The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer [1 ed.] 9780810127784, 2011017609

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The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

the

origins of the

philosophy of symbolic forms Kant, Hegel, and cassirer

donald phillip verene

northwestern universit y press evanston, illinois

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2011 by Donald Phillip Verene. Published 2011 by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Verene, Donald Phillip, 1937– The origins of the philosophy of symbolic forms : Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer / Donald Phillip Verene. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8101-2778-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Cassirer, Ernst, 1874–1945. 2. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804—Influence. 3. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831—Influence. 4. Symbolism. I. Title. B3216.C34V46 2011 193—dc22 2011017609 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

In memory of Herbert Spiegelberg professor, phenomenologist, and historian of the phenomenological movement (1904–1990)

The truly symbolic is that in which the particular represents the universal, not as a dream and shadow, but as a living, instantaneous revelation of the inexplicable. —johann wolfgang von goethe

Contents

Preface List of Abbreviations

xi xxi

Introduction

Schema, Substance, and Symbol

Chapter 1

Linguistic Form: The Critique of Reason Becomes the Critique of Culture

17

Mythical Thought: Beginning the Ladder of Consciousness

31

Phenomenology of Knowledge: Taking Phenomenology in the Hegelian, Not the Modern Sense

45

Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: Spirit, Life, and Werk

61

Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Nature and Culture

75

Chapter 6

Animal Symbolicum

89

Chapter 7

Human Freedom and Politics

103

Appendix: A Bibliographical Essay

117

Notes

129

Index

139

Chapter 2 Chapter 3

Chapter 4 Chapter 5

3

Preface

Ernst Cassirer is commonly classified as a neo-Kantian. There is considerable truth to this conception of his philosophy. In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, German philosophy was dominated by various schools of neo-Kantianism associated with major German universities. Cassirer was the principal disciple of Hermann Cohen, who, along with Paul Natorp, was one of the two leading figures of the Marburg school. Cassirer’s doctoral dissertation, written under Cohen’s direction, “Descartes’ Critique of Mathematical and Natural Scientific Knowledge” (1899), became the introduction of Cassirer’s first book, Leibniz’ System (1902). Cassirer regarded Leibniz as “the last European thinker to master the whole of knowledge.” Leibniz, in Cassirer’s view, “gave the clearest and keenest systematic expression to the fundamental problem of the relationship between world and individual.” Cassirer’s study of Leibniz prepared the way for the first two volumes of the Problem of Knowledge (1906–07), which traced the interconnections between the rise of modern science and the development of modern philosophy from the Renaissance philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa to its culmination in Kant’s critical idealism. This historical account of the problem of knowledge demonstrated Cohen’s claim of the agreement of his epistemology with the development of modern philosophy and scientific thought. The Marburg school, founded by Cohen about 1870, was framed by Otto Liebmann’s motto, “Back to Kant,” in Liebmann’s Kant and the Epigones (1865). In the first issue of the journal they founded, Philosophische Arbeiten, Cohen and Natorp wrote: “Whoever is bound to us stands with us on the foundation of the transcendental method.” The commitment to this method means that philosophy “is bound to the fact of science, as this elaborates itself. Philosophy, therefore, to us is the theory of the principles of science, and therewith of all culture” (1906). In contrast to the dedication of the Marburg school to scientific epistemology as revealing the basis of all culture was the Baden or Southwest German school of neo-Kantianism led by Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, which attempted to formulate the principles of historixi

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cal and cultural experience on a Kantian basis. Central to this opposition was Rickert’s distinction between two objects of knowledge: the objects of science, grounded in the senses, and the objects of experience that we can know not by the senses but by understanding (Verstehen). These are cultural objects as found in history, art, and morality. Given Cassirer’s later philosophy of culture, one might expect his position to have been derived through contact with this school, but it was not. Instead it arose by progressive transformations of the approach of the Marburg school. Even brief attention to the volumes of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms of the 1920s and his later summary and extension of this philosophy in An Essay on Man (1944) and The Myth of the State (published posthumously in 1946) makes it clear that Cassirer’s thought did not simply remain within the confines of the Marburg school. The questions then arise: How did Cassirer reach the original philosophical position for which he is famous? What are the fundamentals of this philosophy? To answer these questions I wish to approach Cassirer’s philosophy in Cassirer’s own terms. Cassirer was a master of the genetic method—that the primary way to understand any human production is to grasp how it came to be what it is. This approach is not merely to relate its history but to obtain a grasp of its “inner form,” to use a term Cassirer took from Wilhelm von Humboldt for his approach to the uniqueness of each symbolic form. This genetic approach to understanding Cassirer’s philosophy does not replace the assessment of its philosophical truth. The questions of the genesis of his position and its truth and viability cannot be separated. Cassirer is one of the greatest of all Kant scholars, the editor of an edition of Kant’s works, and a proficient interpreter of his philosophy. Cassirer’s grasp of Kant’s writings courses throughout all of Cassirer’s own philosophy. But a number of the authors whose essays appear in the Library of Living Philosophers volume on his work, the first full examination of his philosophy, raise questions about the importance of Hegel for understanding Cassirer’s thought. Because Cassirer died during the completion of the volume it contains no “philosopher’s reply,” and thus it is not possible to know what Cassirer might have said in answer to these questions concerning the influence of Hegel. Cassirer’s relation to Hegel has remained problematic since the appearance of the Library of Living Philosophers volume and since my early essay “Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer: The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms” in the Journal of the History of Ideas (1969), from which this study takes its title and

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which broached the question of Cassirer’s Hegelianism as a counterpart to his Kantianism. Broadly and simply put, it is my thesis that Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms cannot be understood apart from a dialectic between Kantian and Hegelian philosophy that lies within it. Kant and Hegel are the master keys to the comprehension of Cassirer’s philosophy. They remain the two main characters on his stage, but they are accompanied by a large secondary cast. Cassirer was an encyclopedic thinker with a vast learning and mastery of the major fields of human knowledge. The other special figure that occurs throughout his works and cannot be overlooked as a source is Goethe. Cassirer is not only a contributor in his own right to Goethe scholarship; it is to lines of Goethe that he turns at crucial points in the communication of his position. Cassirer had an intense devotion to Goethe; throughout his life he read and reread the great Weimar edition of Goethe’s works. There is a separate study to be written of Goethe’s influence on Cassirer but it is beyond my purpose and scope here. Beyond Kant, Hegel, and Goethe are Descartes, Leibniz, the pantheons of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the other figures of German idealism, and the work of major representatives of the fields of linguistics, mythology, psychology, mathematics, historical studies, aesthetics, and the natural sciences. All these philosophical figures and representatives of various fields make their appearance at the appropriate moments, often to reappear on cue as needed at later moments in the development of Cassirer’s works. In addition to his specific studies of Goethe and other literary figures such as Schiller, Hölderlin, and Heinrich von Kleist, the major divisions within Cassirer’s corpus are his works in the history of philosophy and his works of systematic philosophy, including works in the philosophy of science. Cassirer held that philosophers should never hurl their ideas into empty space but should in their formulation and presentation always relate them to what exists in the history of philosophy and in other fields of knowledge. The special sciences are the beginning points for philosophical science. To obtain Cassirer’s own philosophy it is necessary both to grasp his views in relation to these bases and to bring them forth in themselves. At times, immersed in the mosaic of Cassirer’s writing, the reader wishes Cassirer would quote less and speak more freely. The task of his commentator is both to preserve something of the senses in which his

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thought is embedded in his sources and to free up his ideas as such for examination and interpretation. Cassirer’s philosophy develops in a progressive fashion, each successive step differing from the others in “tonality,” to use his term for the differences between various symbolic forms. He transforms the thought of other thinkers into his own and in so doing he continues to transform his own thought from one work of his philosophy to another. It has been just over 100 years since Cassirer wrote his first work of systematic philosophy, concerning substance-based concepts versus function-based concepts, translated as Substance and Function in 1923 and having the subtitle in the original German edition of “investigations concerning the fundamental questions of the critique of knowledge” (1910). This remained the only book-length work available in English until he wrote, in English, An Essay on Man (1944). The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms appeared in English translation in the 1950s, after his death. It is said that Herman Cohen, on reading Substance and Function, thought Cassirer had departed from his position of neo-Kantianism, but Cohen’s friends dissuaded him of this view. Cohen, however, was correct, as Cassirer declares in the first sentence of the first volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923) that he projected this new philosophical position in Substance and Function. Later in the volume he typifies this position as that in which the “critique of reason becomes the critique of culture.” In the famous encounter between Cassirer and Heidegger, in a special session of the “university courses” they individually gave in Davos, Switzerland, in 1929 that became known as the “Debate on Kant,” Cassirer claimed that neo-Kantianism must be understood in functional terms. Neo-Kantianism is like a functional principle that governs the development of a series of variables; each moment in the series determines what the series is in a new way. Cassirer never renounces his origins in Marburg neo-Kantianism, but his philosophy is not bound to them. He makes a claim similar to the above about neo-Kantianism in the preface to his later work in the philosophy of science, Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics (1936), where he points out that Natorp, in his article “Kant and the Marburg School,” declared that it had never been the intention of the Marburg school to endorse Kant’s doctrine unconditionally. In the article on “Neo-Kantianism” that Cassirer contributed to the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1928), he claimed of the various forms of neo-Kantianism that “notwithstanding differences

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of detail, there is a certain methodological principle common to all of them. They all see in philosophy not merely a personal conviction, an individual view of the world, but they enquire into the possibility of philosophy as a science with the intention of formulating its conditions.” Cassirer claims that “in Herman Cohen neo-Kantianism reached its climax” and that Cohen in his formulation of Kant’s doctrine brought “one single systematic idea into the center of the investigation. This idea is that of the ‘transcendental method.’ ” Cassirer also contributed the entry for this edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on “Transcendentalism.” In it he wrote: “Transcendental idealism, therefore, does not reach beyond the sphere of cognition by experience, beyond the realm of the empirical objects; it rather tries to exhibit the foundation of empirical cognition itself.” In the entry on “Truth” that Cassirer contributed to the same edition he says that truth can be described as “the central question of all theoretical philosophy.” After tracing the question of truth from the Greeks forward to modern philosophy, he concludes with a description of Kant’s position: “Cognition a priori has, therefore, truth (agreement with the object) only because it contains nothing further than what is necessary for the synthetic unity of experience.” Cassirer never gives up the transcendental method, even as it is modified in his later phenomenology of knowledge with its connections to Hegel and in his metaphysics of spirit and life that involves Hegelian dialectic. Cassirer is influenced not only by Cohen but also by Natorp. In his conception of culture as a series of symbolic forms, Cassirer extends Natorp’s view that philosophy is more than the reflection of scientific facts, that it involves morality, art, and religion. Its subject matter is “the entire creative work of culture.” Natorp’s modification of a doctrine of categories such that they apply not simply to the theoretical sphere but to the practical and productive spheres foreshadows Cassirer’s very flexible use of Kant’s categories in his analysis of the various symbolic forms of culture. Further, Cassirer takes from Natorp the position that the objective and the subjective are not two realms opposed to each other. The objective and the subjective are two directions, both starting from the same phenomenon and both requiring the transcendental method for their comprehension. Cassirer gives a full statement of this basic sense of subjective and objective in his phenomenology of knowledge in the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Crucial for Cassirer above all else is the validity of idealism as the essence of true philosophy. He understands idealism in the widest terms

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as originating in Plato’s endorsement of eidos, or form. Cassirer called Cohen “one of the most resolute Platonists that has ever appeared in the history of philosophy.” The idea is the medium of all human knowledge. Cassirer as well as all the schools of neo-Kantianism and Hegelianism does away with the Kantian thing-in-itself. Cassirer also does away with the Platonic form as a substance. In its place is Cassirer’s conception of form as function. The medium of this sense of form as function is the symbol. All senses of form in the human world depend upon the phenomenon of the symbol. In his conception of the symbol Cassirer places what is present in neo-Kantianism, as well as in Kant and Hegel, in a new position. My purpose in this volume is to bring forth this new position that is at the same time grounded in the idealism that has gone before it. Cassirer does not discuss reactions to Hegel’s system, such as are found in Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. He may regard such proto-existential philosophies as personal and not scientific because they do not employ the transcendental method. In his Myth of the State he also does not discuss the dialectical materialism of Marx or Marxism, not even the Marxist theory of the state. In the Essay on Man he designates Nietzsche’s and Marx’s conceptions of man as reductionistic. He does closely consider certain representatives of Lebensphilosophie (life-philosophy), which he understands as including Max Scheler, Henri Bergson, and Heidegger, among others. Such philosophy, however, stands in a dialectical relationship with Cassirer’s idealism and enters into its dialogue with other philosophical positions. Cassirer died suddenly on the Columbia University campus on April 13, 1945, the day after the death of President Roosevelt. In the Cassirer file of the archives of Low Library at Columbia is a small card, stating that the flag is at half-staff in mourning for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the United States, and Ernst Alfred Cassirer, visiting professor of philosophy. Cassirer began his teaching career as a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin in 1906 and took a position as professor at the newly founded University of Hamburg in 1919. He served as rector in 1929–30. Following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Cassirer left Germany in May, never to return. He occupied a position at All Souls in Oxford University for two years, lecturing on Hegel’s conception of the state and other topics. He then accepted a professorship at the University of Göteborg, Sweden, which he held until 1941, when he accepted the offer of a visiting position promulgated by Charles Hendel of the Department of Philosophy at Yale University.

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Cassirer and his wife, Toni, arrived in the United States on the last ship permitted to leave Sweden. Cassirer moved from Yale to Columbia University in the fall of 1944. In his remarks to the Philosophical Club at Yale he spoke of his series of positions as his “long Odyssey.” They were his ports of call. There never developed, around Cassirer’s work, an interrelated body of scholarship such as developed around, for example, Husserl, Dewey, or Whitehead. Cassirer left Germany just as his monumental Philosophy of Symbolic Forms was beginning to be fully absorbed, and his sudden death in the United States cut off any opportunity he might have had, in the first years following World War II, to teach his ideas firsthand to a generation of graduate students. As a result of his odyssey, caused by the adversities of the times, no body of critical literature formed around his philosophy in Germany or in the United States. What did develop was sporadic and the result of individual interests. Yet An Essay on Man and The Myth of the State are among the most widely read works of any twentieth-century philosopher; they have remained continuously in print for over half a century and are translated into nearly all European and Asian languages. In the past two decades, beginning with the appearance in Germany of the first volume of his unpublished papers, there has been a surge of Cassirer studies among Continental scholars. But there is currently no parallel to this in the English-speaking world. A picture of the scholarly work on Cassirer can be found in the appendix to this volume. The study that follows takes as its departure point that Cassirer never wishes to argue Kant over Hegel. Instead he takes from each what he needs, realizing that philosophical idealism itself did not stop with Kant but developed to Hegel, that much of what remains problematic in Kantian philosophy finds particular solutions in Hegel’s philosophy. Cassirer never replaces transcendental reflection with dialectical speculation, but he does transfer dialectic from a logic of illusion, that is, the form of thinking beyond experience as Kant conceives it in the Critique of Pure Reason, to a logic of consciousness as Hegel employs it in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Cassirer rejects Kant’s thing-in-itself but he also rejects Hegel’s Absolute as well as Hegel’s conception of Aufhebung. Cassirer extends Kant’s principle of the schematism that unites the concept with the sensible intuition to each stage of Hegel’s phenomenology such that it becomes a ladder extending from the beginnings of consciousness in myth to the forms of cognition in the sciences. The various forms of culture, once developed, are held together in a harmony

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of dialectical relationships rooted in the dynamic nature of the symbol. Cassirer accomplishes this harmony by a method of “systematic review” rather than the production of a system in which the forms of culture are absorbed in or governed by a stage of absolute knowing. How he accomplishes these transformations regarding Kant and Hegel is my topic. The order of the chapters follows that of the major works of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms as he wrote them. There is perhaps another book to be written on his interpretation of the history of modern philosophy, but a discussion of Cassirer’s works in this area is beyond my purpose here. I do not intend that it is necessary for the reader to have an extensive knowledge of the philosophies of Kant and Hegel to follow this reading of Cassirer, but some knowledge would clearly be useful. I have at some points introduced criticisms, but my focus is on an overview of the originality of Cassirer’s philosophy and the way we may find access to the riches it contains. I first read Cassirer fifty years ago as an undergraduate, the result of finding a copy in the college bookstore of Susanne Langer’s translation of Cassirer’s Language and Myth, placed next to A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic. In Cassirer for the first time I encountered a philosopher who understood the importance for philosophy of a philosophy of mythology as connected to a philosophy of language. Cassirer is the first philosopher since Giambattista Vico to begin his philosophy in mythical thought. It is the most original part of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms, along with his conception of symbolic form itself. The schools of present-day metaphysical and epistemological philosophy, whether in the Continental tradition or the Anglo-American tradition, have given up on or never even considered the problem of self-knowledge. As will become evident in the discussion of An Essay on Man, Cassirer regards self-knowledge as the central question of philosophy. Contemporary philosophy has largely lost the Socratic sense of human thought in order to pursue whatever seems problematic. Cassirer invites philosophy to rethink itself in terms of its own origins in myth. Unless philosophy can speak once again to the human condition, it can offer us only a sense of particular truths and their criticism, and not a sense of the true as the whole. Present-day moral and ethical philosophy has also restricted itself largely to the formation of critical stances and particular problems. The pursuit of the meaning of the good or best life is not to be found. Ethics has fragmented itself into the myriad of types of applied ethics, such that ethics follows along the edges of the various areas of human activity.

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There is always one more ethical argument to be made and one more type of right to be alleged. Cassirer’s later works, culminating in The Myth of the State and the idea he takes from Schweitzer, of philosophy as the watchman, can bring us back to the pursuit of normative philosophy that directs philosophy toward the consideration of ideals. The philosopher is in a position not simply to criticize those ideals as may be found in various aspects of the human world, but to advance ideals based upon the wide vision natural to systematic thinking. Ultimately, argument, counterargument, and criticism will not sustain philosophy, as they turn it into a skeleton of thought. Cassirer’s manner of philosophizing increases morale. It provides a compass with which to consider the continuation of human knowledge and moral perspective. I express gratitude to my colleagues Thora Ilin Bayer, Ann Hartle, George Benjamin Kleindorfer, Donald Livingston, David Lovekin, Frederick Marcus, John Stuhr, Michael Sullivan, and William Willeford for graciously reading the manuscript of this work. My grateful thanks once again to Molly Black Verene for using her indispensable talents to prepare this work for press.

Abbreviations

Cassirer’s works are listed in the order of the chapters in which they are primarily discussed. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is cited in standard form by the page numbers of the A and B editions. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is cited by the paragraph enumeration of the A. V. Miller translation. The translations of PSF 1–3 are occasionally revised in relation to the German original. SF

Substance and Function. Authorized translation by William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey. Chicago: Open Court, 1923

PSF 1

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, Language. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953

PSF 2

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, Mythical Thought. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955

PSF 3

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, The Phenomenology of Knowledge. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957

PSF 4

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: Including the Text of Cassirer’s Manuscript on Basis Phenomena. Edited by John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene. Translated by John Michael Krois. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996

LCS

The Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Five Studies. Translated by S. G. Lofts. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000

EM

An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944

MS

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

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SMC

Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935–1945. Edited by Donald Phillip Verene. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979

CPR

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan, 1958

PS

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977

The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

Introduction

Schema, Substance, and Symbol

Kant’s Schema The philosophy of the idea or philosophical idealism always faces the problem of how the universal in the form of the concept can combine with the sense impression of the particular. Experience requires both the concept as the product of thought and the intuition (to use Kant’s term) as the product of the senses in their reaction to a given object. Kant’s term, Anschauung, rendered into English as “intuition,” has always produced problems for English readers, who associate intuition with an act of immediate knowing or insight without the use of rational processes, an immediate grasping of the nature of something or a matter at hand. For Kant, Anschauung or intuition is associated with sensibility (Sinnlichkeit): “Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone yields us intuitions; they are thought through the understanding, and from the understanding arise concepts” (CPR, A19; B33). In a well-known assertion, Kant states: “Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (CPR, A51; B75). Thought supplies the universal element in knowledge; sensibility supplies the particular. The interconnection between universal and particular is not simply a problem for idealist philosophy, it is a central problem for philosophy in general. Kant’s solution to this twofold character of human knowledge and experience is bound up in his principle of the schema. He asks: “How, then, is the subsumption of intuitions under pure concepts, the application of a category to appearances, possible?” (CPR, A138; B177). Kant’s answer is his claim of a third thing: “Obviously there must be some third thing, which is homogeneous on the one hand with the category, and on the other hand with the appearance, and which thus makes the application of the former to the latter possible” (CPR, A138; B177). 3

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Kant holds that this third thing “must in one respect be intellectual, it must in another be sensible. Such a representation is the transcendental schema” (CPR, A138; B177). There are two fundamental features of the transcendental schema: that the formal condition of the schema is time and that the schema is a product of the imagination (Einbildungskraft). The schema connects the understanding with the temporal appearances. The schema, although always a product of the imagination, is distinguished from the image. Kant explains: “This representation of a universal procedure of imagination in providing an image for a concept, I entitle the schema of this concept” (CPR, A140; B179–80). The schema provides the image for a concept but is itself the means or procedure by which the image and the concept can come into contact. Kant has reached the necessity of this third thing—the schema—as the mediating element between the conceptual and the sensible, but the question remains of how the schematism actually occurs. Kant’s answer is to affirm that it must occur and that the schema is the concrete bond between the understanding and sensible intuition, but he confesses that he cannot explain how in fact this functions. He says: “This schematism of our understanding, in its application to appearances and their mere form, is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul [ist eine verborgene Kunst in den Tiefen der menschlichen Seele] whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze” (CPR, A141; B180–81). It is an astounding but perhaps true assertion that we can never fully penetrate the workings of this art. Kant’s statement in this regard echoes an earlier one, regarding the power of the imagination: “Synthesis in general, as we shall hereafter see, is the mere result of the power of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul [einer blinden, obgleich unentbehrlichen Funktion der Seele], without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious” (CPR, A78; B103). Although we are unable to penetrate the nature of the art that produces the schema, we can realize that it is more complete than its components. It is a concrete synthesis that is intellectual, sensible, and temporal. In his conclusion to his presentation of the schematism, Kant states: “The schema is, properly, only the phenomenon [das Phänomen], or sensible concept, of an object in agreement with the category” (CPR, A146; B186). In the end, then, Kant claims that the schema is not just a factor reached by transcendental analysis; it is a real presence, a phenomenon. In his introduction to the English translation of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Charles Hendel emphasizes the importance of Kant’s

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schema for Cassirer’s thought: “The schema’s the thing that caught the imagination of Cassirer. He interpreted the whole subsequent postKantian philosophy in Germany by reference to it. And his own philosophy of symbolic form was a development of the possibilities of this new concept of form” (PSF 1:14). Hendel provides a number of references in which Cassirer extols the importance of the schema, ranging from the concluding volume of his edition of Kant’s works, Kant’s Life and Thought, to the introduction to the third volume of the Problem of Knowledge, in which he regards the Critique of Judgment as an advance upon the abstract schematism of the Critique of Pure Reason, to traces of the schema in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and An Essay on Man (PSF 1:14–15). I would add to Hendel’s remarks that, in his review of Heidegger’s book on Kant, it is the schematism that Cassirer singles out for discussion as something that he and Heidegger both hold as of great importance for Kant’s philosophy,1 and in his exchange with Heidegger at Davos, Switzerland, Cassirer says: “The extraordinary significance of the Schematism cannot be overestimated.”2 Cassirer regarded post-Kantian philosophy from Fichte to Hegel as a quest to develop an adequate account of the universal in the particular, begun in Kant’s doctrine of the schema that is foreshadowed in Kant’s exploration in the Critique of Judgment of the “particularized universal” in organic natural and aesthetic forms. An organism, as well as an artwork, is at once a spiritual ( geistig) and a sensible (sinnlich) form. A work of art is a complete and unique particular, yet as an artwork it carries a universal meaning. Each stage of consciousness presented in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit can be regarded as having the properties of Kant’s schema, as having an intellectual, sensible, and temporal dimension. Hegel’s doctrine of the concept (Begriff ) as “concrete universal” is a direct extension of the Kantian schema. Although the medium of all Hegel’s stages of consciousness is spirit or Geist, what is the medium of Geist? In what can Geist itself be found as a phenomenon? Hegel does not offer an answer to this question. Cassirer’s philosophy is Socratic in the sense that, like Socratic reasoning, Cassirer’s texts employ no special or technical vocabulary. The one term distinctive to Cassirer’s philosophy is symbolic form. I will later say more about his sources for this term. All his systematic, original philosophy depends upon and is a development from his conception of the symbol. The symbol is the medium of all forms of human knowledge and of all the forms of human culture. There is no distinction for Cassirer between the symbolic and the literal or non-symbolic. All in

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the human world is generated through the symbol. What might from another perspective be called literal is in fact only another system of symbols. The human being never passes outside the world of human experience, and all of human experience depends upon the power of the symbol to form the human. The basis of Cassirer’s philosophy can be simply put. If we take Kant’s claim that the schema is a phenomenon, but described by him in the abstract, we are led to the questions that are at the origin of Cassirer’s philosophy: What is this phenomenon? In what is it manifested as such? Cassirer’s answer is the symbol. There is nothing human without the symbol, and whatever has to do with the symbol is human in some sense. Cassirer’s second term, form, is tied to the idea as the basis of true philosophy. Cassirer takes idea in its root sense, as form. The unique power of the mind is to give form to experience. By being able to give form to experience by the power of the symbol, the mind releases the human from its bonds of sensuous immediacy. The symbol is the key to the mediation of human existence such that the distinction between the objective and the subjective can arise. The crucial first step, for Cassirer, in order for this philosophy of symbolic forms to develop, is to adduce a theory of form that is adequate to the nature of the symbol, and that will reinforce and expand our understanding of its power. Cassirer takes this first step in terms of a philosophy of mathematics and the natural sciences that depend upon mathematics. This required a theory of concept formation that places functionconcepts (Funktionsbegriffe) over substance-concepts (Substanzbegriffe). It required the abandonment of the linguistic subject-predicate-based Aristotelian logic, upon which Kant relied. This shift from Aristotelian to mathematical logic, however, on Cassirer’s view does not abandon the Kantian approach to the theory of knowledge as grounded in the transcendental method.

Substance and Function The theory of concept formation present in Aristotelian logic requires the support of the Aristotelian metaphysics of substance. Cassirer begins Substance and Function with this claim: “The Aristotelian logic, in its general principles, is a true expression and mirror of the Aristotelian metaphysics. Only in connection with the belief upon which the latter rests, can it be understood in its peculiar motives” (SF 4). The generic concept of Aristotelian logic is at the basis of our ordinary worldview. Noth-

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ing more is presupposed by it than the multiplicity of things and the ability of the mind to collect them into classes by selecting properties common to groups of these particulars. When we repeat this process, forming classes of sensuous particulars into classes of classes by finding the common properties or similarities among classes, we rise in levels of abstraction. The conceptual pyramid that results ends in the representation of “something” under which all possible intellectual content falls but which because of its total generality is devoid of any specific content (SF 6). The mind, through this process of reflective abstraction, achieves a complete ordering of experience. As it ascends from the existence of concrete sensuous particulars, each judgment of commonality—made first among individual things, placing them into classes, and then made by placing the classes into classes—is determinate. But once we arrive at the class of all classes, or that everything is something, we are at the point of the most indeterminate of all thoughts. As we look down from this summit we command a complete descriptive account of all that is in experience. But it is a fixed order; there is no way open to us dynamically to apply the highest generic concepts directly back on any particular thing, to determine it or to form a new meaning of it. Cassirer says: “What we demand and expect of a scientific concept, first of all, is this: that in the place of original indefiniteness and ambiguity of ideas, it shall institute a sharp and unambiguous determination; while, in this case, on the contrary, the sharp lines of distinction seem the more effaced, the further we pursue the logical process” (SF 6). Furthermore, from a purely logical point of view we have nothing to assure us that we have selected out the truly typical features of the objects as classified. Our order may simply be arbitrary. For Aristotle this problem is not solved on the level of logic as such. It is solved only through the interlocking of logic and metaphysics. The concept becomes the bridge between the logical process of reflective abstraction and the metaphysical doctrine of being as a hierarchy of substance. The conventional intension of a class term—those characteristics, properties, or qualities that comprise its meaning, such as can be found in its definition in a dictionary—is insufficient to determine fully its nature. What is required is its real definition or real intension—those characteristics, properties, or qualities that designate its essence. This essential form in Aristotle’s metaphysical doctrine is that toward which each individual object within a generic class teleologically develops. As Cassirer explains: “For Aristotle, at least, the concept is no mere subjective schema in which we collect the common elements of an arbitrary

8

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group of things. The selection of what is common remains an empty play of ideas if it is not assumed that what is thus gained is, at the same time, the real Form which guarantees the causal and teleological connections of particular things” (SF 7). What we produce in language in attaching predicates to subjects, if rightly conducted, results in the Aristotelian view on the discovery of the real essences of things. As Cassirer concludes: “The determination of the concept according to its next higher genus and its specific difference reproduces the process by which the real substance successively unfolds itself in its special forms of being. Thus it is this basic conception of substance to which the purely logical theories of Aristotle constantly have reference” (SF 7). The difference between modern logic, which is compatible with modern scientific development, and Aristotelian logic is the value placed on relation-concepts over thing-concepts. In Aristotelian logic, relation is relegated to a subordinate position. Relation is viable only to the extent it can be manifested as the categorical relation of the thing to its properties. All relations that the thing has to other things that are not part of its essence are understood as non-essential properties and are left out of its real definition. They do not determine the nature of its substantial being. In contrast, modern logic is built upon mathematical relations as they can be employed to determine the meaning of the object within a system or set of relations. This new sense of the object requires a shift from the subject-predicate structure of linguistic symbolism that mirrors the thing-concept to the mathematical sense of symbolism that thinks in terms of variables and the principles of their order in a series. In an essay, “The Influence of Language upon the Development of Scientific Thought,” published only several years before his death, Cassirer puts the above point in the historical terms of the difference between Aristotle’s and Galileo’s conceptions of the physical world.3 In Aristotle’s view the subject of the sentence reflects the substance, or substratum (hypokeimenon), to which the predicate refers. Physical nature is described in Aristotelian terms, as is all in experience, through substances or things and their qualities and properties. Aristotle describes a physical thing much as Galileo does. A physical thing has in itself a principle of motion or rest such that “nature is a principle or cause of being moved and of being at rest in that to which it belongs primarily, in virtue of itself and not accidentally.”4 Aristotle describes motion and rest in terms of substance and qualities. Galileo describes them in terms of relations and quantities. The shift from Aristotelian and Scholastic physics to Galilean

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physics depends upon replacing the symbols of language, with its subject and predicate structure, with the symbols of mathematics, with its notational and calculative structure. Cassirer points out that in Galileo’s Il saggiatore (The Assayer) we first meet with the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. What Aristotelian thought regarded as the objective qualities of things— heat, cold, bitter, sweet, red, blue—are now regarded as only secondary characteristics of physical nature. For Galileo, Cassirer says, nature “is an open book legible to everyone. But to read this book we first have to learn the letters in which it is written. These letters are not the ordinary sense-data: the perceptions of heat and cold, of red or blue and so on. The book of nature is written in mathematical characters, in points, lines, surfaces, numbers. By this postulate Galileo removed the keystone of Aristotelian physics.”5 This shift in the symbols in which the book of nature can be read, which Galileo accomplished in its most rudimentary form, develops through the rise of modern science and mathematics to the level of the function-concept. The thing-concept or generic concept presupposes in consciousness the process that becomes articulated in the functionconcept. Cassirer says: “Without a process of arranging in series, without running through the different instances, the consciousness of their generic connection—and consequently of the abstract object—could never arise” (SF 15). The weakness of the psychology of abstraction inherent in the theory of the generic concept is its privileging of the principle of similarity. Of all the possible relationships among the entities brought under the generic concept, only similarity is employed in a drive to express their common property. “In truth, however, the connection of the members of a series by the possession of a common ‘property’ is only a special example of logically possible connections in general. The connection of the members is in every case produced by some general law of arrangement through which a thoroughgoing rule of succession is established. That which binds the elements of the series a, b, c . . . together is not itself a new element, that was factually blended with them, but is the rule of progression, which remains the same, no matter in which member it is represented” (SF 17). The mathematical concept of function is composed of two inseparable elements. One of these is the series of entities to be ordered as variables, the other is the law of their arrangement or rule of succession. These two elements differ in kind, not in degree. Neither can be derived from

10

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the other, yet each is meaningless without the other. The law of arrangement or rule of succession commands no intrinsic meaning apart from what is ordered by it; in itself it arranges nothing. The variables it orders have no meaning in and of themselves; they only are something when they are determined to have a specific place in the series, when they are given membership in the series the law governs. Cassirer says: “Modern expositions of logic have attempted to take account of this circumstance by opposing—in accordance with a well-known distinction of Hegel’s— the abstract universality of the concept to the concrete universality [die konkrete Allgemeinheit] of the mathematical formula” (SF 20). Although in his distinction in the Critique of Pure Reason between general logic and transcendental logic Kant takes a step toward making logic concrete in purely epistemological, not metaphysical, terms, Cassirer points to Hegel’s sense of the internal dialectic of the concept (Begriff ) as the precursor of the function-concept in mathematical concept formation. In Hegel’s formulation of being-in-and-for-itself (das Anundfürsichsein) there is a parallel to the two elements of the functionconcept. What is an sich and what is an sich for consciousness, or the für-sich sein, are two moments different in kind yet which necessarily and mutually require each other in order for either to be or have any meaning (PS 25). This inseparable connection between these two moments is not a judgment; it is the condition for any judgment by which we would attempt to express their connection in a specific context. This inseparability is radically diverse from the external connection through the copula of subject and predicate or thing and property of the judgments upon which ordinary logic is based. What Cassirer designates as the series and the law of its arrangement that makes up the function-concept is analogous to Hegel’s principle of the “true infinite” (das wahrhafte Unendliche) in the Science of Logic.6 The series may be extended without limit, with each member acquiring a determinate place in it as its law of arrangement is progressively applied. At no point in this extension is there simply a beyond, a Jenseits. Furthermore, a particular formula of a function-concept can be expanded with complete determinateness in all directions, not simply in the progression inherent within itself. The function-concept can duplicate itself in an unlimited fashion. In principle, each variable in a given series can also serve as a law of arrangement of a series of its own, and the law of arrangement of the originally given series can have the status of a variable in a series of another order. In this way the function-concept formalizes a true infinity—a progression without limits, at which every

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moment is a determinate version of itself, like a bottle with a label that depicts the same bottle with the same label on it, and so on. Cassirer uses the Kantian term “manifold” (Mannigfaltigkeit) in summing up his presentation of the function-concept. “The serial form F (a, b, c . . .) which connects the members of a manifold obviously cannot be thought after the fashion of an individual a or b or c, without thereby losing its peculiar character” (SF 26). He says that its being consists in the determination of it in relation to other serial forms and this determination can be expressed only by a “synthetic act of definition, and not by a simple sensuous intuition” (SF 26). This is a restatement in terms of the theory of the function-concept of Kant’s claim, mentioned above, that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” Cassirer says: “The totality and order of pure ‘serial forms’ lies before us in the system of the sciences, especially in the structure of exact science” (SF 26). It will become evident that the function-concept in its internal structure is the basis of Cassirer’s conception of the symbol and symbolic form. But as early as 1910, in Substance and Function, Cassirer is not in explicit possession of this conception or of the term “symbolic form.” In his application of the function-concept to the natural sciences, however, he refers in a telling fashion to the importance of the symbol. He says that the sensuous quality of a thing becomes a physical object of scientific investigation when it is transformed from the sum of its properties into a system of mathematical values, and when these are placed into some scale of comparison. Cassirer will many years later employ this sense of the physical object in his contrast between nature-concepts and culture-concepts in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (LCS 56–86). For example, specific gravity, as a property of a physical object, depends upon a definite numerical value assigned to the object in a progression of specific gravities. Culture-concepts, although they order objects in one part of experience, do not do so in the same way. In culture-concepts, historical individuals are brought under what can be called an “ideational abstraction” (to use Husserl’s term) toward which they tend in a teleological fashion, a point that will be discussed in chapter 5. In such ordering of physical objects, Cassirer says, “the chaos of impressions becomes a system of numbers; but these numbers first gain their denominations and thus their specific meaning, from the system of concepts, which are theoretically established as universal standards of measurement” (SF 149). In regard to this, Cassirer concludes: “In this logical connection, we first

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see the ‘objective’ value of the transformation of the impression into the mathematical ‘symbol’ [Symbol]” (SF 149). Cassirer emphasizes that the sensuous impression, in its particularity, is lost, but what distinguishes this impression as a member of a system is preserved and expressed. The symbol “reveals itself to be the real kernel of the thought of empirical ‘reality’ ” (SF 149). Here is Cassirer’s first clear assertion of the sense in which the symbol is the key to our construction of reality, which he will expand into his philosophy of symbolic forms in the succeeding decade.

