 124, 125 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 52, 149–150, 236 Husserl, Edmund, xviii, 3, 4, 106; Cassirer’s correspondence with, 266; on notion of time, 39; phenomenology and, 20, 228; symbols and, 210 hypertext, 88 idealism, xx, xxiii; critical, xxiii, 203– 204, 222n1, 223–224n8; transcendental, 233 ideas, history of, 35, 37 Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (Husserl), 3

280

Index

identity, 11, 69; of human mind, 12; self and other, 70; of subject, 50; symbolic, 165, 173 ideology, 44 imagination, transcendental, 228 Imagination Is Reality (Avens), 133 imitation, 83, 84 immediacy, 6, 24, 43, 81; mysticism and, 72; progression of symbolic forms and, 82; representational distance from, 66 individual, the, 64, 67 Individual and the Cosmos in the Philosophy of the Renaissance, The (Cassirer), 104, 105, 107 individuality, 71, 82, 90, 176, 249 industrialization, 131 Interpretation of Dreams, The (Die Traumdeutung) (Freud), 135, 136, 141 Intimate Journals (Baudelaire), 160 Introduction à la métaphysique (Bergson), 3 ‘‘Introduction to the Kawi-work’’ (Humboldt), 52 intuition, 212, 231, 237, 238 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 133 Jacobsson, Malte, 268 Jaeger, Werner, 266 James, William, 3, 138, 146 Jews, German, xvi, 106, 194, 246–247 Jodl, Friedrich, 138 Jonas, Hans, 248 Judaism, 118 Jung, Carl G., xxii, 127, 152–153; on archetypes, 144; on ‘‘fantasy thinking,’’ 146–149; on language and speech, 139–146; language theory of, 127–153; life of, 127–128; word association and, 141–142 Kanaev, I. I., 111 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 44, 90, 212, 228; Cassirer’s biography of, 79; epistemology of, 230–231; ethics of, 125; on

evil, 120; on formal logic, 241; idealist philosophy and, 21; on intellect and images, 149; Newtonian laws and, 50, 235; notion of time and, 37; philosophy of culture and, 36; philosophy of history and, 38; on schematization, 50–51; on spontaneity of reason, 5; symbols and, 163; synthesis of science and humanism, 243; theory of sensible experience, 242; on understanding and reason, 41–42 Kantianism, xviii, 5, 21 Kantorowoicz, Ernst, xxi, 121–123, 124 Kants Leben und Lehre (Cassirer), 79 Kant-Studien (journal), 245, 246–247, 267 Kapp, Ernst, 214, 216, 217 Kekulé von Stradonitz, August, 130 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 55 Kempf, Heike, 32 Kepler, Johannes, 63 Kerr, Chester, 264 kingship, 121 King’s Two Bodies, The (Kantorowicz), 121 Klages, Ludwig, 132 Klibansky, Raymond, xvi, 267 Kluge, Friedrich, 142 knowledge, 4, 16, 211; absolute, 42; active basis of, 203–204; connectedness and, 51; linked content of, 210; neo-Kantian theory of, 29; phenomenology of, 21; reflection upon action and, 215; relational conditioning of, 91; religion and, 72–73; scientific, 4, 236; self-knowledge, 20, 24, 67; split in being and, 76n35; style and, 65, 82, 83, 84, 88; subjective limitation of, 132; symbolic, xx; transcendental subject and, 41; transcendent objects and, 230. See also science Kreuzzüge eines Philologen, Die (Hamann), 137

Index Krisisschrift (Husserl), 3 Kritische Wälder (Lessing), 137 Krois, John Michael, xxiv, 29, 39, 131, 161, 175 Krug, Wilhelm Traugott, 127 Kugler, Paul, 141–142, 144 Külpe, Oswald, 146 Kulturphilosophie, xii Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (K. B. W.), xiii labor, 25, 213, 217 Lacan, Jacques, 66, 69, 136, 139, 143; on reality and discourse, 172–173; on stade du miroir (‘‘mirror stage’’), 170, 182n52 language, xv, xvi, xxiii, 43, 86–87; art and, 68–69, 81; autonomy of symbolic forms and, 239; being and, 249–250; comparative studies of, 236; construction and, 207; development of human culture and, 222; directed thinking and, 139–146; distance from immediacy, 66; dream symbolism and, 136; functions of consciousness and, 21; history of, 80; human emergence from nature and, 209; individuation and, 252–253; making of culture and, 24; material media of, 212; meaning and, 36; mythic-religious consciousness and, 9, 16, 68; origin of, 137– 138, 140, 213, 216–217, 236; philosophers of, 53, 134; poetic process and, 191; psychoanalytic theory and, xxii; public events and, 7; signs and, xv, 79; speech and, 139–140, 150; subject of culture and, 62; as symbolic form, 23, 235; symbolism and, xvii; transcendental aesthetic and, 52; word association, 141–142; world view and, 65; written versus oral, 220 Language and Myth (Cassirer), xiii Lask, Emil, 232, 234 laughter, 104, 109–110