Symbol and Symbolic Form In Substance and Function, Cassirer realized the sense in which the symbol is the medium of the function-concept through which mathematics, joined with natural science, constructs empirical reality. All form is functional for Cassirer. Form is not substantial or fixed in its being. Form is a synthesis of a manifold in accordance with the functionconcept. Neither form nor symbol is unique to Cassirer’s philosophy, but when he combines these two terms as symbolic form (symbolische Form) he coins the unique term of his philosophy, a term that remains permanently in its possession. From whence does Cassirer generate this term? Cassirer states in a lecture, “Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften” (“The Concept of Symbolic Form in the Formation of the Cultural Sciences”), that appeared in the Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg (1921–22), that he derives this term from the essay “Das Symbol” by the Hegelian aesthetician Friedrich Theodor Vischer.7 Vischer’s essay appeared in a volume honoring Eduard Zeller in 1887.8 In his lecture, Cassirer traces the symbolic in his sense from its origin in Goethe’s interest in the symbolic, through Schelling and Hegel, to Vischer. Cassirer maintains that he wishes to expand Vischer’s aesthetic conception of the symbol to a sense of the symbol that can cover each form of the human spirit, not only art but also language and the mythical-religious worldview. Although Vischer uses the terms Symbol and symbolisch in various combinations with other terms in his essay, he never states the precise combination of symbolische Form.9 In the general introduction to the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms that appears in the first volume (1923), Cassirer suggests a second origin of his concept of symbolic forms. He says: “Mathematicians and physicists were first to gain a clear awareness of this symbolic character of their basic implements. The new ideal of knowledge to which this whole de-

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velopment points, was brilliantly formulated by Heinrich Hertz in the introduction to his Principles of Mechanics” (PSF 1:75). Cassirer emphasizes a point in Hertz’s work that is parallel to that discussed earlier, from Substance and Function, on the symbol and empirical reality. “We make ‘inner fictions or symbols’ of outward objects, and these symbols are so constituted that the necessary logical consequences of the images are always images of the necessary natural consequences of the imagined objects” (PSF 1:75). For this sense of a system of symbolic forms Cassirer here also refers the reader back to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (1921). In this work he says philosophy “has to grasp the whole system of symbolic forms [das Ganze der symbolischen Formen], the application of which produces for us the concept of an ordered reality, and by virtue of which subject and object, ego and world are separated and opposed to each other in definite form, and it must refer each individual in this totality to its fixed place” (SF 447). Cassirer concludes this point with a view similar to his expansion of Vischer’s conception of symbol, saying that this approach will allow us to construct the interrelations of theoretical, ethical, aesthetic, and religious understandings of the world. Since Cassirer wrote his work on Einstein in 1920 (published in 1921), this passage may be considered one of his first uses of the term symbolische Form.10 But the above-mentioned lecture involving Vischer’s aesthetics must have been prepared at about the same time. Thus about 1920–21, Cassirer began to write in terms of the concept of symbolic form and to think of it as the key concept to formulating a comprehensive theory of human knowledge and culture. In personal terms, according to Dimitry Gawronsky’s biographical essay on Cassirer in the Library of Living Philosophers volume, Cassirer said that the conception of the symbolic forms flashed across his mind while he was entering a streetcar in 1917.11 Three years later this conception appears as the theme of his philosophy. Cassirer’s most explicit definition of symbolic form is given in the above-mentioned Warburg Library lecture. He states: “Under a ‘symbolic form’ should be understood each energy of spirit [Energie des Geistes] through which a spiritual content or meaning is connected with a concrete sensory sign and is internally adapted to this sign.”12 A symbolic form, then, has an internal bond between a universal meaning and the particular sensory sign in which the meaning inheres. A symbol is at once inseparably “spiritual” ( geistig) and “sensible” (sinnlich). In a 1927 essay, “Das Symbolproblem und seine Stellung im System der Philosophie” (“The Problem of the Symbol and Its Place in the System

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of Philosophy”), Cassirer advances his one phenomenological “proof ” or perceptual experiment of how symbolic form is rooted in the stances consciousness can take on the object.13 He also relates this experiment in the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, which appeared in the same year as the essay (PSF 3:200–202). This is his example of the Linienzug or graph-like line drawing.14 Cassirer asks us to consider a first apprehension of the line drawing as an object having purely sensory qualities, such that we grasp the tension in its shape, feel its motion, and so forth. Then we may shift perspective and apprehend it as having theoretical significance, as a mathematical object, a geometric figure showing certain proportions and relations.15 We may pass on to regarding it as a mythical-magical form in which it is a sign dividing a sacred from a profane sphere. We may apprehend it again as an aesthetic ornament, giving attention only to its artistic potentialities, a consideration of its visual qualities for their own sake. The phenomenological experiment confirms Cassirer’s concept of the symbol as simultaneously geistig and sinnlich. It also demonstrates what he claims in The Myth of the State (1946), that “it is a common characteristic of all symbolic forms that they are applicable to any object whatsoever” (MS 34). In speaking about symbols, we are accustomed to make a distinction between what is symbolic and what is literal. Cassirer’s epistemology rejects this distinction. Whatever might be designated as literal is, in fact, on Cassirer’s view, simply another symbolic formation of experience. The literal is thus itself symbolic. One formation of experience is not more “symbolic” than another. The elimination of the purely literal, in contrast to the symbolic, is what Cassirer intends to achieve through this phenomenological demonstration of the Linienzug. For example, to say that thunder is the loud and at a distance often rolling sound that follows a flash of lightning due to the sudden expansion of the air in the path of the discharge and to say that thunder is the voice of Jove is not to speak literally in the first instance and symbolically in the second. Both depend upon symbol systems, both are symbolic acts. The first depends upon the object-property structure of commonsense speech. The second depends upon the imagistic structure of mythico-religious expression. The first is a literal description only if we give it primacy. But in the development of culture the second is the truly primary speech, for neither the child nor the archaic mentality initially grasps the object in commonsense terms. For Cassirer the symbol is simply the medium of all human experience and hence the medium of all formations of it.

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Cassirer grounds his conception of symbolic form in historical terms in the Platonic transformation of the pre-Socratic conception of being from a quest for unity as present in some existing thing to unity as dependent on idea. Once being is identified as idea, being can be defined as a problem, and once seen as a problem, being can be understood as a principle. In this way, thought no longer reflects on being but enters into the problem of being in terms of its “inner form.” The conception of innere Form is crucial to Cassirer’s conception of symbolische Form (PSF 1:73–74). By regarding the general history of idealism as beginning with Plato understood in this way, the philosophy of symbolic forms can claim to be both a transformation and an extension of the general philosophy of the idea that goes back to the origin of philosophy as the quest for self-knowledge. Cassirer’s first sentence in An Essay on Man (1944) is: “That self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophical inquiry appears to be generally acknowledged” (EM 1). The philosophy of symbolic forms has as its purpose, from its earliest moments, to reveal the inner form of human reality. The problem of form is the problem of inner form, and this leads directly to the conception of organic form. The importance of Kant’s sense of form in the Critique of Judgment that was noted earlier can now be connected to Cassirer’s conception of inner form. In his interpretation of this third Critique in Kant’s Life and Thought (1918), Cassirer grounds the senses of both organic and aesthetic form, which Kant treats in the two halves of the third Critique, in the Neoplatonism of Plotinus.16 As Cassirer notes, the work of art is only one example of the inner form upon which the cohesiveness of the world as a whole rests.17 Cassirer has in mind the sense, in Neoplatonism, of logos as the active motivation of each thing in the world such that there is a total developmental life of the whole. In the schematism of the first Critique Cassirer finds the idea of a sensuous-intellectual form. In the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment he finds the idea of an individual concrete form, and in the Critique of Teleological Judgment he finds the idea of organic form, the idea of the inner life of a thing which is organized in terms of Zweckmässigkeit or “purposiveness.” The act of understanding that is appropriate to such form is what Kant calls “reflective judgment,” which Cassirer regards as going back to the sense of “intuitive understanding” coined by Plotinus. Such a way of apprehending the object is compatible with the notion of the inner form of the object and the act of symbolization that allows us to construct the phenomenon in accordance with its own concreteness and inner life.

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The inner connection of organic form with inner form allows us to connect Cassirer’s symbolic form, in a further way, to Leibniz. The general scientific theme of organic life predates the Kantian treatment of it by nearly a century. Cassirer saw that in Leibniz “the foundation for a new philosophy of the organic was laid.”18 In Leibniz, Cassirer saw the source for a philosophy of nature based on the whole as organic, not mechanical. If we look back toward Leibniz from Cassirer’s conception of symbolic form, two ideas especially stand out as crucial. Leibniz’s monad, with its sense of immanent causality and its inner dynamic, is compatible with Cassirer’s concern with inner form, and Leibniz’s conception of a universal “characteristic,” his conception of the possibility of a universal system of symbols in which all of human knowledge could be expressed, is also important. Cassirer certainly does not take up this idea per se, because he does not advocate the development of a universal language in which all human knowledge could be unambiguously formulated. But Cassirer’s imagination is fired by the ideal that all knowledge depends upon the symbol in some sense and that there could be a total system of symbols that would comprise the unity of all human knowledge and culture. The demand for a mathesis universalis, coupled with a lingua universalis, which goes back to Descartes and is broadened in Leibniz, is a point of departure for Cassirer’s ideal of a concrete system of symbolic forms, which is present in the totality of culture and which offers a sapientia humana. The principle of inner form is highly compatible with Hegel’s principle, in the Phenomenology, that consciousness as it develops itself in relation to its object comes to know that the object it knows is in fact its own self apprehended in stage upon stage as other than itself. Hegel’s famous dictum that “the True is the whole” (PS 20) is tacitly embraced by Cassirer in his insistence that the symbolic forms all stand in systematic relations to each other, but it is also explicitly declared by Cassirer in the materials for the fourth volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (PSF 4:193). Hegel’s method of dialectic is tied to his own conception of organic inner form. Each symbolic form as it engages in its particular Zweckmässigkeit does so in terms of its own internal dialectic, and all of the symbolic forms that make up the life of human culture stand in dialectical tensions with each other. Although the Hegelian elements are ever-present in Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms, it will be seen as each of the symbolic forms is examined that Cassirer’s Hegelianism is only partial.

Chapter 1

Linguistic Form: The Critique of Reason Becomes the Critique of Culture

Critical Idealism Cassirer’s sentence, “The critique of reason becomes the critique of culture” (PSF 1:80), more than any other, captures the sense and aim of his philosophy. It is a motto. Cassirer regards the expansion of the Kantian concern with the critique of reason to the critique of culture as a natural and necessary step in the fruition of philosophical idealism. He says: “As long as philosophical thought limits itself to analysis of pure cognition, the naïve-realistic view of the world cannot be wholly discredited” (PSF 1:80). The transcendental method of asking how our knowledge of the object is possible and thereby discovering the principles of how we construct the object must be applied throughout all spheres of experience. Each sphere of experience comes about through an original act of the human spirit. The purpose of philosophy is to delineate these areas as having their own formations of space, time, number, cause, and so forth. In its delineation philosophy acts as a modifying force within culture because of its concern with culture as a whole. It shows the validity of each sphere as relative to the validity of the others. Taken on its own terms individually, each sphere seeks “to imprint its own characteristic stamp on the whole realm of being and the whole life of the spirit. From this striving toward the absolute inherent in each special sphere arise the conflicts of culture and the antinomies within the concept of culture” (PSF 1:81). Cassirer’s attachment to critique does not allow him to adopt Hegel’s “speculative sentence” (spekulativer Satz), in which the subject-term passes into the predicate-term and its meaning is so modified by its connection with the predicate that it emerges as a newly formed subject (PS 61–63). To accept this view of philosophical statement Cassirer would 17

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need to accept Hegel’s principle of Aufhebung, in which each stage of consciousness is canceled yet preserved in a succeeding stage, until all the stages culminate in the synthesis of the stage of Absolute Knowing of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Cassirer says that Hegel’s phenomenology of these stages has one purpose—to prepare the ground for logic. He says that as rich and diverse as these stages of consciousness are in their content, “their structure is subordinated to a single and, in a certain sense, uniform law—the law of dialectical method, which represents the unchanging rhythm of the concept’s autonomous movement. All cultural forms culminate in absolute knowledge; it is here that the spirit gains the pure element of its existence, the concept [Begriff ]” (PSF 1:83). Cassirer understands Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit itself to be aufgehoben in Hegel’s Science of Logic. He says: “Of all cultural forms, only that of logic, the concept, cognition [Erkenntnis], seems to enjoy a true and authentic autonomy” (PSF 1:83). Hegel’s speculative logic is thought in discourse with itself, a self-development of the Begriff that finally arrives at the Absolute Idea. Cassirer finds this process to be the ultimate form of reductionism. He concludes: “With all Hegel’s endeavor to apprehend the specific differentiations of the spirit, he ultimately refers and reduces its whole content and capacity to a single dimension—and its profoundest content and true meaning are apprehended only in relation to this dimension” (PSF 1:84).1 Cassirer points out that this reduction of all cultural forms to the one form of logic appears to be inherent in the concept of philosophy itself and to be especially inherent in philosophical idealism. Philosophy that is based in the idea comes naturally to logic as the means through which ideas are rationally structured. The alternative to seeking the totality of cultural forms in the universal terms of logic is to seek their totality in historical terms. Apprehending cultural forms historically would preserve their particularity but would do so at the sacrifice of any sense of their logical unity. Cassirer claims: “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 takes exactly the same shape” (PSF 1:84). This factor that recurs in each cultural form is the symbol, the major features of which were noted in the introduction. In accord with what was said earlier regarding the function-concept as the basis of the symbol, Cassirer speaks of an “index of modalities”: “If we designate the various kinds of relation—such as relation of space, time, causality, etc.—as R1, R2, R3, we must assign to each one a special ‘index of modality’ [Index

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der Modalität], μ1, μ2, μ3, denoting the context of function and meaning in which it is to be taken. For each of these contexts, language as well as scientific cognition, art as well as myth, possesses its own constitutive principle which sets its stamp, as it were, on all the particular forms within it” (PSF 1:97). Cassirer’s concept of an index of modality plainly shows his commitment to transcendental, reflective, and critical understanding of the logical features of the symbolic forms. Regarded horizontally, so to speak, in the totality of cultural forms, each manifests the same kinds of relations that give them structure, but the modality of each varies. Regarded vertically, so to speak, in the totality of cultural forms, each interacts with each other form dialectically. They display internal development, and this internal development is in tension, not only with itself but also with the other forms in the totality of culture. But there is no overall dialectic governed by a telos of the Absolute. The dilemma that Cassirer finds, in terms of the logical and the historical approach to the comprehension of cultural forms, is mirrored by a dilemma in Cassirer’s own philosophical method. He says that in developing his account of language as a symbolic form “I have not been able to pursue any charted philosophical course, but have been compelled throughout to seek my own methodological path” (PSF 1:71). He says philosophical inquiry into language “can neither disregard empirical particulars nor can it wholly submit to them and still remain entirely faithful to its own mission and purpose. In the face of this methodological dilemma, the only possibility was to formulate the questions asked of linguistics with systematic universality, but in each case to derive the answers from actual empirical inquiry” (PSF 1:71). This method of formulating questions from a purely philosophical and often specifically epistemological standpoint and seeking the answers in terms of the special sciences is pursued, by Cassirer, throughout his presentation of each of the symbolic forms. It is his own form of transcendentalism. If Cassirer errs in this twofold approach it is on the side of too much empirical detail, not on the side of becoming overly speculative in formulating or pursuing the questions.

Language as the First Symbolic Form Why does Cassirer begin his multivolume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms with a volume on Language? Seen from one perspective, the “first” volume of this work is his earlier Substance and Function, and the first

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symbolic form is theoretical cognition as found in mathematics and the mathematical science of nature. Cassirer is clear that the basis of his conception of a philosophy of symbolic forms is first advanced in Substance and Function, but at the same time he realized that epistemology could not be limited to the natural sciences and exclude the problems of the cultural sciences (PSF 1:69). In Substance and Function science is not treated as such as a symbolic form. Such a treatment appears in the third part of the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and is restated many years later in the final chapter of An Essay on Man. Why does Cassirer not begin the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms with an analysis of mythical thought, which is the subject of the second volume? Repeatedly throughout his corpus Cassirer asserts the primacy of myth, not only for an understanding of the origin of culture but also as the form of thought that lies at the beginning of any form of culture when it is approached genetically. In the volume on Language Cassirer begins his account of language with an analysis of it in its phase of sensuous expression that corresponds to the linguistic form from which mythical thought arises. Language occupies a unique place in Cassirer’s pantheon of symbolic forms because language enters into each of the other forms and in a sense makes them possible. Distinctive to science are mathematical formulae and systems of formal notation. But in order for these to be employed, linguistic statements are required. There is a language of science through which these formal systems live. Distinctive to myth is the narrative employment of language that expresses archetypal images of the cosmos, society, and the human being. Language is required for the production of religious and aesthetic imaginations and for historical investigation. Language is the medium of these and all other forms of culture. There is the commonly held view that each area of human culture is a “language,” such that there is a language of science, a language of art, a language of history, and so forth. But Cassirer does not regard the common element that runs through all spheres of culture to be the words and sentences of natural languages. The common denominator of all such spheres is the symbol—and the word and the sentence of natural languages is a particular form of the symbol. Although language makes both myth and science possible, there is a particular sense of the symbol that constitutes linguistic form per se. Language qua language, on Cassirer’s view, neither presents the object in its pure immediacy to consciousness nor deliberately constructs the object from its own power to recapitulate systems of meaning. When consciousness uses language

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linguistically, it uses words or sentences to represent things or events or thoughts. Linguistic symbolism is representational symbolism. All natural languages are structures of representation. In his exchange with Heidegger at Davos, Cassirer pointed to the importance of language as the key to the existence of a common human world in which we as individuals live and through which individual differences are bridged. Cassirer says: “This occurs repeatedly for me in the primal phenomenon of language. Each of us speaks his own language, and it is unthinkable that the language of one of us is carried over into the language of the other. And yet, we understand ourselves through the medium of language. Hence, there is something like the language. And hence there is something like a unity which is higher than the infinitude of the various ways of speaking. Therein lies what is for me the decisive point. And it is for that reason that I start from the Objectivity of the symbolic form, because here the inconceivable has been done.”2 Science is fundamental for Cassirer because its productions are not relative to any individual or any culture. There is no individual or private science and there is no sense of true science that is relative to the particular culture in which scientific discoveries are made. There is no such thing as Chinese science, or French science, or American science, beyond such phrases perhaps pointing to some cultural idiosyncrasy under which scientific research is conducted. The form of science and its findings are universal. Language, like science, offers an important form of objectivity. While each natural language forms a world, it is through language that individuals bridge their particularity. There are no private languages; each particular culture has a language. One way to grasp why Cassirer moves from his account of science, in Substance and Function, to language as the way to begin the presentation of his philosophy of symbolic forms is that, in traditional terms, man is uniquely a rational animal and man’s capacity of rationality produces science. Man is also uniquely a linguistic animal (the question of nonhuman languages will be treated in chapter 6). Man produces a common world by representing the world in words and sentences. Language allows human beings to place what is sensed at a distance and to approach the world mediately. Language mediates among individuals and between the individual and the objects experienced in the world external to the individual. When Cassirer speaks of the unity of all languages he is not claiming, I think, that all languages can be reduced to some single entity or form. He is certainly aware of the radical differences among various languages

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and language groups, as investigated by linguistic studies. In the volume on Language there are citations concerning 110 different languages and language groups. What is achieved in any language is in one manner or another a representation of the object in which the linguistic act refers to the object as something having its own independent existence, the meaning of which is grasped in the linguistic formulation. Cassirer notes that “the true and original element of all language formation is not the simple word but the sentence” (PSF 1:303).

Gesture Cassirer discusses two forms of gesture that lie at the basis of sign language and that reflect the two basic tendencies of the linguistic act itself. Neither of these is derived from the other and both are routes by which language achieves its power of representation. “On one side stands the indicative [die hinweisenden] and on the other is the imitative gesture [die nachahmenden]” (PSF 1:180). The indicative gesture has its origin in the grasping movement manifested in human infants, which develops into a pointing movement, allowing an object too far away to be grasped, to be nonetheless designated. This primordial power of “pointing there” is bound up with our grasp of the world in its sensory immediacy. Cassirer regards conceptual knowledge as grounded in this original “pointing there.” He says: “All progress in conceptual knowledge and pure ‘theory’ consists precisely in surpassing this first sensory immediacy. The object of knowledge recedes more and more into the distance, so that for knowledge critically reflecting upon itself, it comes ultimately to appear as an ‘infinitely remote point,’ an endless task” (PSF 1:181). The mediate grasp of the object in thought that appears in the judgment and inference points to the logical concept which characterizes reason. Cassirer concludes that “both genetically and actually, there seems to be a continuous transition from physical to conceptual ‘grasping.’ Sensory-physical grasping becomes sensory interpretation which in turn conceals within it the first impulse toward the higher functions of signification [Bedeutungsfunktion] manifested in language and thought” (PSF 1:181). In making this claim Cassirer plays upon the way in which the German word for concept implies a sense of mental grasping—“Griefen,” grasping, “Begriefen,” conceiving. He further plays on the sense in which, in German, “indication” is connected to “demonstration.” He says: “We might suggest the scope of this development by saying that it leads from

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the sensory extreme of mere ‘indication’ (Weisen) to the logical extreme of ‘demonstration’ (Beweisen)” (PSF 1:181–82). To speak of something, that is, to formulate it in language, is in a significant sense to show it forth, that is, to demonstrate its meaning. The discursive power of language as the power to course through a subject matter provides the basis for its theoretical or orational understanding. The imitative gesture in sign language in its purest form ties the maker of the gesture very closely to the outward sensory impression of the object. But, as Cassirer points out, most developed sign-language systems include an abundance of gestures that are symbolic in the sense that they do not mimic the object directly but designate its character indirectly. Cassirer claims that “the beginnings of phonetic language seem to be embedded in that sphere of mimetic representation and designation which lies at the base of sign language. Here the sound seeks to approach the sensory impression and reproduce its diversity as faithfully as possible” (PSF 1:190). This use of language appears to be very close in principle to the mythic or purely expressive function of language. In the myth the sensory immediacy of the object is preserved. The word and the object are interwoven into a single plane of reality. The mimetic use of language can involve a kind of sound painting. Cassirer says: “Although this type of sound painting recedes as language develops, there is no language, however advanced, that has not preserved numerous examples of it. Certain onomatopoeic expressions occur with striking uniformity in all the languages of the globe” (PSF 1:190–91). The mimetic gesture and mimetic language, as they develop, are not simply acts of copying. Cassirer turns to Aristotle’s conception of imitation, pointing out that imitation, for Aristotle, is not only the origin of language but also the origin of artistic activity. Cassirer says: “Thus understood mimēsis itself belongs to the sphere of poiēsis, of creative and formative activity. It no longer implies the mere repetition of something outwardly given, but a free project of the spirit: the apparent ‘reproduction’ (Nachbilden) actually presupposes an inner ‘production’ (Vorbilden)” (PSF 1:183). Mimēsis understood as a basic form of production establishes the groundwork for the transformation of expression into representation. Cassirer concludes that “with this, imitation itself is on its way to becoming representation, in which objects are no longer simply received in their finished structure, but built up by the consciousness according to their constitutive traits” (PSF 1:183). The crucial step for representa-

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tion to emerge from the imitative sign is the replacement of the sign by the word. Although the sign persists along with verbal language, the immediacy of the sensory impression is not overcome apart from the appearance of the word formulated in the sentence. Cassirer says: “But this function of representation emerges in an entirely new freedom and depth, in a new spiritual actuality when for the gesture it substitutes the word as its instrument and sensuous basis” (PSF 1:184). When language fully acquires the power of representation it passes from its mimetic stage to what Cassirer calls its analogical stage. Cassirer claims that at this stage the imitative sound that is tied to the sense impression is replaced by “a qualitatively graduated phonetic sequence [that] serves to express a pure relation. There is no direct material similarity between the form and specificity of this relation and the sounds with which it is represented” (PSF 1:193). Consciousness is now in possession of language as forming its own world of meanings, but these meanings at the same time refer to the contents of the sensory world, such that “the context is rather communicated by a formal analogy between the phonetic sequence and the sequence of contents designated; this analogy makes possible a coordination of series entirely different in content” (PSF 1:193). In this analogical stage, language builds up a world of spatial, temporal, and numerical relations that define the objective world of sensuous intuition. In this stage language also produces the sphere of inner intuition in which concepts of the self and subjectivity develop from a sense of the I as immersed in the body to a sense of the I in relation to itself—to the I as a theoretical basis of cognition, such as found in Kant’s I of the “transcendental apperception” (PSF 1:265).3 The analogical stage of language is what most closely typifies the symbolic form of language per se. It stands between the mythic-mimetic language of the image and the scientific-theoretical language of “signification” (Bedeutungsfunktion). In its function of signification, language turns in upon itself and systematically constructs new meanings for thought that are to a large extent self-referential. Cassirer calls this third stage of language that of symbolic expression. He says: “In this function language casts off, as it were, the sensuous covering in which it has hitherto appeared: mimetic or analogical expression gives way to purely symbolic expression which, precisely in and by virtue of its otherness, becomes the vehicle of a new and deeper spiritual content” (PSF 1:197). In this stage, language becomes the medium of conceptual thought in which logical distinctions and theoretical formu-

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lations can be produced that give us our most comprehensive grasp of experience.

Qualifying Concepts Language, as it develops its own symbolic power to form the world and the I in terms of representation, as opposed to bringing them forth in the language of presentational immediacy of myth, becomes the basis of logic. Cassirer says: “The problem of concept formation marks the point of closest contact between logic and the philosophy of language; at this point they seem to fuse into an inseparable unit” (PSF 1:278). The power of language to fix, classify, and order sensory experience is presupposed by logic. The logical concept is derived from the word. Conceptual thinking arises from linguistic thinking, not the reverse. Cassirer says: “An absolutely ‘pure,’ speechless thought would not know the opposition between true and false, which arises only in and through speech. Thus the question of the significance and origin of the concept inevitably leads back to the question of the origin of the word” (PSF 1:278). The formation of the concept begins in the power of language to classify the contents of experience. Cassirer says: “But how, one must now ask, do we arrive at this classification itself?” (PSF 1:280). At the level of sensory experience we are faced with a Heraclitean flux in which no content recurs in a true, identical fashion. In order to grasp the world as having a constant order we represent the world through the structure of language. This representation requires an act of universalization. The traditional view is that the generic class concepts of logic are achieved by comparing and finding the common element that can be abstracted from particulars, and that in so doing our goal is to advance to greater and greater levels of abstraction. Cassirer denies that this understanding of the formation of class concepts is correct. It glosses over the means by which the ongoing stream of sense impressions is transformed into representations that can subsequently be formed as classes. Cassirer concludes: “Hence the original and decisive achievement of the concept is not to compare representations and group them according to genera and species, but rather to form impressions into representations” (PSF 1:281). To solve this problem, Cassirer turns to the theory of the “first universal” in the Logic of Rudolf Hermann Lotze.4 Lotze points out that blue and yellow, for example, are not particulars that are subordinated under the genus, color. The universal color as such has no content apart from

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the various gradations of color. Blue and yellow designate or name two of these gradations. Cassirer says: “Before language can proceed to the generalizing and subsuming form of the concept, it requires another, purely qualifying type of concept formation. Here a thing is not named from the standpoint of the genus to which it belongs, but on the basis of some particular property which is apprehended in a total intuitive content” (PSF 1:283). First universals are what we later regard as the qualities or properties of a thing, the various states of its existence. The mind concentrates on some particular recurring feature of what is before it in the senses and gives this a name. This naming by property is an act of universalization but it is not the same as the universal of the generic class concept. Linguistic concept formation is always dynamic in its formation of properties or qualities as names.5 Cassirer makes much of the fact that many languages have only qualifying concepts for a given activity for what other languages classify in terms of a generic concept. He says that in certain North American Indian languages, “the activity of washing is designated by thirteen different verbs, according to whether it applies to the washing of the hands or face, of bowls, garments, meat, etc.” (PSF 1:289). In some languages, in referring to striking, a different verb is used for striking with the fist or with the flat of the hand or with a rod or a whip. Language focuses in such instances not on representing these actions in a generic fashion but on expressing the varieties of such actions. The aborigines of Tasmania had no word for tree, but a name for every variety of tree, and the Bakairi had names for every kind of parrot and palm tree but no name that expressed the concept of parrot or palm tree. Cassirer concludes: “Here, apparently, we are not dealing with an accidental luxuriation of some isolated linguistic impulse, but rather with an original tendency of linguistic concept formation, which often leaves discernible vestiges in languages that have in general passed beyond it” (PSF 1:290). Cassirer says that one of the linguistic devices whereby qualifying concepts are brought together to form a unit is the marking of them with a common suffix or prefix. This addition adds a new, determining element from which a generic concept begins to emerge. The impulse in language toward the logical concept is not fulfilled in either the qualifying or the generic concept. To attain the logical concept, consciousness must connect the concept with the question. Cassirer says: “Indeed, historically speaking, the problem of the concept was discovered when men learned not to accept the linguistic expression of concepts as definitive, but to interpret them as logical questions” (PSF

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1:294). Cassirer claims that this question of the linguistic form of the concept derives from the attainment of Socratic induction. Socrates begins with questioning what a given word means and his inquiry always leads toward the attempt to discover the definitive form of the logical concept. Cassirer suggests that when the logical concept is so pursued “the coordinations and classifications of language contain a certain ideality, a tendency toward the objective unity of the ‘idea’ ” (PSF 1:295). At the end of his small but compact work Language and Myth (1925), published two years after the volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms on Language and the same year as the volume on Mythical Thought, Cassirer calls attention to the limitations of the development of linguistic concept formation and the logical concept it produces. He says: “If language is to grow into a vehicle of thought, an expression of concepts and judgments, this evolution can be achieved only at the price of forgoing the wealth and fullness of immediate experience. In the end, what is left of the concrete sense and feeling content it once possessed is little more than a bare skeleton.”6 Language, like other symbolic forms, has its origin in a bond with mythical expression. Its self-development moves from its production of images and word magic to its powers of representation and classification. Through these powers, language becomes liberated from the immediacy of the stream of sensory impressions. But there is a loss of its power to grasp the world or the I concretely. Once language as a symbolic form has reached this limit it does not return to myth but moves forward to art. Cassirer says: “This regeneration is achieved as language becomes the avenue of artistic expression. Here it recovers the fullness of life; but it is no longer a life mythically bound and fettered, but an aesthetically liberated life.”7 Artistic expression is the way that language can deliberately recapture what language become logic has lost. Myth is an independent symbolic form into which language originally enters, and art also is an independent symbolic form which in its own way develops the non-conceptual powers of language. Language finds itself in a double role in a way that other symbolic forms do not. Myth is not art, or the reverse. Art is not science. Science is not history, nor is history, art, even though elements of the artistic imagination are necessary for the writing of history and these must be combined with the results of specific scientific-empirical investigations into the artifacts of the past. There are artistic characteristics of science, such as the elegance of theories, and so on. All symbolic forms have certain resonances with each other. The symbol is their true common denominator, but accom-

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panying this commonality at every step is the linguistic symbol, giving us essential access to each of the inner forms of the symbolic forms. But language is what constantly supplies us with our common world, which each of the other symbolic forms requires. Language is above all social. Without the power of the symbol, each individual consciousness could not pass beyond itself to a common representation of things. Without language, Cassirer says, “there would have been no bridge between the perceptual and the phonetic worlds of one man and another. But since language arises, not in isolated but in communal action, it possesses from the very start a truly common, ‘universal’ sense. Language as a sensorum commune could only grow out of the sympathy of activity” (PSF 1:286). Language is the epistemological and the social medium of culture as well as the medium of the philosophical comprehension of culture. But language as a specific symbolic form constructs the object in its own way that stands in contrast to the ways in which other symbolic forms construct the object. The most important influence on Cassirer’s conception of language and, from this conception, to his whole conception of symbolic forms is Wilhelm von Humboldt. He regards Humboldt’s philosophy of language as the key example of how the critique of reason can become the critique of culture. Cassirer says: “The basic principle of the transcendental method: the universal application of philosophy to science, which Kant had demonstrated for mathematics and mathematical physics, now seemed confirmed in a totally new field. The new philosophical view of language [in Humboldt’s work] demanded and made possible a new approach to linguistic science” (PSF 1:162). Humboldt is fully cognizant of the necessity of language for the relation of the individual to the natural world and for bridging the gap between one individual and another to form the distinctively human world. Cassirer says that for Humboldt “language is everywhere an intermediary, first between infinite and finite nature, then between one individual and another—simultaneously and through the same act, it makes union possible and arises from this union” (PSF 1:156). The symbol itself, like the linguistic symbol, is the constant intermediary of all human consciousness and activity. Humboldt actually shows how this intermediary functions, and he does so in a manner that is in accord with the principles of critical idealism. Humboldt’s work showed that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideal of a “philosophical” grammar or an abstract universal characteristic in which all of language could be reduced to a universal system of symbolism is mistaken. Hum-

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boldt’s genetic approach to understanding language suggested to Cassirer his own methodological approach to understanding the inner form of each area of human culture, not simply in its historical and empirical aspects but in these aspects comprehended in terms of its own logical structure (PSF 1:71). In this connection Cassirer says: “The true ideality of language exists only in its subjectivity. Hence it was and always will be futile to attempt to exchange the words in the various languages for universally valid signs such as mathematics possesses in its lines, numbers, and algebraic symbols” (PSF 1:158). By the subjectivity of language Cassirer means the interdependence each individual experiences between thought and word. As he says, “it is evident that the languages are not really means of representing the truth that has already been ascertained, but far more, means of discovering a truth not previously known” (PSF 1:159). The task of a philosophy of language is not to reduce language to its logical properties but to discover the way in which language is formative of the truths we seek. This approach regards language as essentially a topical activity, in which the human spirit finds those beginning points or “truths” from which language in its discursive or logical functions can proceed to demonstrate what can explicitly be known. Language generates what is, and each language generates what is in its own way. Yet we can move from one language to another because all are languages, that is, each language passes from phenomena to idea and back, even though each is a different intermediary. What we find to be true of languages in this regard we find generally to be true of the other symbolic forms in their own embodiments of the symbol.

Chapter 2

Mythical Thought: Beginning the Ladder of Consciousness

The Conception of a Philosophy of Mythology: Vico and Schelling In beginning his volume on language as a symbolic form, Cassirer points out that there is no comprehensive work on the history of the philosophy of language (PSF 1:117n1). Cassirer supplies his own brief but valuable history. In this case he could rely on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s inquiries into language, but, as Cassirer says, there was no comparable methodological guide in regard to mythical thinking (PSF 2:xviii).1 Cassirer calls attention to two precursors to his theory of myth as symbolic form: Giambattista Vico, who, in the New Science (1730/1744), presents a theory of myth that he calls “poetic wisdom” (la sapienza poetica),2 and F. W. J. Schelling, who, in Philosophy of Mythology (1842), presents an account of the emergence and development of mythology.3 In the fourth volume of the Problem of Knowledge, Cassirer calls Vico “the real discoverer of the myth [der eigentliche Entdecker des Mythos].”4 Cassirer, like Isaiah Berlin, regards Vico as standing out against the Enlightenment views of myth, and in this respect he connects Vico with Herder and Hamann.5 In the seminar on the philosophy of history that he taught at Yale University in 1941–42, Cassirer opposed Vico to Descartes, holding that as Descartes is the founder of the modern philosophy of science, Vico is the founder of the modern philosophy of history. Cassirer says we may regard Vico’s works “as a new Discours de la méthode—applied to history, instead of mathematics or physics” (SMC 103). Throughout his career Cassirer regarded Vico as the founder not only of the philosophy of history but of the philosophy of the cultural sciences generally.6 In his essay on “Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken” (“The Form of the Concept in Mythical Thought”) in 1922, just prior to publication 31

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of the volume of Mythical Thought, Cassirer claims: “the plan of a structural arrangement of the Geisteswissenschaften in modern philosophy is first sharply and determinately grasped by Giambattista Vico.”7 Indeed, Cassirer makes this claim in his first published work, Leibniz’ System (1902), in which he advises the reader that although a philosophical basis for the Naturwissenschaften can be found in the work of Leibniz, for the Geisteswissenschaften one must turn to Vico’s New Science.8 Vico’s conception of “poetic wisdom” is in principle equivalent to Cassirer’s “mythical thought” in regard to its use as a term to designate an original form of thought, out of which human culture arises, to which each field of human knowledge can trace its origins. Beyond this agreement in principle, comparisons between the two conceptions of origin become complicated.9 It is not my purpose here to discuss the similarities and differences, and Cassirer himself does not engage in such. He names Vico as a unique precursor and proceeds to develop his own view. Cassirer comes to myth in terms of the project of philosophical idealism to provide a comprehensive account of the development of the forms of consciousness. Vico’s sources for his doctrine of poetic wisdom are conceptions of poetry, rhetoric, and jurisprudence found in the grand tradition of Italian humanism that can be traced back to origins in Cicero and Quintilian and Neoplatonism. Vico is concerned to demonstrate that the abstract, rationalistic conception of the origin of human society in a covenant or contract, maintained by Hobbes and the seventeenth-century naturallaw theorists, is inadequate as an understanding of the origin of the civil world of nations. He understands history as cyclic, non-progressive, and governed by a principle of providence such that one can speak of a jurisprudence of the human race. Vico presents his conception of poetic wisdom in a kind of philosophical-poetic speech, grounded in a retelling of the biblical narration of the universal flood, connected to a narrative of the pagan figure of Jove and the pantheon of gods that characterize the beginnings of gentile humanity.10 In contrast, Cassirer’s account of the structure of mythical thought is an extension of Kant’s principles of critique, embedded in Hegel’s conception of a science of the experience of consciousness. Cassirer’s manner of thought keeps the mythic at a distance. Myth stands as an object of philosophical investigation, grounded in an examination of the results of anthropological, ethnographic, and mythological research. Vico brings the reader inside the dynamic movements of the archaic world

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of primitive imagination, or fantasia. Cassirer takes the reader into the shelves of the Warburg Library, to show how myth can be understood as a particular type of knowledge in comparison with other types of knowledge reflected in the other symbolic forms.11 At a time when Vico’s work was not available in reliable translation and was largely unknown, except to specialists, Cassirer realized its originality and importance and grasped it as one of the significant starting points of his own work. He says: “Giambattista Vico, founder of the modern philosophy of language, also founded a completely new philosophy of mythology. For Vico the true unity of human culture is represented in the triad of language, art, myth” (PSF 2:3). It is noteworthy that this triad is that to which Cassirer often refers. Although it may be there in principle in Vico’s thought, Vico never puts it in these terms. Cassirer associates Vico’s conception of culture with the philosophical idealism of Romanticism: “But this idea of Vico [of the unity of culture and its basis in myth] achieved full systematic definition and clarity only with the foundation of cultural science by the philosophy of romanticism” (PSF 2:3). Although Cassirer cites both Vico and Schelling as the precursors to his theory of mythical thought, he does not discuss Vico, but he does discuss Schelling. Herder knew of Vico, but there is no evidence that Schelling did.12 Schelling, Cassirer says, extended the conceptual principles of Kant’s critical philosophy to myth, from Kant’s application of them to theoretical, ethical, and aesthetic judgments, and he did so in an attempt to understand myth as having its own world, its own structural law. This approach is of the greatest significance because it took the theory of myth out of the context of the psychological investigation of myth as illusion and out of the practice of allegorical interpretation. Cassirer says: “Like Herder in the philosophy of language, Schelling in his philosophy of mythology discards the principle of allegory and turns to the fundamental problem of symbolic expression” (PSF 2:4). Schelling, then, shows us that “the philosophical understanding of myth begins with the insight that it does not move in a purely invented or made-up world but has its own mode of necessity and therefore, in accordance with the idealist concept of the object, its own mode of reality” (PSF 2:4). In his discussion of Schelling, Cassirer makes a point regarding the relation of myth to history that is exactly in accord with Vico’s view. Vico revises Aristotle’s well-known view that “poetry is something more philosophic and of greater import than history, since its statements are

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of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”13 Vico claims that myths are the original histories, which means that histories are particular but are formed in the universals of myth. Cassirer says: “In the relation between myth and history myth proves to be the primary, history the secondary and derived, factor. It is not by its history that the mythology of a nation is determined but, conversely, its history is determined by its mythology—or rather the mythology of a people does not determine but is its fate, its destiny as decreed from the very beginning” (PSF 2:5). Cassirer says that the whole nature of any traditional culture is determined by its gods. Myth is not something invented or chosen; it is an original way in which a people’s experience is formed and it is the key to their self-identity. Mythical thought, in addition to being an original form of culture, is an element in our ordinary immediate experience of the reality of the object as well as of ourself as the reality of the subject. Cassirer says that “even the world of our immediate experience—that world in which all of us constantly live and are when not engaged in conscious, criticalscientific reflection—contains any number of traits which, from the standpoint of this same reflection, can only be designated as mythical” (PSF 2:14). Cassirer holds that this mythic stratum that underlies our cognitive grasp of the world should be accessible to descriptive phenomenology. In a footnote, he points to Husserl’s sense of phenomenology in the Ideas— that the analysis of cognition calls for an investigation of the structures of entirely different, objective spheres that underlie it. He says: “Such an investigation should include the mythical ‘world,’ not in order to derive its specific actuality by induction from the manifold of ethnological and ethnic-psychological experience, but in order to apprehend it in a purely ideational analysis” (PSF 2:12n7). But Cassirer says he finds no evidence that such phenomenological investigation is ready to undertake this task. Cassirer’s conception of the life-world, so to speak, is of a world greatly richer than that which grounds only cognition or common sense. Cassirer does not find the task of a philosophy of mythical thought preempted by modern psychology or modern phenomenology. He parts ways with Schelling’s philosophy of mythology in a fashion similar to the grounds on which he parts ways with Hegel. Cassirer points out that Schelling ultimately holds that the true science of mythology is one that represents the activity of the absolute within mythical consciousness (PSF 2:12). Cassirer is wary of the metaphysical impulse to absorb the “truth” of mythical thought in any form of the absolute. This absorption

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goes against the grasping of myth’s own inner form that, for Cassirer, is the purpose of a philosophy of mythology.

Hegel’s Ladder The key problem Cassirer faces in advancing his concept of myth as a symbolic form is the tendency to regard myth in terms of psychology and psychologism. This way of regarding myth reduces it to a world of subjective illusion. Despite the fact that it has been studied as a true form of the human spirit by linguists, anthropologists, and ethnologists, myth, Cassirer says, seems “to be forever at the mercy of psychology and psychologism” (PSF 2:xiv). He says that “this ‘illusionism’ that keeps cropping up” threatens the development of a theory of myth, as well as of art, that can be understood as part of a system of cultural forms. Many years later, these assertions made in the volume on Mythical Thought are made more clearly in The Myth of the State, in Cassirer’s direct criticism of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of myth. He says that in 1913, when Freud began to publish his articles on “Totem and Taboo,” the problem of myth seemed to be solved by the scientific application of a few simple principles. At the hands of psychoanalytic science, myth “was no longer a chaos of the most bizarre and inconceivable things; it became a system. . . . There was no longer a deep chasm, no insurmountable gulf between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ psychic life” (MS 28–29). The psychoanalytic or psychological researcher could pass from one field of human activity to another and apply these principles without ever having to change point of view. Cassirer says: “Freud stood at the sickbed of myth with the same attitude and same feelings as at the couch of an ordinary patient” (MS 29). Myth on this approach can be understood as part of the psychology of the emotions. Freud’s “Fathercomplex and the Oedipus-complex were declared to be the ‘Open Sesame’ to the mythical world. This formula seemed to account for everything. According to the psychoanalytic principle of ‘displacement’ all combinations became possible” (MS 33). Such principles of human activity and the human psyche are regarded as universal. All that is needed is their application to any human phenomenon and its nature and meaning will be revealed and objectively established. This way of understanding the human violates Cassirer’s principle of inner form, in which each form of human existence and human culture has its own logic of subject and object and which, taken together with other forms, comprise the totality of human culture. In opposition to

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this reductionism of psychologism, Cassirer places the phenomenology of spirit. If we recognize that myth is a genuine form of human existence, then “the problem of myth bursts the bounds of psychology and psychologism and takes its place in that most universal domain of problems which Hegel designated as ‘phenomenology of spirit’ ” (PSF 2:xv). Hegel is the corrective to Freud, at least in terms of a philosophy of culture. Each stage of Hegel’s development of consciousness in his “science of the experience of consciousness” is an exploration of the inner form of consciousness in regard to a particular stance consciousness takes on the object and at the same time on itself as subject. Hegel claims that in his Phenomenology of Spirit substance becomes subject (PS 17–18). This appeals to Cassirer as an overcoming of substance by function, which he explicated in terms of his analysis of science in Substance and Function. Hegel’s Begriff as self-developing form is functional, not substantive. Like the principle of immanent causality in the Leibnizian monad, Hegelian consciousness develops in relation to itself, a difference being that on Hegel’s account there is only one monad, only one true individual, which is the whole. Not only must myth be understood as having its own inner form, as being a true symbolic form, it must be understood as being the beginning of all other forms. Although all other forms have their own inner form, this inner form is bound up in its beginning with the inner form of myth. Cassirer says: “None of these forms started out with an independent existence and clearly defined outlines of its own; in its beginnings, rather, every one of them was shrouded and disguised in some form of myth” (PSF 2:xiv). Cassirer is emphatic that the understanding of all of human culture must be based on an understanding of the origin of culture, and this origin must be understood as resting on myth as a symbolic form. Cassirer extends this genetic method of understanding the human world to each part of this world. Thus he claims: “The question of the origin of language is indissolubly interwoven with that of the origin of myth; the one can be raised only in relation to the other. Similarly, the problem of the beginnings of art, writing, law, or science leads back to a stage in which they all resided in the immediate and undifferentiated unity of the mythical consciousness” (PSF 2:xv). The genetic method, taken in Cassirer’s and also in Hegel’s sense, claims that the nature of anything in the human world of consciousness cannot be grasped properly in terms of its logical definition. Such an approach to what something is presupposes the substance-concept, not the function-concept. To comprehend what something is genetically is

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to elicit the objective principles by which it came to be what it is. This approach to its nature is more than historicism, because what is sought is not simply its history as a particular thing but the sense in which it is both particular and universal. The universality involved is functional in the way that the principle of a developing series exists in a bond with the elements of the series. The difference between a formally stated function-concept and the Hegelian Begriff as a concrete universal is that the formal, functional principle of a series remains constant in its determination of the series. The Hegelian principle, functioning to order the series of particulars in any given stance of consciousness, is itself altered in its ordering activity such that it produces a further version of itself. In this way consciousness determinately recapitulates itself and achieves its self-development in accord with what was mentioned earlier as Hegelian true infinity. The problem Cassirer sees in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in regard to myth is that Hegel’s science of the experience of consciousness begins too high in human experience. Cassirer claims that the philosophy of symbolic forms, along with Hegel’s phenomenology, must provide the individual with a ladder that rises step-by-step from the most primary form of consciousness to its most self-consciously developed form. The fully self-conscious, self-determined standpoint of consciousness is spirit (Geist), realized as science (Wissenschaft). Cassirer quotes Hegel’s ladder metaphor (PSF 2:xv–xvi): “The individual has the right to demand that Science should at least provide him with the ladder to this standpoint, should show him this standpoint within himself ” (PS 26). In quoting this passage with approval, Cassirer is not endorsing the culmination of all forms of consciousness in that of Hegel’s absolute knowing, or that each stage of consciousness must be seamlessly aufgehoben in the next, as was discussed earlier. What he is endorsing in his focus on the ladder metaphor is the necessity of the above-mentioned genetic comprehension of all human phenomena. Hegel’s phenomenology begins with the stage of sense-certainty (die sinnliche Gewißheit). This is a stage of immediate sensory apprehension that is connected to the perception of the thing (das Ding), which is the succeeding stage. The stage of sense-certainty is a stage of discrete sensation that leads to the grasp of these sensations residing in the intuition of the thing and the world of things. The beginning stage of sense-certainty is not a stage of expressive consciousness. The object is sensed but it is not felt. Consciousness, in Hegel’s phenomenology, begins its life in a flux of neutral sensations which do not contain any emotional orienta-

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tions or vectors. In his later summary of myth as a symbolic form in An Essay on Man, Cassirer makes this factor of the mythic apprehension of the object quite clear. He says that mythical perception is always impregnated with emotional qualities: “Whatever is seen or felt is surrounded by a special atmosphere—an atmosphere of joy or grief, of anguish, of excitement, of exultation or depression. . . . All objects are benignant or malignant, friendly or inimical, familiar or uncanny, alluring and fascinating or repellent and threatening” (EM 76–77). Hegel’s opening stages of sensation and perception are too cognitively oriented to accommodate what Cassirer finds in myth.14 Thus Cassirer concludes: “If then, in accordance with Hegel’s demand, science is to provide the natural consciousness with a ladder leading to itself, it must first set this ladder a step lower” (PSF 2:xvi). Cassirer insists that the object is first felt in a benign or malignant way and this felt aspect of the object is expressed in the gods and demons of myths. As consciousness develops, this emotional and physiognomic grasp of the object gives way to the expressively neutral sensing of the object. This expressively neutral apprehension of the object prepares the way for placing the object in a representational world, a world of things and their qualities. At its most primordial level consciousness lives in a world of felt qualities, but these felt qualities nonetheless constitute a world with its own distinctive form and distinctive engagement in the symbolic act. Hegel’s phenomenology combines both descriptive and developmental phenomenology, for each stage taken as such, on Cassirer’s version including myth, requires a descriptive account of itself. But taken in relation not just to what it itself is, but to what it is not—the other forms of consciousness—the understanding of consciousness requires developmental phenomenology so that the nature of all of consciousness as a phenomenon can become an object of knowledge.

Mythical Categories and Forms of Intuition Cassirer’s specific title of the first volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is “The Phenomenology of Linguistic Form.” He presents his philosophy of language as a development of three stages—language in the phase of sensuous expression, in the phase of intuitive expression, and as the expression of conceptual thought and forms of pure relation. These phases mirror those of the three functions of consciousness in his general phenomenology of knowledge of the third volume that will be

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discussed in chapter 3. He does not label the second volume, Mythical Thought, a phenomenology, and his basic approach is transcendental. In the way that Kant inquires into the conditions of the possibility of scientific thought, Cassirer inquires into the conditions of the possibility of mythical thought. His three principal divisions are myth as a form of thought, as a form of intuition (Anschauung), and as a life-form. The first two divisions have obvious parallels with Kant’s transcendental analytic and transcendental aesthetic; the third corresponds in principle to Kant’s place-holder for the self and the subjective—the “I think” and transcendental unity of apperception. There is in this third division a developmental approach to the formation of the self as arising out of the mythical feeling of the unity of life and the phases of the mythical concept of the I as the I develops from an impersonal existence in nature to a conception of its existence as a spiritual-ethical personality (PSF 2:217–18). Cassirer is concerned to demonstrate that there is a kind of transcendental doctrine of categories and of the forms of intuition in myth that can be contrasted to science. He says it may seem strange even to be concerned with a philosophy of mythology, because “the history of philosophy as a scientific discipline may be regarded as a single continuous struggle to effect a separation and liberation from myth” (PSF 2:xiii). Theories of knowledge generally begin from the “given” and build views they contain from it, and, once built from it, to reconcile these views back against it. They do not ask: how is the given, given? Cassirer says: “It is one of the first essential insights of critical philosophy that objects are not ‘given’ to consciousness in a rigid, finished state, in their naked ‘as suchness,’ but that the relation of representation to object presupposes an independent, spontaneous act of consciousness” (PSF 2:29). The given for most theories of knowledge contains the object of knowledge as present and as that which the act of knowing must rightly represent. This givenness of the object is consonant with our commonsense grasp of the world and even with that which is found in Husserl’s life-world. On Cassirer’s view the given is itself constructed, and it is first constructed in the expressive act of mythic symbolformation. The world is originally brought about as an object for awareness by the power of the myth. On the level of the myth the object is not represented; it is presented. The dancer who dons the mask of the god is not an empirical person who signifies or represents the god. The dancer, for mythical conscious-

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ness, literally is the god. In the presence of the dancer is the presence of the god. The god walks among us. Cassirer says that “it has rightly been stressed that rite precedes myth. Rites cannot be explained as a mere representation of beliefs . . . rites are not originally ‘allegorical’: they do not merely copy or represent but are absolutely real” (PSF 2:39). The god, once symbolized, is actualized. The god is an immediate presence from which we can attain no distance at the level of mythical consciousness. The god is present on the same plane of reality as we are. Cassirer claims that in the mythical world there are no different degrees of reality; all is one single condition. He says: “For mythical thinking all contents crowd together into a single plane of reality; everything perceived possesses as such a character of reality. . . . A man’s image like his name is an alter ego; what happens to the image happens to the man himself ” (PSF 2:42). Myth is a kind of thought that occurs on the level of perception itself. On the level of perception there is no better or worse perception. On this level nothing grasped is more true than another; there are no false perceptions. Cassirer points out that “every simple perception implies a ‘taking for true’ ” (PSF 2:35). Cassirer is playing on the root sense of the German term for perception, Wahrnehmen (nehmen, “to take”; wahr, “true”). Hegel plays on this term in similar fashion in his abovementioned stage of the consciousness of the thing. Cassirer points out that perception in this sense is selection: “Out of the mass of impressions which pour in on consciousness in any given moment of time certain traits must be retained as recurrent and ‘typical’ as opposed to others which are merely accidental and transient” (PSF 2:35). Perception as it comes to possess its full powers stands on the edge of the purely expressive grasp of the object to the representation of it. In the most primordial sense of perception there is no “taken for true”; the object is simply felt, simply sensed as benign or malignant. As the power of perception itself is exercised, one “taking” of what is sensed is privileged in contrast to what else is in the sensory field. With this power of selection the mythic object is beginning to undergo a transformation. The most important element of mythical thought, in addition to the mythical grasp of the object, is causality. Cassirer says: “Mythical thinking is, in general, distinguished from a purely theoretical world view as much by its concept of causality as by its concept of the object” (PSF 2:43). Causality understood as a category of scientific or theoretical thinking presupposes an analysis of the objects of experience such that only certain of these objects can be causally connected to others. It is the task of science to produce principles whereby such connections can be made

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and verified. Thus science is always involved in an analytic-synthetic discursus, for with certain connections come further distinctions. Cassirer says: “According to Kant the principle of causality is a synthetic principle which enables us to spell out phenomena and so read them as experience. But this causal synthesis, like the synthesis which takes place in the concept of the object, involves a very specific analysis” (PSF 2:43). Cassirer describes mythic causality as the precise inverse of this scientific conception of causality. In fact, Cassirer finds in mythical consciousness the embodiment of Hume’s conception of causality as constant conjunction. Cassirer points out that scientific empirical thinking aims at establishing a universal causal relation between specific causes and specific effects. But in mythical thinking “anything can come from anything, because anything can stand in temporal or spatial contact with anything” (PSF 2:46). Because a certain bird arrives at the same time as the spring it is seen as the bringer of the spring. In regard to change, empirical scientific thought seeks a universal rule that will account for all change of a specific sort. But “mythical ‘metamorphosis,’ on the other hand, is always the record of an individual event—a change from one individual and concrete material form to another” (PSF 2:47). In the mythical world there is no concept of the accidental: “Often where we from the standpoint of science speak of ‘accident,’ mythical consciousness insists on a cause and in every single case postulates such a cause” (PSF 2:47). Everything in the mythic world happens by conscious purpose. Cassirer might add that whereas scientific neutrality seeks a single true cause of an effect, regarding other factors involved as accidental to this effect, mythic mentality is greatly satisfied by multiple causes. The more causes that can be attributed to an effect or event, the richer and more meaningful it is. Cassirer is emphatic that myth and science do not employ different categories in the construction of experience. They employ the same categories. It is a principle of the philosophy of symbolic forms that each symbolic form, viewed as a type of thought, employs the same categories, but each of the symbolic forms employs them with a different “tonality” (Tönung). He says: “Thus, taken abstractly, both the mythical and the scientific explanations of the world are dominated by the same kinds of relation: unity and multiplicity, coexistence, contiguity, and succession. Yet each of these concepts, as soon as we place it in the mythical sphere, takes on a very special character, one might say a specific ‘tonality’ ” (PSF 2:60–61).

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Note that Cassirer’s four kinds of relation bear a general resemblance to Kant’s four kinds of categories (CPR, A80; B106). Cassirer does not hold to Kant’s architectonic of his twelve categories in any precise manner, but he does subscribe to the doctrine that there are transcendental categories that take on various tonalities. The variations in their tonalities are what make up the significant differences among the symbolic forms. Tonality is a concept that accompanies Cassirer’s principle of inner form. It designates the sense in which the basic structure of any symbolic form is animated in its own specific way. Categories in the Kantian sense are forms of synthesis in judgments that are produced by the understanding. The type of knowledge the understanding provides is propositional. Kant asks the question: how are certain types of judgment possible? And his answer is: because they embody or necessarily presuppose certain categories. In this way Kant proceeds from general logic to transcendental logic. Cassirer wishes to extend the idea of a category to such non-propositional forms of knowledge as myth and art. In so doing he wishes to avoid the view that myth and art employ different categories than science and cognitive thinking. He also wishes to deny the view that myth and art are non-categorical in form. To treat categories in this way Cassirer must broaden the Kantian transcendental method. If he can attribute categories to myth then it is meaningful to speak of categories for all non-propositional forms of knowledge. He has this problem in mind in Mythical Thought, the subtitle of the second volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and in the division of it titled “Myth as a Form of Thought.” For Cassirer myth is a way of thinking. It has a cognitive element, but the categories are quite fluid and dynamic in their use and do not comprise a fixed set. Cassirer asks how myth is possible, and his answer is: because myth employs categories but does so in its own way. In this sense Cassirer has a “critique” of myth that remains broadly Kantian and transcendental. Kant’s transcendental aesthetic divides the forms through which the object is subjected to intuition into space and time. To these, Cassirer adds number: “Besides space and time, the third great formal motif dominating the structure of the mythical world is number” (PSF 2:140). Space, time, and number occur in the mythical world in terms of the basic opposition of the sacred and the profane.15 Cassirer says: “All reality and all events are projected into the fundamental opposition of the sacred and the profane, and in this projection they assume a new meaning” (PSF 2:75). In contrast to the neutrality of geometrical space and

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measurable space, in which all spatial units are continuous, differing from each other only in quantitative terms, mythical space is structured in terms of those spaces which are sacred and those that lie outside the sacred and are profane. Cassirer says: “For the sacred always appears at once as the distant and the near, as the familiar and protective but at the same time absolutely inaccessible, as the mysterium tremendum and the mysterium fascinosum” (PSF 2:78). Primitive peoples live at the center of the universe, at the exact navel of the world. This center is the essential point of contact with the gods. What lies beyond and at a distance is the profane space in general. This sense of the navel is preserved in ancient societies. I note that one finds preserved today in the Roman Forum the inscription: Umbilicus urbis Romae. In modern societies the sense of the sacred remains in the existence of holy places. In like manner, time, for the mythical consciousness, is ordered in terms of sacred periods and profane periods in which time passes in ordinary fashion. In modern societies this temporal division persists in a reduced form, in terms of holidays and diurnal time. Mythical time differs from historical time in that “for mythical time there is an absolute past, which neither requires nor is susceptible of any further explanation. History dissolves being into the never-ending sequence of becoming, in which no point is singled out but every point indicates the way to one further back, so that regression into the past becomes a regressus in infinitum” (PSF 2:106). For mythical consciousness there is an absolute division between the past and the present. The ancestors are all equally past, and they peer over the rim of the world, looking down upon the scene of the present. Number is understood by mythical thought in terms of certain numbers and systems of numbers bearing sacred meanings. Numbers, for mythical consciousness, each bear a very individual imprint. Numbers do not simply signify links in a system of relations, as they do in theoretical thought. We need only think of the significance of the tetraktys in Pythagorean thought or the number three in the conception of the Trinity to realize the sense in which the concept of number is rooted in mythical senses of number. The double sense of number as cardinal and ordinal is parallel to the forms of space and time. Kant uses number as an example of his principle of the synthesis of recognition in a concept. He says that in counting, if I did not realize that one unit is, in a sense, a succession being added to the next, I would remain ignorant of number: “for the concept

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of number is nothing but the consciousness of this unity of synthesis” (CPR, A103). He says further that “a concept is always, as regards its form, something universal which serves as a rule” (CPR, A106). Cassirer says Leibniz was the first to define space “as the ideal condition of ‘order in coexistence’ and time as the ideal condition of ‘order in succession’ ” (PSF 2:80). The cardinal system of numbers lends itself to the measurement of spatial units and the ordinal system of numbers is required for the measurement of time. As number develops from its mythical, qualitative meanings to its power to signify abstract relations, so space and time develop into systems of relations. Cassirer says: “Just as astronomy goes back to astrology and chemistry to alchemy, so arithmetic and algebra go back to an older magical form of number theory, to a science of almacabala” (PSF 2:144). But as number takes on its full mathematical form it escapes the narrowness of the immediacy of the sensuous and mystical world and becomes the symbol system of theoretical and scientific investigation. As mentioned above, Cassirer’s account of mythical thought moves from a theory of categories and forms of intuition to myth as a life-form and a “dialectic of the mythical consciousness” which shows how religion arises out of myth. His views of the interconnection of myth and religion will be treated in chapter 6.

Chapter 3

Phenomenology of Knowledge: Taking Phenomenology in the Hegelian, Not the Modern Sense

The Phenomenology of Erkenntnis Cassirer explains that the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, The Phenomenology of Knowledge (Erkenntnis), concerns the problem of knowledge understood as part of the theoretical worldview. He says that this problem, understood in this way, refers back to the function-concept and the philosophy of science explicated in Substance and Function. In that work Cassirer put forth the structure of science as such. In this volume on Erkenntnis he intends to show how the symbolic systems of scientific thought arise within consciousness from those essential forms of experience that are not scientific or theoretical. To accomplish this demonstration Cassirer turns from the transcendental method of critical idealism to the phenomenology of Hegel. Cassirer says: “In speaking of a phenomenology of knowledge I am using the word ‘phenomenology’ not in its modern sense but with its fundamental signification as established and systematically grounded by Hegel” (PSF 3:xiv). Cassirer claims that Hegel has established this sense of phenomenology as the basis of all philosophical knowledge that seeks to encompass all cultural forms as a totality. He refers to Hegel’s famous sentence from the Phenomenology of Spirit: “The True is the whole” (PS 20). But in so doing Cassirer modifies its principal term; he says: “the truth is the whole [die Wahrheit ist das ‘Ganze’]” (PSF 3:xiv). Hegel’s statement is “das Wahre ist das Ganze.” Instead of das Wahre Cassirer uses die Wahrheit. He also cites it this way in the draft of his introduction to the fourth volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (PSF 4:193; the translation reads “true” but the original is die Wahrheit). Given Cassirer’s great pow45

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ers of learning and memory, it seems unlikely that he misremembers how Hegel phrases this famous assertion. Das Wahre is correctly rendered as “the True” with a capital T in English when it is intended in a philosophical or metaphysical sense. Cassirer’s die Wahrheit keeps the sense of the whole epistemological rather than metaphysical. Used in this context, “truth” in contrast to “the True” directs the careful reader’s attention to the purpose of Cassirer’s phenomenology. Cassirer’s purpose is different from Hegel’s. Hegel’s phenomenology presents the whole dialectical development of spirit (Geist). This development includes, in addition to forms of knowing, psychological, ethical, social, political, and religious forms of consciousness. These do not appear in Cassirer’s phenomenology of Erkenntnis. Erkenntnis is only part of Geist, that part which involves knowledge or cognition as such. Each stage of Hegel’s phenomenology may be seen as a way in which consciousness apprehends or “knows” its object, including those stages that are explicitly presented in psychological and social terms; Cassirer’s phenomenology does not include such terms or stages. Cassirer’s phenomenology proceeds from mythic to linguistic to theoretical functions of consciousness, but he treats the mythic and the linguistic only in terms of their proto-cognitive aspects. Cassirer’s sentence, unlike Hegel’s, places “Ganze” in quotation marks, which suggests a different sense of the whole than that of Hegel’s phenomenology. The whole without the quotation marks connotes, in Hegel’s statement, the grasping of all the stages of consciousness in his final stage of “absolute knowing.” As discussed earlier, Cassirer rejects Hegel’s Absolute, which he regards as a final synthesis in which all the stages of consciousness are aufgehoben. Cassirer regards his sense of dialectic as more open than what he interprets Hegel’s principle of Aufhebung to entail. What he says of dialectic in its application to the development of mythical consciousness applies to his conception of cultural dialectic in general: “The separate stages of its development do not simply follow but rather confront one another, often in sharp opposition” (PSF 2:235). This view of the sharp opposition between stages, as well as Cassirer’s modification of the meaning of the whole, clarifies the sense in which Cassirer wishes to employ the dialectic of Hegel’s phenomenology, but, at the same time, not to embrace it fully. Cassirer says: “Philosophical reflection does not set the end against the middle and the beginning but takes all three as integral factors in a unitary total movement. In this fundamental principle the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms agrees with

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Hegel’s formulation, much as it must differ in both its foundations and its development” (PSF 3:xv). The disagreement with Hegel’s formulation in its foundations was discussed in the preceding chapter, in which Cassirer sets Hegel’s ladder for the individual one step lower, at the first rung of myth. His disagreement in its development (Durchführung, “carrying out,” “completion”) refers to his objections to the smooth sense of synthesis in Hegel’s Aufhebung and totality of the Absolute. These are also tied to Cassirer’s aim to modify the structures of philosophical system that will be discussed in the final section of this chapter. In his treatments of science, language, and myth, Cassirer focused on them as forms of knowledge. He was concerned to show through a transcendental analysis of their structure that each of them was a genuine form of knowledge, especially language and myth. Following his doctrine of the function-concept, Cassirer now wishes to show the three senses of function that underlie these three forms, to the end of showing how science or theoretical thinking arises from and continually presupposes the other two functions of consciousness. Science is the end that is placed against the middle of language that is placed against the origin that is myth. In each of these functions there is no fixed subject and object. The subjective and objective are constructed or articulated within the development of each in a manner analogous to Hegel’s process of consciousness coming to realize that its object is the result of its own activity. Although Cassirer wishes to explicate the total course of the movement of consciousness from the origin to the middle to the end, the structure of each of the three functions of consciousness is to be reached by transcendental analysis. Cassirer says: “We shall attempt by means of reconstructive analysis to find our way back to their elementary presuppositions, the conditions of their possibility” (PSF 3:57). Transcendental analysis and Hegelian phenomenology intersect. Transcendental analysis that elicits the conditions of the possibility of knowledge as grounded in experience produces the principle of the schematism. As discussed in chapter 1, the schematism is the concrete unity of the sensible intuition and the concept, but the achievement of this unity in the understanding is “an art concealed in the depths of the human soul” (CPR, A141; B180–81). Each stage of Hegel’s “science of the experience of consciousness” is an embodiment of the transcendental schematism. Hegel’s Begriff as it is progressively realized in the stages of the Phenomenology of Spirit is the schematism set in motion. Hegel’s dialectic reveals what is left concealed in Kant’s conception of

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the schematism. Dialectic is the art internal to consciousness whereby the two moments of consciousness, that which is in-itself and the initself as grasped by consciousness as for-itself, is expressed in a selfmoving process of self-recapitulation, of cancellation and transcendence or Aufhebung. This conception of dialectic transforms the transcendental analysis of experience into a total narrative that consciousness creates of itself by making each instance of schematism a moment in the whole of consciousness. The three functions of consciousness of Cassirer’s phenomenology are the expressive (Ausdrucksfunktion), the representational (Darstellungsfunktion), and the significative (Bedeutungsfunktion). The first two of these are situated in a world; they each constitute a “life-world.” The expressive function is there in a world of expression or Ausdruckswelt. Although this world is formed through the exercise of expression, it has a sense of immediate wholeness or “givenness.” Cassirer discusses the second function as the “problem of Repräsentation,” using the Latinized German word rather than Darstellung. This avoids the ambiguity in Darstellung of meaning both presentation and representation. In the phase of expression, symbol and symbolized are not on different planes. In the example mentioned in the previous chapter, the dancer with the mask of the god does not “symbolize” or represent the god but presents the god—literally is the presence of the god. In the second function the symbol (primarily the words or phrases of natural language) stands for or refers to the thing or object symbolized. The world of this second function is discussed by Cassirer in terms of the “building up of the intuitive world” (der Aufbau der anschaulichen Welt). Unlike the immediate embodiment of expression in its world, the world of the representational function is built up through the forms of intuition of space and time. The third function is sometimes cited as reine Bedeutungsfunktion or the purely significative function, since each of the two other functions has Bedeutung, “meaning” or “significance.” Through this function the world of scientific knowledge is built up (der Aufbau der wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnis). The world which is so built is one of systems of symbols in which the symbol does not achieve its meaning by mediating the intuitively based world of things, nor is it the immediate presentation of the expressive function. At this third level the symbol is selfmediating, in the way that the function-concept is in essence selfconstructive. The symbol in this third function constructs levels of meaning, all of which are purely symbolic. This is a world of Erkenntnis

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but it is not a life-world. Science and purely theoretical thought presuppose the life-worlds of expression and intuition in which we live. The significative function is free to produce the orders of pure thought made possible by the powers of symbolization itself, but it requires the ground for thought that the other two functions provide.