281

law, 16, 21, 122 Lebensphilosophie, 234, 236, 246 Lehmann, Paul, 100 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 132, 159, 204, 222; on intuition and understanding, 212; on ‘‘pregnant’’ substance, 211, 217; ‘‘universal characteristic’’ of, 238 Leiden des jungen Werther, Die (Goethe), 189 Leonardo da Vinci, 7, 65 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 137 ‘‘Letter on Humanism’’ (Heidegger), 117 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 22, 139 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 138 liberalism, 126 Library of Living Philosophers, 20 life, chain of, 70 Lingua Franca (journal), 55 linguistics, 140, 141, 150, 159 literature, 43, 87–88, 90, 109; science and, xvi; study of, xi, 186; tragedy and comedy blended together, 193 Litt, Theodor, 268 Locke, John, 158 Lodge, David, 110–111 Lofts, Steve, xx logic, xxiv, 7; centrality of, 229, 230; deconstructive, 176; formal (Aristotelian), 231, 241, 242; of Hegel, 10, 20, 25; history of, 57; ‘‘pure logic,’’ 231, 232; relational concepts and, 237; transcendental, 231 Logical Investigations (Husserl), 231 Logical Positivism, xvii, 238 Logic of the Science of Culture, The (Cassirer), 61 Logische Aufbau der Welt, Der (Carnap), 232, 234, 239–240 logocentrism, 139 Lotte in Weimar (Mann), xxiii, 185–198 Lotze, Rudolf Hermann, 138, 231 Machiavelli, Niccolò, xxi, 65, 119, 120– 121, 123, 124

282

Index

magic, 103, 225n21 Magic Mountain (Mann), 244 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 225n21 mana-taboo formula, 103–104 ‘‘Manfred’’ (Byron), 59 Mann, Thomas, xvi, xxiii, 244; Cassirer’s correspondence with, 266; exile from Germany, 194, 195, 197; Goethe novel of, 185–198 Marburg school, 5, 36, 105, 106, 205; antisemitic attack on, 246; conception of knowledge, 235; construction/constructivism of, 246; Heidegger and, 228; influence on Cassirer, 127–128; on intuition in cognition, 224n16; Southwest school compared with, 231–232 Marcus, Ruth Barcan, 267 Marx, Karl, 223n5 Marxism, 37 mathematics, xv–xvi, 230; astrology and, 104; formal logic and, xxiv; relational structures and, 231–232, 237; Renaissance and, 7; simultaneity and, 51–52; symbols in, 221 Mauthner, Fritz, 138 Maxims and Reflections (Goethe), 165 meaning, 13–16, 23, 33, 88, 245; ambivalence of, 103–104; Cassirer versus Jung on, 133; construction and, 204; experience and, 210; expressive function of, 236; human need for, 34; myth and, 73; significative function of, 240; style and, 91; symbol and, 212; symbolic pregnance and, 163 Meaning of Meaning, The (Richards and Ogden), 157 medicine, 106 Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (T. Cassirer), 268 Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung), 130 memory, cultural, xv metamorphosis, 197 metaphor, 21, 88, 160, 211

metaphysics, xviii, xix, 29–34; Aristotelian, 30; critique of, 33; cultural plurality and, 205; reason and, 228; sign and symbol in, 158; theory of being and, 42; time and, 37–38; unity principle and, 41 Middle Ages, 103, 104, 121, 122, 194 mind, 33, 173; creative character of, 12; exteriorization principle and, 9; historical progress and, 38; mind-body dualism, 58; reality confluent with, 41 Molyneux Problem, 139 Monod, Jacques, 56 monotheism, 118 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 85–86 morality, 9, 16, 21, 242, 252 Mörike, Eduard Friedrich, 135 Moritz, Carl Philipp, 174 music, xi, 240 Musil, Robert, xvi mysticism, 71–72, 127 myth, xiv, xix, 9–10, 49, 206; causality and, 131; construction and, 208; as form of objective spirit, 145; functions of consciousness and, 21; GermanicChristian mythology, 105; ideological unity and, 44; making of culture and, 24; power and limitations of, 253; relation to language, 53; science and, 58– 59; self-reflection and, 66, 67–70; semiotics and, 79; spatial-temporal forms and, 104; as symbolic form, 23, 235; taboos and, 118; transcendence through tool-use, 214; transition to religion, 71 Myth of the State, The (Cassirer), 119, 123, 125, 213, 253, 264; on cultural suicide, 120; on eternal return of myths, xiv; liberalism of, 126; as pathology of the modern state, xxi, 121 mythology, 105, 147–148 Natorp, Paul, 5, 36, 41, 106, 230 nature, 22, 25, 56; civilization and, 36;

Index cultural criticism and, 120; human emergence from, 35, 209; moral law and, 70; organic being and, 63; Rousseau’s view of, 252; scientific representation of, 55; subject-object opposition in, 41 Naumann, Barbara, xx, 162, 163, 164, 166 Nazis, xvi, 8, 187, 192, 194; party press of, 247; persecution of Jews, 195; seizure of power (1933), 227 negation, nothingness and, 229 neo-Kantianism, 3, 21, 39, 131; being, theory of, 42; Cassirer’s move away from, 40, 235; critique of cultural achievements and, 41; Heidegger-Cassirer disagreement and, 230, 245, 248; knowledge, theory of, 29; Marburg school of, 128, 205, 224n16; schools of, 230–232; ‘‘science wars’’ and, 55; style and, 83; technology and, 222 neo-Platonism, 105 Neuhaus, Volker, 167 Newton, Isaac, 50, 63 Nicolaus Cusanus, 107, 109, 110, 115n54, 115n63, 119, 132 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xii, 128, 130, 133, 138, 168; on Greek tragedy, xiv; on Rousseau, 252 Noiré, Ludwig, xxiv, 204, 213–214, 216, 217 nothingness, concept of, 227–229 number, 14, 23 objectification, 214, 215 objectivity, 22, 240, 241 Ogden, C. K., 157 ‘‘On Psychic Energy’’ (Jung), 145 ‘‘On the Concept and the Tragedy of Culture’’ (Simmel), 35–36 On the Naive and the Sentimental in Poetry (Schiller), 145 ‘‘On the Objects of the Plastic Arts’’ (Goethe), 172

283

On the Origin of Language (Herder), 137 ontology, 39, 117, 168, 214, 250 organ projection, 215, 217 orientation, 30 Ortega y Gasset, José, 38 Orth, Ernst Wolfgang, xviii–xix, 87 Panofsky, Erwin, xiv, 266 Panpsychia (Patrizzi), 106 papacy, 122 Paracelsus, 106 Parody in the Middle Ages (Lehmann), 100 Parting of the Ways, A (Friedman), 227– 228 Pascal, Blaise, 86 Patrizzi, Francesco, 106 Peirce, Charles, 258n50 perception, 15, 37, 210; ‘‘intuitive world’’ of, 237; language and, 150; symbols and, 169, 175; ultimate nature of, 240 persona, 67, 69, 71, 73 Phaedrus (Plato), 141 phenomenology, 20, 21, 28; CassirerHeidegger dialogue and, 246; of experience, 40; Heidegger and, 228; of time, 39 Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness (Husserl), 39 Phenomenology of Spirit, The (Phänomenologie des Geistes) (Hegel), 38, 66, 221, 223n6 Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (Cassirer), 3, 13–16, 134–135, 175 Philosophie und Poetik des Symbols (Naumann), 162 Philosophische Untersuchungen (Wittgenstein), 3 philosophy, 23, 84, 163, 235; analytic, xvii, xxiv, 243; continental, xxiv, 243; Greek, xiv; historical change and, 37; history of, 92; meaning and, 36; poetry