Expression and Dasein In 1928 Heidegger reviewed Cassirer’s volume on Mythical Thought for the Deutsche Literaturzeitung. In this review he raised the crucial question of how myth can be understood to belong to Dasein. He concludes that, for all of Cassirer’s extensive analysis of myth, “the fundamental philosophical problem of myth is not yet attained: in what way does myth belong to Dasein as such; in what respect, after all, is it an essential phenomenon within a universal interpretation of being [Sein] and its modifications?”1 Heidegger is obviously skeptical as to whether the question of the relation of myth to Dasein is possible given Cassirer’s purely epistemological discussion of myth. He says: “An opinion on this can only be produced when not only all the symbolic forms are presented, but also only when above all the fundamental concepts of this Systematik are thoroughly worked out and are brought to their ultimate ground.”2 Heidegger’s review falls between the publication of Being and Time in the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschuung in 1927 and Cassirer’s publication of the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms in 1929, although, as Cassirer states in his preface, the manuscript for the volume was complete at the end of 1927 (PSF 3:xvii). Cassirer’s volume on Mythical Thought appeared in 1925, so it was known to Heidegger prior to the completion of Being and Time. In Being and Time, Heidegger includes a footnote to Cassirer’s volume, acknowledging the value of Cassirer’s analysis of the Dasein of myth and ethnological research, but he points to the need for a more phenomenological approach. He calls attention to the footnote in Cassirer’s volume in which Cassirer holds that Husserl’s phenomenology has not been exhausted in his analysis of cognition, leaving open its extension to the world of myth.3 There is a letter in the Husserl archives from Husserl to Cassirer of April 3, 1925, in which Husserl expresses sympathy with Cassirer’s enterprise, in contrast to Nicolai Hartmann, whom Husserl denounces for misunderstanding phenomenology.4 This exchange would support the

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point of Cassirer having in some sense extended Husserl’s approach, that Heidegger says is needed. Heidegger concludes his footnote by pointing out that in a discussion with Cassirer, at a lecture “before the Hamburg section of the Kantgesellschaft in December 1923 on ‘Tasks and Pathways of Phenomenological Research,’ it was already apparent that we agreed in demanding an existential analytic such as was sketched in that lecture.”5 Although Cassirer had completed or was in the process of completing his volume on the phenomenology of knowledge when Heidegger’s Being and Time appeared, he did include four footnotes in response to Heidegger’s work and a number of references to Husserl (PSF 3:149n4, 163n2, 173n16, and 189n34). Cassirer’s remarks in these footnotes concern Heidegger’s views of space and time. He makes clear that a full discussion of Heidegger’s position cannot be accomplished until Heidegger’s work as a whole is available (a comment similar to Heidegger’s remark concerning Cassirer’s position, in his review). Cassirer’s and Heidegger’s remarks about their views are hampered by the fact that neither had had the opportunity, when writing them, to absorb fully the other’s work on the topic. Cassirer did not publish a critique of Heidegger’s phenomenology, but he does present some views on it in his discussion of Lebensphilosophie in the manuscripts that appear in the fourth volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Heidegger was given an opportunity to review Cassirer’s volume on the phenomenology of knowledge, but he never published a review of it. Mrs. Cassirer reports that at a lecture at Freiburg following their 1929 meeting and debate at Davos, Cassirer asked Heidegger about progress on the review. She quotes from a letter written to her at that time, in which Cassirer says he met with Heidegger the day after the lecture and found him quite friendly, but “he admitted to me that he had struggled for a long time with a review of my third volume, but for the present he did not yet know how he ought to come to grips with the thing.”6 There is no question but that the most original part of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms is his inclusion of a philosophy of myth. No other twentieth-century philosopher of the first order has presented a full philosophy of myth. Later Paul Ricoeur gave attention to myth, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose Phenomenology of Perception employs Cassirer’s three functions of consciousness, in his late thought projected a theory of l’être sauvage.7 But only Cassirer truly stands out as ground-

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ing his whole philosophy on myth, which includes his conception of the expressive function. Heidegger recognizes the importance and uniqueness of this fact in his review. He says that despite the critical questions he has raised, they “cannot diminish Cassirer’s service, as it lies precisely in the fact that for the first time since Schelling it has placed myth as a systematic problem on the philosophical horizon. The investigation stands even without its insertion into a ‘philosophy of symbolic forms’ as a valuable departure point for a renewed philosophy of myth.” But Heidegger concludes that “a presentation of the phenomena of spirit, however rich and obliging to the prevailing consciousness, is never philosophy itself.”8 Heidegger is certainly not alone in wondering if Cassirer’s philosophy is no more than the application of great learning and philosophical perspective to the phenomena of spirit. Many readers of Cassirer’s works have wondered the same, but Heidegger is not willing simply to draw such a conclusion. The question of whether Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms is metaphysically or ontologically satisfying is to be judged from the issues of the next chapter. Here the question remains as to whether or not Cassirer’s phenomenology has uncovered the deepest foundations of human consciousness. In one of his footnotes to Heidegger’s phenomenology Cassirer states an important difference: “The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms does not question this temporality which Heidegger discloses as the ultimate foundation of existentiality [Existentialität des Daseins] and attempts to explain its diverse factors. But our inquiry begins beyond this sphere, at precisely the point where a transition is effectual from this existential temporality to the form of time. It aspires to show the conditions under which this form is possible, the conditions for the postulation of ‘being’ [Sein] which goes beyond the existentiality of ‘being-there’ [Dasein]” (PSF 3:163n2). What Cassirer claims regarding time may also be true of what he means by expression (Ausdruck). Our access to being is always indirect in the sense that we can never be at the origin. Heidegger primarily has Cassirer in mind in his section early in Being and Time, “How the Analytic of Dasein Is to Be Distinguished from Anthropology, Psychology, and Biology.” Heidegger holds that such sciences of the human can never provide us with a grasp of what it is to be human. He says that in order to discover what such being is we need new ways of thinking “which must have their source in ontological problematics.”9 He says that these sciences “all fail to give an unequivocal and

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ontologically adequate answer to the question about the kind of Being which belongs to those entities which we ourselves are.”10 These sciences of man are sciences in their own right but they do not supply the ontological ground of the subject they investigate. Heidegger emphasizes “that these ontological foundations can never be disclosed by subsequent hypotheses derived from empirical material, but that they are always ‘there’ already, even when that empirical material simply gets collected.”11 Heidegger says we have at our disposal a rich store of information about all types of human cultures. But, he says, “this plethora of information can seduce us into failing to recognize the real problem. We shall not get a genuine knowledge of essences simply by the syncretistic activity of universal comparison and classification.”12 Cassirer would have no problem agreeing with the view that something more is needed to grasp the nature of human being than a correlation of the results of the researches of the particular human and cultural sciences. Cassirer claims there must be a constant methodological interaction between phenomenological analysis and “a purely objective philosophy of the human spirit” (PSF 3:74). Thus what we can know of myth as a symbolic form guides us in the phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon of expression that underlies all apprehensions we can have of the world and our own being in it. Cassirer says: “We begin with the characterization of the mythical world as a formation of the objective spirit and seek by reconstruction to arrive at the stratum of consciousness corresponding to this formation” (PSF 3:88). Cassirer agrees with Max Scheler’s theory of expression and expressive totalities, that it is impossible to dissect the universality of an expressive phenomenon such as a smile or menacing look (PSF 3:86– 87). Cassirer claims that the expressive function is in fact “premythical, prelogical and preaesthetic; it forms the common ground from which all these formations have in some way sprung and to which they remain attached” (PSF 3:81). Although expression is our original way of being in the world, Cassirer’s analysis of expression is unlikely to satisfy Heidegger. Cassirer’s approach is epistemic, not ontic. Heidegger has doubted whether Cassirer’s approach to Dasein through myth is adequate. The question may be applied in the reverse, as to whether Heidegger’s ontological phenomenology of Dasein offers an understanding of myth. For a grasp of this question it is not enough to go back to the pre-Socratics; we must go further, to the mythical foundations from which they think. Might Heidegger’s analysis of “everydayness,” “thrownness,” “historicity,” “facticity,”

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and so forth be viewed as an important and rich phenomenology of what Cassirer calls the world of intuition, such that the Heideggerian ladder has not been placed low enough to reach to expression and the mythic? It is not my purpose to settle this question of Heidegger interpretation here but only to raise it; nor is it my task to settle the issue of the true nature of Dasein as such. My aim is only to suggest the problem Heidegger has raised for Cassirer and the problem Cassirer’s phenomenology poses for Heidegger.

Symbolic Pregnance As part of his phenomenology of representation and the formation of the intuitive world, Cassirer introduces his theory of symbolic pregnance (symbolische Prägnanz). Cassirer’s coining of this key term for his philosophy is based on the “law of pregnance” of Gestalt psychology. It is also connected to Leibniz’s praegnans futuri. Symbolic pregnance is based in the act of recognition that allows consciousness to emerge from the immediacy of the stream of sensation first captured in the phenomenon of expression, and which attains objective form in myth. Cassirer says: “It is the power of language that lends stability and permanence to the formations of myth” (PSF 3:108). Language provides the “possibility of ‘finding-again’ [wiederfinden] and of recognition by virtue of which totally different spatially and temporally separate phenomena can be understood as manifestations of one and the same subject” (PSF 3:108). This act of finding-again allows consciousness to have one sensory impression to stand for a whole succession of impressions, such that the meaning of these impressions can be recognized through this impression. Cassirer says: “This act of recognition is necessarily bound up with the function of representation and presupposes it. Only where we succeed, as it were, in compressing a total phenomenon into one of its factors, in concentrating it symbolically, in ‘having’ it in a state of ‘pregnance’ in the particular factor—only then do we raise it out of the stream of temporal change” (PSF 3:114). In this way, permanence is achieved such that in a punctual here and now there is a not-here and a not-now. The present is not simply fleeting; it can be preserved. The constancy of all things and their attributes that make up the intuitive world of space and time depends upon this act of finding-again. As Cassirer says, “it is a common function which makes possible on the one hand language and on the other hand the specific articulation of the intuitive world” (PSF 3:114).

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The given so often spoken of in theories of knowledge is not simply found as something spatially and temporally there. It is the product of finding-again; it is something made by consciousness, by its power of recognition and representation. We never encounter a substratum that then takes on form or meaning. There are no bare, perceptive data that are then ordered into a meaningful arrangement by consciousness. Rather, the particular perception and its meaning are mutually determined. Cassirer intends the term “symbolic pregnance” to designate this mutuality. He says: “By symbolic pregnance we mean 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” (PSF 3:202). Symbolic pregnance is the principle, reached phenomenologically, whereby Cassirer unlocks the mystery of the Kantian schematism, which, as mentioned earlier, Kant says is lost in the human soul. Cassirer does not regard Husserl’s phenomenology as having overcome the problem of how there is, so to speak, Sinn im Sinnlichkeit. He says: “Husserl dissects the whole of experience into two halves: primary contents, which still contain no meaning, and experiences or factors of experience, which are grounded in a specific intentionality” (PSF 3:198). Cassirer claims that while Husserl’s “hyletic” and “noetic” factors in consciousness are never separable in an absolute sense, they are “to a great extent independent variables in respect to each other” (PSF 3:199–200). Cassirer counters Husserl’s diremption of these two strata by his demonstration of the graph-like line-drawing, or Linienzug, which was discussed previously in the introduction. We never perceive the line as such. We may grasp its purely expressive meaning and then grasp it as a purely geometric structure. In between these two extremes we may grasp it as mythical symbol, or aesthetic object, and so forth. Cassirer emphasizes that “the experience of spatial form is completed only through its relation to a total horizon which it reveals to us—through a certain atmosphere in which it not merely ‘is,’ but in which, as it were, it lives and breathes” (PSF 3:201). Perception is symbolization. The symbolic forms are our various fundamental acts of perception, writ large. Cassirer affirms that symbolic pregnance is a basic phenomenon that cannot be derived from or reduced to any other phenomenon: “This pregnance can be reduced neither to merely reproductive processes nor to mediated intellectual processes—it must ultimately be recognized as an independent and autonomous determination, without which neither an object nor a subject, neither a unity of the thing nor a unity of the self would be given to us” (PSF 3:235).

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Cassirer finds a confirmation of his conception of symbolic pregnance in Adhémar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein’s studies of aphasia. The aphasic’s difficulties with language are not simply speech difficulties, they are difficulties of thought. They are based in what Cassirer calls “the pathology of the symbolic consciousness.” In experiments of physically placing items in a series, persons suffering from aphasia can successfully imitate the order in which the objects are placed but they are unable to continue the series beyond that which has been shown to them. They are unable to grasp the principle by which the series has been formed. In acquiring language the human being is able to pass beyond the immediacy of sensory impressions. Through language “man has entered the path from physical to conceptual ‘grasping’ [from Greifen to Begreifen]. The aphasiac or apractic seems to have been thrust one step backward along this path which mankind had to open up by slow, steady endeavor. Everything that is purely mediated has in some way become unintelligible to him; everything that is not tangible, not directly present, evades his thinking and his will” (PSF 3:277). The pathology of the symbolic consciousness gives Cassirer a proof of the essential nature of the symbol and demonstrates that even on the most rudimentary level of consciousness the symbolic act embodies the pattern of the function-concept. This proof allows Cassirer a basis to restate his theory of the function-concept, first broached in Substance and Function, now attached to the significative function of consciousness on which the foundations of mathematics and scientific knowledge rest. What Cassirer intends to show in his phenomenology of the three functions of consciousness is how “the symbolic process is like a single stream of life and thought which flows through consciousness, and which by this flowing movement produces the diversity and cohesion, the richness, the continuity, and constancy, of consciousness” (PSF 3:202). His phenomenology shows how the three functions of consciousness arise out of each other, how each underlies a form of Erkenntnis, and how, as the first two develop, Erkenntnis proper evolves. But regarded as phases of a single act of knowing or erkennen, each is present potentially or explicitly as a moment of the symbolic act.

The Shape of the “System” In 1938, approximately a decade after completing his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer, in “Zur Logik des Symbolbegriffs,” stated that “The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is in no position to be nor does it

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wish to be a philosophical ‘system’ in the traditional meaning of the word. What it only sought to offer were the ‘prolegomena to a future philosophy of culture.’ ”13 His exposition of the three functions of his phenomenology of Erkenntnis comes as close as Cassirer ever does to presenting the outline of his “system.” From the first, readers and critics of his three-volume work have wondered how the philosophy of symbolic forms could be conceived as a system. Myth, language, and science are in some sense basic, as they are the forms of the expressive, representational, and significative functions of consciousness. But Cassirer often mentions art and religion, and he mentions history—all of which, along with myth, language, and science, later became the chapter titles of An Essay on Man. And in passing, Cassirer mentions other symbolic forms by name. These are forms of social life: economics (die Wirtschaft), technology (die Technik), ethics or morality (die Sitte), and law (das Recht) (PSF 2:xv). One might add politics, for he claims in The Myth of the State that there are laws of political life but they are not yet known. In The Myth of the State he suggests a theory of technology, as tied to the modern state. Earlier there is his essay on “Form und Technik.”14 The one volume that readers expected to see in the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms was a treatment of art. Susanne Langer, the philosopher most influenced by Cassirer, dedicated to him her book on aesthetics, Feeling and Form. Originally, Cassirer did in fact plan to include a volume on art in his major work. In a letter of May 13, 1942, to Paul Schilpp, he wrote: “Already in the first sketch [Entwurf ] of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms a particular volume on art was considered but the disfavor [die Ungust] of the times postponed its working out again and again” (see SMC 25). How might Cassirer’s prolegomena be seen as implying a system? The backbone of the system must be myth, language, and science. If we consider types of symbols, it is clear that these are three basic ways a meaning can be formed: as an image, in the word or sentence of natural languages, and through numbers. Cassirer says: “The realm of numbers shows us, in typical purity and perfection, the example of a sphere of objects which takes form from an underlying original relation, and which may be wholly surveyed and determined through this relation” (PSF 3:406). In this regard, numbers should be understood to include any type of formal notation, such as found in symbolic logic, the table of elements, chemical formulae, genetic patterns, grids, and so forth.

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Art is a counterpart of science. In art the power of the image is recovered, as Cassirer states in Language and Myth, which was discussed earlier. Art, like the symbol systems of science, but unlike myth, develops orders of meaning out of itself. To do so, consciousness must reach the level of the significative function. Aesthetic knowledge, like scientific knowledge, is self-developing. History is recapitulation of both art and science, for, as Cassirer holds, the production of historical knowledge requires the power of the artist to animate materials, but the empirical basis of what is brought to life—the artifacts—is established by methods of scientific research. The forms of social life are rooted in the forms of myth and language and their corresponding functions of consciousness, and, as specific forms of knowing, they are attached to and dependent on the powers of the significative function. Any of these forms of social life could be interposed with those Cassirer singles out in his thought-experiment of the Linienzug. Its lines could be apprehended as a political insignia, or a set of economic trends, and so forth. Are there additional symbolic forms beyond those that Cassirer mentions? Could new symbolic forms evolve? It would seem that new symbolic forms could emerge. Technology as we know it today, as a selfdeveloping form of consciousness, thought, and social life, takes shape from the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. Human beings have always employed means or techniques for accomplishing things, but these were attached to other symbolic forms. Technology as a totality of human activity has a much more complicated status. For an area of experience to count as a symbolic form requires that it have an “inner form” that can be articulated in transcendental terms— that it embody categories, forms of space, time, and number, and of the self, or subjectivity. These must manifest a specific “tonality” such that its inner form can be distinguished from other symbolic forms. Cassirer gives a full account of the conditions for the possibility of only myth, language, and science, and he suggests in his corpus some of the distinctive characteristics of art and history as symbolic forms. In principle, however, a full transcendental analysis could be accomplished for any symbolic form. With all of this said, Cassirer has still avoided the production of a complete speech in which all forms of spirit are continuously generated, as we find in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The idea of such a system is very much distinctive of German philosophy. The idea of philosophical system reaches perhaps its high point in nineteenth-century German

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idealism, allowing also for earlier systems of “dogmatic” philosophy, such as that of Christian Wolff, to which Kant reacts. Cassirer wishes not only to employ Hegel but to pass beyond him. The danger of the philosophical drive toward system is that when the book is bound, the system is complete. We speak of any great philosophy as being a system, but little more can be meant than that the works of the philosopher are comprehensive of a great deal of experience and that they aim at coherence. The terms which Cassirer substitutes for system are “systematic overview” (systematischer Überblick), “systematic review” (systematischer Rückblick), or “systematic reconstruction” (systematischer Rekonstruktion) (PSF 4:56, 227).15 Cassirer’s philosophy is systematic, but it is not a system in any traditional sense—not comparable to the systems of nineteenth-century philosophical idealism. In a fragment written between 1921 and 1927, Cassirer leaves no doubt as to whether philosophy itself can be considered a symbolic form. He wrote: “It is characteristic of philosophical knowledge as the ‘self-knowledge’ of reason that it does not create a principally new symbol form, it does not found in this sense a new creative modality—but it grasps the earlier modalities as that which they are: as characteristic symbolic forms” (PSF 4:226). He holds that philosophy is both a critical force on the symbolic forms and a fulfillment of them. Philosophy shows the limits of each symbolic form as it stands in opposition to, yet in harmony with, the others. In so doing, philosophy is also the completion of the development within each, for it marks the moment when each becomes selfreflective. Cassirer concludes that “philosophy does not want to replace the older forms with another, higher form. It does not want to replace one symbol with another; rather, its task consists in comprehending the basic symbolic character of knowledge itself ” (PSF 4:226). Cassirer finds the historical basis for his conception of philosophy as systematic review in the Enlightenment. He says: “But in renouncing, and even in directly opposing, the ‘spirit of systems’ (esprit de système), the philosophy of the Enlightenment by no means gives up the ‘systematic spirit’ (esprit systèmatique).” The systematic spirit connects philosophy directly with each of the fields of knowledge. Cassirer claims: “Philosophy, according to this interpretation, is no special field of knowledge situated beside or above the principles of natural science, of law and government, etc., but rather the all-comprehensive medium in which principles are formulated, developed, and founded.”16 In describing the Enlightenment concept of philosophy in this way Cassirer is just as much describing his own conception of philosophy. In An Essay

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on Man Cassirer says: “Were it not for this previous synthesis effected by the sciences themselves philosophy would have no starting point” (EM 71). This comprehension of all forms of knowledge by means of systematic review, overview, or reconstruction accurately describes what Cassirer does in much of his discussion of symbolic forms and the philosophical issues that lie therein. Given his version of Hegel’s sense of the whole, coupled with Kant’s sense of the transcendental, Cassirer can enter into any particular content of culture or aspect of human experience and begin to give a systematic account of its meaning, which includes attention to its relation to the totality of the symbolic forms. Nothing in the human world lies outside the possibilities of this approach. This approach is completely in accord with Cassirer’s guiding principle of the functionconcept, and the determinate self-development it entails.

Chapter 4

Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: Spirit, Life, and Werk

The Dialectic of Spirit and Life In concluding his preface to the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer informed the reader that he had intended to include a final chapter, in which he would critically place his conception of a philosophy of symbolic forms in relation to contemporary philosophy. Not to make a long book longer by adding to it a discussion that considers problems that go beyond its specific analyses, Cassirer announced his decision to present the issues of such a chapter as a separate, future work, under the title: “ ‘Life’ and ‘Spirit’: Toward a Critique of Contemporary Philosophy” (PSF 3:xvi). Cassirer’s preface is dated July 1929. The promised critique appeared to be an essay of twenty pages with nearly the same title that Cassirer published the following year in Die Neue Rundschau: “ ‘Spirit’ and ‘Life’ in Contemporary Philosophy.”1 This essay is directed primarily to criticism of Max Scheler’s philosophical anthropology. It appeared to be much less than the study Cassirer seemed to be proposing in his preface—and indeed, it was. Found among Cassirer’s Nachlass were parts of a fourth volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, involving the nature of spirit (Geist) and life (Leben) and discussions and criticisms of, among others, Scheler, Simmel, Heidegger, and Bergson, and analysis of Lebensphilosophie—what Cassirer associates with post-idealist philosophy generally, from Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche to Heidegger (see PSF 4:xi). This manuscript, unpublished during Cassirer’s lifetime, was drafted in 1928 (recall that the text of PSF 3 was completed in 1927). In this projected and partially completed fourth volume Cassirer sought not only to place his philosophy in the spectrum of contemporary philosophy and to show its differences with the development of 61

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Lebensphilosophie; he also attempted to face the issue of the sense in which his philosophy has a metaphysical ground and is not simply a theory of knowledge connected to a theory of culture. To accomplish this task he centers his account in an interpretation of Geist as a transformation of life. The reader of the first three volumes of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is not so concerned with how Cassirer’s philosophy stands over and against other philosophical positions as with what sense of reality is required for his symbolic forms to function. The question of the metaphysical ground for Cassirer’s symbolic forms has haunted his philosophy from its first critical assessments to his students in his seminars at Yale.2 In his remarks for the final sessions of his seminar on the Philosophy of Language and the Principles of Symbolism at Yale in spring 1942, Cassirer takes a stand on the question of the ground of his philosophical idealism. He says: “In our former discussions I often had the impression that some of you were thinking that what I defend here is a system of subjective idealism in which the ego, the subjective mind, the thinking self is considered as the center and as the creator of the world, as the sole or ultimate reality” (SMC 194). Cassirer claims that the problems of symbolism and knowledge, treated from the position of the philosophy of symbolic forms, “are to a very large degree independent of any metaphysical theory about the absolute nature of things” (SMC 195). Whether we are metaphysical realists or idealists, he claims, makes no difference in answering questions about human culture, if we investigate it by empirical methods applied to empirical facts. Cassirer concludes: “The ego, the individual mind, cannot create reality. Man is surrounded by a reality that he did not make, that he has to accept as an ultimate fact” (SMC 195). Cassirer sounds almost like C. S. Peirce in this passage, except his emphasis is on culture, not so directly on the world of hard facts. Cassirer takes a similar approach in his 1936 lecture at the Warburg Institute, “Critical Idealism as a Philosophy of Culture,” which he begins by quoting Byron’s stanza in Don Juan criticizing Berkeley, the first lines of which are: “When Bishop Berkeley said ‘there was no matter,’ / And proved it—’t was no matter what he said.” Cassirer said that these witty lines express a common opinion concerning the problem of philosophical idealism, and that “Idealism seems to remain a merely speculative view—an airy system” (SMC 65). He emphasizes that culture is a construction and reconstruction of the empirical world: “For culture is not a merely speculative thing and cannot be based on merely speculative

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grounds” (SMC 65). Culture is the reality in which we find ourselves. But, we may ask—in what reality does culture find itself? If we can answer the question of what we can know in terms of an investigation into culture, then how do we answer the companion question that every philosopher must face: what is the nature of the reality that we know? This is the question that critical philosophy would avoid because it must either refer it to some version of the Kantian thing-in-itself or it must do away with such an entity and advance at least a metaphysics of experience. Cassirer turns to the primary term of Hegelian phenomenology—Geist. To a great extent this is a term set in the German language, a part of its Sprachwelt, and difficult to translate into English in a way that does not distort its essential meaning. It is one of the terms Hegel had in mind when he said he wished to teach philosophy to speak German, as Johann Heinrich Voss had done for Homer, and Luther for the Bible.3 How can Geist be conceived? And how does it function as the central term of Cassirer’s metaphysics of symbolic forms? Geist can be translated as “mind” in English, but to do so is misleading, as a first synonym for mind is “intellect,” and the activity of Geist is not restricted to intellectual activity or cognition. As a philosophical term (in contrast to its function as a religious term) Geist is best rendered as “spirit,” in the sense of that which flows through and is manifest through the human world. Geist or spirit can be understood as a historical term, in the sense of the spirit of an age, such as the spirit of the Enlightenment. It can also be understood as a cultural term, such as the scientific spirit or the artistic spirit, and as a social-political term, such as the spirit of a people or national spirit. It can be understood as a fundamental term of philosophical anthropology—as human spirit, that which is distinctive to the reality of the human being. Cassirer can accept as part of the meaning of Geist all of the above senses of spirit. He endorses a fundamental opposition between spirit and life. It is an opposition he takes over from metaphysics as it has developed from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He says: “The opposition between ‘Leben’ and ‘Geist’ is the hub of this metaphysics; it proves to be so definitive and decisive that it gradually comes to absorb into itself and eliminate all the other pairs of metaphysical terms that have been coined in the history of metaphysics. The opposites of ‘Being’ and ‘Becoming,’ of ‘One’ and ‘Many,’ ‘Matter’ and ‘Form,’ ‘Soul’ and ‘Body’ all appear now to have been dissolved into this one completely fundamental antithesis” (PSF 4:8).

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The metaphysical imagination is always stuck with the problem of the two-one, that is, the sense in which all that there is, is somehow a unity which is never perfectly encountered. What we encounter is diversity, but even to grasp this encounter as diversity requires that we somehow also feel it to be a unity. Diversity itself is subject to the sense of unity as it comes to be represented by the two terms of a fundamental opposition from which all other opposites are generated. Cassirer, having grounded his thought in the internal dialectic of the function-concept, knows that the solution to the problem of unity cannot be to embrace one of the terms of this fundamental opposition over the other. The inner form of the function-concept is the dialectical bond between the principle of a series and the members of the series. Spirit and life cannot stand to each other as substantial entities. They must be understood as a process of transformation, in which life achieves what it inherently is through a transformative activity into spirit, and spirit is what it is, not as a being independent of life but as the ongoing transformation of the force that is life. Cassirer explains his conception of the relation of spirit and life as a solution to the problems he finds in Simmel’s Lebensphilosophie. He says that in Simmel’s concept of life, “life’s actual movement consists in the oscillation between two extreme phases. It is never at one with itself except by being beyond itself at the same time” (PSF 4:9). Life is always reaching beyond its own mere movement toward a transcendence of this movement. Because of this inherent duality, life is always potentially spirit, and spirit when it becomes actual is a fulfillment of life. Spirit is the product of life but it never completely supersedes life. The process of transformation is never fully accomplished in which the formlessness of life becomes fully formed and its vitality completely stilled. Cassirer says: “The life of geist cannot represent itself except in forms of some kind, yet it can never put its totality into form and confine this totality to its limits” (PSF 4:11). Cassirer points to Simmel’s conception of life as turning toward the idea. As Cassirer puts it: “We now stand at the point where this modern metaphysics of life bears directly on our own basic systematic problem. For what is here described as ‘rotation of the axis of life,’ is nothing other than the particular turnabout, the intellectual peripeteia, that it experiences as soon as it catches sight of itself in the medium of a ‘symbolic form.’ The ‘turn to the idea’ requires in every case this turn to ‘symbolic form’ as its precondition and necessary access” (PSF 4:13–14). We can, as a manner of speaking, portray spirit as a product of life, as actualized

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from the ongoingness of life and its turn to the idea, but this account is not completely accurate. Spirit just as much makes life what it is as life makes spirit what it is. Cassirer is not advancing a more adequate version of Lebensphilosophie, nor is he replacing Lebensphilosophie with a Philosophie des Geistes. Cassirer is a metaphysical dualist, but it is functional dualism in which the unity of the real is not a third thing that somehow embraces or synthesizes the opposition of spirit and life. The unity of the real lies in the simple fact that each side of the opposition of spirit and life requires the other in order to be. Spirit and life are a functional bond of selfformation, the internal movement of which is dialectical. Regarding the fundamental status of spirit, Cassirer says: “No matter how we regard it or proclaim it as the original source of all reality, life in itself is never the source of the symbols in which this reality is first comprehended and understood, in which it ‘speaks to us’ ” (PSF 4:30). Spirit, unlike life, has the power to turn about on itself. Spirit is essentially a kind of self-knowing. Cassirer concludes: “This turnabout, this ‘reflection,’ entails no break with geist itself; rather, it is the form in which it proves itself and reconfirms itself, something that is characteristic of and typical of it alone. So what threatens constantly to tear it asunder is also what always brings it back to itself; this being two-in-one is its true fate and represents its actual achievement” (PSF 4:33). The two-one that is the unity of the opposition between life and spirit is taken up within the life of spirit and is what gives spirit its distinctive character. The reflective character of spirit is the basis of spirit as freed from the immediacy distinctive to life. Cassirer says: “The philosophy of symbolic forms has sought from the beginning to establish the path that leads through the concrete productions of geist. By taking this path, the philosophy of symbolic forms finds that it meets with geist everywhere as not the ‘Will to Power,’ but as the ‘Will to Formation’ ” (PSF 4:28). The self-determination that is at the basis of the life of spirit is the basis for human freedom. Cassirer’s conception of freedom, like Hegel’s, is grounded in the process of self-determination, as will be discussed in chapter 7. In his above-mentioned essay on spirit and life, Cassirer turns to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. He points to Hegel’s claim that substance must become subject and holds that only if life and spirit are functional activities can this occur. Cassirer says: “The realization of this principle demands not only that Spirit and Life come to know themselves as opposites; but that, at the same time, on account of this very opposition, they seek and demand each other. The polarity between the

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two remains, but it loses its appearance of absolute estrangement.”4 This endorsement of Hegel’s sense of opposites as crucial to the comprehension of that between spirit and life sets Cassirer apart from any of the criticism of Hegel’s system as a philosophy based purely on spirit, raised by advocates of Lebensphilosophie. The answer to Lebensphilosophie is a metaphysics that acknowledges both sides of the opposition of life and spirit as a functional dualism—spirit stands for the self-reflective rule, by which the moments of the flow of life are formed as an ordered series. Cassirer’s metaphysics of spirit and life is a restatement of the standpoint of Hegel’s phenomenology, placed as an answer to the problems that are embedded in Lebensphilosophie. As Cassirer emphasizes, “The fundamental thesis of ‘Objective Idealism’ completely maintains its ground in the face of all the criticism which the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ ‘philosophy of life’ has urged against it. Especially as concerns Hegel, it would be a complete misunderstanding of his system to bring against it the reproach that by reason of its panlogistic tendency it denies the rights of Life—that it has sacrificed the vital sphere to that of logic.”5 In regard to the principle of life, Cassirer puts aside his general criticism, previously discussed, that Hegel reduces the forms of consciousness to the one form of logic. This reduction does not apply to Hegel’s dialectic of spirit and life in his Phenomenology of Spirit. Cassirer’s criticism of reduction would still hold, but not at this level of Hegel’s system. Cassirer will support Hegel’s metaphysics of the phenomenon of spirit but not his metaphysics of the pure forms of thought of the Science of Logic. What is not achieved in Cassirer’s metaphysics? Cassirer has not presented an ontology; there is no Cassirerian doctrine of being, or of God. There is no Cassirerian speculative cosmology, such as is to be found in A. N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality. What Cassirer has offered is literally a metaphysics of symbolic forms, that is, a broadly stated analysis of the opposition that is at the basis of the human world, that allows us to place the symbolic forms in a total context. Cassirer will make this context more precise in An Essay on Man, in his recasting of the problem in terms of Jacob von Uexküll’s biology, which is discussed in chapter 6.