284

Index

philosophy (continued) and, 91; psychology and, 128–129; reason and, 8–9; reflection on culture, 43; science and, 229; style and symbolic function in, 79 Philosophy in a New Key (Langer), 161 Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Cassirer), xxiv, 36, 59, 79, 213, 228; active subject and culture in, 204; Bakhtin influenced by, 100; ‘‘basis phenomena’’ doctrine in, 24–25, 29, 245; on being and doing, 88; childhood development theory and, 141; connectedness in, 52– 53; construction and, 208–209, 245– 246; on human being as symbolic form, 31; introduction to, 264; Kantian philosophy and, 131–132; on language, 136, 137, 143, 145–146, 150– 151; on linguistics, 140; on meaning and sensibility, 12–16; mechanism of development in, 215–216; ‘‘morphology of culture’’ in, 117–118; move away from neo-Kantianism in, 40; Phenomenology of Knowledge, The (volume 2), 236; phenomenology of knowledge in, 20; as philosophy of culture, 49; psychology in, 129–130; symbolic pregnance in, 250; technology and, 218–220 Philosophy of the Enlightenment, The (Cassirer), 137, 251 physics, xv, 53, 54, 55, 105, 218; as intersubjective language, 239–240; mathematics and, 235; quest for unified theory, 56; relational concepts and, 237 Pickwick Papers (Dickens), 74 Pico della Mirandola, 105–106, 124 Pietikäinen, Petteri, 134 Pippen, Robert, 51 Plato, 37, 50, 52, 141 Platonism, 105, 109, 253 Plessner, Helmuth, 31, 32 plurality, 5, 35, 167, 205

poetry/poeisis, 6, 91, 142, 188, 193– 194, 249 polytheism, 118 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 106, 119 Poole, Brian, xx–xxi Porta, Giambattista della, 106 Portmann, Adolf, 131 positivism, 233 post-structuralism, 111 power, political, 123, 124 Pragmatism, 3 presence, 15 Preuss, Konrad, 131 Principe, Il (The Prince) (Machiavelli), 123 Principia Mathematica (Russell and Whitehead), 52, 233, 234 Principia Philosophiae (Descartes), 89 Principles of Mathematics (Russell), 232 progress, 252 Prometheus legend, 142 Protestantism, 252 Pseudoproblems in Philosophy (Carnap), 239 psychoanalytic theory, xxi–xxii, 141, 145 Psychological Types (Jung), 132, 148 psychology, 128–129, 138 Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido (Jung), 134 Puritans, English, 253 quantum theory, xv–xvi, 56 Quine, W. V., xvii Rabelais, François, 102, 106, 107, 109 Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin), 99, 104, 105, 106 Rathenau, Walter, 226n39 rationalism, 4, 152 reality, 30, 250; appearance and, 237; enigma of existence and, 29; historical epochs and, 37; technical activity and, 8; unity principle and, 41

Index reason, xviii, 4, 85, 166; autonomy of, 125; basis phenomena and, 166; definition of, 5; law and, 122; practical, 242; renunciation of, 228; state and, xxi; symbols and, 173; tool-use and, 214; understanding and, 42 reflection, speculation versus, 20 Reformation, 158 regression, 147 relativism, subjective, 43 relativity, theory of, xv, 56 relics, in Middle Ages, 99, 103 religion, 10, 49, 118, 235; English Enlightenment and, 109–110; language (words) and, 57, 207, 239; mana-taboo formula and, 103–104; meaning and, 36; monotheistic abstraction, 118; myth developed into, 71–73, 236; symbolization and, 158, 159–160 Renaissance, xviii, 110, 254; astrology in, 104; English, 253; as epoch of Enlightenment, 124; ethics and, 119; learning through activity in, 7; literature of, xxi; Platonists of, 109; ‘‘Renaissance man’’ subject, 65, 75n22; struggle with mythic consciousness, 103; union of art and science in, 5–6 representation, 15, 21, 159; crisis in, 56; expressive function and, 207; general theory of, 80; historical development and, 91; mythical consciousness and, 68; style and, 89, 90, 91; subject and, 66–67; symbolic meaning and, 237; time and, 32, 64 Richards, I. A., 157 Rickert, Heinrich, xiii, 230, 232, 233, 248 Ricoeur, Paul, 43 Riehl, Alois, 248 Riemer, Friedrich Wilhelm, 169, 176, 189 Rig-Veda, 100–101, 105 Ritter-Bollnow protocol, of Davos meeting, 245