Basis Phenomena About 1940 Cassirer wrote a long essay on “Basis Phenomena” (Basisphänomene) that is included in the fourth volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. It is unlike any of Cassirer’s other writings in approach and subject matter.6 Cassirer derives his concept of basis phenomena

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from three of Goethe’s maxims (see PSF 4:127–28). At various points throughout the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Cassirer cites or quotes Goethe to emphasize a claim, but here he derives his philosophical account directly from Goethe. His use of Goethe here is reminiscent of his quoting lines from Goethe regarding the anthropomorphism of all our concepts of nature, in the final chapter of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the same chapter in which he introduces his concept of symbolic forms. He says Goethe, in the wisdom of old age, loved to point out that “ ‘all philosophy of nature is still only anthropomorphism, i.e., man, at unity with himself, imparts to everything that he is not, this unity, draws it into his unity, makes it one with himself. . . . We can observe, measure, calculate, weigh, etc. nature as much as we will, it is still only our measure and weight, as man is the measure of all things” (SF 445). As we will see, even nature as it exists for man is the result of the basis phenomenon of the “work” through which culture itself comes about. Cassirer’s analysis of the basis phenomena is metaphysical in its intent, in that he is seeking to elicit those ultimates of human existence upon which all else in the human world depends and from which all else is derivative. In this regard they are like the expressive function of consciousness, which has a totally objective, original, and originating character. Cassirer says: “It is negatively correct that there can be no formal, syllogistic proof of the ‘birthright’ (quid juris) of the expressive function” (PSF 4:123). Cassirer couples this claim concerning the non-derivability and irreducibility of the expressive function with the I as a fundamental phenomenon. He claims: “The fact always remains as a certain starting point that cannot be challenged by any scientific skepticism that a person’s ‘own I’ is given as a phenomenon which is not ‘physicalistically’ describable” (PSF 4:124). Cassirer is offering a version of the Cartesian Archimedean starting point, about which we cannot be skeptical. But it is not Descartes’ abstract “I think,” reached by hypothetical doubt; it is the I or I-factor grasped as a phenomenon. Cassirer says: “So even the positivistic, physicalistic theory of knowledge speaks about sensory ‘experiences.’ But such ‘experiences’ always include the I-factor, which is indescribable in physical terms and can only be defined as a ‘point of reference’ ” (PSF 4:126). Cassirer may be echoing Natorp’s assertion in his Introduction to Psychology According to Critical Method that “the I, as the subjective point of reference of all contents conscious to me, stands opposite all these contents as something different from them” (see PSF 4:126n33).

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Cassirer’s insistence on the I as a primordial phenomenon on a par with the expressive function of consciousness would seem to be counter to the status of the I as he describes it in his account of the phenomenon of expression. He says that, at the level of expressive consciousness as manifested in myth, “the representation of the I, of the living and active subject, is not the beginning but rather a determinate result of the mythical process of formation. Myth does not start from a finished representation of the I and the soul but is the vehicle which leads to such a representation” (PSF 3:71). He says that the boundary between “I” and “thou” is fluid: “Life is still a single unbroken stream of becoming, a dynamic flow which only very gradually divides into separate waves” (PSF 3:71). He says the mythic world has a “strangely impersonal character. ‘There is a fitting in; there is an omen; there is a warning’—but behind these there is not necessarily a personal subject, the shape of any recognizable warner. . . . The pure act, the function of this showing and meaning stands as it were on itself, requiring no reduction to a personal substrate, to an agent” (PSF 3:72). Cassirer characterizes the first of the basis phenomena as “the phenomenon of the ‘I,’ of the monas, of ‘life’ itself ” (PSF 4:138). He says “this cannot be inferred from something else, but instead lies at the basis of everything else” (PSF 4:138). Goethe’s maxim 391 describes life as a rotating movement of the monad around itself. Cassirer interprets this sense of the human monad as “a process, as movement—the ‘stream of consciousness’ which constantly flows and knows neither rest nor quiet” (PSF 4:128). Cassirer says this monadic being “is not bound to a particular moment, but rather encompasses the totality of all aspects of life, the present, past, and future” (PSF 4:139). The I as monadic being is not a developed individual with a subjectivity, set off against the world, it is the world, and it is in constant flux, like the phenomenon of expression. It is perhaps like the flow of changing facial expressions that can be observed in very young infants as they find themselves in the world. As the myth gives form to the expressive function, the dichotomy of the I and the world begins to arise. The flow of past, present, and future is originally not temporally defined in the way these distinctions will eventually come to be realized in the individual. For myth, as explained in chapter 2, the past is an absolute past and the future is repetition. Goethe’s maxim 392 speaks of the living and moving monad’s intervention into the world, a process in which it seems unlimited internally but externally meets definite limits. Cassirer says this process is one of

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“ ‘becoming aware’ in the sense of doing—both action and reaction. The life of the monas does not remain a kind of closed existence” (PSF 4:128). He calls this the basis phenomenon of “action” (Wirken) (PSF 4:139). The monadic being experiences opposition, something standing over and against its life-process. Cassirer says that “this ‘standing in opposition,’ this ‘resistance’ is originally encountered in the experience of the will, but not a merely impersonal ‘It’ [Es]. Rather, we find it originally as a ‘Thou’ [Du]” (PSF 4:140). The object as a Thou at this level is in accord with the sense of the object as an alter ego in mythical thought. Cassirer says: “We want to emphasize this one point, that this form of beingwith-one-another in the form of having influence-on-one-another is a genuine Basis Phenomenon; it can be derived from nothing else, but is originally constitutive” (PSF 4:140). Thus Cassirer makes the same claim to non-derivability for this second basis phenomenon as he does for the first. Goethe’s maxim 393 points to the fact that our actions toward the outer world do not remain ours or under our control. They take on and require the forms of speech and writing. These belong to the outer world more than they belong to us. Our actions must be put in terms that are not simply of our own possession. But this formation of our actions in speech and writing is necessary for us to experience ourselves. In such we mirror and create ourselves, yet what we create does not remain ours. Cassirer says: “Others can know us only in our work, as what we do and make, as what we say and write, as praxis and poiesis (Aristotle)” (PSF 4:130). Cassirer says that these works outlive their creator and possess a peculiar kind of transcendence, in which those who receive our works are often in a position to know more of what is in them than those who originally made them. Cassirer calls the third basis phenomenon “the sphere of the ‘work’ ” (PSF 4:141). His term here is Werk in the sense of the artwork or the literary work, the oeuvre as opposed to labor or Arbeit. The work is something made: factum. He says: “We must move beyond the sphere of mythic effect (mastery by means of wish) to mastery by means of the work” (PSF 4:141). The work opens up for us the sense of the objective world of things that can be represented in the work. The work allows us to be in the world on our own terms, not simply to be in it. Having delineated each of these three types of basis phenomena, Cassirer again emphasizes that it is not appropriate to think of these as subject to a proof. We cannot ask of them quid juris because they are themselves the ground from which this question can be applied to anything else in

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the human world. Cassirer says, without qualification: “Here we have the three primary phenomena (basis phenomena) before us, for which we ourselves cannot give any further ‘explanation’ and cannot want to” (PSF 4:142). He regards these as the key to reality—“die Schlüssel zur ‘Wirklichkeit’ sind.” Although the basis phenomena of the monadic-I and action are given his own special conception, they are not especially original with Cassirer. The basis phenomenon of Werk is unique; the first two have the purpose of establishing its ground. Werk is the phenomenon that underlies Cassirer’s conception of human culture and his conception of philosophy that accompanies it. Culture itself is Werk made up of the various “works” of the symbolic forms. What completes the Werk of culture is the Werk of philosophy, because built into the phenomenon of Werk is reflection. A Werk is reflective by its nature, and philosophy is the reflection on culture.

The Pursuit of Truth and the Work Cassirer ends his account of the basis phenomenon of the work with a discussion of the connection this third phenomenon has to the classic sense of the pursuit of truth. He centers his remarks first on an interpretation of Socrates and then adds to this a defense of Kant. He is concerned to show that the phenomenon of the work is not simply understood as a culmination of the second basis phenomenon of action and willing. He says that at first glance it may be difficult to draw a fundamental distinction between the second and third basis phenomenon, “for is not every work also something willed and actuated? Doesn’t it belong exclusively to the world of willing, and is it not exhausted in this sphere?” (PSF 4:182–83). There are works whose content and aim are exclusively to bring about a specific effect, to establish some practical end in the world. But a work in its fullest sense has a being that goes beyond any practical effect it may have. The ability of the work to outline its particular “moment” and become an enduring part of human culture “is the basic determining factor in the make-up of a ‘work’ ” (PSF 4:183). Cassirer establishes this point through a distinction between the poetic and the practical, which he holds have different “temporal shapes.” The practical work is limited to the result it can accomplish and in this sense its influence is momentary. The poetic work may have a momentary effect, but it endures. It is tied to some specific goal and in this sense it is “without interest.” It dwells within itself; it is its own justification

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for being. Cassirer says: “This ‘absence of interest’ makes obvious how it differs from the ‘second dimension.’ This absence of interest is not confined to the work of art alone, but holds equally for works of language, philosophical works, works of science, and pure knowledge in general. Here we move from the sphere of intuition (first dimension) and of action (second dimension) to the sphere of pure contemplation” (PSF 4:183–84). Cassirer attributes the discovery of this sphere of pure contemplation to Socrates. Socrates is ironic in his very being, because when we believe we have understood him to be a practician and essentially an ethical figure, he appears to us also as a theoretician, a discoverer of the logos. This ironic or double sense of the figure of Socrates is not the solution to his identity; it is only the manner in which Socrates poses the problem of the relation of practice to theory. The solution is to see that Socrates in fact enacts a synthesis between the two terms of this opposition: “Socrates seems to reject the opposition; for him all knowing is doing” (PSF 4:185). Virtue is knowledge, for Socrates. The synthesis Socrates enacts depends upon his method of inquiry, for he always begins by pointing to some productive action, such as the action engaged in by the craftsman. Through his questioning of this action he requires us to turn back upon it and to reflect on its meaning. Cassirer says: “The reflection of productive activity in the work is what creates the new sphere that is characteristically to be distinguished from that of mere ‘theory’ and from that of mere ‘praxis’ ” (PSF 4:185). In this combination of these opposites Socratic thought becomes truly contemplative. The achievement of this position of contemplation is the seat of Socrates’ originality. In his call for self-knowledge Socrates passes beyond any sense of introspection of the I of itself. “This call now means know your work and know ‘yourself ’ in your work: know what you do, so you can do what you know. . . . Submit to the imperative of the work” (PSF 4:186). Socrates’ discovery of this imperative is his real accomplishment. It requires the turn to the Idea which goes beyond both theory and praxis and has a peculiar “transcendence.” Cassirer says, “What we call truth, goodness, and beauty rests upon and derives from this realm of form” (PSF 4:187). The pursuit of truth, no matter what the specific terms under which it is taken, requires the Socratic sense of contemplation. It is a direct manifestation of the basis phenomenon of the work. Cassirer claims that “truth is not a matter of usefulness; it is a formal value. . . . The recognition of this purely formal value of truth ‘itself in itself ’ is what

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distinguishes the ‘philosopher’ from the ‘Sophist,’ the ‘dialectician’ from the ‘rhetorician’ and ‘eristic’ ” (PSF 4:187). Cassirer regards the pursuit of truth as fundamental to self-knowledge and as a natural propensity of the human being. The love of wisdom or philosophy is an ultimate expression of this propensity. To reduce the work to the product of will and action is to fall short of the power of the work to embody the pursuit of truth. Although writing these remarks in 1940, Cassirer was certainly familiar with the reduction of philosophy, literature, and the arts to the practical and the political, and what he holds runs completely counter to later views that have been summed up in the term “hermeneutics of suspicion,” and in the postmodern, deconstructionist approach to knowledge generally. To hold that philosophy, literature, and the arts—any work of culture—is no more than the reflection of class interests, race, gender, or economics is a mistake. Such thinking is simply unable to make the Socratic turn to contemplation and so can never experience its grasp of truth, goodness, and beauty as an integral part of the human. The ability to contemplate the purely formal is essential to the work. In modern philosophy, Cassirer says, we find this cognitive ideal of pure form most importantly realized by Kant. To inquire into the “conditions of the possibility” of natural science is first grasped by Kant. And “in the same way the question is raised about the ‘conditions of the possibility’ of morality, or art, and so on. Even the question of morality is traced back to a pure form. The ‘categorical imperative’ can only be a ‘formal imperative.’ That is what links Kant—through the centuries, over Descartes and Leibniz—again with Plato” (PSF 4:188–89). Contemplation gives us access to form, which releases us from the immediacy of praxis. Contemplation is the key to culture, understood as a work. Cassirer says: “The ‘philosophy of symbolic forms’ grows out of this critical transcendental question and builds upon it. It is pure ‘contemplation,’ not of a single form, but of all—the cosmos of pure forms—and it seeks to trace this cosmos back to the ‘conditions of its possibility’ ” (PSF 4:189). The basis phenomenon of the work, then, is what underlies our ability to grasp form as something objective in and of itself. Without this ability we cannot produce or possess human culture. Without it we would live in a world of simply fulfilling our needs, and with our thought capable only of reflecting our practice. The works we would make if directed solely by practice would not take on a being of their own. They would not endure as forms of meaning having their own intrinsic properties of truth.

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Cassirer’s basis phenomenon of the work puts to rest any view that his thought is a type of historicism. He makes this clear in a single sentence in his remarks on the phenomenon of the work. “But as the philosophy of symbolic forms regards things, history is only the starting point, not the end—terminus a quo not terminus ad quem, a phase, not the goal of philosophical knowledge” (PSF 4:165). Although the series of works that make up the life of the mind and the life of culture take their places in tradition and history by the fact that they are works, they are attempts to access truth, goodness, and beauty, which are the ultimate forms of things and which are beyond the relativism of historical periods. Although Cassirer is clear that philosophy is not a symbolic form, it is fair to raise the question whether metaphysics is not in some sense a symbolic form. Cassirer allows for a metaphysics of experience based on the functional dichotomy of spirit and life. What might be said for a metaphysics of reason in discourse with itself, an ontological meditation on being or the really real, and the ultimate nature of things? We find this use of reason in Aristotle. We find it in Whitehead’s speculative cosmology based not on substance but on process. We have encountered Cassirer’s objection to Hegel’s metaphysics of logic and categories which begins with the relation of being and nothing—that it is reductionistic. As indicated earlier, Cassirer does not intend to offer a theory of being in his dialectic of Geist and Leben. His is a metaphysics of experience in the sense of a broad statement of the general opposition that underlies the formation of the specific symbolic forms. When his essay on basis phenomena is added to this dialectic we are given an account of the most fundamental and irreducible elements of the activity of Geist. Leben is transformed into Geist by the realization of the three basis phenomena. They manifest the way in which Geist relates to itself and makes symbolic formation possible. As discussed earlier, for Cassirer the key to Kantian epistemology is the schematism, which Cassirer finds embodied in the phenomenon of the symbol. Kant’s art concealed in the human soul is the art of the symbolic act. The schema as symbol is made possible by the dialectical transformation of Leben into Geist. Cassirer’s dialectic of Leben and Geist moves the Kantian dialectic of illusion, found in the attempt of metaphysical thought to go beyond experience, into experience. Geist and Leben are the necessary conditions of the schematism. Their interrelated action is the inner form of the schematism and thus its ground. When we seek to apprehend this interaction phenomenologically, we

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uncover the basis phenomenon of Werk, which is the expansion of the symbolic act in cultural terms. Cassirer left his metaphysics of symbolic forms unpublished, and in effect he left it unfinished. If by metaphysics we expect to have put before us a full and integrated statement of the principles of the real, we are not given it in what stands as Cassirer’s metaphysics. We are left with suggestive and rich reflections that go beyond Cassirer’s epistemologically centered presentation of the particular symbolic forms, but not with a systematic metaphysics. Yet it is doubtful that Cassirer would have intended to say much more had he continued to form these views into a completed fourth volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Through his metaphysics of spirit and life Cassirer has done away with Kant’s objection to metaphysics as a dialectic of illusion. But in so doing he has not done away with Kant’s observation that metaphysics is a natural propensity of mind. Metaphysics is a particular way of thinking and using language, a complete form of speech. Without making it explicit, Cassirer adheres to a true form of philosophy—that which reasons within experience—and a false form of philosophy—that which reasons beyond experience.7 Should we agree with Cassirer’s criticism of Hegel’s Logic, it does not follow that any such engagement in metaphysical thought is false philosophy. There can be a speech about the seen and the unseen that is more than the expression of individual or subjective views or that must in one sense or another be classified as a philosophy of the irrational or absurd. What is Cassirer to do with the Socratic-Platonic speech about the nature of things? He wishes to accept its interest in the idea or form as well as its ethical concerns. He can reject the substantial conception of the Forms, but this rejection of substance in favor of function does not carry with it grounds for rejecting the sense of reasoning we find in the Parmenides or the Timaeus and the interest for the human being that such discourses hold. If metaphysical discourse in this sense is regarded in positive terms, it remains a genuine human activity, a part of human culture which Cassirer does not truly assert in his philosophy of culture.

Chapter 5

Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Nature and Culture

The Difference between Natural Concepts and Cultural Concepts In the same period of his thought that Cassirer wrote the manuscript on basis phenomena, he wrote and published his brief work of “five studies” on The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942). This work goes over much of the same ground that Cassirer treated at length in various parts of the three volumes of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, such as the differences and developmental connections between expression and the intuitive world of things, and the general nature of various of the symbolic forms. In the fifth study Cassirer engages in a brief discussion of the work that mirrors that of his (at the time) unpublished discussion of it as a basis phenomenon. What was Cassirer’s purpose in producing this little book? One answer may be that he wished to call attention to and reaffirm his conception of culture in the turmoil of the times. He was living in Sweden and the European war had become a World War. It was well over a decade since the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms had appeared. In the interim he had devoted himself largely to historical studies, including The Platonic Renaissance in England and the Cambridge School (1932), The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), his collection of five essays on Descartes: Lehre-Persönlichkeit-Wirkung (1939), and Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics (1936). But the central essay of The Logic of the Cultural Sciences treats an issue that was omitted from his phenomenology of knowledge in the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms—the theory of cultural concepts. Cassirer’s phenomenology of knowledge concludes with an extensive account of the building-up of scientific knowledge, his reworking of what he had originally presented in Substance and Function, beginning with his restatement of the function-concept in terms of the proposi75

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tional function φ(χ) of symbolic logic (PSF 3:301). All of these pages concentrate on an understanding of the exact or mathematical sciences of nature—Naturwissenschaften. There is no discussion of the symbol or the significative function (Bedeutungsfunktion) of consciousness as the basis for the Kulturwissenschaften. Yet the fields that fall under this classification are sciences that presuppose and require the systematic use of symbols achieved only in terms of the viewpoint of theoretical thinking, when consciousness has passed beyond the limits of the intuitive world of representation. The question arises whether the world of human culture is to be understood through the form of the concept as applied to natural phenomena or whether there is a form of the concept distinctive to cultural phenomena. Cassirer holds that there is a fundamental difference between Naturbegriffe and Kulturbegriffe, which is the subject of his third study. There is a logic of cultural concepts that is different in kind from natural concepts. Cassirer points to Vico as the founder of the philosophy of history and, in so doing, the founder of the philosophy of culture. There is a true knowledge of culture to be had that stands alongside the true knowledge of nature such as pursued by Descartes. Cassirer says: “According to Vico, the real goal of our knowledge is not the knowledge of nature but human self-knowledge. . . . For the cardinal rule of knowledge is, according to Vico, the statement that each creature truly understands and penetrates only that which it itself produces. The circle of our knowledge extends no further than the circle of our creative work” (LCS 9). Cassirer finds in Vico a basis for his conception of culture as Werk, a claim which will be treated later in this chapter. Since we make culture and also make a knowledge of culture, cultural science is always an activity of self-knowledge. In a text for one of the sessions of a seminar he taught on the philosophy of history at Yale in 1941–42, “Descartes, Leibniz, and Vico,” Cassirer remarks on how Vico transformed the principle of modern rationalism which led Descartes to exclude history from knowledge into the basis for a knowledge of history itself. “Modern rationalism has often maintained the principle that the human mind can have no adequate conceptions except of those things that are produced by the mind itself and that originate in its own innate powers. Vico adopts this principle, but he gives it a completely new turn and he draws from it the opposite inference” (SMC 103–4). The problem for rationalism is to produce a knowledge of nature, but access to natural objects seems to necessitate an empirical factor supplied by the senses.

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The convertibility of the true and the made cannot be perfectly accomplished because the object to be known is not made by the knower. Cassirer points out: “Nature remains, therefore, in a sense always external to man and beyond the powers of human knowledge” (SMC 104). This externality of the object to be known disappears when we seek to produce a science of the human world of history. In this case man is both knower and maker of the thing to be known. The empirical thing to be known is itself something made, a factum, or work. What man does is the object of historical knowledge. Cassirer says, following Vico: “Man understands history because he is the maker of history. Neither the mathematical nor the physical but the historical world, the civil society is, therefore, the proper study of mankind” (SMC 104–5). Thus, to achieve his new science of the common nature of the nations, Vico stands the central tenet of rationalism on its head. This does not mean, however, that the logic by which the concepts of natural science are formed is the same as that by which the concepts of cultural science are formed. Cassirer uses the term Kulturwissenschaften instead of Geisteswissenschaften to designate the cultural as opposed to the natural sciences. The use of Kultur reflects the name of the Warburg Library, which was, in full, Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, and the interests closely associated with it in Kunst- and Kulturgeschichte.1 We have seen in the preceding chapter that Cassirer takes up the term Geist in relation to his critique of Lebensphilosophie. Cassirer’s use of Kultur- rather than Geisteswissenschaften makes clear that his conception of the cultural sciences goes in a different direction from that of Dilthey. The philosophy of symbolic forms is above all a philosophy of culture. Geist stands to Kultur as function stands to form. Geist is the vitality, the living process of the human world that is formed as culture through the Werk. Cassirer’s prominent declaration in his general introduction to the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms that the critique of reason becomes the critique of culture (Kritik der Kultur) (PSF 1:80) firmly establishes the term “culture.” Cassirer does not state that the critique of reason becomes the critique of Geist. Culture in each of its forms is the manifestation of the world of Geist, of the actuality of the human spirit. This relationship is made clear in the introduction to the third volume, in which Cassirer places Erkenntnis within the world of spirit: “The critical justification and foundation of knowledge [Erkenntnis] consists rather in its knowing itself to be a mediated and mediating spiritual organ [ geistes Organon], with its definite place and task within the world of the spirit as a whole [Gesamtwelt des Geistes]” (PSF 3:6).

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In simply using the term “culture,” Cassirer is in accord with the times, with the rising science of anthropology and with the fields of humanistic and social research. Kant uses the term Cultur in its enlightenment sense of “cultivation.” Herder uses Cultur and Humanität in the sense of a progressive cultivation of the faculties; he also couples Cultur with tradition. German philosophy after 1800, led by Hegel, moves from the use of Cultur to Geist. But after 1850 there was an almost universal turn back to the use of Cultur, later written Kultur. Heinrich Rickert’s Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft (1898) and Georg Simmel’s Zur Philosophie der Kultur (1923) are two works among many in the last decades of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth that employ Kultur.2 Cassirer’s theory of concept formation, as will be evident, applies to fields of the humanities. Although, as mentioned earlier, Cassirer acknowledges symbolic forms of social life such as law, economics, technology, and ethics, his theory of the Kulturwissenschaften does not include an analysis of concept formation in such fields of thought. Whether there is implicit in Cassirer’s treatment of concept formation a theory of the concept in the behavioral and social sciences remains an open question. For example, is there a logic of the concept in Sozialwissenschaft (sociology) that perhaps has characteristics that fall between the logics of the Natur- and the Kulturwissenschaften? Cassirer makes many claims about psychology in developing his philosophy of symbolic forms, but he does not offer a specific theory of concept formation for it. The place to begin to extract such a theory, however, is in his analysis of the concept of group and perceptual constancy that he believes can be connected to group theory in mathematics and quantum mechanics. Cassirer says in “Reflections on the Concept of Group and the Theory of Perception” that he followed developments in these fields very closely. He declares: “For here I found a new confirmation of my general conviction that the concept of group is of universal applicability and extends over the whole field of human knowledge” (SMC 290). Perceptual constancy is the ability to ascribe consistently certain qualities to objects, even when the conditions under which we apprehend them change. Research into this power to group such perceptions suggests a physiological basis exists through which this grouping is accomplished. He says that to develop the implications of the concept of group will require “a close cooperation between various fields of investigation: mathematics, physics, psychology, philosophy” (SMC 291). Cassirer was concerned with the possibilities of the concept of group until the last day of his life; his sudden death cut off what more he might have found in it. It may offer a

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bridge generally between the social and the natural worlds, but to pursue these possibilities further goes beyond the purpose of this study.3 Cassirer describes natural concepts (Naturbegriffe) in Kantian terms. Natural concepts require the subsumption of the particular under the universal. The universal appears in its simplest form as the concept of a law which allows us to derive its individual instances deductively. In essence the natural concept is the product of Kant’s determinate judgment. Cassirer says: “To oppose ‘universal concepts’ of natural science to ‘individual concepts’ of historical science was evidently an unsatisfactory solution to the problem” (LCS 69). The theory of individual concepts as the key to the cultural sciences violates the very logic of the concept as universal. Every concept attempts to achieve a unity of the manifold. Cassirer’s example of a natural concept is gold. He says that modern science “shows that the properties of an element, each of which was initially discovered through empirical observation, are functions of a determined quantity, the quantity of ‘atomic weight,’ that they are in a lawful manner linked to the ‘atomic number’ of the element” (LCS 70). Thus what we call gold is that which has a specific weight, electrical conductivity, coefficient of expansion, and so forth. Gold is that which occupies a particular position in a scientific system. The aim of science is to pass beyond descriptive concepts to subsumptive concepts. Behind his remarks on Naturbegriffe is Cassirer’s fully developed theory of Funktionsbegriffe, discussed in previous chapters. Cultural concepts are different in kind from natural concepts: “Here, too, the particular is, in a way classified by the universal; but it is never subordinated to it in the same way” (LCS 70). Concepts employed in the cultural sciences are form and style concepts (Form- und Stilbegriffe). These concepts as found in the Kulturwissenschaften “are clearly distinct from the concepts of the natural sciences as well as from historical concepts . . . they represent a class of concepts sui generis” (LCS 62). Cassirer’s two prime examples of form and style concepts are the concepts of the linear and the painterly styles and difference between the classical and the Baroque in Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History and Jacob Burckhardt’s concept of the Renaissance man in his Culture of the Renaissance. Cassirer’s claim that such cultural concepts differ from historical concepts seems strange, since Wölffin’s and Burckhardt’s works are both pioneering historical studies. Cassirer means history in this regard, however, in a very limited sense, as a type of empirical research into the artifacts of the past that is relevant to the description of the cultural object. He says: “Physical, histori-

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cal, and psychological concepts continually enter into the description of a cultural object” (LCS 57). The cultural sciences begin their concept formation from the cultural object as so described and delivered to them from these empirical investigations. The concern of the cultural sciences is to put what can be described into a whole. Cassirer says: “Each particular science of culture develops certain concepts of form and style and uses them to establish a systematic survey [systematischer Überblick], a classification and differentiation of the phenomena with which it concerns itself ” (LCS 58). Note that, as discussed earlier, Cassirer applies here the term “systematic survey” which he employs to describe the nature of philosophical thought, a point to which I will return. Cassirer also wishes to distinguish form and style concepts from value concepts (Wertbegriffe) such as play a role in Rickert’s logic of history. Cassirer holds that there is a difference in kind between form and style concepts and value concepts: “What the concepts of style represent is not an ought but a pure ‘being’—even though this being is concerned not with physical things but with the existence of ‘forms’ ” (LCS 63). Form and style concepts present us with a scheme of what is in the cultural world. They do not as such endorse some particular values. We can link certain value judgments to such forms but they are not required for us to grasp the meaning of what has been formed. The cultural concept is a transformation of the generic concept of Aristotelian class logic. Class concepts of Aristotelian logic are typical of the world of representation or Darstellungsfunktion of Cassirer’s phenomenology of knowledge. Such concepts are characteristic of language as a symbolic form in which things are ordered into classes. Cultural concepts presuppose the substance-concepts of linguistic thought, but they fall between these and the function-concepts of theoretical or scientific thought. Cultural concepts (Kulturbegriffe) are not based on a common property found in the particulars they order. Rather, the universal of the cultural concept is an “ideational abstraction,” to use Husserl’s term, toward which the individual particulars under it tend. Cassirer says, regarding the concept “Renaissance man”: “When we characterize Leonardo da Vinci and Aretino, Marsilio Ficino and Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Cesare Borgia as ‘men of the Renaissance,’ we do not mean to say that there is to be found in them a definite individual feature that is fixed as regards its contents, in which they all agree” (LCS 72). Each of these tends toward the properties of the universal—Renaissance man; no one of them is a complete, concrete fulfillment of it. The unity among them that is expressed in the universal “is a

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unity of direction, not a unity of being . . . they cooperate in a common task” (LCS 72). Burckhardt’s concept captures the distinctive meaning of the Renaissance. Cassirer concludes: “All genuine concepts of style in the sciences of culture reduce, when analyzed more precisely, to such concepts of meaning” (LCS 72). Cultural concepts are functional in that the particulars they order appear under them as a series, but they simply encompass the series. They do not offer a rule by which the series is constructed or synthesized such that each member has a specifically determined place. Yet there is an indissoluble bond between the universal and the particulars of the series, because without the concept “Renaissance man” the individual figures are without any special meaning, and without it having a bearing on these figures, Renaissance man is a free-floating abstraction without definite content. There is an analogy between natural concepts and cultural concepts as the two types of gesture that Cassirer regards as underlying language, discussed in chapter 1. The indicative gesture has a resonance with natural concepts in that through this type of concept, gold is pointed out. Its being is fixed by thought, and the means by which its being is fixed is repetitive for the determining of other elements. The imitative gesture re-creates in the medium of the body the thing meant; each thing meant requires a different imitation. The cultural concept of Renaissance man is a linguistic likeness of the individuals whose meaning it attempts to portray. If we change to the man of the Middle Ages, a different linguistic likeness is required. As neither of these gestures is derived from the other, so natural concepts and cultural concepts are not derived from each other, yet they accompany each other within the realization of theoretical thought and its grounding in signification or Bedeutung.

The “Tragedy of Culture” Cassirer’s fifth of his five studies of The Logic of the Cultural Sciences takes its title from Simmel’s essay on “The Concept and Tragedy of Culture.” Simmel points to the fact that man becomes more and more alienated from his own world of culture. Culture continually presents the individual with more and more gifts but the individual seems less and less able to possess them. For the individual to realize his subjectivity he must project it into the objective world of human culture. But in this attempt of the I to realize itself, it loses itself. Cassirer says Simmel presents the problem but despairs of finding a solution. Philosophy appears helpless

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to offer the individual relief from this loss of self. Cassirer says: “The I finds itself crushed under their manifoldness [the goals that culture creates] and continually increasing weight. The I no longer draws from culture the consciousness of its own power but only the certainty of its own intellectual powerlessness” (LCS 105). This problem of the alienation of the I and culture is not the invention of Simmel; it goes back at least to Rousseau’s invective in his two Discourses against the ability of the arts and sciences in their progress to have produced a better world, that is, a more human world. Cassirer acknowledges the dialectic that exists between the I and culture such that the I loses itself in culture. But he is unwilling to take such a limited sense of dialectic—that dialectic yields only alienation. The mediating term is the work, which is one of the three basis phenomena of human existence, although Cassirer does not refer to it here as such a phenomenon. Cassirer adopts a Hegelian conception of dialectic in that he wishes to extend the dialectical process such that what the I creates in culture comes back to it in a new or further form. Cassirer says: “For the work, in whose enduring existence the creative process congeals, does not stand at the end of this path, but rather the ‘you’ [Du], the other subject who receives this work in order to incorporate it into his own life and thus transform it back into the medium from which it originates” (LCS 110). Cassirer claims that once attention is directed to a kind of reception theory of the work in the “thou” or “Du,” culture becomes a circle and Simmel’s pessimism is overcome. The work becomes the mediator between the I and its alter ego. Culture becomes the process of Bildung, the basis of spiritual development that every human being requires. The work is the bridge that allows for a world of intersubjectivity. The creators of the work, even the greatest thinkers, writers, and artists, always experience a loss of self in the objectivity of their creations, and there is always, within culture, a drive toward conserving what is made and a drive toward its revitalization and revision—a drive toward the development of the new. But the creator of the work does not act in a vacuum. The creator of any work begins from the reception of the work of another I. Culture functions in terms of this internal dialectic of past, present, and future. The dialectical process of culture is the self-transformation of spirit, the drive for which is its emergence from the ongoing movement of life, as was discussed in chapter 4. Cassirer concludes: “The work is essentially nothing other than a human act that has solidified in order to become being but that does not deny its origin in this consolidation. The creative will, and the

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creative power from which it has emerged, continues to live and be effective within it and to lead to new creations” (LCS 127). What we have here is a plea for high culture, made in a time when all of the great nations of the world were at war. It could be argued that Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms lives only in its own world, a world that, like the Weimar Republic in politics, has no place in the philosophies that were to come and in terms of which we live today. The process of the work that Cassirer describes is one of self-liberation, a world in which thought and learning, the liberal arts and sciences, and the cultivation of the arts remain alive as a Republic of Letters. Philosophy is not politics but the opposite of politics. As in the Middle Ages philosophy was pursued as the servant of theology, so in the contemporary age philosophy is pursued as the servant of politics. As Cassirer wrote his Freiheit und Form (1916) as a reaffirmation of literary and artistic ideals and a reaction to World War I, so he writes his last works as a reaffirmation of culture and philosophy and a reaction to World War II and its times. Cassirer refuses to give up on what he finds in the human effort to create culture. All philosophers know that particular conditions as they exist at particular times in the history of culture will pass. What is important, and the duty of philosophy in such times, is to make accessible what culture in its highest sense is and can be. Philosophy in this regard is memory, a view that fits with the motto Aby Warburg placed over the entrance to his library: Mnemosyne.4 Philosophy became the memory and the conscience of the self-knowledge that is human culture. If philosophy does not attempt this memory, what else will, since philosophy, by its nature, is in a position to speak in terms of the whole?