285

Roman Empire, 125 Romanticism, 138 Romantic School, 133 Rorty, Richard, 251, 261n75 Rosenberg, Alfred, 247 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 252 Rudolph, Enno, xxi Russell, Bertrand, 52, 232 Saussure, Ferdinand de, xii, xv, 159 Saxl, Fritz, xiii, 268 Scheler, Max, 236 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm von, 132 schematization, 50–51, 231 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, 145, 154n27, 160, 171, 176; aesthetic semblance and, 161; Kant’s epistemology and, 180n33 Schlick, Moritz, xvi Schmitt, Carl, 121, 122 scholasticism, 3, 153n9, 249 Schopenhauer, Adele, 189 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 129 Schubart, C. F. D., 172 Schweitzer, Albert, 266 Schwemmer, Oswald, xviii, 206, 223n5 science, xix–xx, 22, 49, 118, 207; centrality of, 230; construction and, 208; cultural studies and, 54–55; eternal truths and, 228; history and, 24; mathematics and natural sciences, 52, 241; meaning and, 36; psychology and, 138; Renaissance and, 7; split with human culture, 56–57; as symbolic form, 23, 235; symbols in, 221. See also knowledge Science and the Modern World (Whitehead), 52 ‘‘science studies,’’ 55 Second World War, xxiii, 195, 263; outbreak of, 185, 187; return of myth and, 133; role of poetry and, 192 Sein und Zeit (Heidegger). See Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) (Heidegger) self-knowledge, 25, 67

286

Index

self-liberation, xxi, 24, 124, 252 semiology/semiotics, xii, 42, 49, 250, 251; Goethe’s theory of symbols and, 177; origin of language and, 137; symbolic forms and, 79 semi-projection, 214–215 sensibility, 13 sensuousness, 12 sexuality, 135 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 109–110, 115n63, 253 Shakespeare, William, 73, 74, 110, 111, 193; antithetical moods in, 254; English Enlightenment and, 253 significance, 28, 32, 34, 238 signification, 21, 80, 143, 150, 166 signs, xii, xv, 13, 79, 157; abstraction in, 163–164; development of, 210; of significance, 238; symbol and, 158, 173, 177n3; totality and, 15 Simmel, Georg, 35–36, 236, 246 ‘‘Simple Imitation of Nature, Manner, Style’’ (Goethe), 80, 192 Social Text (journal), 55 sociology, 233 Socrates, 170, 193 Socratic tradition, 20, 26 Sokal, Alan, 55 Soliloquies (Augustine), 89 Solmitz, Walter, 81, 84, 87 Soviet Union, 99 space, 14, 101, 204; astrology and, 104, 105–106; language and, 143; medieval notion of, 106; transcendental logic and, 231 Spann, Othmar, 247–248, 257n30 speculation, 20 Spinoza, Baruch, 123 Spirit (Hegelian concept), 37, 38–39, 41, 42 Spitzer, Leo, 111 spontaneity, 5, 6 Stalinism, 106, 111 state, the, xxi, 9, 16, 121 Stephenson, R. H., xxii–xxiii

Sterne, Laurence, 74 structuralism, 110, 159 structure, event and, 52 style, 64, 65–66, 75n22, 78–92 subject, the: as active agent of culture, 61–74; basis phenomena and, 208; constitutive function of, 132; decentered, 70; knowledge and, 41, 203– 204; persona and, 67 subjectivity, xx, 71, 216, 217 Substance and Function (Cassirer), 231, 233, 234–235, 245 Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (Cassirer), 3, 37, 53 suicide, cultural, xxi, 119, 120 Sulzer, J. G., 171 Süßmilch, Johann Peter, 137 symbiosis, 32, 36 symbolic forms, xi, xix, 7, 19; archetypes as, 134, 144; depth psychology and, xxii; Hegel’s influence and, 20–21; hierarchy and genesis of, 81, 208, 223n5; human being as, 31; instantaneous inspiration for idea of, 130; Kantian stance toward, 162; language as, 151, 175, 191; life of spirit and, 62; logical supersystem and, 10; meaning and, 11, 13–16; metaphysics and, 35, 245, 250; mode of seeing/understanding and, 65; myth and, 9–10; phenomenology of knowledge and, 21–22; philosophy of, xxiv; pluralistic unity of culture and, 205–207, 221, 251; production of culture and, 252; style and, 79, 84–88; symbolic pregnance and, 161; tonality and, 22–23; ways of comprehending world and, 4 symbolic pregnance (symbolische Prägnanz), xxii, 22, 161, 210–211; production of meaning and, 163; semiology and, 250; sensory presence of, 176 symbolism, xvi, 28, 250; bipolar structure of, 170; dream, 135; Goethe’s conception of, 165–167; of language, 150;

Index mathematical, xv; religious, 174; as representation, 159; subjectivity and, xx; symbolic metabolism, 32 symbolization, xiv, 11, 59, 168; bodily sensation and, 57; development and, 211; entoptic color theory and, 191; spiritual aspect of life and, 36; as transfiguration of the trivial, 171 symbols, 133, 153, 157, 209–211; abstraction in, 163–164, 168; aesthetic, 160; dual nature of, 204; intellect and, 149; as material and mental synthesis, 169; religious, 160; signs and, 158, 173, 177n3; in structural linguistics, 159 Symbols of Transformation (Jung), 135 Symposium (Plato), 193 synthesis, 50 taboos, 118 Tauler, Johannes, 133 technology, xxiv, 21; as art and science, 24; culture of, 30; directed thinking and, 145; ideal component of, 212– 213; myth and, 253; neglected in Cassirer’s work, 218–221. See also tooluse teleology, 36, 206, 236 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 111 Thadden, Elisabeth von, 167 theology, political, 121–122 Theory of Colour (Goethe), 169 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 44, 158 Thought and Things or Genetic Logic (Baldwin), 144 Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 130, 133 Timaeus (Plato), 50 time (temporality), xix, 14, 57, 107, 204; body and, 102; consciousness and, 38– 39; historical concept of, 39; ontological significance of, 37; transcendental imagination and, 228; transcendental logic and, 231

287

tolerance, 251 tool-use, xxiv, 209, 220; development of human culture and, 213–216, 222; embodiment of ideas and, 212–213; objectifying role of, 8; transcendence of myth and, 214. See also technology totalitarianism, xxi, 119, 120, 123, 185 totality, 15, 16, 205, 212; concrete, 10; of expressive functions, 216; of human personality, 137; impossibility of, 167; of symbolic forms, 235, 242 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), 3 Traherne, Thomas, 174 Transcendental Deduction (Kant), 50 Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (Jung), 137, 138, 140, 148 ‘‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’’ (Sokal), 55 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 74 ‘‘Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Syntax der Sprache’’ (Carnap), 227 Uexküll, Jakob von, 32, 63 unconscious, collective, 129 understanding, 41–42, 146, 228, 230, 254 unity, 12–13, 41 Unity of Science, The (Carnap), 239 universals, 15 Urphänomen (Goethean concept), 163, 164, 168, 170, 171, 239; as selfregulating activity, 176; transcendental method and, 245 validity 235, 238, 240-242 Verene, Donald, xviii, 40, 265 Vico, Giambattista, 39, 236 Vienna Circle, xvii, 227, 239 Voigt, C. G., 171 Völkischer Beobachter (Nazi newspaper), 247

288

Index

Vorlesungen über praktische Philosophie (Natorp), 41 Wagner, Winfried, 247 Wallenstein (Schiller), 176 Wanderjahre (Goethe), 164, 167–168 Warburg, Aby, xiii–xvi Warburg Institute (University of London), xvi Ways of Worldmaking (Goodman), 33, 90 Weimar Classicism, 161, 172 Weinberg, Steven, 56–57, 59 Werkzeug und seine Bedeutung für die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Menschheit (Noiré), 213, 214 West-östlicher Divan (Goethe), 197 Weyden, Roger van der, 107, 108 White, Leslie A., 31 Whitehead, Alfred North, 36, 51–52, 161, 169, 170, 175 ‘‘Wiederholte Spiegelungen’’ (Goethe), 190

Wilkinson, Elizabeth M., 176 ‘‘will to power,’’ xii Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 137 Wind, Edgar, xvi, 268 Windelband, Wilhelm, xiii, 230, 248 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xviii, 3, 4, 30 Woglon, William H., 264 Wolff, Christian, 29, 33, 38, 138 work, 25–26 ‘‘working-class’’ culture, xi world view (Weltanschauung), 65, 118, 120; language and, 207; mythical, 71, 214; natural, 223n5 Wundt, Wilhelm, 138, 141 Yale University, Cassirer papers at, 263– 268 Zschokke, Friedrich, 128 Zur Einstein’schen Relativitätstheorie (Cassirer), 53 Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften (Cassirer), 213, 239