The Phenomenology of Culture In An Essay on Man, the work Cassirer intended as a summary of his philosophy of symbolic forms, he says: “Our objective is a phenomenology of culture” (EM 52). In The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, in discussing the limitations of Herder’s historical approach to the problem of origins, Cassirer declares: “What is required now is no mere developmental history but a ‘phenomenology of spirit’ ” (LCS 12), and he proceeds to explain the importance of Hegel’s attempt at this way of understanding. At another point Cassirer says that the proper solution to the differences of the sciences of nature from the sciences of culture can be obtained only by a phenomenological analysis: “The solution can be attained only through a phenomenological analysis that grasps the prob-

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lem in its true universality” (LCS 42). He says this solution can come about only by grasping how each symbolic form contributes to the construction of a common world. At another point he says we can grasp the logical analysis of the concepts of style only “when we compare it with the result of the phenomenological analysis” (LCS 73). He holds that by such an analysis we can see how the cultural concept captures discursively what perception achieves as an “intuitive” knowledge—by ordering the world of things—as discussed above regarding class concepts and the symbolic form of language. We have also seen how Cassirer turns to Hegel’s phenomenology in the second and third volumes of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and how in the fourth volume he puts forth his theory of basis phenomena. In the preface to The Philosophy of the Enlightenment Cassirer says that in this work and in his two works that went before it, on the Platonic renaissance in England mentioned earlier and The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, he hoped “to give a ‘phenomenology of the philosophic spirit’; it is an attempt to show how this spirit, struggling with purely objective problems, achieves clarity and depth in its understanding of its own nature and destiny, and of its own fundamental character and mission.”5 He goes on to say that he considers all of his historical studies in philosophy to be parts of such a total phenomenology. Cassirer’s historical studies concentrate on the development of philosophy since Nicholas of Cusa. This development is a process in which philosophy realizes itself as an independent activity of spirit, an activity which can also hark back to its origins in Greek philosophy, especially in terms of the problem of form and the philosophy of the idea that is taken up in the development of modern idealism.6 The first use of the term Phänomenologie as part of a philosophical system was made by Johann Heinrich Lambert in his Neues Organon (1764). He concludes this work with a theory of appearance or Schein, using the title: Phänomenologie oder Lehre von dem Schein. He calls this Phänomenologie a “transzendente Optik.”7 This “optics” allows us to see through forms of appearance, avoid error, and employ human reason. On September 2, 1770, Kant wrote to Lambert: “A quite special, though purely negative science, general phenomenology (phaenomenologia generalis), seems to be presupposed by metaphysics. In it the principles of sensibility, their validity and their limitations, would be determined, so that these principles could not be confusedly applied to objects of pure reason, as has heretofore almost always happened.”8 In a letter to Marcus Herz in February 1772 Kant wrote that he planned to

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write such a general phenomenology as the first part of a metaphysics.9 The first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason appeared in 1781. A little more than two decades later, Hegel began to formulate his “science of the experience of consciousness” that appeared as the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807, announced as the first part of his system, the second being his metaphysics, the Science of Logic. Cassirer’s metaphysics of symbolic forms is not a metaphysics of the real as such. It is a metaphysics of human reality but it is not a philosophy of what is beyond the circle of culture. To the extent that Cassirer speaks of life it is life only as engaged with spirit, not life as such. As stated earlier, Cassirer is clear that philosophy is not a symbolic form. There is no philosophical causality, philosophical space, time, or number, and so forth, that differs from that in other symbolic forms. Philosophy is reflective of what is present in the other forms. Philosophy, however, comes to its theory of symbolic forms through the formation of cultural concepts. Philosophy engages in the systematic review (systematiker Überblick) of culture and advances an account of the various forms taken by the symbolic act. Philosophy is guided in this review by the overall sense of the function-concept. The various symbolic forms that contain the content of culture are the series that philosophy orders. Each of the symbolic forms aims at the formation of culture itself, but none of them is the summation of the process of human culture. Philosophy preserves the ideal of culture as a totality. It holds forth the concept, not of “Renaissance man,” but of “man.” Systematic review is a version of the transcendental method in the sense that philosophy establishes the conditions for the possibility of each area of culture that constitutes a symbolic form. If philosophy were to pursue only the systematic review of culture the results would be simply a static critique of culture, a fixed ordering of the total set of forms. But there would be no dynamic account of the forms, of their genesis within culture, and of culture as a whole. What is achieved by the transcendental method must be supplemented by the dialectical method to produce a phenomenology of culture. This dialectic will not be a logic of illusion because it is directed only to the movement of spirit as spirit develops its identity within the process of culture. The object of philosophy always remains in the sphere of phenomena. Cassirer’s synthesis of these two methods of philosophy allows him to conceive the Werk of philosophy as contemplation. He says that Socrates is the discoverer of the sphere of the work as contemplation: “In the history of philosophy it is Socrates who discovers this sphere, who puts it

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forth and establishes it as a central object for philosophical investigation and ‘marvel’ [Verwunderung]” (PSF 4:184). Contemplation is the reaction to wonder and the means by which it can be sustained. Cassirer ties his basis phenomenon of the work to the basis of philosophy itself. Wonder is the phenomenon that is embodied in the work. The result of contemplation is the discovery of form (the idea or eidos) which Cassirer combines with the phenomenon of the symbol. The phenomenon, so to speak, is always something “seen.” But the SocraticPlatonic form is something both “seen” and “unseen.” The world of the form, however it is to be interpreted, is unseen by the senses and is seen only by the mind’s eye. The world of the forms requires metaphysical vision. It requires philosophy to become speculative and to pass beyond the phenomenal form to the form itself. Cassirer is Socratic in that his speech of the totality of the symbolic forms is made within the agora of human culture, but he is unwilling to pass beyond it to the speculative sense of the form. Kant does not make this passage to the thing-in-itself. Hegel’s passage is to the forms of the Science of Logic and the Absolute Idea, a journey that Cassirer is unwilling to undertake. Cassirer keeps us on the island of culture, but in so doing we are able to see much. And, in Socratic fashion, we are able to think systematically but not to close time with a system. Philosophical contemplation seems to share with the particular cultural sciences the type of concept formation Cassirer finds in them. Although Cassirer does not speak directly about the contemplative form of the concept, he also does not claim that contemplation requires a special sense of the concept. The object of contemplation is not being but human being as it is manifested in the phenomenon of the work. To contemplate is to order the symbolic forms in terms of the ideal of culture. But they are not taken up in some synthetic form of experience that is culture itself. The ordering of the symbolic forms requires a developmental phenomenology such that each tends toward the ideal of culture as a harmony of the whole. To contemplate philosophically is to phenomenologize the contents of culture. A phenomenology is a kind of narration, a way of relating the story of the human world, the story of spirit. Phenomenology in this sense is not history because it relates the universal forms of the human spirit that are found particularized in history. The historical order of events always presupposes and incorporates the phenomenological order of the forms of human experience themselves.

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Philosophical thought has a systematic relation to mythical thought. The primordial ordering of the human world is the result of the power of the myth to produce a speech of the whole. This speech has its own logical structure, its own inner form. From this original speech, culture begins. At the most reflectively distant point of culture is philosophy. Art is closer to myth than is philosophy. What originally is produced in the mythic imagination in its cosmic and archetypal images of man and the world is recovered by art as its particular subject matter. But art does not replace myth’s role as a totalization of all oppositions within human experience. Art, unlike philosophy, does not offer a complete speech. In The Myth of the State Cassirer says that myth is always there, lurking in the background of political life, ready to be revived, to offer the individual a sense of unity and order, as was accomplished in the formation of Nazi politics and culture (MS 280). Once the world of mythical thought has been left behind in the progression of human culture its resurrection is unnatural and dangerous, for its drive toward totality is a replacement for that sought by rational thought. Philosophy is the benign replacement of myth in the fully developed world of culture. The phenomenological narrative of philosophy shows myth as the origin of culture, and each of the symbolic forms originates in a mythical or expressive phase. Thus philosophy’s duty is to place myth within the harmony of the forms and in so doing to offer itself as a replacement for myth in its rational dedication to the comprehension of the whole. In this manner philosophy appears as the reflective embodiment of culture. It is the ideal of cultural science itself, the full self-attainment of the human spirit or the phenomenon of the work in the form of contemplation.

Chapter 6

Animal Symbolicum

Self-Knowledge: The Individual Writ Large When Cassirer began teaching at Yale University in 1941, his friends and colleagues suggested that he publish a translation of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. His response was to write a new book that would both summarize his earlier and larger work and put its conclusions in a new light. The essence of this new light was explicitly to cast the philosophy of symbolic forms as a philosophy of self-knowledge. He begins An Essay on Man (1944) with the claim that self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophy. He says: “In all the conflicts between the different philosophical schools this objective remained invariable and unshaken: it proved to be the Archimedean point, the fixed immovable center, of all thought” (EM 1). This is a noble claim, a way to read all philosophy that has gone before as having the single concern of self-knowledge. Much, if not nearly all philosophy, from the late twentieth century on, has given up any attempt to pursue self-knowledge. Yet Cassirer’s book has remained in print and is one of the most widely read works in modern philosophy. Cassirer takes his title from Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733): “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, / The proper study of mankind is man” (Epistle 2, line 1). Taking the title from Pope reflects Cassirer’s commitment to the importance of the Enlightenment for a phenomenology of the philosophic spirit. In The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Cassirer writes: “Time and again thought returns to its point of departure from its various journeys of exploration intended to broaden the horizon of objective reality. Pope gave brief and pregnant expression to this deep-seated feeling of the age in the line: ‘The proper study of mankind is man.’ ”1 Casting his work as an essay reflects a form 89

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that since Montaigne has been the proper and natural form for the self to consider its own nature; it also fits with Cassirer’s aversion to calling the philosophy of symbolic forms a system. It emphasizes Cassirer’s conception of his philosophy as Socratic, since Socrates, as Cicero says, “was the first to call philosophy down from the heavens and set her in the cities of men and bring her also into their homes and compel her to ask questions about life and morality and things good and evil.”2 There is immediately a normative dimension to Cassirer’s work, since the question of what man is has implications for how we are to regard our selves, our society, and our history. Cassirer’s subtitle, “An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture,” stresses that the sense in which he views what the work contains remains open. It is an introduction to a not to the philosophy of human culture. Attaching human to culture brings attention to the fact that our humanity is tied to our making of culture. Cassirer says: “It is my serious wish not to impose a ready-made theory, expressed in a dogmatic style, upon the minds of my readers. I have been anxious to place them in a position to judge for themselves” (EM viii). The fragmentation in modern culture is a threat to our ethical life and to our ability to ascertain what the human is. Never before have we been in such a favorable position to have access to sources for the development of a knowledge of human nature, yet never before have we found ourselves at such a loss to find a common reference point from which to grasp the nature of the human world. Cassirer calls this “the crisis of man’s knowledge of himself.” He maintains that in past ages, beginning with Greek philosophy, the question of what man is could be raised and investigated in terms of a common context. He claims: “Metaphysics, theology, mathematics, and biology successively assumed the guidance for thought on the problem of man and determined the line of investigation” (EM 21). Cassirer claims that in modern thought there is no agreement on a general standpoint from which the nature of man can be investigated. “Nietzsche proclaims the will to power, Freud signalizes the sexual instinct, Marx enthrones the economic instinct. Each theory becomes a Procrustean bed on which the empirical facts are stretched to fit a preconceived pattern” (EM 21). He points out that if we turn to the fields that study man we also gain no such standpoint: “Theologians, scientists, politicians, sociologists, biologists, psychologists, ethnologists, economists all approached the problem from their own viewpoints” (EM 21). Cassirer’s diagnosis of this crisis in self-knowledge is not unique in its

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general outlines. It is in line with many critiques of the lack of coherence in modern thought and society. One of the most influential of these was the “two cultures” thesis of C. P. Snow, in which there is no common link between the worlds of the natural sciences and the humanities.3 Cassirer saw, prior to the end of World War II, the existence of this problem of cultural fragmentation. His concern is to show that the philosophy of symbolic forms offers a solution to this fragmentation without extrapolating a view of human nature from one aspect of human existence and then attempting to show how all other aspects of the human world are derivative from it. Cassirer’s Archimedean point is the symbol. To define human nature in terms of one of its aspects, making it an essence, is to conceive the nature of man in substantial rather than functional terms. The symbol stands as the medium through which all the aspects of human existence are formed. Cassirer takes the approach of Plato’s Republic—of the large and small letters—that the “parts” of the soul, inscribed in small letters, are also inscribed in large letters in the “parts” of the polis. For Cassirer the nature of man is writ large in the symbolic forms of culture (EM 63). Cassirer’s Essay is the new Republic, a difference being that, unlike Plato, Cassirer does not return to the smaller letters of the symbolic forms as elements of the individual psyche, but it is not difficult to conceive of such, given Cassirer’s earlier example of the Linienzug. Cassirer’s approach follows the Greek ideal that there is no fundamental difference between the state and the individual. This accord between man and culture is of a piece with Cassirer’s rejection of culture as the alienation of the individual, discussed in chapter 5. Pope’s phrase, “presume not God to scan,” fits with Cassirer’s stand that metaphysics is not the basis for the study of man. Cassirer is also clear that self-knowledge cannot be based on introspection because it can never yield a comprehensive view of human nature. Cassirer says: “Introspection reveals to us only that small sector of human life which is accessible to our individual experience. It can never cover the whole field of human phenomena” (EM 2). The proper study of man, in Cassirer’s terms, is similar to the Socratic quest for civil wisdom and to the quest in German thought for Bildung. To grasp what it is to be human requires us to survey all the forms of the human world and to account for how they came about individually and as a totality. Only philosophy is in a position to acquire such knowledge. Because it is not a symbolic form, philosophy does not participate in the propensity of each form to dominate all of human culture from its own perspective. Philosophy gains its

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identity as a type of human knowledge by adherence to the principle that the truth is the whole.

The Human Animal Having established that the symbol is the common denominator of all the forms of human culture, Cassirer raises the question of how the symbol itself is part of the human organism. He turns to the theoretical biology of Uexküll. Uexküll regards every organism as a monadic being that apprehends the world from its own unique perspective. Each type or species of organism lives life on its own terms that may overlap with but fundamentally differ from those of other organisms. As Cassirer puts this: “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). Every organism adapts itself to its environment completely in terms of a receptor system (Merknetz) and an effector system (Wirknetz). Through its receptor system the organism receives outward stimuli and through its effector system it reacts to these stimuli. The survival of the organism demands that these two systems are closely interwoven within the whole of the organism. Uexküll calls the interconnection of these two systems the functional circle (Funktionskreis) of the organism. This sense of the organism as a process of internal relations that form a functional circle has immediate appeal for Cassirer. An organism is not a substance in which certain properties inhere. It is a process of life functionally ordered. Uexküll’s biology allows Cassirer a way to understand life as more than an ongoing stream of becoming. The transformation that life ultimately makes to become spirit is already present in an analogous form in animal existence. Cassirer asks: “Is it possible to make use of the scheme proposed by Uexküll for a description and characterization of the human world?” (EM 24). The human animal lives in a world of “human things,” but this is not achieved simply by the way in which the receptor and effector systems interact in the human organism. Cassirer claims: “Between the receptor system and the effector system, which are to be found in all animal species, we find in man a third link which we may describe as the symbolic system” (EM 24). Man lives in a world that is different in kind from that of other animals. Cassirer distinguishes between “animal reactions” and “human responses.” The symbolic system mediates between the receptor and the effector systems such that stimuli do not directly produce reactions. In the distinctively human act the stimuli are absorbed and

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formed by the symbolic system. The way in which these stimuli are internalized by this system determines the reaction the human animal has to them. With the presence of the symbolic system, “No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself ” (EM 25). Cassirer is now in a position to reformulate the classical definition of man. Because he has expanded the critique of reason to the critique of culture, he can regard all of man’s symbolic activity—like rationality—to be an inherent feature of all human cultural activity. Reason can in a sense be regarded as connected to all the symbolic forms, including myth. Myth is a form of thought and thus its activity can be understood by reason. Myth is not rational as such, but neither is it irrational in the sense of having no meaningful order. Language can be identified with reason, but within language we can distinguish between its power discursively to produce thoughts and concepts and its power to express images and feelings. Although the critique of reason can be expanded to the critique of culture, reason as such loses its own identity if we attempt to establish all of culture simply as reason.4 Cassirer says: “Reason is a very inadequate term with which to comprehend the forms of man’s cultural life in all their richness and variety. But all these forms are symbolic forms. Hence, instead of defining man as an animal rationale, we should define him as an animal symbolicum” (EM 26). With this new definition, Cassirer intends to answer the question of how to differentiate human from animal mentality. Does human mentality differ from animal mentality in degree or in kind or in both degree and kind? Cassirer asks: “But are we entitled to consider them [symbolic thought and behavior] as the special endowment of man to the exclusion of all other organic beings?” (EM 27). His answer is, yes. Cassirer relies on what are now outmoded studies of primates but what was pioneering research in the 1920s by W. Köhler and R. M. Yerkes, as well as the famous earlier experiments of Pavlov. Cassirer applies the distinction between signs and symbols to the essential difference between animal and human mentality. Animals can be trained to respond to signs and signals. Signs and signals have a one-to-one correspondence to the thing they signify. A sign or signal for something, once grasped, can produce the same reflex repeatedly, but a sign or signal is fixed in its reference and is not self-modifying. A system of signs can become quite complex, but its reference points and its structure remain

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constant. The symbol is self-modifying and perspectival. To symbolize something is to apprehend it in a particular way and to possess its meaning such that what it is can be modified and transformed by the holder of the symbol. All symbols are part of some system of symbols. The symbol is functional in that it can generate new versions of itself and the meanings that it captures. The symbol is tied to the development of intelligence that characterizes the human individual. Cassirer brings forth the example of Helen Keller as a means to portray the interconnection between symbolism and the development of human mentality. The story of Helen Keller learning to spell “water” and grasping that everything has a name, in a sudden breakthrough with her teacher, Mrs. Sullivan, is well known. Cassirer points out that the case of Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf from childhood, allows us to observe in a compact event what occurs naturally in the development of language in the course of childhood. Helen Keller, in a moment of sudden recognition, went from being in a world of particulars, in which every instance of water was something fixed and unique, to realizing that water was a name—that all such instances were instances of the same, nameable thing. Cassirer says: “The principle of symbolism, with its universality, validity, and general applicability, is the magic word, the Open Sesame! giving access to the specifically human world, to the world of human culture. Once man is in possession of this magic key further progress is assured” (EM 35). Today, research into linguistic and symbolic responses and abilities in non-human animals makes it impossible to ascribe the difference between human and non-human animals as a difference parallel to that between the semiotics of signs and signals versus symbols. But Cassirer’s argument will still hold, that there is a genuine difference in degree and kind between non-human and human mentality. How to set the precise dividing point between them remains an open question. But it also is clear that the gap between the powers of non-human mentality and human mentality remains insurmountable. The world of culture delineated by Cassirer in his philosophy of symbolic forms, involving myth and religion, language, art, history, and science, as well as the social forms he mentions, is a world to which the non-human animal has no true access. Non-human animal mentality may touch upon aspects of the world of these forms, but it has no access to the self-developing symbolic systems that comprise their identities. Many astonishing things have been learned about non-human mentality and behavior, and there is every reason to believe that more will

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be discovered.5 However, should we one day discover that some class of non-human animals actually is capable of creating such forms of culture but for some reason gave no indication of this ability, it would be a scientific discovery of an order we have not experienced. It would be comparable to discovering that human beings have the capacity in their own bodies to fly, but that, for some reason, no human being has ever properly attempted to do so.

The Harmony of the Forms: The Bow and the Lyre Cassirer says: “If the term ‘humanity’ means anything at all it means that, in spite of all the differences and oppositions existing among its various forms, these are, nevertheless, all working toward a common end” (EM 70). This statement is both descriptive and normative. It is descriptive in the sense that, for Cassirer, there is something called human culture, something like the unity of all cultures. We may assert this in the same way Cassirer said of language as a symbolic form, in his remarks at Davos, mentioned earlier, that there is something called language for him, something like the unity of all languages. This statement is also normative in the sense that there is something in addition to human culture, called humanity. What it means to be human is to enter into the creative process that is at the heart of culture. Cassirer is writing in English but he likely has in mind the connection between Humanität and Bildung—the process an individual must undergo to acquire the fruits of culture, to acquire individually what humanity has acquired in its efforts at culture collectively, as mentioned earlier in connection to the acquisition of civil wisdom. Philosophy is the essence of Bildung because it is a process of self-knowledge, of the self coming to know its nature as a unity of its own activities. Cassirer says: “Myth, religion, art, language, even science, are now looked upon as so many variations on a common theme—and it is the task of philosophy to make this theme audible and understandable” (EM 71). This is also both a descriptive and a normative statement. The task of philosophy is to show the interconnections among the various forms of culture. We encounter this view of philosophy throughout Cassirer’s works. But this task of philosophy is at the same time normative, for it can guide the individual toward the ideal of self-liberation that is inherent in the creation of culture. Cassirer says: “Human culture taken as a whole may be described as the process of man’s progressive selfliberation” (EM 228). At the basis of culture is human freedom, under-

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stood in the way both Kant and Hegel understood it, as self-determination. The forms of self-determination are writ large in the symbolic forms of human culture, for in each of them the world is made in a different way. As Cassirer says, “All these functions complete and complement one another. Each one opens a new horizon and shows us a new aspect of humanity” (EM 228). Cassirer regards culture as a dialectically ordered whole: “For this is a dialectic unity, a coexistence of contraries” (EM 222). The sense of dialectical unity to which Cassirer points is not Hegelian. He describes it through a line of Heraclitus: “ ‘Men do not understand,’ said Heraclitus, ‘how that which is torn in different directions comes into accord with itself—harmony in contrariety, as in the case of the bow and the lyre’ ” (EM 222–23). Cassirer must have chosen this line of Heraclitus with care, as it is the final image with which he leaves his readers of An Essay on Man. Harmonia, in this line of Heraclitus, most likely means connection, in the sense that the strings connect the bow and the lyre each to themselves. In the view of Heraclitus, such connection demonstrated that opposites are the same. It is impossible to experience one opposite fully without the other. They are the same in the sense that the road up is the same as the road down. What is opposite, so to speak, is that which is connected to itself. Cassirer points to the fact that the forms of human culture are held together by a conformity to their fundamental tasks, which can underlie what appears to be a struggle between opposing forces. Cassirer says: “This struggle does not exclude that ‘hidden harmony’ which, according to Heraclitus, ‘is better than that which is obvious’ ” (EM 223). The hidden harmony that is the connection between the opposites in culture is the symbol. Cassirer says: “It is symbolic thought which overcomes the natural inertia of man and endows him with a new ability, the ability constantly to reshape his human universe” (EM 62). What appears as a struggle between opposing forces and, in a sense, is a struggle, is also a manifestation of a harmony originating from the same factor functioning in each. The fact that there is the hidden harmony of connections among all of the oppositions within man’s cultural activities makes possible a dialectical presentation of culture as a totality by philosophy. The fact that human culture is actually a whole makes possible a philosophical account that pursues the truth as the whole. But Cassirer once again cautions against the sense in which Hegelian dialectic is overly synthetic in its dialectic. Cassirer claims that anthropological philosophy must not

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gloss over the tensions within culture. He says: “If we wish to grasp its real meaning and import, we must choose not the epic manner of description but the dramatic. For we are confronted, not with a peaceful development of concepts or theories, but with a clash between conflicting spiritual powers” (EM 9). As emphasized earlier, Cassirer’s dramatic dialectic eschews Hegel’s two principles of synthesis—the Aufhebung of opposites and the Absolute. Yet for Cassirer philosophy is capable of a systematic overview which ultimately can see culture as a harmonia. As previously discussed, Cassirer sees work as the key to both man’s nature and human culture: “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’ ” (EM 68). In his presentation of the philosophy of symbolic forms as a theory of man Cassirer emphasizes some features that are not as evident in his earlier work. In An Essay on Man Cassirer combines myth and religion into one chapter. This raises the question whether religion is a separate symbolic form. In his works and even in An Essay on Man, Cassirer names religion as a symbolic form alongside the others. But in this work and also in the final part of Mythical Thought, the second volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer presents religion as a continuous development from myth. All of human culture and each symbolic form has its roots in myth, but religion remains connected to the mythic image in the way, for example, art or history do not. Art is an attempt to recover the power of the image functioning in myth, and history is a recovery and transformation of the original power of the mythic narrative. The recovery of myth is based on a break with myth. Art and history, unlike religion, are not continuing developments from myth. Cassirer holds that there is no radical difference between mythical and religious thought: “Both of them originate in the same fundamental phenomena of human life. In the development of human culture we cannot fix a point where myth ends or religion begins. In the whole course of its history religion remains indissolubly connected and penetrated with mythical elements” (EM 87). Cassirer does not intend this characterization to be a criticism of religion; he intends it as descriptive. From the standpoint of myth, he says: “Myth is from the very beginning potential religion. What leads from one stage to the other is no sudden crisis of thought and no revolution of feeling” (EM 87). As mythical consciousness evolves into religious consciousness, two important shifts take place—one is a shift in the relation of symbol to

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object and the other is a shift in self-concept. In mythical consciousness, the god and the image of the god are one; they exist on the same single plane of objective reality. There is no beyond. As religion develops, the image comes to refer to the god who exists in a realm beyond the here and now. To accomplish this representational rather than presentational sense of the symbol, religion requires the intuitive world of linguistic form, in which words refer to non-linguistic objects. In a second shift in consciousness, religion becomes the source and original basis of the ethical. In the totem and taboo system of society there is no sense of individual responsibility: “There is not a shadow of any individual responsibility in this system. If a man commits a crime it is not he himself who is marked off—his family, his friends, his whole tribe bears the same mark” (EM 105). There is no personal responsibility because there is no sense of personality or individual selfhood in the world of mythical consciousness. Identity is the identity of the whole group. Religion develops in accord with the development of the individual self: “The great religious teachers of mankind found a new impulse by which, henceforward, the whole life of man was led to a new direction. They discovered in themselves a positive power, a power not of inhibition but of inspiration and aspiration” (EM 108). This new positive power is at the basis of the world’s ethical religions and fits with Cassirer’s conception of human freedom as self-determination. In his discussion of language in An Essay on Man Cassirer seems more aware than in his earlier treatment of how language is grounded in the act of human speech and in the formation of human community. He emphasizes that the unity of language is a functional unity and cannot be a substantive unity, and that such a unity does not presuppose a material or formal identity. He says: “Two different languages may represent opposite extremes both with respect to their phonetic systems and with their parts-of-speech systems. This does not prevent them from accomplishing the same task in the life of the speaking community” (EM 130). The symbolic form of language does not imply that there is some set of formal properties in which all languages participate. Rather, the symbolic form of language is predicated on the fact that wherever we find men in human community we find language. The possession of language allows us to live in an ordered world, but the order of the world found in any given language is its own. There is no set standard or order of things to which all languages conform or should in principle conform. But all languages classify what we experience. Cassirer says: “Classification is one of the fundamental features of

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human speech. The very act of denomination depends upon a process of classification” (EM 134). What is named in human speech is not determined by a substantial world of things or independent entities that exist in themselves. “They are determined rather by human interests and human purposes. But these interests are not fixed and invariable” (EM 134). As Cassirer insists, from his earlier treatment of language to his later treatment in An Essay on Man, the common world in which any particular culture lives is made by the interaction of the symbol with its object and there is no one fixed way in which this making occurs. The result, however, is something objective that can be investigated and understood as a human product or work. Cassirer says: “Language and science are abbreviations of reality; art is an intensification of reality” (EM 143). Language and science are the principal ways we build up our concepts of the external world. In both we classify and order our sense perceptions and bring them under general notions. This process always involves simplification. Art moves in the opposite direction. But “the artist is just as much a discoverer of the forms of nature as the scientist is a discoverer of facts or natural laws” (EM 143–44). The imagination of the artist does not deal simply in fictions or inventing the forms of things. Art shows us the forms of things in their concreteness. It makes them visible and recognizable. The artist selects out of experience what can be objectified by the imagination and in so doing we are brought to see what is there in a certain way. Cassirer says: “Science gives us order in thoughts; morality gives us order in actions; art gives us order in the apprehension of visible, tangible, and audible appearances” (EM 168). Art, like the other symbolic forms, is a form of knowledge. It is the way in which our subjectivity is given form, but when formed in the artistic process and its products, it is objective. Cassirer says that “art may be described as knowledge, but art is knowledge of a peculiar and specific kind” (EM 169). Art follows the principle that there is a truth of beauty, but this truth differs from truth found in theoretical explanation. These two senses of truth, Cassirer holds, are in contrast to each other but they do not contradict each other, for “each has its own perspective and, so to speak, its own angle of refraction” (EM 170). Once our common world has been formed through language that has developed in contrast to myth, the dualism of science and art can emerge as symbolic forms. Science passes beyond language as the ability to form experience, not simply in terms of classification but according to the functional order of systems of symbols. Art becomes the form

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of the imagination in contrast to the reason of scientific thought. Art accomplishes its position by recovering in a new, deliberate form what originally is present only in myth. The view of man and the world put forth in both myth and religion might be described as categorical in contrast to that put forth in art. Myth and religion in their creations designate exactly what is the nature of man and the world. In comparison, the creations of art have a hypothetical status. The characters of novels, the views of man and the world in the plastic arts, are each ways of regarding them. No one work of art is definitive. There is always more art to be made. Art does not close time. In this hypothetical stance art is similar to scientific and theoretical thought. Cassirer says: “Art and history are the most powerful instruments of our inquiry into human nature. What would we know of man without these two sources of information? We should be dependent on the data of our personal life, which can give us only a subjective view and which at best are but the scattered fragments of the broken mirror of humanity” (EM 206). History is a combination of art and science. Like science, history must be empirical. It grounds its narratives in what can be verified in documents and artifacts. The data of history are subject to direct scientific analyses. Further, history is more than the repetition of past events. There are no historical facts without theories any more than there are ever facts without theories in any sphere of investigation. But the historian advances more than theories about the past. The task of the historian is the reconstruction and rebirth of the past, and in accomplishing this process the historian joins with the imagination of the artist but without the freedom to engage in fictions. The historian has the task of palingenesis. As Cassirer says: “It is this ‘palingenesis,’ this rebirth of the past, which marks and distinguishes the great historian” (EM 178). History, in the great realistic drama it relates, is a great key to human self-knowledge. In stressing the empirical basis of the historian’s palingenesis, the impression should not be left that the artist is non-empirical. Great art is not simply flights of fantasy. All great artists give great attention to detail and take great care in grasping what they are writing about or in what they are painting. The fictions of the artist are precise to the actualities of the human condition. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a compilation of the exactitudes of puns, grammar, spellings, names, events, and images of the human world. Piet Mondrian’s neo-plasticist paintings of lines and primary colors are reflections of precise observations of the visibility of things.

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Perhaps the most controversial sentence in the whole of Cassirer’s writings on the philosophy of symbolic forms is that with which he begins the final chapter on science in An Essay on Man: “Science is the last step in man’s mental development and it may be regarded as the highest and most characteristic attainment of human culture” (EM 207). For all Cassirer’s insistence on the harmony of the forms and the duty of philosophy not to allow any one form to dominate culture itself, the assertion seems to go too far. It seems to reflect an Enlightenment faith in science, and to an extent it does. Cassirer underscores his point: “There is no second power in our modern world which may be compared to that of scientific thought. It is held to be the summit and consummation of all our human activities, the last chapter in the history of mankind and the most important subject of a philosophy of man” (EM 207). Cassirer makes clear that his remarks in this chapter are not intended as a full philosophy of science and that what he says of science is a summary reflection of what he has exposited in earlier works on the symbolic form of science. What is notable is his impassioned endorsement of the importance of science. Clearly Cassirer does not mean, in these comments, to violate his principle that a philosophy of symbolic forms assigns each its proper place in human culture as a whole. But he does wish to stress that science is an inestimable achievement of the human spirit. The freedom of the human spirit is its release from the immediacy of the world and its gaining a place from which this immediacy can be not only mediated but freely formed into the structure of knowledge. Science is to the pursuit of objectivity what art is to the pursuit of subjectivity. What is remarkable in Cassirer’s endorsement of the high attainment of science for human culture is his lack of any discussion of the law as an equally high attainment of human culture. Law is one of the greatest works of human culture. It is a great part of what makes human beings human and is tied to the development of civilized life itself. It is a product of reason, as is science. As mentioned earlier, Cassirer does name law as a symbolic form but he goes no further. Cassirer gave some attention in historical terms to the concept of natural law and without a doubt he regards law as a great human achievement, but its absence here remains problematic.6 One might consider this exclusion in personal terms, on the grounds that no thinker can include everything, but a chapter on law would not be beyond Cassirer’s great learning. He is the author of a philosophy more inclusive of fields of knowledge than any since Aristotle, Leibniz, and Hegel. In The Myth of the State, which became his last work be-

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cause of his sudden death, he turns to politics. Following his discussion of Plato’s Republic we find this statement: “Plato’s theory of the legal state became an everlasting possession of human culture” (MS 78). But we do not find any discussion of the importance of Roman law as the basis of Western society.

Chapter 7

Human Freedom and Politics

Politics as Symbolic Form In his inaugural lecture, “The Concept of Philosophy as a Philosophical Problem,” at the University of Göteborg, Sweden, in the fall of 1935, Cassirer employs Kant’s distinction between a scholastic conception of philosophy, as having the goal to seek “nothing more than the logical perfection of knowledge and the systematic unity of knowing” and a conceptus cosmicus, in which “philosophy is the science of the relation of all knowledge to the essential ends of human reason (teleologia rationis humanae)” (SMC 58). Cassirer says that we have mistakenly not upheld this concept of “philosophy as ‘related to the world.’ ” Cassirer quotes Albert Schweitzer, his ethical hero,1 that in this period of crisis of human culture, philosophy neglected its proper self: “But in the hour of peril the watchman slept, who should have kept watch over us. So it happened that we did not struggle for our culture” (SMC 60). Philosophy did not cause the Third Reich, but it did not call out the warning to us. Cassirer says: “I believe that all of us who have worked in the area of theoretical philosophy in the last decades deserve in a certain sense this reproach of Schweitzer: I do not exclude myself and I do not absolve myself. While endeavoring on behalf of the scholastic conception of philosophy, immersed in its difficulties as if caught in its subtle problems, we have all too frequently lost sight of the true connection of philosophy with the world” (SMC 60). Cassirer announces this officially, as a turning point in his thought. Concern with the conceptus cosmicus of philosophy is a deliberate theme in the last decade of Cassirer’s life that began in Sweden and culminates in his American works. His criticism of the Swedish philosopher Axel Hägerström’s positivism and emotivist ethics in Axel Hägerström: Eine Studie zur swedischen Philosophie der Gegenwart (1939) is part of this because such a position removes the possibility of confronting mod103

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ern barbarism with objective moral and cultural ideals. Cassirer’s debate with Hägerström’s views and the bankruptcy of modern ethics with its various schools of ethical relativism is not a philosophical exercise in scholastic philosophy of “getting it right.” It is set against the actual challenge to culture—the destruction of culture by totalitarianism. Although Cassirer continues his academic studies and investigation into pure questions in the philosophy of science and mathematics, and into problems in intellectual history (and this was one of the most creative periods of his career in these questions), from this point on the works that are the full products of his philosophical spirit are never far from the conceptus cosmicus. This is true, as we have seen, of the fifth study in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, on the “Tragedy of Culture,” and of An Essay on Man, in which, as we also have seen, he wishes to demonstrate that “human culture taken as a whole may be described as the process of man’s progressive self-liberation” (EM 228), and in his articles of the same year, “The Myth of the State” in Fortune magazine and “Judaism and the Modern Political Myths” in Contemporary Jewish Record that together led up to The Myth of the State (1946), which was left in manuscript by his sudden death in April 1945. I am not claiming that Cassirer is predominantly a political thinker, or that all of his works should be approached only through their political dimensions or implications. I do wish to call into question the belief that Cassirer is an example of the pure thinker, “the Olympian,”2 whose philosophy is an exercise in purely cognitive research, historical investigation, and scholarly quotation. This picture of the Olympian is certainly a proper part of the description of Cassirer’s mode of thought, as it is part of the description of his physical appearance, with his white hair and scholar’s brow. Mrs. Cassirer reports that he was mistaken for Einstein by a taxicab driver when he was returning from giving a lecture at Princeton on “The Myth of the State.”3 There certainly are social and political ideas openly pursued in Cassirer’s works, from the time in Sweden of his declaration of the conceptus cosmicus. These have roots in his concern for the validity of the human individual as connected with aesthetic and ethical form as early as Freiheit und Form (1916), and in his concern with human knowledge and human freedom that leads up to his confrontation with Heidegger in 1929. I do not mean to imply that Cassirer intended to culminate his philosophical system in the work of political philosophy—which, because of his death, happens to be his final work. One can see from his unpublished papers of this last decade of his life that he had various projects underway, political thought and the roots of democracy being only one

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of them. There is the work on art that he had postponed for so long, and there was his continuing interest in the implications of the “concept of group” for the mathematical and natural sciences and psychology, on which he was at work during the morning of the day of his death (SMC 271–91). He certainly would have had a role in the continuing openingup of Renaissance studies, and he would no doubt have made contributions to the field of modern linguistics. His late paper on “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics” is one of the sources for the term “structuralism.”4 None of this would have precluded contributions he might have made in the analysis of the roles of technique and the image in political life in the mid-twentieth century following the close of World War II, had he lived even a few more years. Is politics a symbolic form? The answer is, yes. We can think of politics as being a total way in which human experience is ordered, as having a logic that would display its own “inner form.” Cassirer says: “For there is, after all, a logic of the social world just as there is a logic of the physical world. There are certain laws that cannot be violated with impunity” (MS 295). Politics arises from the power of the symbol to give the object particular meanings in the activity of the knower that have a different “tonality” than are given in, say, art or religion or purely scientific thought. We can imagine—and, in fact, find a large amount of evidence in various studies of politics—that there is a political space and time, and a distinctively political understanding of causality, subjectivity, and objectivity, of the relation of whole to part, and so forth. We can imagine a chapter in An Essay on Man titled “Politics,” in which Cassirer, beginning from Hegel’s formulation of the interlocking forms and sub-forms of social and political life in the Philosophy of Right, moves back toward his treatment of such forms in the earlier Phenomenology of Spirit as activities of the self-formation of consciousness. Then, using the Kantian vectors of space, time, and causality as guides, Cassirer might construct an account of the inner form of politics as part of human culture. Such an account would undoubtedly be of great interest and value. But would such an account—even developed not simply as a chapter, but as a whole book—constitute Cassirer’s possible contribution to political philosophy? The answer is, no.

Relation of Philosophy to Politics In The Myth of the State, Cassirer makes it clear that philosophy has a different relation to man’s cultural and social life than simply to understand the epistemological structure of political thought. The philosophi-

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cal understanding of science or art may exert some influence on these as actual activities, but philosophy does not have a duty to be a force in their natures. The case of man’s political life is different. Cassirer finds himself caught between Hegel and Plato. He says: “Our modern philosophers seem long ago to have given up all hope of influencing the course of political and social events. Hegel had the highest opinion of the worth and dignity of philosophy. Nevertheless, it was Hegel himself who declared that philosophy comes always too late for the reform of the world” (MS 295). Cassirer has in mind Hegel’s famous dictum in the Philosophy of Right that every philosopher is a child of his own time, and the image that the Owl of Minerva takes flight only at the falling of the dusk. The image of the wisdom that philosophy seeks would be that open to the “pure spectators,” taken literally, in the original characterization given of the philosophos by Pythagoras. The philosopher can observe and draw together events only after they have happened. Cassirer would see this passive attitude as false to the true spirit of philosophy. As he continues: “In this case philosophy would be nothing but a sort of speculative idleness” (MS 295). Cassirer says that Plato is enough to refute this passivity as proper to the philosophical spirit. Cassirer may have in mind here Plato’s attempts to influence political rule in his trips to Sicily, as well as the Republic and the Laws. But Cassirer is also aware that Hegel wrote a number of shorter works on actual political problems. Cassirer is really touching on the ancient notion found in both Plato and Aristotle, that there is a natural connection between wisdom in general and practical wisdom or phronēsis. Philosophy cannot stand to the polis, to civil life, simply as an activity of theoretical thought. Philosophy is to teach us how to live. Cassirer cites and endorses Plato’s procedure in the Republic, that the nature of the soul must be understood as it is writ large in the form of the state, or in Cassirer’s terms, in the system of the forms of human culture. Cassirer appeals to Kant’s endorsement of Plato’s Republic as a valuable statement of an ideal rather than an unreal utopia, and he sees Kant as making a powerful connection between the ability of theoretical thought to form ideals of knowledge that pass beyond the simple grasp of facts and our corresponding ability to form ideals of conduct against the prevailing state of affairs. Cassirer says: “Kant’s observation that for the human understanding it is both necessary and indispensable to distinguish between the reality and possibility of things expresses not only a general characteristic of theoretical reason but a truth about practical reason as well” (MS 60).

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Cassirer has not lost the dedication to the conceptus cosmicus of philosophy that he proclaimed a decade earlier. He states, finally, in The Myth of the State: “The great thinkers of the past were not only ‘their own times apprehended in thought.’ Very often they had to think beyond and against their times. Without this intellectual and moral courage, philosophy could not fulfill its task in man’s cultural and social life” (MS 296). Cassirer’s answer to Hegel’s image of the Owl of Minerva is Schweitzer’s image of the watchman. Cassirer does not regard philosophy as a power to correct actively the ills of social life. In this regard, then, he does not have a Deweyan or pragmatist’s sense of philosophy as social problem solving. Cassirer does regard human culture as a manifestation and a proof of the reality of human freedom. In his essay on “ ‘Spirit’ and ‘Life’ in Contemporary Philosophy,” Cassirer sees a functional relationship between Leben and Geist, in which the free flow of Leben undergoes a dialectical change into Geist, as has been discussed earlier. In his discussion of Simmel’s essay on “The Concept and Tragedy of Culture” Cassirer argues, as we have seen, against Simmel’s view that in culture there is an abandonment of self, in which the self is forever alienated from the world. Cassirer says that Simmel has presented the problem with “complete decisiveness”; but, he says, Simmel doubts that there is any solution. Cassirer says that, according to Simmel, “philosophy is able only to point out the conflict; it can assure no final way out of it. For the deeper reflection penetrates, the more it reveals the dialectical structure of cultural consciousness” (LCS 105). In this dialectic the individual ego finds its own reality smothered in the multiplicity of cultural achievements. Cassirer does not wish to deny the profound tensions that exist within culture, and we need go no further than the aesthetic process to understand the tension between the creator and tradition. But Cassirer holds that “ ‘spirit’ has achieved what was denied to ‘life.’ Here the becoming and the effect of individuals are linked to the whole in a totally different and more profound way. What individuals feel, will, and think does not remain enclosed within themselves; it is objectified in their work” (LCS 126). The individual’s Werk is what is achieved in terms of language, art, literature, science, religion, and so on. It is within such “works” that the individual finds his reality objectified, and not in the retreat back into the stream of life. In An Essay on Man, Cassirer concludes that human culture is founded in the phenomenon of human freedom, the freedom to leave both the expressive immediacy of felt experience and the “factual object” and to produce an ideal world.

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This view of culture and the concrete forms upon which cultural work depends is highly Goethean. Along with Schiller, it is Goethe that Cassirer quotes against Heidegger at Davos, in defending his view of culture as liberation against Heidegger’s conception of the human situation as bound up in Geworfenheit. Later, in The Myth of the State and in his lectures during his American period, Cassirer connects Heidegger’s conception of human existence with Spengler’s conception of history, in which history is seen no longer as a process of human liberty, but rather as a framework in which we can only divine the nature of our place (SMC 228–29). Cassirer says that Spengler has reduced the philosophy of history to the art of divination. This way of looking at things, at the individual in terms of his thrownness or Geworfenheit, and at the historical period in terms of the divination of conditions, is of a piece with the mentality of the modern politician. Cassirer says: “Our modern political life has abruptly returned to forms which seemed to have been entirely forgotten. To be sure, we no longer have the primitive kind of sortilege, the divination by lot; we no longer observe the flight of birds nor do we inspect the entrails of slain animals. We have developed a much more refined and elaborate method of divination—a method that claims to be scientific and philosophical” (MS 289). As Heidegger put his case for Geworfenheit at Davos, human freedom is not something that can be a project of Geist—an activity, a Werk. In his remarks at Davos, Heidegger states that a human being stands “in a particular condition of being bound up with beings. In the midst of this it finds itself, not in the sense of a spirit which looks down on it, but rather in the sense that Dasein, thrown into the midst of beings, as free, carries out an incursion into the being which is always spiritual and, in the ultimate sense, accidental. [It is] so accidental that the highest form of the existence of Dasein is only allowed to lead back to very few and rare glimpses of Dasein’s duration between living and death.”5 Cassirer holds that such a view puts philosophy in a position where it “can no longer do its duty.” When freedom is made a matter of contingency, history and culture are no longer understood as activities of self-knowledge. The Socratic ideal is given up and man is robbed of the basis for self-respect. Cassirer is of course speaking only of Heidegger’s views expressed at Davos and as developed in Being and Time. What he might have thought of Heidegger’s later critique of technology can never be known. But he would have had no sympathy for Heidegger’s notorious statement, in his Introduction to Metaphysics of 1935 and retained in his corrected text of

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1953, asserting that “the works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man)—have all been written by men fishing in the troubled waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities.’ ”6 What Cassirer is against, then, in his own way, is nihilism. He is against the notion that we cannot know the whole and that we cannot make ethical sense of culture. Cassirer holds that we can connect culture to the ancient project of self-knowledge, and that man can understand himself in relation to his own work and not simply in relationship to Being. The focus on Being, to the exclusion of all else, makes moral philosophy impossible. Geist ceases to be a medium of Being and Leben takes over. Philosophy becomes the analysis of Dasein coupled with the “meditative thinking” of Being. To think in terms of ideals becomes an activity of human delusion, of fishing in the troubled waters of “values” and “totalities,” and not one of distinctive human achievement. In Cassirer’s terms, then, philosophy “can no longer do its duty”; it is the watchman who merely watches and waits, who has no basis on which to sound the alarm in times of political crisis or to instruct in phronēsis in times of peace. In Cassirer’s view, however, philosophy has no power over the political process itself. Philosophy never causes nor alters the nature of the times. But philosophy can instruct those who can listen. Viewed in these terms, I find Cassirer’s conception of the “duty” of philosophy to be more Platonic—and even Hegelian—than Kantian. Cassirer’s position seems most of all to counsel prudence. When we know the actual condition of things, prudence can guide human action in relation to ideals. In the end, Cassirer does not advocate a Kantian formulation of right imperatives formed from human reason, expecting us to reform the course of events on the basis of them. His view seems much more in touch with the classical pursuit of justice.

Human Freedom Cassirer’s original contribution to political philosophy, I think, may be understood along two lines: his conception of human freedom and its grounding in the epistemological process, and his understanding of political modernity in relation to his analysis of primitive, mythical thought. Neither of these themes, human freedom or myth in political life, are unique as such to Cassirer; they can be found in various ways in much of the writings on modern politics. But in his case, as in the case

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of Hegel, and unlike so much of modern writing on politics, Cassirer’s views are grounded in a total philosophy of human experience. Cassirer approaches his understanding of the state and political life from the perspective of his whole philosophical position, not as a set of special topics in a special field. In speaking about the connection of finitude and infinitude, in his disputation with Heidegger at Davos, Cassirer stressed the central principle of the philosophy of symbolic forms—that man can change the form of his Dasein. Man’s power to transform his lived experience into some objective shape allows him to take his finitude as a point of departure toward infinitude. Man’s position is one of immanent infinitude. Cassirer claims that man must possess “the metabasis which leads him from the immediacy of his existence into the region of pure form.”7 At Davos he underscored this claim by paraphrasing the last lines of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which are themselves a paraphrase of Schiller’s poem “Friendship.” Cassirer said: “From out of the chalice of this spiritual realm, infinity flows to him” (“Aus dem Kelche dieses Geisterreiches strömt ihm die Unendlichkeit”).8 Human freedom is the act of selfdetermination or formation in which the finite and infinite intersect. In his paraphrase, Cassirer moves the subject (him) from the Godhead, as it is in the original, to man, as the creator of the forms of culture. Human freedom is a theme that runs throughout the development of philosophical idealism from Kant and Hegel forward. In its most optimistic form, history is understood as “the story of liberty.” In broadest terms, the Romantic thinkers on liberty can be seen as taking the Enlightenment conceptions of the democratic ideals of the “rights of man” and human progress and connecting them to the dialectical relationships inherent in cultural and historical processes. Principles that are advanced by Enlightenment thinkers largely on the basis of rational intelligibility are given content by the Romantics, who redefine reason itself as bound up with these historical and cultural processes of development. Cassirer certainly regards himself as part of these movements of philosophical history. This historical involvement of his systematic philosophy is evident in the title of his lecture to the Warburg Institute in 1936: “Critical Idealism as a Philosophy of Culture” (SMC 64–91). Cassirer always understood his philosophy as a development of philosophical idealism and its transformation of certain ideas from eighteenth-century thought. The one item among Cassirer’s papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale that is not his own work is an extensive essay on Thomas Jefferson that he had clipped from a newspaper.

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Although Cassirer does not present a phenomenology of ethical consciousness, he implies and occasionally says that with the development of this epistemological distance from the immediacy of the object there is a corresponding freedom of the self from the world. This freedom is accompanied by the self ’s realization of the powers of its own reality. The self realizes its own freedom in its power to transform Leben into Geist, to create the world of culture through the power of the symbol. Without this power to separate the object in the world from thought and consciousness, the self cannot achieve the freedom of its own being. In Cassirer’s view, this freedom is not realized by the individual simply as individual but in the individual’s Werk, in culture. Thus we could say that, for Cassirer as for Aristotle, ethics is part of politics. The state is made through this power of human freedom, and is guided by those ideals that are present within each of the symbolic forms of cultural life that, when cultural life is at its best, form a totality.

The State States become degenerate or barbarous when there is a major imbalance among the symbolic forms of cultural life. Although the symbolic forms contain truths and ideals that are more than political in form, they live through the life of the state. From one perspective, political life can be considered as having a distinctive inner form and a logic of its own. It can be understood as a way of knowing and symbolization, that is, a symbolic form. From another perspective, political life is the medium through which the system of symbolic forms exists. Viewed in this way, philosophy is parallel to politics in that it is not a symbolic form but the intellectual medium through which the unity or harmony among the differences of the symbolic forms can be understood. Philosophy is the watchman, the conscience of the state. The role of political philosophy is to understand each of the forms of culture and to be the agent of our awareness of the fragmentation and imbalances that naturally occur within culture. As mentioned above, there is a tendency for each symbolic form to claim all of knowledge and reality for itself. The philosopher is the spectator who can see the whole and who, as a conscience, can sound the warning. The periods of social crisis that generate the dominance of one form over others is not caused by the philosopher, nor can it be solved by purely philosophical means. As Cassirer makes clear in regard to the dominance of myth in modern political life, “It is beyond the power of philosophy to destroy the politi-

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cal myths. A myth is in a sense invulnerable. It is impervious to rational arguments; it cannot be refuted by syllogisms. But philosophy can do us another important service. It can make us understand the adversary” (MS 296). Cassirer is the only major philosopher of the twentieth century to have a fully developed philosophy of mythology and to ground his conception of knowledge in it. Cassirer’s rediscovery of the myth raises in new terms the question of the origin of human knowledge and sets his epistemology apart from all others which ground their conception of cognition in our empirical-commonsensical apprehension of the world. Cassirer shows that this is not the key to the “life-world.” The lifeworld of our sensible grasp of the object is not originally analogical to the empirical world of qualities and things. The life-world is originally expressive—that is, mythical. Our empirical world that we apprehend with sensations of objects is itself an outgrowth of a world of mythical forces that live within sensation, within our own distinctive powers of sensuous expression. The myth “thinks” directly on the level of the senses. Any theory of knowledge that cannot account for the very origins of knowledge itself allows cognition to dictate what it is, rather than the reverse. To begin our understanding of human knowledge where it itself begins is to have a guarantee, at least in principle, that we know what we are talking about when we say what knowledge is. Not to know where knowledge comes from, in cultural terms, is to further the illusion of cognitive science, namely, that the origin of knowledge is understandable in psychological terms. What can be said of the philosophy of knowledge can also be said of political philosophy. To hold to a political philosophy that does not offer an account of the origin and whole of political life is to philosophize by lamplight only, illuminating the world of the polis piece by piece. Political life originates in the myth. Myth, Cassirer holds, is not only a way of thinking: it is also a life form. To have an independently developed philosophy of mythical consciousness, as Cassirer does, becomes crucial for the comprehension of the modern state and modern political life because myth is the form that comes to dominate other forms of our modern political life. To attempt to understand myth by studying it as it operates in modern political life is a mistake, for it will ultimately be whatever political life is. In so doing we will have a collection of the characteristics of myth as we find it, but we will have no genuine philosophy of mythology.

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In this realm, as in others, it seems Cassirer has taken heed of Vico’s claim that “the first science to be learned should be mythology.”9 Thus when Cassirer, as philosophical watchman, applies his intelligence to the modern political state, he has at his disposal his complete philosophy of mythical thought of the second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. This allows him, unlike other thinkers, to understand two things, neither of which has been adequately appreciated by those in political science and political philosophy: he can understand why Hitler persecuted the Jews, and he can understand the sense in which the Third Reich is the first formulation of the forces that shape contemporary political and social life—although as forces in the hands of the Third Reich they appear in their most malignant form.

Judaism: The Ethical and the Mythical In “Judaism and the Modern Political Myths” (1944) Cassirer asks why it is that Hitler, in his address marking the eleventh anniversary of the National Socialist regime (when, as Cassirer says, “no Jew could any longer speak or even breathe or live in Germany”), directs his remarks not to the victory of Germany but to the menace of the Jews. Cassirer writes: “Does he think of the defeat of his armies, of the destruction of German cities? Nothing of the kind. His whole attention is still fixed on one point. He is obsessed and hypnotized by one thing alone. He speaks of—the Jews. If I am defeated—he says—Jewry could celebrate a second triumphant Purim festival. What worries him is not the future destiny of Germany, but the ‘triumph’ of the Jews.”10 Cassirer explains this attack on the Jews—that could have no political consequences, nor arise from any traditional political concerns—in terms of what he has discovered: in terms of the philosophy of culture. Hitler has based the German state on the revival of a mythical orientation of the individual consciousness merged with the consciousness of the state. But within the development of human culture itself is the breakdown of the mythical world. The challenge to mythic belief in the truth of the immediacy of the object is marked by the rise of religion. Within that rise are developed the roots of ethical consciousness—the sense of the self as responsible. The fortune and fate of the life of the collective in society, governed by totem and taboo, is challenged by religious consciousness. In Cassirer’s view, in Western history this break with myth comes about through the ancient Hebrew prophets. In reli-

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gion, symbols do not carry their own meaning; the negative aspect of graven images occurs when consciousness can keep the meaning of the image at a distance rather than be absorbed in its immediacy. One can understand Hitler’s attack on the Jews in many ways, but Cassirer argues that none of them explain it ultimately. Hitler’s attack is at base a reenactment of the ancient struggle between myth and the religious-ethical consciousness, and this struggle is fundamental to man’s political life. In his final chapter of The Myth of the State, which is connected to this 1944 essay on Judaism, Cassirer goes further than an analysis of the basis of the Nazi state. He has the Nazi state in mind, but he also has in mind the whole form of what he sees to be modern political life. It would be a mistake to think that his book is only about Hitler’s Germany, and he is careful to state his claims much more broadly. Cassirer can see that the modern state, like that of the Germany of the Third Reich, has been built on the association of technology and myth. And further, that there has been developed a technique of the myth. These are the techniques of modern communication—our ability to take a mythical form of consciousness and present it as a master image to the mass, to all the members of society. This image allows the individual to form his experience without thinking. The individual is placed within the world by such images, and finds no need to confront the object rationally, or to establish a form of self-knowledge. Technique, as the form of acting and working in the world, offers certainty. All that can be accomplished occurs by the pursuit of technical ordering of events and processes. We can live in terms of an ensemble of means. But the ensemble of means that determines our everyday actions, even our national achievements, carries with it no spiritual meaning of its own. For this we must turn to the mass mythical image, which offers placement and orientation in the world but in so doing holds us in the grasp of its immediacy. Thought and ethical understanding become unnecessary, or need trouble us very little. Cassirer says: “Our modern politicians know very well that great masses are much more easily moved by the force of the imagination than by sheer physical force. And they have made ample use of this knowledge. The politician becomes a sort of public fortuneteller. Prophecy is an essential element in the new technique of rulership. The most improbable or even impossible promises are made; the millennium is predicted over and over again” (MS 289). The Third Reich did not depend upon propaganda in its traditional sense of contrived lies that appeal to the emotions with the hope that the individual’s reason will not come into play. The Third Reich created a

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world of master images, in which the spirit of each individual, and Geist itself, was given a total orientation such that thought was unnecessary. It was a world impervious to argument or to the rational ideal. What the Third Reich did was to create what we now, in a benign way, call the media, advertising—what has become the world of the electronic image. Cassirer was not the only person to see this. Jaspers describes this in very specific terms in Man in the Modern Age (1931).11 But Cassirer saw this as set against a complete philosophy of the mythic image and of the interaction of the forms of human culture. Cassirer understood that in the modern state politics is technique, the technique of the image. I do not think, however, that Cassirer would deny that images and myths are required in the political process, in order that the principles of a constitutional society can be envisaged and held before the mind as ideal. No state can survive as a purely rational entity. It must enter the memories and imagination of the citizens and live as a set of passions and feelings as well as thoughts. Cassirer has been regarded as condemning myth as intrinsically dangerous in the political process, and he does speak this way, but I think he deliberately overstates his case in order to gain the reader’s attention. The danger is not that the state requires an image of itself as part of its political life, but that the process of images and their immediacy becomes the very being of the state. At such a point all reality of law and political principle is lost, and images become the basis of the meaning of images. We do not, then, resolve a question about the meaning of a political myth by comparing it to a constitutional principle, but by invoking a further political myth, a further form of absorbing emotions. If we extend Cassirer’s approach, the democratic state requires that the rational forms of political and legal principles stand in a dialectical relationship to the popular or mythic images that make such principles live for the imagination. But I share Cassirer’s view of the watchman. Philosophy cannot guarantee such a corrective of the image. It can only warn of the dangers of politics as the technique of the image. Cassirer has offered a powerful warning. It is powerful not simply because it is formulated as a view of political philosophy but because it is made from the perspective of a total understanding of human culture. Cassirer concludes The Myth of the State with a warning: “Our science, our poetry, our art, and our religion are only the upper layer of a much older stratum that reaches down to great depth. We must always be prepared for violent concussions that may shake our cultural world and our social order to its very foundations” (MS 297). For Cassirer,

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political philosophy is ultimately normative, not descriptive. It is normative in two senses: political philosophy, being grounded in a total philosophy of culture, holds up to actual political life the ideal of a harmony of all symbolic forms, a sense of proportion among all the activities of Geist that political organization makes possible. And it is normative in the sense of sounding the alarm when this sense of justice in spiritual order begins to collapse into its origins in myth. Cassirer says: “As long as these forces, intellectual, ethical, and artistic, are in full strength, myth is tamed and subdued. But once they begin to lose their strength chaos is come again. Mythical thought then starts to rise anew and to pervade the whole of man’s cultural and social life” (MS 298). If Cassirer’s approach is correct, the greatest threat to modern political life is the collapse of social life into a primitive life-world. If Cassirer is correct, then no political philosophy that does not ground itself in a philosophy of culture, and especially in a philosophy of mythical thought, can do its duty of informing us when things go wrong, and telling us how they do so. I have attempted to present a picture of Cassirer’s political philosophy and the sense in which it is a genuine part of his thought. Cassirer’s political philosophy does not offer a view on all the various problems that traditionally form part of political philosophy. Cassirer’s approach is in a sense very untraditional, because he largely focuses on the modern condition and on the role philosophy can play in relation to it. He focuses only indirectly on what an ideal state should be: one governed by a harmony among the symbolic forms. In this Cassirer’s view is very like that of Plato’s in the Republic, put into cultural terms: the aim of our political life must be justice, in the sense of an order of the soul that is also an order of the state. It is myth when not properly directed that contains the abiding threat to the just state.

Appendix

A Bibliographical Essay

An Overview The following remarks are intended as an overview of scholarship and scholarly materials on Cassirer and his writings. To my knowledge no such essay exists. It may be useful for anyone seeking a grasp of the state of Cassirer studies, despite any defects and omissions it may contain. In regard to critical literature on Cassirer, the various works I mention are intended only to give the reader a sense of what exists. Of the many works not mentioned, the fact that I do not mention them is in no sense intended as a judgment of their value and importance. Those pursuing particular research on Cassirer must turn to the available bibliographies.

Bibliographies of Cassirer’s Published Writings There are three comprehensive bibliographies of Cassirer’s published works. Quite useful is the one compiled by C. H. Hamburg and W. M. Solmitz that appears at the end of the Library of Living Philosophers volume: The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. P. A. Schilpp (Evanston, Ill.: Library of Living Philosophers, 1949). This volume has been reprinted several times, first by Tudor and then by Open Court Publishing Company. It orders Cassirer’s writings chronologically and includes the table of contents of each of Cassirer’s books. A second comprehensive bibliography, compiled by R. Klibansky and W. M. Solmitz, appears at the end of the Ernst Cassirer Festschrift: Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. R. Klibansky and H. J. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963). This volume originally appeared in 1936, published by Clarendon Press, Oxford. The bibliography that appeared in the 1936 edition is brought up to date in the 1963 edition. It organizes Cassirer’s works not by an overall chronol117

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ogy but by categories under two main headings: A. Systematic Philosophy, and B. History of Philosophy, with subheadings. The essays in this volume have only passing citations to Cassirer, but the contributors are figures famous in their fields. Among them are J. Huizinga, S. Alexander, L. Brunschvicg, É. Gilson, G. Gentile, L. S. Stebbing, T. Litt, É. Bréhier, L. Lévy-Bruhl, E. Panofsky, and Ortega y Gasset. A third comprehensive bibliography of Cassirer’s works appears in the first part of Ernst Cassirer: An Annotated Bibliography, ed. W. Eggers and S. Mayer (New York: Garland, 1988). This bibliography classifies Cassirer’s works in terms of type of publication: books, essays, reviews, and so forth. It contains a section of “Miscellaneous Items by Cassirer,” which includes several incidental items that do not appear in the two previous bibliographies, such as remarks Cassirer made on his chessplaying that appear in Edward Lasker, Chess for Fun and Chess for Blood (New York: McKay, 1950). See also SMC 2n1.

Bibliographies of Writings on Cassirer The above-mentioned volume of Eggers and Mayer, Ernst Cassirer: An Annotated Bibliography, lists critical literature on Cassirer in all languages, classified in terms of books, essays, reviews, dissertations, and so forth, to 1988. There is no supplement to this volume. Two good database sources for work on Cassirer from 1988 to the present are Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) First Search: List of Records and The Philosopher’s Index. These list works in various languages.

The Hamburg Edition of Cassirer’s Gesammelte Werke In the past approximately ten years, volumes of a critical edition of Cassirer’s published works have appeared. This edition, Gesammelte WerkeHamburger Ausgabe, is published by Felix Meiner and is twenty-five volumes, arranged in chronological order, beginning with Leibniz’ System (vol. 1) and ending with The Myth of the State (vol. 25). The edition is under the general editorship of Birgit Recki (University of Hamburg). The volumes of this edition supersede those of Cassirer’s works published by the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, beginning in the 1950s.

The Cassirer Papers and Their Publication A substantial quantity of papers was left at Cassirer’s death in 1945. The papers were originally in the care of Charles Hendel of the Department

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of Philosophy at Yale University, who had been instrumental in bringing Cassirer to the faculty in 1941. The papers became the property of Yale University Press in 1964. From 1964 to 1987, with the agreement of the press, the papers were held in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and could be seen only by special permission. The papers were for the most part in 220 manila envelopes. A rough card-file catalogue was made of them. The papers remained in this condition, unexamined by any qualified Cassirer scholar, until 1972, when I examined the contents of each of the envelopes. My work then led to transcribing, editing, and publishing twelve of them, at the invitation of the Yale University Press, in the volume: Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935–1945 (1979). Ten of the papers in this volume are essays and lectures in which Cassirer attempted to introduce his philosophy of symbolic forms and philosophy of culture to his new American audience. A major treasure in the papers was the manuscripts that comprise The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, which John Michael Krois, my former doctoral student, and I edited and published in 1996. In 1987 the physical rights of the papers were transferred to the Beinecke Library, with the press retaining the literary rights. The papers were fully and professionally catalogued in 1990 and have the designation GEN MSS 98. They are housed in fifty-seven boxes, divided into four series: Books, Essays and Lectures, Correspondence, and Personal Papers, with an additional two boxes of oversized material. They are available to any qualified scholar visiting the Beinecke Library. Not all of Cassirer’s papers are in the Beinecke collection, as I have a number of miscellaneous materials from Cassirer’s courses, including lightly annotated, typed lectures for an introductory course in Greek philosophy, given to me by Charles Hendel and John E. Smith of the Yale Department of Philosophy. In 1995 a multivolume edition of Cassirer’s papers, Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, was begun, published by Felix Meiner, the first volume of which was the original German text of the fourth volume of the Philosophie der symbolischen Formen: Zur Metaphysik der symbolischen Formen, edited by John Michael Krois and Oswald Schwemmer. The series has continued under the general editorship of Krois, Schwemmer, and Klaus Christian Köhnke. The editorial base for this edition is the Cassirer Edition Project at Humboldt University, Berlin. For a more complete assessment of Cassirer’s papers, see Vincent Giroud, “Appendix: How the Cassirer Papers Came to Yale,” in Symbolic

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Forms and Cultural Studies: Ernst Cassirer’s Theory of Culture, ed. Cyrus Hamlin and John Michael Krois (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 263–69.

Cassirer’s Library For approximately two decades following Cassirer’s death, a substantial number of his books were housed, unsecured, on the shelves of the Philosophy Reading Room on the sixth floor of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. His library was purchased in 1966 by the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle as part of a program to increase its holdings in philosophy. When I visited the Chicago library a number of months after the purchase, many of Cassirer’s books were held in closed stacks and in the process of being catalogued, but some had been allowed to disappear into the general collection, with no record kept. It contained, to my memory, many extremely valuable, rare, and first editions of works by figures in which Cassirer specialized, such as Newton, Descartes, and Leibniz. I observed very little marginalia in the books I examined, an exception being some brief marginal notes in Cassirer’s hand in his copy of Heidegger’s Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Bonn: Verlag Friedrich Cohen, 1929). See the essay by Vincent Giroud, mentioned above, for further details on Cassirer’s library.

Biographies of Cassirer There are two firsthand biographies of Cassirer. One is the biographical essay by Dimitry Gawronsky, “Ernst Cassirer: His Life and Work,” followed by four addresses delivered at the memorial service for Cassirer held at Columbia University and several pages of recollections of Cassirer by the philosopher Hendrik J. Pos in the Library of Living Philosophers volume, The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, 3–72. Gawronsky’s essay was published in place of the autobiographical essay Cassirer would have written, in accordance with the general format of this series, had he not died before the completion of the volume on his work. The other biography is an autobiography-biography written by Cassirer’s wife, Toni Cassirer: Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981). This was written during a period of three years following Cassirer’s death; she added an afterword in December 1950. It was originally issued privately. The privately issued copy I have appears to have been duplicated from typed stencils and run off on a mimeograph machine, photocopying being then a thing of the future.

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For a brief intellectual biography, see my introduction, “The Development of Cassirer’s Philosophy,” in Thora Ilin Bayer, Cassirer’s Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: A Philosophical Commentary (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 1–37. For a biography by a German Cassirer scholar, see Heinz Paetzold, Ernst Cassirer, von Marburg nach New York: Eine philosophische Biographie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995). Volume 18 of Cassirer’s Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte contains Cassirer’s correspondence from the beginning to the end of his career (Ernst Cassirer, Ausgewählter wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, ed. J. M. Krois [Hamburg: Meiner, 2009]). Not widely known is the location of Cassirer’s grave. He is buried in the Cedar Park Beth-El Cemeteries in Westwood, New Jersey. Toni Cassirer died in 1961 and is buried beside him. Both graves are marked by simple stones.

The Davos Meeting between Cassirer and Heidegger This is a topic that deserves some independent mention. Of prime interest is a little periodical, Davoser Revue: Zeitschrift für Literatur, Wissenschaft, Kunst und Sport, vol. 4, no. 7 (April 15, 1929), which is dedicated to a “Bericht über die II. Davoser Hochschulkurse 17.März–6.April.” It contains photographs of the various professors and summaries of their lectures in these short courses, including those of Heidegger and Cassirer. It shows that Heidegger directed his lectures to themes in his Kant interpretation. Cassirer directed his lectures to themes in his philosophy of symbolic forms, but concluded with a discussion of the problem of death (das Todesproblem). There is also a summary of the special lecture Cassirer gave on Leben and Geist in Scheler’s philosophy that I mentioned in chapter 4. A newspaper article in the Abendblatt der Frankfurter Zeitung, “Denken dieser Zeit. Fakultäten und Nationen treffen sich in Davos” (April 22, 1929), reported that there were over 200 students and about 30 professors at Davos. Most of these were German, French, and Swiss. The report makes clear that the major issue was the opposition between the views of Cassirer and Heidegger concerning Dasein and the possibilities and meaning of human freedom. This substantial news report of the time does not characterize the debate between Cassirer and Heidegger as a debate over Kant, as it has come to be called in academic circles. The central document of the Davos meeting is a summary report or Protokoll of this debate, done by Hans Bollnow and Joachim Ritter,

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“Arbeitsgemeinschaft Cassirer-Heidegger.” The copy I have is from the literary estate of the associate of Heidegger, W. Szilasi, given to me by his literary executor, Ernesto Grassi. It is one of the original hektographiert copies (printed on a duplicating machine, from stencils) of eight closely typed pages that were distributed to those at the Davos courses. It corresponds word for word to the text of what is printed in Guido Schneeberger, Ergänzungen zu einer Heidegger-Bibliographie (Bern, 1960). A much expanded version (nearly twice as long) of the text of the disputation is to be found in the appendix of Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 4th ed., enlarged (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1973). See Heidegger’s footnote on the text of the disputation in the preface to this edition. The English translation is “Davos Disputation between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger,” in Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 4th ed., enlarged, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 171–85. See also Pierre Aubenque, ed., Débat sur le kantisme et la philosophie (Davos, mars 1929) et autres textes de 1929–1931, trans. P. Aubenque, J. M. Fataud, and P. Quillet (Paris: Beauchesne, 1972). Among the discussions of the Davos debate, see Dominic Kaegi and Enno Rudolph, Cassirer-Heidegger: 70 Jahre Davoser Disputation (Hamburg: Meiner, 2002), and Peter Eli Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), which is a comprehensive treatment of all aspects and sources of the Davos event, including a translation and passage-by-passage commentary of the Bollnow and Ritter text as it appears in the fourth edition of Heidegger’s Kant, as cited above.

Cassirer Conferences and the International Ernst Cassirer Society In October 1974 a conference was held at the University of Hamburg to honor the 100th anniversary of Cassirer’s birth. A small bust of Cassirer was placed in the university. Major papers were delivered by Herman Lübbe, Ernst Gombrich, Karl-Otto Apel, John Searle, and Nelson Goodman. Goodman’s paper, “Words, Works, Worlds,” became the basis for his Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). The center of academic work on Cassirer over the past several decades has been in Europe. Two major conferences held outside Europe have resulted in two volumes of papers on Cassirer. Symbolic Forms and Cultural Studies: Ernst Cassirer’s Theory of Culture, ed. Cyrus Hamlin and John Michael Krois

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(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004) reflects a conference held at Yale University in October 1996 on “Philosophy of Culture and Symbolic Forms: New Perspectives on Ernst Cassirer.” The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Barash (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), reflects a conference held at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in May 1998 on “Ernst Cassirer: Symbol, Science, and Culture.” The Internationale Ernst-Cassirer Gesellschaft was founded in October 1993. “The aim of the Society is to coordinate and further research concerning the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer and to support the edition of Cassirer’s unpublished writings.” Information on the activities of the society, its directorate, and membership can be found by consulting its website. There is a Swedish Ernst Cassirer Society based in Göteborg, where Cassirer taught during his years in Sweden, which began publishing a monograph series in 2004. A conference organized by Fabrizio Lomonaco to celebrate eighty years since the publication of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms was held in Naples in October 2010.

Critical Literature on Cassirer In 1964, nearly two decades after Cassirer’s death, I compiled the first bibliography of critical work on Cassirer, seeking out critical work in all languages (Bulletin of Bibliography 24 [1964]: 104–6). Using the search methods available at the time, I was able to document eighty-six items, but this list contained only some reviews of Cassirer’s works. Finding less than 100 items was astonishing, given the fact that Cassirer’s An Essay on Man and The Myth of the State were some of the most widely read philosophical books in print. A list maintained some years ago by the Yale University Press showed translations of these two books into many European and Asian languages. The English translation of the three volumes of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms had been available for several years, along with Susanne Langer’s widely read translation of Language and Myth (1946). This bibliography established that while Cassirer was a philosopher widely read in English and was beginning to be read again in Germany, with the reprinting of his books in the editions of the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, no body of scholarship had accrued. Except for Carl H. Hamburg, Symbol and Reality: Studies in the Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer

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(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), no single philosophical study was available. Most of the articles were on various problems or themes with which their authors were concerned and had found a connection with something in Cassirer’s work. The Eggers and Mayer bibliography has subsequently shown that there were a great number of reviews of Cassirer’s works, beginning with fifteen reviews of his first book, Leibniz’ System. Among these reviews is one by Leo Strauss of The Myth of the State (Strauss wrote his doctoral dissertation on Jacobi at Hamburg, under Cassirer’s direction). See Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959), 292–96 (orig. pub. Social Research 14 [1947]: 125–28). Strauss considers The Myth of the State to be a missed opportunity for Cassirer to achieve “a radical transformation of the philosophy of symbolic forms into a teaching whose center is moral philosophy.” Another review is of An Essay on Man, by the Yale metaphysician Brand Blanshard, who writes: “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” (Philosophical Review 54 [1945]: 510). The main source for interpretation of Cassirer’s thought, and an invaluable one, was the above-mentioned Library of Living Philosophers volume, The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (1949), but one feature of the twenty-three essays in the volume was that their authors found it difficult to put Cassirer’s work in any firm, critical perspective. The essays, although of high quality, are largely expository and appreciative. They only tentatively raise some questions, mainly those that have followed his philosophy since—the extent of his neo-Kantianism, the role of Hegel in Cassirer’s theory of symbolic forms, and how the overall structure of his philosophy is to be understood. By 1974, with the appearance of a special issue on Cassirer of the Revue Internationale de Philosophie 28, no. 110 (1974) with major articles on his work by Hans Blumenberg, Susanne Langer, Nathan Rotenstreich, and John E. Smith, the number of books, articles, dissertations, and reviews had grown to a total of 288, according to the bibliography by Robert Nadeau that also appeared therein. This number included items that had been previously overlooked, but it showed a major increase in the critical study of Cassirer’s work. A bibliography by Steven W. Esthimer (Bulletin of Bibliography 40 [1983]: 40–44), dealing with the decade 1969–79, showed 104 entries for that period alone.

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The bibliography of Eggers and Mayer shows that most of the scholarly work to 1988 was in essay and article form. It lists a total of only twenty-five books, which include the Library of Living Philosophers volume, two special issues of journals, the small, separately published index to the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms done by Hermann Noack (1931), and so forth. But it lists 172 essays and articles and 48 masters’ theses and doctoral dissertations, mostly in English and German, with several in French. The bulk of bibliographic items on Cassirer are the reviews of his works. In addition, there are 98 books and 137 essays that Eggers and Mayer classify as background works. Many of these treat Cassirer’s work quite significantly, although by their titles they are not directly on Cassirer, and often they include Cassirer along with other, related thinkers on a common theme. They are a significant part of the attention given to Cassirer. For example, A. W. Levi, Literature, Philosophy, and the Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), begins with the chapter “From Kant to Cassirer.” There is Merleau-Ponty’s use of Cassirer’s three functions of consciousness in The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), Paul Ricoeur’s references to Cassirer’s conception of the symbol in Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), and the Yale Cassirer lectures of Lewis White Beck, The Actor and the Spectator (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975). Often more is said in such “background” works about a figure or an issue than in an article written directly on the topic. The work that begins the current sphere of Cassirer studies is John Michael Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), which appeared at the point where the Eggers and Mayer bibliography leaves off. An annotated bibliography that would cover Cassirer scholarship over the past two decades would be most welcome. But at present, critical literature on Cassirer must be sought through the computer sites mentioned earlier. The four main books in English on Cassirer’s philosophy in the past two decades began as doctoral dissertations—that of Krois, mentioned above (Penn State), Thora Ilin Bayer, Cassirer’s Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001) (Emory), S. G. Lofts, Ernst Cassirer: A “Repetition” of Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000) (Université Catholique de Louvain), and Edward Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008) (Oxford). These works, together with the two recent

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volumes of essays on Cassirer edited by Hamlin and Krois and Barash, cited earlier, offer a wide range of Cassirer interpretation. The reader of these four books is faced with three approaches to Cassirer’s philosophy: that it is a unique development of philosophical idealism (Krois and Bayer); that it is a “repetition” of modernity (Lofts), or that Cassirer is the last philosopher of culture, representing a world and a way of thinking that, while not without a certain value and interest, has been passed by (Skidelsky). To the perspectives of these volumes should be added Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), which has brought a great deal of attention to Cassirer; it focuses on his theory of knowledge in relation to his conception of culture. Friedman’s work also contains valuable discussion of the encounter between Cassirer and Heidegger at Davos. The German rediscovery of Cassirer began in the 1990s, signaled by the founding of the International Ernst Cassirer Society and the beginning of the publication of the Cassirer Nachlass, followed by the first volumes of the critical edition of Cassirer’s Gesammelte Werke. There is a multivolume series, Cassirer-Forschungen, published by Meiner, Hamburg. Surrounding this center of Cassirer research are numerous articles, books, and dissertations. Among these are Oswald Schwemmer, Ernst Cassirer: Ein Philosoph der europäischen Moderne (Berlin: Akademie, 1977), which, as the title implies, places Cassirer back into the center of European culture; and Enno Rudolph, Ernst Cassirer im Kontext: Kulturphilosophie zwischen Metaphysik und Historismus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003). Those studying Cassirer may wish to consult Hans Jörg Sandkühler and Detlev Pätzold, eds., Kultur und Symbol: Ein Handbuch zur Philosophie Ernst Cassirers (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003) and Heinz Paetzold, Ernst Cassirer zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2002). See also Jürgen Habermas, “The Liberating Power of Symbols: Ernst Cassirer’s Humanistic Legacy and the Warburg Library,” in The Liberating Power of Symbols: Philosophical Essays, trans. Peter Dews (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 1–29. In Italy there has been for decades a substantial interest in the philosophy of Cassirer, going back to the many writings of Leo Lugarini, including a special issue edited by Lugarini of Il Pensiero 13 (1968). There is a special issue on Cassirer of Il Cannochiale: Revista di Studi Filosofici, no. 1/2 (1991). Giulio Raio is the author of many writings on Cassirer, including Introduzione a Cassirer (Rome: Laterza, 1991). Raio has recently launched an international journal, Cassirer Studies. See also Mas-

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simo Ferrari, Ernst Cassirer: Dalla scuola de Marburgo alla filosofia della cultura (Florence: Olschki, 1996), and Irene Kajon, Il concetto dell’unità della cultura e il problema della trascendenza nella filosofia di Ernst Cassirer (Rome: Bulzoni, 1984). There has been a long-standing interest in Cassirer in France. Recall the above-mentioned 1974 issue of the Revue Internationale de Philosophie. There is also Jean Seidengart, Ernst Cassirer: De Marbourg à New York; L’itinéraire philosophique actes du colloque de Nanterre, 12–14 octobre 1988 (Paris: Cerf, 1990). Fabien Capeillères is coeditor of the French translation of Cassirer’s works and has published numerous articles on Cassirer’s philosophy. See, for example, his “Philosophy as Science: ‘Function’ and ‘Energy’ in Cassirer’s ‘Complex System’ of Symbolic Forms,” Review of Metaphysics (2007) Digital. Scholarship on Cassirer is not confined to works in English, German, Italian, and French. There is a special issue of articles in Slovenian on Cassirer covering a wide range of topics in the journal Filozofski-Vestnik 27, no. 3 (2006). There are also works on Cassirer in, for example, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, Russian, Polish, and Chinese. An overview based on the two computer lists mentioned earlier shows approximately two hundred books, articles, essays, and dissertations in all languages for the past twenty years. This is a like amount to that listed in the Eggers and Meyer bibliography of books, articles, essays, and dissertations and excluding the categories of reviews and background works to 1988. There is no question but that critical work on Cassirer has dramatically increased; although Cassirer’s interpreters take various approaches, there is no evidence that particular schools of interpretation have formed. The critical literature on Cassirer remains diverse and wide-ranging. There are various works on his historical writings but the greatest share of the critical literature focuses, in one way or another, on his theory of the symbol.

Notes

Introduction: Schema, Substance, and Symbol 1. Ernst Cassirer, “Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics: Remarks on Martin Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant,” in Kant: Disputed Questions, ed. Moltke Gram, 2nd ed. (Independence, Ohio: Ridgeview, 1984), 167–93. 2. “Davos Disputation between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger,” in Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 4th ed., enlarged, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 173. See the summary of bibliographic sources on this debate in the appendix, herein. 3. Ernst Cassirer, “The Influence of Language upon the Development of Scientific Thought,” Journal of Philosophy 39 (1942): 309–27. 4. Aristotle, Physics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1:327 (192b1–23). 5. Cassirer, “Influence of Language,” 316. 6. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), 137–56. 7. Ernst Cassirer, “Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften,” in Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956), 171–200. 8. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Das Symbol,” in Philosophische Aufsätze: Eduard Zeller, zu seinem funfzigjährigen Doctor-Jubiläum gewidmet (Leipzig: Fues’s Verlag, 1887), esp. 169–73 and 192–93. Cassirer shared an interest in Vischer’s conception of the symbol with Aby Warburg. See Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History, trans. Richard Pierce (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 14–17 and 112–15. 9. The term symbolische Form does appear as such, but not exactly in Cassirer’s sense, in a comment of Schlegel on Lessing: “I esteem Lessing because of the grand tendency of his philosophical spirit and because of the symbolic form [symbolische Form] of his work. Because of this tendency I find him gifted with genius; because of this symbolic form

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his work for me belongs in the sphere of the highest art; exactly here, in my opinion, is the single decisive mark of his work itself.” See Friedrich Schlegel, “Abschluß des Lessing-Aufsatzes,” in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 2, ed. Hans Eichner (Zurich: Thomas Verlag, 1967), 412 (my trans.). 10. Cassirer also uses the term symbolische Formen in referring to language, myth, art, religion, and mathematical and empirical knowledge in his essay “Goethe und die mathematische Physik,” which was published the same year as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in his little volume Idee und Gestalt (1921). See Ernst Cassirer, Aufsätze und kleine Schriften (1902–1921), ed. Marcel Simon, vol. 9 of Gesammelte Werke-Hamburger Ausgabe (Hamburg: Meiner, 2001), 303. 11. Dimitry Gawronsky, “Cassirer: His Life and Work,” in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston, Ill.: Library of Living Philosophers, 1949), 25. 12. Cassirer, “Der Begriff der symbolischen Form,” 175 (my trans.). 13. Ernst Cassirer, “The Problem of the Symbol and Its Place in the System of Philosophy,” trans. John Michael Krois, Man and World 2 (1978): 411–28. 14. In his Yale course on “The Philosophy of History,” Cassirer gives an example of an imaginary figure like Robinson Crusoe finding a stone on a desert island and regarding it from different perspectives of fields of knowledge, resulting in the discovery of a kind of writing on the stone, representing a language. In this example Cassirer combines the thoughtexperiment of the Linienzug with the phenomenon of the symbol being at once a physical and a spiritual object. See SMC 135–36. 15. This aspect of the Linienzug, and perhaps the Linienzug itself, echoes Leibniz’s example of a geometrical line: “And, if someone drew in one stroke a line which was now straight, now circular, now of another nature, it is possible to find a notion or rule, or equation common to all the points on this line in virtue of which these same changes must occur.” See G. W. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, trans. Peter G. Lucas and Leslie Grint (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953), 10 (sec. 6). 16. Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 282. 17. Cassirer’s term, innere Form, has a basis in Plotinus, Ennead 1.6.3 (endon eidos). See Plotinus, vol. 1, trans. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library of Harvard University Press, 2000), 240–41. 18. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Boston: Beacon, 1960), 84.

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Chapter 1. Linguistic Form: The Critique of Reason Becomes the Critique of Culture 1. My own interpretation of Hegel’s system is different from Cassirer’s, especially in terms of Hegel’s principle of the Absolute. See Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel’s Absolute: An Introduction to Reading the “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007) and Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985). 2. “Davos Disputation between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger,” in Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 4th ed., enlarged, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 183. 3. The details of objective and subjective intuition are the subject of PSF 1, chap. 3. 4. Rudolf Hermann Lotze, Logik, ed. G. Gabriel (Hamburg: Meiner, 1989; 1874, 2nd ed. 1880); for an English edition see Logic, ed. and trans. Bernard Bosanquet (Oxford: Clarendon, 1884; 2nd ed. 1887). See also PSF 1:282–83. 5. Although Cassirer does not make this connection, his interpretation of “first universals” comes close, at least in principle, to the “imaginative universals” (universali fantastici) of Giambattista Vico’s New Science. Vico’s view is grounded in his conception of “poetic wisdom,” upon which Cassirer draws in conceiving his theory of mythical thought that is the subject of PSF 2. See The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), esp. paras. 201–10; and Donald Phillip Verene, “Vico’s Science of Imaginative Universals and the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,” in Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Phillip Verene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 295–317. 6. Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (New York: Dover, 1953), 98. 7. Ibid. Chapter 2. Mythical Thought: Beginning the Ladder of Consciousness 1. For a contemporary source book on theories of mythology, see Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson, The Rise of Modern Mythology 1680–1860 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972). 2. The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984).

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3. Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie, 2 vols. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftsliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976). 4. Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel, trans. William H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950), 296. 5. Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pimlico, 2000). 6. Donald Phillip Verene, “Vico’s Influence on Cassirer,” New Vico Studies 3 (1985): 105–11. 7. Ernst Cassirer, “Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken,” in Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftsliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956), 5 (my trans.). 8. Ernst Cassirer, Leibniz’ System in seinen wissenschaftliche Grundlagen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftsliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961), 447–49. 9. On Cassirer and Vico, see Donald Phillip Verene, “Vico’s Science of Imaginative Universals and the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,” in Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Phillip Verene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 295–317. 10. The critical literature on Vico is extensive in both English and Italian. A place to start is Giambattista Vico: Keys to the New Science; Translations, Commentaries, and Essays, ed. Thora Ilin Bayer and Donald Phillip Verene (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), which contains a bibliography of Vico’s works translated into English. For critical literature on Vico in English, see Molly Black Verene, Vico: A Bibliography of Works in English from 1884 to 1994 (Bowling Green, Ohio: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1994), and its update in New Vico Studies 27 (2009). 11. The Warburg Library, the personal creation of the art and cultural historian Aby Warburg, was located first in Hamburg and then moved to London with the rise of Nazism. Its general classification of books and its manner of shelving particular works together reflected an approach to human culture and cultural memory that was extraordinarily compatible with Cassirer’s philosophy of culture. Although the library was a great source of inspiration as well as research for Cassirer, he states that when he first visited it in Hamburg the basic work on his theory of myth was completed (PSF 2:xviii). See his comments on the library in “Critical Idealism as a Philosophy of Culture,” in SMC 78–79; see also E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Phaidon,

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1986; 1970), esp. chap. 17, Fritz Saxl’s “The History of Warburg’s Library 1886–1944.” 12. See the comments on Vico’s reputation and influence in Germany in the introduction to The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 67–68. 13. Aristotle, Poetics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1:2323 (1451b5–7). 14. For remarks on why Hegel did not begin his phenomenology with mythical consciousness, see Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel’s Absolute: An Introduction to Reading the “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 41–43. 15. See also Ernst Cassirer, “Mythic, Aesthetic, and Theoretical Space,” trans. Donald Phillip Verene and Lerke Holzwarth Foster, Man and World 2 (1969): 3–17.

Chapter 3. Phenomenology of Knowledge: Taking Phenomenology in the Hegelian, Not the Modern Sense 1. Martin Heidegger, review of Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, vol. 2, Das mythische Denken, by Ernst Cassirer, Deutsche Literaturzeitung 21 (1928): 1011–12 (my trans.). See also SMC 34–35. There is a full English translation of Heidegger’s review, “Mythic Thought,” trans. James G. Hart and John G. Maraldo, in The Piety of Thinking: Essays by Martin Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976). 2. SMC 34. 3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 490, n. xi. 4. See Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 2 vols. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), 1:359. 5. Heidegger, Being and Time, 490, n. xi. 6. Toni Cassirer, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981), 184. 7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), esp. 235 and 291; and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), esp. 167–70 and 200. 8. Heidegger, review, 1011–12 (my trans.).

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9. Heidegger, Being and Time, 71. 10. Ibid., 75. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 77. 13. Ernst Cassirer, “Zur Logik des Symbolbegriffs,” in Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956), 229 (my trans.). 14. Ernst Cassirer, “Form und Technik,” in Symbol, Technik, Sprache, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and John Michael Krois (Hamburg: Meiner, 1985), 39–91. In this essay Cassirer regards Technik as having an inner form and he theorizes concerning its effects in modern life. He sees the problems of technology more deeply in The Myth of the State, as discussed below in chapter 7, but he does not have as full a grasp of the phenomenon of technology as is found, for example, in the work of Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Knopf, 1964; orig. French ed. 1954). See also Donald Phillip Verene, Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), chap. 3, “Technological Desire.” 15. Cassirer also uses the term “systematic review” in The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel, trans. William H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950), 19. 16. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Boston: Beacon, 1960), vii.

Chapter 4. Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: Spirit, Life, and Werk 1. Ernst Cassirer, “ ‘Spirit’ and ‘Life’ in Contemporary Philosophy,” trans. Robert Walter Bretall and Paul Arthur Schilpp, in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston, Ill.: Library of Living Philosophers, 1949), 857–80. According to the Davoser Revue 4, no. 7 (April 15, 1929): 198, Cassirer gave a special lecture at the Hochschulkurse in Davos, Switzerland, titled “Geist und Leben in der Philosophie Schelers.” 2. In the Library of Living Philosophers volume, various contributors raise questions concerning the relation of metaphysics to the philosophy of symbolic forms. See, for example, Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, 77, 116, 124–26, 137, 206, 293, 312–15, and 393. The first article to appear in English, outside of the Library of Living Philosophers volume, Iredell Jenkins, “Logical Positivism, Critical Idealism and the Concept of Man,” Journal of Philosophy 47 (1950): 677–95, claims that Cassirer’s philoso-

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phy, like those of the logical positivists, avoids the question of a reality that is independent of the knower. None of these critics was aware of the views in the manuscripts that became PSF 4. 3. Hegel’s letter to Johann Heinrich Voss of May 1805; see Briefe von und an Hegel, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister, 4 vols. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1952–60), 1:99–100. 4. Cassirer, “ ‘Spirit’ and ‘Life’ in Contemporary Philosophy,” 875–76. 5. Ibid., 875. 6. Basisphänomene occurs in another of Cassirer’s unpublished texts, written in 1936–37. See Ernst Cassirer, Ziele und Wege der Wirklichkeitserkenntnis, vol. 2 of Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, ed. Klaus Christian Köhnke and John Michael Krois (Hamburg: Meiner, 1999), 89n and 92. 7. Cassirer’s colleague at Yale, Wilbur M. Urban, attempts to include metaphysics as a form of culture in his Language and Reality: The Philosophy of Language and the Principles of Symbolism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1939).

Chapter 5. Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Nature and Culture 1. See Edgar Wind, “Warburgs Begriff der Kulturwissenschaft und seine Bedeutung für die Ästhetik,” in Aby M. Warburg, Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen, ed. Dieter Wuttke (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1980), 401–17. 2. See A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York: Vintage, n.d.; 1952), 47–48. 3. In addition to Cassirer’s comments on the concept of group in the final selection of SMC, see his “The Concept of Group and the Theory of Perception,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4 (1944): 1–35. 4. See Cassirer’s comment on this matter in his lecture “Critical Idealism as a Philosophy of Culture” in SMC 78. 5. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Boston: Beacon, 1961), vi. 6. In addition to the development of modern philosophy from its Renaissance origins, the period of the history of philosophy that Cassirer treats systematically is Greek philosophy from its origins to Plato. He wrote Die Philosophie der Griechen von den Anfängen bis Platon for vol. 1 of Die Geschichte der Philosophie of the Lehrbuch der Philosophie, ed. Max Dessoir (Berlin: Ullstein, 1925) and two essays of particular interest: “Eidos und Eidolon: Das Problem des Schönen und der Kunst in Platons Dialogen,” Vorträge der Bibliotek Warburg 2 (1924): 1–27, and

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“Logos, Dike, Kosmos in der Entwicklung der griechischen Philosophie,” Göteborgs Högskolas Arsskrift 47 (1941): 1–31. These emphasize in historical terms Cassirer’s thesis of the development of form as central to philosophical thought. While at Yale University in the 1940s Cassirer taught an elementary course in Greek philosophy. 7. Johannes Hoffmeister, “Einleitung des Herausgebers,” in G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1952), viii. 8. Ibid., xiii (my trans.). 9. Ibid., xiv.

Chapter 6. Animal Symbolicum 1. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Boston: Beacon, 1960), 5. 2. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library of Harvard University Press, 2001), 435 (5.4.10– 11). 3. The fragmentation of modern culture becomes a popular theme, brought forth in C. P. Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” and in J. Bronowski’s little book Science and Human Values. On this issue, see Albert William Levi, Literature, Philosophy, and the Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), chaps. 1 and 2. See also Isaiah Berlin, “The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities,” Salmagundi 27 (1974): 9–39. 4. An example of using “reason” as the fundamental term for a philosophy of culture is George Santayana, The Life of Reason, that is organized as Reason in Common Sense, in Society, in Religion, in Art, and in Science. See The Works of George Santayana, Triton edition, vols. 3–5 (New York: Scribner’s, 1936). 5. See, for example, Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, ed. Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). 6. Cassirer discusses human rights in his 1928 address “Die Idee der republikanischen Verfassung” in Aufsätze und kleine Schriften (1927– 1931), ed. Tobias Berben, vol. 6 of Gesammelte Werke-Hamburger Ausgabe (Hamburg: Meiner, 2004). See also “Vom Wesen und Werden des Naturrechts,” in Aufsätze und kleine Schriften (1932–1935), ed. Ralf Becker, vol. 18 of Gesammelte Werke-Hamburger Ausgabe (Hamburg: Meiner, 2004); and Philosophy of the Enlightenment, chap. 6. An attempt to conceive law as a symbolic form is Deniz Coskun, Law as Symbolic

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Form: Ernst Cassirer and the Anthropocentric View of Law (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), which argues that law originates, as does ethics, from the symbolic powers of man and is a primary way in which we form human reality.

Chapter 7. Human Freedom and Politics 1. See Ernst Cassirer, “Albert Schweitzer as Critic of NineteenthCentury Ethics,” in The Albert Schweitzer Jubilee Book, ed. A. A. Roback (Cambridge, Mass.: Sci-Art, 1946), 239–58. 2. Dimitry Gawronsky, “Ernst Cassirer: His Life and Work,” in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston, Ill.: Library of Living Philosophers, 1949), 8. 3. Toni Cassirer, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981), 327. 4. Ernst Cassirer, “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics,” Word 1 (1946): 99–120. 5. “Davos Disputation between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger,” in Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 4th ed., enlarged, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 181. 6. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1961), 166. 7. Ibid., 179. 8. Hegel’s paraphrase of the lines from Schiller’s poem preserves Schiller’s subject of the Godhead. For a discussion of Hegel’s paraphrase, see Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 6–7. 9. The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), para. 51. 10. Ernst Cassirer, “Judaism and the Modern Political Myths,” Contemporary Jewish Record 7 (1944): 126. 11. Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1957).

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Index

Aretino, Pietro, 80 Aristotle, 69, 73, 101, 106, 111; on difference between poetry and history, 33–34; physics of, 8–9; relation of logic and metaphysics, 6–8; theory of imitation, 23 art. See symbolic forms Ayer, Alfred Jules, xviii basis phenomena, 66–70 Bergson, Henri, xvi, 61 Berkeley, George, 62 Berlin, Isaiah, 31 Borgia, Cesare, 80 Burckhardt, Jacob, 79, 81 Byron, George Gordon, 62 Cassirer, Ernst Alfred: biographical details, xvi–xvii, 13, 104; coining of term “symbolic form,” 12–14; and Heidegger’s review of Mythical Thought, 49–53; lifelong interest in Goethe, xiii; meeting with Heidegger at Davos, xiv, 5, 21, 95, 104, 108–9; and neoKantianism, xi–xvi; and Warburg Library, 13, 33, 62, 77, 110 works: — Axel Hägerström: Eine Studie zur swedischen Philosophie der Gegenwart, 103 — “Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften,” 12 — “Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken,” 31 — “The Concept of Philosophy as a Philosophical Problem,” 103 — “Critical Idealism as a Philosophy of Culture,” 62, 110 — “Descartes’ Critique of Mathematical and Natural Scientific Knowledge,” xi — Descartes: Lehre-Persönlichkeit-Wirkung, 75 — “Descartes, Leibniz, and Vico,” 76 — Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics, xiv, 75 — Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, 13, 67

— An Essay on Man, xvi–xvii, 5, 38, 58–59, 66; on harmony in culture, 96–101; on human freedom, 104–5, 107; and philosophy of symbolic forms, xii, xiv, 20, 56, 83; and Plato’s Republic, 91; relation to Pope’s Essay, 89; and self-knowledge, xviii, 15 — “Form und Technik,” 56 — Freiheit und Form, 83, 104 — Individual and Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, 84 — “The Influence of Language upon the Development of Scientific Thought,” 8 — “Judaism and the Modern Political Myths,” 104, 113–14 — Kant’s Life and Thought, 15 — Language and Myth, xviii, 27, 57 — Leibniz’ System in seinen wissenschaftlichte Grundlagen, xi, 32 — The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, 11, 75, 83, 104 — “The Myth of the State” (Fortune magazine), 104 — “The Myth of the State” (Princeton lecture), 104 — The Myth of the State, xii, xvi, xviii, xix, 101–2, 104, 107; and concept of philosophy, 105; criticism of Freud, 35; on Heidegger, 108; and Nazi state, 114–15; and symbolic form, 14; theory of technology, 56 — “Neo-Kantianism,” xiv — The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 75, 84, 89 — The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, xii, xiv, xvii, 12, 89; critique of culture, 75, 77; Kant’s schema in, 5; not a system, 55–56 — vol. 1, Language, 19–20, 27, 31; number of languages treated, 22; as phenomenology, 38 — vol. 2, Mythical Thought, 20, 27, 35, 39; Heidegger’s review of, 49; on myth and religion, 97; and political myth, 113; and Vico, 32

139

140 — vol. 3, The Phenomenology of Knowledge, 20, 61, 84; concept of phenomenology, xv, 38, 45, 75, 77, 84; Linienzug example, 14 — vol. 4, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, 61, 74; critique of Heidegger in, 50; theory of basis phenomena, 66, 84; and True as the whole, 16, 45 — The Platonic Renaissance in England and the Cambridge School, 75 — The Problem of Knowledge (vols. 1 and 2), xi — The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel, 31 — “Reflections on the Concept of Group and the Theory of Perception,” 78 — “‘Spirit’ and ‘Life’ in Contemporary Philosophy,” 61, 107 — “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics,” 105 — Substance and Function, xiv, 11–12; and Aristotelian logic, 6; and Hegel’s Begriff, 36; as related to phenomenology of knowledge, 19–21, 45, 55, 75 — “Das Symbolproblem und seine Stellung im System der Philosophie,” 13 — “Transcendentalism,” xv — “Truth,” xv — “Zur Logik des Symbolbegriffs,” 55 Cassirer, Toni Bondy, xvii, 50, 104 Cicero, 32, 90 Cohen, Hermann, xi, xiv, xv concepts: cultural, 11, 79–81; function, 6–12, 36–37, 59, 75–76; natural, 11, 79; substance, 6–12 Dasein, 49–53 Descartes, René, xi, xiii, 16, 67, 72; opposite to Vico, 31, 76–77 Dewey, John, xvii Dilthey, Wilhelm, 77 economics. See symbolic forms Einstein, Albert, 13 expressive function, 23–24, 48, 52–53 Fichte, Johann Gottleib, 5 Ficino, Marsilio, 80 Freud, Sigmund, 35–36, 90 Galileo, 8–9 Gawronsky, Dimitry, 13

index Gelb, Adhémar, 55 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 12, 108; and basis phenomena, 67–69; source for Cassirer’s thought, xiii Goldstein, Kurt, 55 Hägerström, Axel, 103 Hamann, Johann Georg, 31 Hartmann, Nicolai, 49 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 32, 57, 96– 97, 101; conception of phenomenology, 5, 16, 18, 36–38, 47, 83–85; dictum that the True is the whole, 16, 45, 59; and function-concept, 10; general influence on Cassirer, xii–xiii, xiv, xvii; and German language, 63, 78; on human freedom, 96, 110; ladder metaphor, 38; and Lebensphilosophie, 66; political philosophy of, 106–7; Science of Logic, 18, 66, 74, 85–86; on speculative sentence, 17 Heidegger, Martin: meeting with Cassirer at Davos, xiv, 5, 21, 95, 104, 108–9; and National Socialism, 108–9; as representative of Lebensphilosophie, xvi, 61; review of Mythical Thought, 49–53 Hendel, Charles, xvi, 4–5 Heraclitus, 96 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 31, 33, 78, 83 Hertz, Heinrich, 13 Herz, Marcus, 84 history. See symbolic forms Hitler, Adolf, xvi, 113–14 Hobbes, Thomas, 32 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich, xiii Homer, 63 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, xii, 28–29, 31 Hume, David, 41 Husserl, Edmund, xvii, 39, 80; conception of phenomenology, 34, 49–50, 54 index of modality, 19 inner form, xii, 15, 57, 105 Jaspers, Karl, 115 Jefferson, Thomas, 110 Joyce, James, 100 Kant, Immanuel, 32, 58–59, 70, 78–79; and categories, 42; and conceptus cosmicus, 103–4, 107; Critique of Judgment, 5, 15;

141

index and function-concept, 10–11; as general influence on Cassirer, xi–xvi, xvii; on human freedom, 96, 110; on metaphysics, 73–74, 84–85; political ideals, 106; space, time, and number, 42–44; theory of the schematism, xvii, 3–6, 47, 54, 73; thingin-itself, xvi, 63, 86; transcendental apperception, 24, 39 Keller, Helen, 94 Kierkegaard, Søren, xvi, 61 Kleist, Heinrich von, xiii Köhler, Wolfgang, 93 Kulturwissenschaften, meaning of term, 77–79 Lambert, Johann Heinrich, 84 Langer, Susanne, xviii, 56 language. See symbolic forms law. See symbolic forms Lebensphilosophie, xvi, 50, 61, 65–66, 77 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, xi, xiii, 44, 76, 101; conception of form, 16, 72; and symbolic pregnance, 53; and Vico, 32 Leonardo da Vinci, 80 Liebmann, Otto, xi Linienzug, 14, 54, 57, 91 Lotze, Rudolf Hermann, 25 Luther, Martin, 63 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 80 Marx, Karl, xvi, 90 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 50 Michelangelo, 80 Mondrian, Piet, 100 Montaigne, Michel de, 90 morality. See symbolic forms myth. See symbolic forms Natorp, Paul, xi, xiv–xvi, 67 neo-Kantianism: Baden school, xi; Marburg school, xi–xii, xiv–xvi Nicholas of Cusa, xi, 84 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xvi, 61, 90 Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich, 93 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 62 phenomenology, Cassirer’s conception of, 45–47, 55, 83–87 Plato, 106; and Cassirer’s conception of culture, 91, 102, 116; and philosophical idealism, xv–xvi, 15, 72

Plotinus, 15 politics. See symbolic forms Pope, Alexander, 89, 91 Pythagoras, 43, 106 Quintilian, 32 religion. See symbolic forms representational function, 23–24, 48 Rickert, Heinrich, xi, 78, 80 Ricoeur, Paul, 50 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, xvi Scheler, Max, xvi, 52, 61 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 12, 31, 33–34, 51 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich, xiii, 108, 110 Schilpp, Paul Arthur, 56 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 61 Schweitzer, Albert, xix, 103, 107 science. See symbolic forms significative function, 24, 48, 76 Simmel, Georg, 61, 64, 78, 81–82, 107 Snow, Charles Percy, 91 Socrates, 5, 27, 70–71, 85, 90 Spengler, Oswald, 108 spirit (Geist), 65–66, 77; meaning of term, 63, 109 symbolic form, definition of, 12–14 symbolic forms: art, 27, 57, 87, 99–100; economics, 56; history, 57, 100; language, 19–29, 36, 98–99; law, 56, 101; morality, 56; myth, 27–28, 34–44, 57, 68, 97–100, 112–16; politics, 105; religion, 97–98; science, 21, 27, 57, 99–101; technology, 56, 57, 114 symbolic pregnance, 53–55 systematic overview, 58, 80 systematic reconstruction, 58 systematic review, 58, 85 technology. See symbolic forms tonality, xiv, 57, 105 Uexküll, Jacob von, 66, 92 Vico, Giambattista, xviii; as discoverer of the myth, 31–34; opposite to Descartes, 31, 76–77 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 12–13 Voss, Johann Heinrich, 63

142 Warburg, Aby, 83 Whitehead, Alfred North, xvii, 66, 73 Windelband, Wilhelm, xi Wolff, Christian, 58 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 79

index work (Werk), 70–73, 82–83, 107 Yerkes, Robert Mearns, 93 Zeller, Eduard, 12

About the Author

Donald Phillip Verene is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy and director of the Institute for Vico Studies at Emory University. His previous books include Vico’s Science of Imagination, Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge, Knowledge of Things Human and Divine, Hegel’s Absolute, The History of Philosophy: A Reader’s Guide, and Speculative Philosophy. He is the editor of Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935–1945 and coeditor of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms. He is a fellow of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome.