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C M

S FA Philosophical Commentary

T I B

W I E

D P V

Yale University Press New Haven & London

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Copyright by Yale University.All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in wholeor in part, including illustrations, in any form

(beyond that copying permitted by Sections and of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewersfor the public press), without written permission

from the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataBayer, Thora Ilin,

Cassirers Metaphysics of symbolic forms : a philosophicalcommentary / Thora Ilin Bayer ; with an introductory

essay by Donald Phillip Verene.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. --- (alk. paper)

. Cassirer, Ernst, . Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. t. .. Symbolism. . Metaphysics. I. Cassirer, Ernst, .

Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. t. . II. Title.. dc -

Printed in the United States of America.

A catalogue record for this book isavailable from the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelinesfor permanence and durability of the Committeeon Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of

the Council on Library Resources.

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La den Anfang mit dem EndeSich in Eins zusammenziehn!Schneller als die GegenstndeSelber dich vorberfliehn.Danke, da die Gunst der MusenUnvergngliches verheit,Den Gehalt in deinem BusenUnd die Form in deinem Geist.

Goethe, Dauer im Wechsel

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C

Introduction: The Development of Cassirers Philosophy

by Donald Phillip Verene /

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The Early Texts: Life and Spirit

Life and Spirit /

The Object of Philosophy /

P

The Late Text: Basis Phenomena

Basis Phenomena /

TheWork of Philosophy /

Bibliography /

Index /

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Cassirers Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms

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Introduction

At his death in Cassirer left a quantity of unpublishedpapers, among which were manuscripts concerning a meta-physics of symbolic forms. These manuscripts were on a topicnot previously thought to be part of his conception of a philoso-phy of symbolic forms. They have only recently come to light,and their appearance invites a new perspective, a new under-standing of Cassirers philosophy.Cassirer left his professorship at the University of Hamburg

in May of , following Hitlers appointment as chancellorof Germany in January. As a Jew, Cassirer had no future in hishomeland, and two months later he was formally dismissed, inabsentia, from his university position. Cassirer taught for twoyears () at All Souls College, Oxford, before takingup a professorship at the University of Gteborg, Sweden. In he accepted a position at Yale University, and that summerthe Cassirers came to the United States on the last ship to leaveSweden. At the time of his death, Cassirer had moved to an ap-pointment at Columbia University. He died suddenly of a heartattack on the Columbia campus on April , .In the summer of , after the end of World War II, Mrs.

Cassirer returned to Sweden and brought to the United Statesthe papers which her husband had left on their departure. Thepapers remained in storage and unexamined by any Cassirerscholar until , when I surveyed them. They are now per-

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manently housed at Yales Beinecke Rare Book andManuscriptLibrary.My survey of the papers led to the publication of a volume of

twelve of Cassirers essays and lectures from the last decade ofhis life, Symbol, Myth, and Culture.1 These were pieces in whichCassirer summarized and introduced to new audiences, in Swe-den and principally in the United States, his conception of cul-ture and symbolic form. Most prominent among the papers re-mained two manuscripts marked as an unpublished text of afourth volume to his three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,published in the s and translated into English in the s.The first of these three volumes concerns language, the second,mythical thought, and the third is a phenomenology of knowl-edge, showing the genesis of scientific thought from pretheo-retical expressive and representational functions of conscious-ness.2

C U M

Missing in Cassirers philosophy of symbolic forms was a treat-ment of the metaphysical principles that supported it. One ofthe principal criticisms made by Cassirers first commentators,the contributors to a volume of twenty-three essays published onCassirers work in the Library of Living Philosophers series, wasthat Cassirer had no metaphysics or was in fact antimetaphysi-

. For a description of the papers see Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essaysand Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, , ed. Donald Phillip Verene (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ), .

. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vols., trans. Ralph Manheim(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ). Hereinafter citedas PSF.

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cal. Several of these essays make this point quite strongly.3 Be-cause Cassirer died during the preparation of this volume, whichappeared in , he made no reply to his critics as is usual inthis series.Cassirer had indicated in the preface to the third volume of

his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms that he intended to publish adiscussion of the principles of spirit (Geist) and life (Leben).4 Henever did so, but in an essay on Max Schelers philosophical an-thropology that was printed in lieu of a reply in the Library ofLiving Philosophers volume, he made some leading commentsabout these two principles.5 The view that Cassirer had a phi-losophy without a metaphysics reinforced the popular view thathis philosophy of symbolic forms was basically an extension ofMarburg neo-Kantianism.The Marburg neo-Kantians had focused their account of

knowledge quite narrowly on forms of scientific and theoreti-cal cognition. Cassirer was understood as simply extending theprinciples of Kantian critique to noncognitive areas of symbolicformation as found in myth, religion, art, and history. His phi-losophy was commonly seen as a series of analyses of variousareas of human culture to show howeach employs Kantian cate-gories in different ways and how each can be understood as atype of knowledge.But what understanding of reality, especially human reality,

. The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston,Ill.: Library of Living Philosophers, ); see the essays of WilliamCurtis Swabey, Felix Kaufmann, Robert S. Hartman, and Wilbur M.Urban.

. PSF, : xvi.. Spirit and Life in Contemporary Philosophy, trans. Robert

Walter Bretall and Paul Arthur Schilpp, in The Philosophy of Ernst Cas-sirer, .

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did this entail? Cassirer seemed not to have given a reply to this.His thought appeared to his readers and commentators as an ex-pansion of Kantian epistemology coupled with work in the his-tory of thought, represented by the ground-breaking studies hehad written on the problem of knowledge in modern philoso-phy, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Platonic renais-sance in England, and individual studies of various philosophers.Brand Blanshard, in a reviewof the last workCassirer published,An Essay on Man (), saw Cassirers philosophy still to be aseries of scholarly researches not mobilized in the interest of anymetaphysical theory.6

The manuscripts that make up the fourth volume of The Phi-losophy of Symbolic Forms appeared in a German edition in as the first volume in what is planned to be a twenty-volume edi-tion of Cassirers unpublished papers.7 The following year, thisvolume appeared in an American edition, which John MichaelKrois and I edited.8 Cassirers title for this volume is The Meta-physics of Symbolic Forms. The first part of it, written in atthe time he was finishing the third volume of The Philosophy ofSymbolic Forms, concerns the principles of spirit (Geist) and life(Leben).The second part, written in Sweden about , shortly be-

fore his departure for the United States, introduces his conceptof basis phenomena (Basisphnomene), an idea Cassirer writesof nowhere else in his published or unpublished works. These

. Philosophical Review (): .. Zur Metaphysik der symbolischen Formen, ed. John Michael Krois,

vol. of Ernst Cassirer, Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, ed. JohnMichael Krois and Oswald Schwemmer (Hamburg: Meiner, ).

. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. , The Metaphysics of SymbolicForms, ed. John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene, trans. JohnMichael Krois (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ).

/ Introduction

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phenomena, for which Cassirer uses various terms, includingI, action, and thework, underlie all human experience andmake human reality possible. The concept of basis phenomena,coupled with the great distinction between spirit and life, con-stitute Cassirers metaphysics and offer themost that he has saidabout howhis concept of symbolic form is grounded in a conceptof the real.It was a unique event in twentieth-century philosophy that

an unknown major work of a major philosopher came to lightso long after his death. The papers of figures such as Husserland Peirce have, as a body, influenced the understanding of theirthought. In Cassirers case, here is a single, complicated workthat changes ones opinion of his philosophy and how he ulti-mately understood his philosophy.It is a work that requires a commentary, and the exposition by

Thora Ilin Bayer that follows is extraordinarily usefulindeed,essentialfor the comprehension of Cassirers metaphysics. Noother commentary currently exists on this work. Bayers com-mentary is keyed to the text with references to the pages of theEnglish and German editions, but it is also written as a narra-tive that can be read on its own, which allows the reader to seemuch of what Cassirer himself saw when reflecting on his ownphilosophy. Bayer does not propose to solve problems that maylie within Cassirers metaphysics. Her method of commentarytakes the reader progressively through Cassirers claims, and shereminds the reader how each point stands in relation to the gen-eral themes of Cassirers position.The publication and analysis of Cassirers metaphysics comes

at a time of new international interest in Cassirer studies. Sev-eral of Cassirers works of original philosophy have been con-tinuously in print since their first publication in English. Thishas been true of the three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic

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Forms since their translation into English in the s, and ofAn Essay onMan () andTheMyth of the State ().9 Theselast two works, which Cassirer wrote in English while at Yale,have been translated into every major European and Asian lan-guage. This is a remarkable record of readership. Cassirer is oneof those philosophers, along with Dewey, Whitehead, Nietz-sche, and the Existentialists, to mention a few, whose workshave attracted continual attention beyond professional philoso-phy and academics.Almost since their publication, Cassirers The Philosophy of

the Enlightenment and The Individual and the Cosmos in Renais-sance Philosophy have been standard texts in the history of ideas.10

But it is only within the last decade that Cassirers original phi-losophy has begun to receive systematic scholarly attention. Thebeginning of this period is marked by the appearance of JohnMichael Kroiss Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History, for sometime the only major study in English of Cassirers philosophy.11

Although before that some valuable critical writings on Cassirerhad appeared, it is only in the past few years that a body of workon Cassirer has begun to accumulate and that a common inter-est in Cassirers work has developed that has brought togetherscholars from various countries and in various fields.Evidence of this is the formation in the last several years

of an International Ernst Cassirer Society (Internationale Ernst

. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ); The Myth of the State(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ).

. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln andJames P. Pettegrove (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, );The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. MarioDomandi (New York: Harper and Row, ).

. John Michael Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ).

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Cassirer-Gesellschaft), which has been involved in several confer-ences and meetings held on Cassirers philosophy in Europe andin the publication of various volumes of essays on Cassirer. Ayearlong cycle of lectures on Cassirer was organized at the Uni-versity of Hamburg, the papers of which have appeared as ErnstCassirers Wesen und Wirkung.12

Two major international and interdisciplinary conferencesheld in the past few years brought together scholars principallyfrom the United States, Germany, France, and Israel; one inOctober at Yale University, the other inMay in Israel.Both of these focused attention on Cassirers metaphysics, in-cluding his conceptions of symbol and culture. In addition tothe edition of Cassirers unpublished papers just mentioned, thepublication of a twenty-five volume edition of all of Cassirerspreviously published works has begun to appear in German.13

New studies and editions of Cassirers works continue to appearin Germany as well as in France and Italy.All of this was inconceivable only a few years ago. The dan-

ger is that Cassirer will become an industry, as has occurred withother figures. But these publishing commitments and the mem-berships in the Cassirer society represent a genuine new inter-est in Cassirers work, which attracts not only philosophers butscholars from across the humanities.The cause of this pattern of interest is probably twofold. Per-

haps one cause is simply that the existence and nature of an ar-chive of unpublished work by a major thinker, who writes about

. Ernst Cassirers Wesen und Wirkung: Kultur und Philosophie, ed.Dorothea Frede and Reinold Schmcker (Darmstadt: WissenschaftlicheBuchgesellschaft, ).

. Between and , the complete edition is to appear, the firstvolume of which is Ernst Cassirer, Gesammelte Werke: Hamburger Aus-gabe, ed. Birgit Recki, vol. , Leibniz System in seinen WissenschaftlichenGrundlagen () (Hamburg: Meiner, ).

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topics of contemporary appeal, has been brought to light. Thisin itself excites interest. The second cause very possibly lies inthe connection between Cassirers thought and certain move-ments in contemporary thought, such as structuralism, phe-nomenology, linguistics, and hermeneutics.To cite one example,Cassirers posthumous article in the first volume of the journalWord, titled Structuralism in Modern Linguistics (), be-came a source for the term structuralism. 14

Beyond its connections with these movements and theirmethods, which have strongly influenced the fields of the hu-manities, Cassirers approach to culture offers a total philosophy.In Cassirers philosophy the perennial questions are still alive.Cassirers thought proceeds without a technical vocabulary andoffers a way to consider the ancient Socratic questions about thenature of the human world and the nature of self-knowledge.Cassirer offers intellectual morale. His works are readable, andhe brings the whole of human culture back into view, and withit the viability of a metaphysics of culture.Beyond the incorporation of Cassirers ideas in the works of

Susanne Langer, no school of Cassirerian philosophy was everformed. Cassirer had to leave Germany just at the time whenmany scholars there were beginning to study critically his vol-umes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. He left Oxford afteronly two years for Gteborg and six years later came to theUnited States, while the war was still in progress. Cassirer neverhad a proper place or a good situation in which to present hisnew philosophy in a sustainedmanner to advanced students or tocolleagues. He would in all likelihood have enjoyed more favor-able conditions in the United States following the war, but hissudden, untimely death precluded him from doing so.

. Cassirer, Structuralism in Modern Linguistics, Word ():.

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To approach Cassirers metaphysics, which is a new key tohis thought, the reader may wish to have in mind the develop-ment of his philosophy. Cassirer published more than booksand articles in a period of nearly fifty years, including severalitems that appeared posthumously.Theseworks comprise ,pages, not includingCassirers unpublished papersmore pagesthan the Prussian Academy edition of Kants collected works.In what follows I have divided Cassirers work into four peri-ods. Within each of these, and throughout his career, there isa dialectic between his works of systematic philosophy and hishistorical studies. Each of these supplements the other.Cassirer never wished to throw his ideas into empty space

but always saw the need to ground his philosophy in the historyof thought. This dialectic between philosophy proper and his-tory is both Cassirers strength and his weakness. The meaningand originality of his philosophical ideas are revealed throughtheir connections with the thought of others, yet his continualquotations and historical discussions tend to absorb his ideasand inhibit his ability to develop further statements of themon their own terms. This is his style of thought, even in hiswork on metaphysics. One of the virtues of the commentarythat follows is that it allows us to focus on the ideas them-selves and their structure. Because Cassirer moved back andforth throughout his career between so many subjects, the fourdivisions that follow should not be regarded as sharp divisionsin his thought. They are general positions from which most ofthe various threads of his thought can be grasped.

M N-K

P K

Cassirer wrote his doctoral dissertation under Hermann Cohenat the University of Marburg in , Descartes Critique of

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Mathematical and Natural Scientific Knowledge. 15 This be-came the introduction to his first book, which appeared threeyears later, Leibniz System ().16 Cohen had founded theMarburg school of neo-Kantianism about .When Cassirercame to Marburg to attend Cohens seminars, he had alreadyreadCohens works onKant; he regardedCohen as themost im-portant interpreter of Kant in Germany. Neo-Kantianism haddeveloped in the last half of the nineteenth century as a reactiontoHegelianism, from a belief thatHegelian philosophy attemptsto grasp all of human knowledge in one swoop, in a total systemdeveloped from the top down, leaving the specific bases of theindividual fields of knowledge insufficiently examined.Hegelianspeculation was thought to have turned its back too quickly onthe method of critical philosophy.The roots of this return to Kant lie in the works of Hermann

von Helmholtz, Friedrich Albert Lange, Eduard Zeller, andOtto Liebmann. Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp were thecentral figures of the Marburg school, which emphasized theepistemology of the natural sciences. Another tendency of neo-Kantianism, known as the Southwest (Baden) school, wasfounded by Wilhelm Windelband and carried on by HeinrichRickert. It focused on the logical problems of history and thecultural sciences.Cassirer, in his article Neo-Kantianism for the fourteenth

edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica () said, of the vari-ous forms of the neo-Kantian movement, But, not withstand-ing differences of detail, there is a certain methodical principle

. Descartes Kritik der mathematischen und naturwissenschaft-lichen Erkenntnis (inaugural dissertation, Marburg, ). I have givenall titles of Cassirers works in the text in English.

. Leibniz System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen (Marburg:Elwert, ).

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common to all of them. They all see in philosophy not merelya personal conviction, an individual view of the world, but theyenquire into the possibility of philosophy as a science with theintention of formulating its conditions. Cassirer says that itwas in Hermann Cohen that neo-Kantianism reached its cli-max. Cohens exposition of the fundamental doctrines of Kant,Cassirer said, brought one single systematic idea into the cen-tre of the investigation. This idea is that of the transcendentalmethod. 17

Cassirers thought developed from this neo-Kantian position.In textbooks and discussions of twentieth-century philosophy,his philosophy is commonly typed simply as neo-Kantian. Inhis famous debate with Heidegger at Davos, Switzerland, in concerning Kant and the problem of human freedom,Hei-degger begins by questioning Cassirer about neo-Kantianism.18

Cassirer sees that Heidegger, by bringing up neo-Kantianism,is attempting to reduce his philosophy of symbolic forms to itsorigin, to create the impression that it is just a narrow form ofKantianism.Cassirer bristles at this implication and replies that neo-

Kantianism must be understood in functional terms, mean-ing that although his philosophy began atMarburg, he does notintend an understanding of his philosophy to end there. Cas-sirer reiterates this claim that neo-Kantianism must be under-stood in functional terms in the preface to his later work in thephilosophy of scienceDeterminism and Indeterminism inMod-ern Physics (), in which he wishes to show how the Kantianposition can be revised to offer an account of the new non-Newtonian conceptions of causality and quantum theory.19

. Encyclopaedia Britannica, th ed., s.v. Neo-Kantianism.. See Symbol, Myth, and Culture, .. Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics: Historical and

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Cassirers origins are certainly in the Marburg tradition. Theuse of the term critique in relation to Descartes in the titleof his doctoral dissertation is no accident. His interpretationsof Descartes and Leibniz are crucial for bringing the perspec-tive of critical philosophy to bear on an understanding of mod-ern philosophy. At Cassirers hands, Descartes and Leibniz ap-pear not simply as formulators of rationalist metaphysics but asfundamental sources for the approach to knowledge of criticalphilosophy.While editing an edition of Leibnizs works, Cassirer began

to publish his multivolume work The Problem of Knowledge inPhilosophy and Science in the Modern Age, the first two volumesof which appeared in .20 His aim was to show howthe problem of knowledge developed, from the speculations ofNicholas of Cusa, regarded as the first modern philosopher, tothe critical philosophy of Kant. The problem of knowledge,conceived as the central problem of modern philosophy, culmi-nates in the stage of Erkenntniskritik, and this culmination canbe understood only by comprehending the interconnections be-tween the conceptions of knowledge within the development ofmodern philosophy and those present in the rise of modern sci-ence.These two volumes were an enormous accomplishment of

learning and philosophical scholarship. Later, Cassirer decidedto continue his treatment of the problem of knowledge in a thirdvolume, published in , taking his history through the figuresof post-Kantian thought, especially Hegel.21The very full treat-

Systematic Studies of the Problem of Causality, trans. O. T. Benfrey (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ), xxiii-xxiv.

. Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neuernZeit, vols. (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, ).

. Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neuernZeit, vol. , Die Nachkantischen Systeme (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, ).

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ment of Hegels philosophy in this volume has a resonance withhis use of Hegel as a source for the phenomenology of knowl-edge in the third volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,which was written in but published in .22 While inSweden, Cassirer wrote a final, fourth volume of The Problemof Knowledge, treating developments since Hegel up to andexpanding his discussion to the areas of biology and history.23

Three years after the appearance of the second volume ofThe Problem of Knowledge, Cassirers first work of original phi-losophy, Substance and Function (), was published.24 Thiscontained a philosophy of science, but it was more than this,for it had the subtitle Investigations Concerning the Funda-mental Questions of the Critique of Knowledge [Erkenntnis-kritik]. The first chapter demonstrated that Aristotelian classlogic based on a metaphysics of substance could not account fortheway in whichmathematically based concepts were employedin modern science.Cassirer shows that substance-based logic must be replaced

with a new theory of the concept, based on the idea of the func-tional order of a series. Cassirers model was F(a,b,c . . . ), inwhich F is the principle or law by which the series is constructedand the variables are the particulars, each of which is fixed in adeterminate position within the series by the law of the series.The F can also stand as a variable in some other series, and thusan ever-expanding systemof serial orders is conceivable inwhich

. Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, vol. , Phnomenologie derErkenntnis (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, ).

. The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History SinceHegel, trans. William H.Woglom and Charles W. Hendel (New Haven,Conn.: Yale University Press, ).

. Substance and Function and Einsteins Theory of Relativity, trans.William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (Chicago: OpenCourt, ).

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each variable in each series is completelydetermined, yet the sys-tem itself and the series within it have ultimately no set limits.This model of the functional concept in which the universal

element is held in an inseparable bond with the serial particu-lar becomes the master key to Cassirers later conceptions of thesymbol itself and to his sense of a system of symbolic forms inwhich the whole of culture is ordered in terms of its own setof functional relations, harmoniously grasped and portrayed byphilosophy. This conception of a system of symbolic forms doesnot appear in Substance and Function, nor does the concept ofsymbolic form itself, butHermannCohen, on reading this work,felt that Cassirer had departed from the Marburg neo-Kantianepistemology. He was dissuaded by friends from pursuing thisview, but in retrospect Cohen was certainly right that Cassirerwas moving in a new direction.Cassirer had laid the groundwork for taking the transcen-

dental method further than the elucidation of the principlesof cognition and scientific thought to which Marburg neo-Kantianism was tied. In these same years Cassirer was followinghis practice of combining scholarly work and original philosophyby preparing his ten-volume edition of Kants Works (), towhich he later added a volume on Kants Life and Work ().25

This contains his highly original discussion of Kants third Cri-tique, in which he shows the connection between aesthetic andorganic form that is crucial for his own conception of culture asa system of symbolic forms. In the literature on Kant, Cassirersdiscussion of the third Critique remains the best work writtenon it to date.

. Immanuel Kants Werke, vols. (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, );Kants Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven, Conn.: YaleUniversity Press, ).

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T P S F

Cassirer said that the entire conception of the philosophy ofsymbolic forms flashed before his mind in as he entereda streetcar in Berlin. This was while he held his first academicposition at the University of Berlin (), before he ac-cepted his professorship at the University of Hamburg. He wasalready at work on what was to be his magnum opus when he ar-rived in Hamburg. There he encountered theWarburg Library,the extraordinary collection of books andmaterials assembled byAby Warburg and organized according to a concept of culturenearly parallel to that of Cassirer. The library placed emphasison myth as the basis of human culture and displayed throughthe order of its shelf-classifications the basic forms of symbolismupon which all culture rests.Cassirer gave his first definition of symbolic form in an essay

that appeared in one of the publications of theWarburg Library,The Concept of Symbolic Form in the Formation of the Cul-tural Sciences (): Under a symbolic form should beunderstood each energy of spirit [Geist] through which a spiri-tual [ geistig] content or meaning is connected with a concrete,sensory sign and is internally adapted to this sign. 26 A sym-bolic form, then, has as its internal structure a bond between auniversal meaning and the particular sensory sign in which themeaning inheres. This parallels the two elements of the func-tional concept of Substance and Function: the principle of orderof a series and the particular that is ordered by it. A symbol is atonce inseparably spiritual ( geistig) and sensible (sinnlich).In the third volume ofThe Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (),

. Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geistes-wissenschaften, in Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Oxford: BrunoCassirer; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ), .

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Cassirer ties this to the idea of symbolic pregnance (symbol-ische Prgnanz), a term Cassirer takes from the law of preg-nance of Gestalt psychology.There Cassirer says: By symbolicpregnance we mean the way in which a perception as a sen-sory experience contains at the same time a certain nonintuitivemeaning which it immediately and concretely presents. 27

In the final chapter, titled The Theory of Relativity and theProblem of Reality, of hisEinsteinsTheory of Relativity Consid-ered from the Epistemological Standpoint (), Cassirer spoke ofa system of symbolic forms in which theoretical as well as ethi-cal, aesthetic, and religious understanding would be included.He says: It is the task of a systematic philosophy, which ex-tends far beyond the theory of knowledge, to free the idea of theworld from this one-sidedness. It has to grasp the whole systemof symbolic forms. 28

The term symbolic form is Cassirers own. It is the one termthat is wholly characteristic of his philosophy. Its source is two-fold. One source is in the field of aestheticsan essay by theHegelian aesthetician Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Das Sym-bol, that appeared in a Festschrift for Eduard Zeller in .29

In this important and influential essay, Vischer uses the term derSymbolbegriff and similar formulations, but never does he pre-cisely use die symbolische Form. Cassirer refers to Vischer in thesame passage in the essay quoted earlier, in which hefirst defines the term symbolic form.The other source is in the field of science, in the work of

Heinrich Hertz. In presenting the concept of his philosophy of

. PSF, : .. Substance and Function and Einsteins Theory of Relativity, .. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Das Symbol, in Philosophische Auf-

stze: Eduard Zeller, zu seinem fnfzigjhrigen Doctor-Jubilum gewidmet(Leipzig: Fuess Verlag, ), see esp. , .

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symbolic forms in the first volume of The Philosophy of Sym-bolic Forms (), Cassirer says: Mathematicians and physi-cists were first to gain a clear awareness of this symbolic char-acter of their basic implements. This new ideal of knowledge towhich this whole development points, was brilliantly formulatedby Heinrich Hertz in the introduction to his Principles of Me-chanics. 30 Hertz understood that scientists do not grasp the ob-ject of their investigations in its immediacy but grasp the worldby means of the system of their symbols.If not by , in Substance and Function, then certainly by the

beginning of the s Cassirer was well beyond the Marburgneo-Kantianism of Cohen, but throughout his career he alwaysheld Cohen in the highest regard. He had not abandoned thecentral principle that the Marburg school took from Kant, thetranscendental method. In his general introduction to his phi-losophy in the first volume ofThe Philosophy of Symbolic Forms hestates that in the philosophy of symbolic forms the critique ofreason becomes the critique of culture. 31He seesKant as havingeduced, through his transcendental method, the forms of sci-ence, ethical life, aesthetics, and organic natural forms.Throughthe medium of the symbol Cassirer intends to extend this ap-proach to include myth, religion, art, and language, to showthat these traditionally noncognitive forms which use symbolsin different but fundamentally related ways are in fact forms ofknowledge.InAnEssay onMan (), he reinforces the importance of art

as a symbolic form bywriting a chapter on it, and he adds historyto his original list. In the preface to the second volume of ThePhilosophy of Symbolic Forms he mentions the possibility of, butdoes not discuss, various symbolic forms of social life: economics

. PSF, : .. PSF, : .

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(die Wirtschaft), technology (die Technik), ethics (die Sitte), andlaw (das Recht).32 Art, history, and these social forms presup-pose the emergence in culture of science from the pretheoreticalforms of myth, religion, and language. Art draws upon the sym-bols of myth and religion and appears in culture as a counterpartto science. History needs the power of art to re-create the senseof the past, but it depends on science to establish the validity ofits data. In similar fashion, the social forms are essentially cogni-tive, although, like science, they presuppose the worlds of mythand language for an account of their origins.All these forms depend on symbols, and the formations of ex-

perience they produce differ from one another within the struc-ture of culture as a whole. Cassirer has found in the symbol, asthe key to all human knowledge, the phenomenological presenceof Kants schema. In his doctrine of the schema Kant reachesonly abstractly, through his transcendental analysis, the prin-ciple of a concrete bond of intuition and concept. Cassirer findsthis present in the phenomenon of the symbol as the observ-able medium of all thought and culture.In the logic of Cassirers system, Substance and Function is

the first volume of his conception of the philosophy of sym-bolic forms because in it Cassirer presents the symbolic formof science and theoretical knowledge. As mentioned above, vol-ume inThe Philosophy of Symbolic Forms isLanguage (), vol-ume Mythical Thought (), and volume is titled The Phe-nomenology of Knowledge (). In this third volume Cassirerpresents three functions of consciousness, which recapitulate, inreverse order of their publication, the three fundamental formsof the earlier works.The expressive function (die Ausdrucksfunktion) of conscious-

ness corresponds to myth. The representational function (die

. PSF, : xv.

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Darstellungsfunktion) of consciousness corresponds to languageas the basis for the formation of the empirical world of common-sense class concepts. The significative function (die reine Bedeu-tungsfunktion) corresponds to science and theoretical thought,which brings up to date Cassirers account of science in Sub-stance and Function. The third volume presents the philosophyof symbolic forms as a phenomenological system.At one point in this volume, Cassirer gives a demonstration

of the fact that the perceptually given object for consciousness isnever purely given. Its nature is formed by the power of the sym-bol. Cassirer asks the reader to consider a Linienzug or graph-like line drawing. He says that we may apprehend this line asa purely expressive object, as we grasp the tension in its shape,feel its motion, and so forth. Then we may shift perspective andapprehend it as having theoretical significance, as a mathemati-cal object, a geometric figure showing certain proportions andrelations.We may pass on to seeing it as a mythical-magical form, in

which it is a sign dividing a sacred from a profane sphere. Wemay apprehend it again as an aesthetic ornament, giving atten-tion only to its artistic potentialities, a consideration of its visualqualities for their own sake.33 This phenomenological experi-ment reaffirms Cassirers original conception of the symbol assimultaneously geistig and sinnlich, and his later principle of sym-bolic pregnance. It also demonstrates what he states inTheMythof the State (), that it is a common characteristic of all sym-bolic forms that they are applicable to any object whatsoever. 34

Only the philosopher is in a position to see that all symbolicforms are variations of one another and that the truth of thenature of the object of knowledge is dependent on a coordina-

. PSF, : .. The Myth of the State, .

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tion of each with the others, so that they coalesce into a whole.This is Cassirers version of Hegels principle, The true is thewhole (Das Wahre ist das Ganze). In order for Cassirer to ar-rive at the conception of symbolic forms as a totality, he addsthis speculative principle of Hegel to his transcendental analysisof the various areas of culture. His primary difficulty with theHegelian standpoint is its propensity to resolve all other formsinto that of logic. Cassirer regardsHegel as engaging in this typeof reduction in the system of categories in his Science of Logic.Cassirers attachment to Hegel is based on his interest in The

Phenomenology of Spirit. In the preface to The Phenomenologyof Knowledge, the third volume of The Philosophy of SymbolicForms,Cassirer says that he is using the term phenomenologyin Hegels sense, not in the modern (Husserlian) sense.35 In thepreface to the second volume, onmyth, he says, likeHegel in thePhenomenology of Spirit, that he wishes to offer the individual aladder by which to ascend from the most rudimentary to higherforms of consciousness. He says Hegel begins at the level of thethings of the empirical world. He wishes to take the ladder onestep lower, and to begin with myth.36

In these prefaces and in other places, such as the first sentenceof his draft for the introduction to The Metaphysics of SymbolicForms, where he says: We start with the concept of the whole:the whole is the true (Hegel), Cassirer casts his project in itsbroadest outlines in Hegelian terms.37 He conceives all the sym-bolic forms as standing in dialectical relation to one another andas developing always through dialectical oppositions, beginningin myth.Cassirers dialectical oppositions remain free-floating. He is

. PSF, : xiv.. PSF, : xiv; see also PSF, : xv.. PSF, : .

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unwilling to order the symbolic forms into a metaphysical logicof categories. Cassirers method of philosophizing is that ofsystematic review (systematischer Rckblick) or systematicoverview (systematischer berblick), in which, given the prin-ciple that the true is the whole, taken from Hegel, and theprinciple of the transcendental, taken from Kant, he can enterinto any particular content of culture. Taking the symbol as themedium of this particular, he can begin to give a systematic ac-count of the meaning of the particular, which includes its rela-tion to the totality of symbolic forms.Cassirers dialectic is a functional dialectic. All contents of

consciousness are products of the symbol. They fall within thevarious symbolic forms that characterize human culture. Thesymbolic forms exist in opposition to one another. Human cul-ture is the totality of these oppositions. The task of philosophyin relation to culture is to elucidate these oppositions, showingin its account of them both the divisions within and the overallharmony of human culture.Each symbolic form develops according to a dialectic of its

ownmode of symbolism from its beginnings inmyth.Each sym-bolic form, like human culture as a whole, originates in formsof mythic expression. Cassirer gives an extended example ofthis sense of dialectical development of phases within a sym-bolic form at the end of the second volume of The Philosophy ofSymbolic Forms, where he outlines the dialectical stages throughwhich myth passes to become religion. In the first volume hegives an account of the phases of the development of language.Within culture the internal dialectical development of any sym-bolic form involves its confrontation with the presence of othersymbolic forms. These two senses of dialectical oppositionthat among symbolic forms and that among the phases of theinternal development of eachare interlocked.Although Cassirer subscribes to Hegels principle of whole-

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ness, he does not adhere to the traditional sense of the HegelianAufhebungthat there is a progressive synthesis in which theforms of consciousness cancel and transcend one another as theymerge into the whole. Cassirer claims that there are often sharpcontrasts and oppositions within culture that do not clearly re-solve themselves into a higher synthesis, even though cultureitself is a whole. Hegels dialectic is a dialectic of the Absolute.Hegels aim is to produce a total account that comprehends allmoments of experience in a progression. The Absolute is thestandpoint of the whole that emerges when this progression isarticulated. It is a single story, determinate in all its parts.Cassirers dialectic does not proceed from the Hegelian per-

spective of the Absolute. Cassirers dialectical account of cul-ture begins in medias res and is committed to the aim of sys-tematic review. Cassirer understands the symbol as internallydialectical, comprising at once a particular content and a uni-versal meaning, like Hegels Begriff (concrete universal). Cas-sirer can begin with any particular content of culture and articu-late its dialectical relationships with other symbolic forms in adiscussion that expands in various directions. In principle, fromthis functional perspective the account can be taken as far as thewhole. But the account does not attempt to achieve comprehen-sion of a total progression of forms in order to illuminate theoppositions in question. Oppositions are explained in terms ofthemselves, not through their relation to the Absolute.Cassirer wrote the first part of his Metaphysics of Symbolic

Forms () at the time he was writing the third volume ofThe Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. He sees spirit (Geist) and life(Leben) as dialectically related, such that these principles ofreality are in dynamic tension with each other: life continu-ally transforming itself into spirit and spirit constantly renewingitself in the immediacy of life. The relationship of spirit and lifeparallels that of the functional bond that is inherent in the sym-

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bolthe universalmeanings achieved by spirit are attained by itsmediations of life. Life is the immediate particularity that spiritrequires. From the nature of the symbolic form itself Cassirergenerates a metaphysics of the reality that underlies the human.In a fragment written between and that has come

to light with Cassirers manuscripts on The Metaphysics of Sym-bolic Forms and is discussed by Bayer in the commentary thatfollows, Cassirer unequivocally states that philosophy is not initself a symbolic form. This does not mean that philosophicalthought dispenses with symbols, for it uses them, especially inlanguage. Philosophical thought does not have symbolic formof its own, separate from other symbolic forms. Philosophy isthought that can grasp the symbolic forms as a totality, while, inHegels terms, showing each to have its own determinate iden-tity and inner form. Cassirer says: It is characteristic of philo-sophical knowledge as the self-knowledge of reason that it doesnot create a principally new symbol form, it does not found inthis sense a new creative modalitybut it grasps the entire mo-dalities as that which they are: as characteristic symbolic forms.Thus, Cassirer says, philosophy is both criticism [Kant] andthe fulfillment [Hegel] of the symbolic forms. 38

T P P S

In the preface toThe Philosophy of the Enlightenment (), Cas-sirer says that this work, together with The Individual and Cos-mos in Renaissance Philosophy (), and The Platonic Renais-sance in England (),39 constitute a phenomenology of the

. PSF, : . See also Chap. in this book.. The Platonic Renaissance in England, trans. James P. Pettegrove

(London: Thomas Nelson and Sons; Austin: University of Texas Press,).

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philosophic spirit (Phnomenologie des philosophischen Geistes),playing on the title of the work of Hegel to which he is mostattracted.40 The fragment mentioned earlier, part of Cassirersmetaphysical writings, is the only place in his corpus where Cas-sirer truly makes clear that philosophy is not a symbolic form.Even if philosophy is not a separate symbolic form having in-dependent access to the object, Cassirer still has the problem ofsayingwhat philosophy is. Philosophy is certainly a part of spirit.How are we to understand philosophy as such a phenomenon?In his trilogy on the philosophic spirit, Cassirer looks at mod-

ern philosophy historically, as it develops itself from the Re-naissance forward as a self-conscious activity, independent ofits ties with religion and theology in the medieval world. Cas-sirer regards the origins of philosophical idealism as lying withthe Greeks, specifically with Platos conception of the idea asform. He regards self-knowledge as the true aim of philosophi-cal reasoning, which he considers as having originated withthe Greeks, specifically with Socrates. These classical originsneeded to be rediscovered in the Renaissance in order for phi-losophy to be reborn as a self-confident, self-conscious enter-prise. Cassirer attempts historically to trace this philosophicspirit as it develops from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.He begins with Nicholas of Cusa, as he did in the first vol-

ume of The Problem of Knowledge in , but now his questionis not the development of the critical problem of knowledge; itis to understand philosophy as a development of spirit. This ap-proach to the same general development of modern philosophy,presented in Kantian terms in the early volumes of The Prob-lem of Knowledge, here assumes a distinctlyHegelian tenor. Herethe problem is what philosophy itself is, as a part of culture.Cassirer in this trilogy regards the Platonic renaissance in En-

. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, vi.

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gland as created in the thought of the Cambridge PlatonistsShaftesbury and othersas a missing link in the revival of clas-sical humanism.Typical of humanist philosophy generally, noneof the thinkers in this phenomenology of the philosophic spiritare system-builders in the traditional sense. They force us tounderstand each of them as particular thinkers who are part ofthe universal spirit of their age.In approaching the thinker in relation to the age, Cassirer is

employing the logic of culture-concepts (die Kulturbegriffe) thathe explains in his later work The Logic of the Cultural Sciences().41 With nature-concepts (die Naturbegriffe), as opposedto culture-concepts, a specific principle can be employed to de-termine their object. If we wish to determine whether a spe-cific metal is gold we can do so unambiguously, for, as Cassirersays, gold means only what possesses a certain specific weight,a specific electrical conductivity, a specific coefficient of expan-sion, and so on, and has a specific place on a table of metals. ButCassirer says that when we turn to form- and style-concepts inthe humanities or cultural sciences (die Kulturwissenschaften), welose this power of specific determination.In the cultural sciences the particular can be coordinated with

the universal, but the particular cannot be subordinated to theuniversal in the way it can be in the natural sciences. Cassirersays that when we characterize Leonardo da Vinci and Aretino,Ficino and Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Cesare Borgia asmen of the Renaissance we can coordinate their particularproperties only by means of the universal; we cannot assign toeach a specific determinate meaning. We cannot subsume theirindividual oppositions under some common principle, but theconcept does allow us to grasp an ideal connection among them

. The Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Five Studies, trans. S. G. Lofts(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ).

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such that each of these figures can be seen as contributing to thespirit (Geist) of the Renaissance. Cassirer employs such culture-concepts in his treatment of the Enlightenment, in which thephilosophers he discusses are, each in his own way, coordinatedwith the spirit of the age.This holistic approach in which philosophy, understood in

cultural, not simply logical, terms, is also found in Cassirerslater studies of individual philosophers, such as The Question ofJean-Jacques Rousseau (),Descartes: Doctrine, Personality, andInfluence (), and his posthumousRousseau, Kant, and Goethe().42 Here, his approach, different from that of the early vol-umes of The Problem of Knowledge, is to come to grips with thephilosopher in light of the interrelationships of his life, work,and times. Philosophy thus understands itself to be part of thehuman spirit. There is a culture of philosophy that exists withinand is made possible by the wider processes of human culture.This is not to reduce philosophy to its history. In The Meta-

physics of Symbolic Forms Cassirer is firm on the point that phi-losophy is above all else the pursuit of truth.The pursuit of truth,he says, is what distinguishes the philosopher from the sophist.43

Philosophies once brought alive by the palingenesis of the his-tory of philosophy must be critically considered in terms of theirtruth. Cassirer strongly engages in this critical process in his at-tack on the copy theory of knowledge in volume ofThe Philoso-phy of Symbolic Forms, in his evaluation of types of philosophiesof life and philosophies of spirit in The Metaphysics of Symbolic

. The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. Peter Gay (New York:Columbia University Press, ); Descartes: Lehre-Persnlichkeit-Wirkung(Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, ); Rousseau, Kant, and Goethe, trans.James Gutmann, Paul Oscar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr.(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ).

. PSF, : .

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Forms, and in his attack in The Myth of the State on Heideggersand Spenglers lack of a conception of freedom.Philosophy, for Cassirer, is more than the history of philoso-

phy, and philosophy is also more than an adjunct to science. Un-like the positivists, Cassirer regards philosophy as more than aclarification of the logic of the sciences. For Cassirer, philosophyis one of theKulturwissenschaften; like them, philosophyemploysculture-concepts to understand its own spirit, to understanditself as part of culture, and to understand culture itself. Cas-sirer does not explicitly state a theory of concept formation forphilosophical reasoning, but philosophic concepts would seemto be arrived at through a transformation of culture-concepts inwhich particulars are illuminated but not formally determinedby thought.The aim of philosophy is not to attach itself to a specific

symbolic form but to understand human culture and the natureof the human as such. The philosopher must coordinate allthe symbolic forms under the universal of the human being.What guides philosophical reasoning in this process is a sense oforganic form, a sense of the whole as something ordered withinitself. Cassirers source for this is Hegel, to an extent, and Vico,whom Cassirer held throughout his career to be the founder ofthe philosophy of the Geistes- or Kulturwissenschaften.44

But more than these, Cassirers inspiration is Goethe. Cas-sirers various writings on Goethe occupy a place in the field ofGoethe scholarship in their own right.They run from GoethesPandora (), early in his career, through his Goethe and theHistorical World () to its very end, with an essay on Thomas

. Cassirer makes this claim from his earliest work, Leibniz System(), to his last works. The references to Vico throughout Cassirerswritings are traced out in my Vicos Influence on Cassirer, New VicoStudies (): .

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MannsGoethebild ().45Goethes lively sense of nature andpoetic formwas for Cassirer an embodiment of the aesthetic andorganic natural forms with which Kant struggled in the thirdCritique.It is to Goethe that Cassirer turns for the basic formulations

of his conception of the three basis phenomena in The Meta-physics of Symbolic Forms, and it is GoethewhomCassirer quotesto Heidegger at Davos in answering questions about the natureof human freedom. It is Goethe who allows Cassirer to standbetween the poles of Kant and Hegel, between the restrictionsof critical philosophy and the excesses he perceives in speculativelogic. For Cassirer, Goethe is not only a source of the concep-tion of organic form; he is also the poet of the humane spirit,reminding us of what culture is and can be.

T P H C

If Goethe was Cassirers ideal of the humane spirit of the cul-tural thinker, Albert Schweitzer was Cassirers example of thespirit of the ethical thinkerof the trueEthiker. In his inaugurallecture, at the assumption of his professorship at the Universityof Gteborg in Sweden in , Cassirers topic was The Con-cept of Philosophy as a Philosophical Problem. 46 Cassirer putthis in ethical terms. He began by quoting Goethes view of thetwo types of philosophy represented by Plato and Aristotlethat Plato relates himself to the world as a blessed spirit that

. Goethes Pandora, Zeitschrift fr sthetik und allgemeine Kunst-wissenschaft (): ; Goethe und die geschichtliche Welt: DreiAufstze (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, ); Thomas Manns Goethebild:Eine Studie ber Lotte inWeimar, Germanic Review (): .

. The Concept of Philosophy as a Philosophical Problem, inSymbol, Myth, and Culture, .

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penetrates it to its depths but is here to stay only for a while.Plato seeks heaven like an obelisk, like a pointed flame, whereasAristotle is the master builder who piles up materials from allsides, pyramid fashion, and ascends to the top. Goethe says it isas though these two figures divide humanity between them, andtheir two properties are not easily reconcilable.From there, Cassirer moves to Kants distinctions between

two kinds of philosophyone is the Scholastic conception ofphilosophy and the other is the conception of philosophy as re-lated to theworld. Cassirer holds himself responsible along withothers for having pursued the former to the detriment of thelatter. Cassirer is speaking as an exile in the midst of the de-struction of the ideals of Western culture at the hands of theNazis.Cassirer quotes Schweitzer, saying that philosophy as such

is not responsible for the disintegration and crumbling of ourspiritual and ethical ideals of culture. But, as Schweitzer ex-plains, Philosophy is to be blamed for our world in that it didnot admit the fact. Every effort should have been made, led byphilosophy, to direct our attention to the disintegration of cul-ture. But in the hour of peril, Schweitzer says, the watchmanslept, who should have kept watch over us. So it happened thatwe did not struggle for our culture. Cassirer says, I believe thatall of us who have worked in the area of theoretical philosophyin the last decades deserve in a certain sense this reproach ofSchweitzer; I do not exclude myself and I do not absolve my-self. 47

AsWorldWar II took shape, Cassirer began to bring out thenormative dimension of his philosophy of symbolic forms. Buthis earlier analyzing of culture had never been wholly withoutnormative direction. His response to the conditions of World

. Ibid., .

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War I was Freedom and Form (), which from one point ofview appears to be a work on aesthetics, but as the thrust ofthe subtitle, Studies of German Cultural History [Geistesge-schichte], indicates, he intended it to serve as a reminder ofthe connection between freedom and culture.48 This is the sametheme Cassirer attempts to emphasize in his confrontation withHeidegger a decade after the war at their meeting at Davosthat culture is the work of human freedom.In their confrontation at Davos, Heidegger stated that for

him, freedom or liberation is to become free for the finitudeof existence and to enter into the Geworfenheit (being throwninto existence). And he goes on to say, I believewhat I callDa-sein (existence) is not translatable into Cassirers vocabulary. 49

As Heidegger puts it, freedom cannot be a project of Geist inCassirers sense. In explaining his position,Cassirer quoted fromGoethe, arguing that freedom is an ideal for human beings andcan be understood as the purpose of all the finite configura-tions of culture that, when traversed, point us toward the infi-nite. ForHeidegger, freedom requires a breakthrough, anEin-bruch, which is not necessary to the nature of human beings butis wholly contingent (zufllig).Cassirer was convinced that Heideggers conception of Da-

sein offered no ethics. He also was convinced that the emotiv-ist ethics deriving frommodern positivism was unacceptable. InSweden he wrote a critical work on the views of an exponent ofthis position, Axel Hgerstrm ().50 To reduce ethical judg-

. Freiheit und Form: Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte (Berlin:Bruno Cassirer, ).

. Symbol, Myth, and Culture, .. Axel Hgerstrm: Eine Studie zur schwedischen Philosophie der

Gegenwart, Gteborgs Hgskolas Arsskrift, vol. (Gteborg: ElandersBoktryckeri Aktiebolag, ).

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ments to subjective states of approbation or disapprobation is toignore the sense in which values are objectively present in cul-ture and the sense in which ethical ideals exert a real force inhuman affairs.When Cassirer arrived in the United States in , friends

and colleagues began to press him to translate The Philosophyof Symbolic Forms into English so that his philosophy of culturewould be available to anAmerican audience.They also expressedthewish that hewould apply his philosophy to an understandingof politics and the events of the twentieth century. These urg-ings led him to write two books: An Essay on Man () andThe Myth of the State (), which was left in manuscript at hisdeath. Cassirer decided not to put the three volumes ofThe Phi-losophy of Symbolic Forms into English but instead to summarize,recast, and update his views in a new form.He nowpresented hisconception of symbolic forms not as an expansion and revisionof the critical problem of knowledge but as a philosophical an-thropology, using Popes title An Essay onManwith the subtitle,An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture.A normative tension runs through his essay on man. Culture

is presented as an activity of self-knowledge, the result of theability to connect reason and imagination with human freedom.Human beings are to be understood through an examination ofthe whole cycle of human cultural activity, rather than througha reduction of their being to any one form of activity. Cassirersays there is a crisis in mans knowledge of himself, in thathuman nature is so fragmented that human beings cannot con-front the human as a whole in the mirror of culture. Insteadwe find human beings reduced to one aspect of the human, toNietzsches will to power, to Freuds sexual instinct, to Marxseconomic instinct. Theologians, scientists, politicians, sociolo-gists, biologists, psychologists, ethnologistsall approach the

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problem from their own viewpoint. We have no common con-text from which to understand human nature.Cassirer transforms the Aristotelian definition of man as ani-

mal rationale into man as animal symbolicum.51 The symbol notonly provides the universal medium of human knowledge; itprovides the moral medium for human nature understood as thesystem of cultural activity in which man can act. Cassirer nowconnects his conception of the philosophic spirit with the clas-sical project of self-knowledge. Cassirer opens An Essay on Manwith the sentence: That self-knowledge is the highest aim ofphilosophical inquiry appears to be generally acknowledged. 52

Cassirer employs the biological theories of Jakob von Uex-kll to explain the human organism that underlies culture. Uex-kll claims that each organism is a functional circle in whichthere are two polesa reactor system and an effector system.Each organism is surrounded by its own environment, its ownUmwelt. Thus the world of the sea urchin is full of sea urchinthings and the world of the fly is full of fly things. In thehuman organism, Cassirer says, there is a third and mediatingfactora symbol system such that the world of the human isalways full of symbolic things.The power of the symbol to transform itself into systems of

symbols whose meanings self-consciously reside in other sym-bols involves human freedom to create ideals. The ideal freeshuman beings from the immediacy of their existence and allowslife to take on moral direction. The duty of philosophy is topresent the harmony of all the symbolic forms of culture, tocounter the tendency within any symbolic form to dominate theothers. This is a moral ideal for philosophy, not simply a task ofdialectical logic. Cassirers emphasis on this need for harmony

. Essay on Man, .. Ibid., .

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in An Essay onMan is a version of Schweitzers metaphor of phi-losophy as the watchman.In this same period Cassirer wrote Albert Schweitzer as

Critic of Nineteenth-Century Ethics, which appeared posthu-mously in .53 Schweitzer remained Cassirers inspiration asan ethicist of culture. In this essay, Cassirer uses Schweitzersviews to oppose the Hegelian view that philosophy is its timeapprehended in thoughts, that philosophy has only a passiverole in culture. Cassirer thus opposes the view that philosophyalways comes too late to events.In concluding this essay, Cassirer says that philosophy only

comes too late when it begins to forget its principal duty, whenit yields to the pressure of external forces instead of using its ownpowers and confiding in these powers. Schweitzer stands forthe courage of truth as well as the enjoyment of knowledge.The ideals of harmony and self-knowledge that are crucial tothe courage of truth can be held up by philosophy against thedisintegration of culture. But to this end, Cassirer says, phi-losophy must first reconstruct and regenerate itself. It must rec-ognize its fundamental duties before it can regain its place inmodern cultural life. 54

Until the appearance of The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms,the discussion of the human organism in An Essay on Man wasall that was known of Cassirers grounding of his conceptionof culture in a doctrine of the human. The second part of TheMetaphysics of Symbolic Forms, as mentioned, is the essay BasisPhenomena, which he wrote about , in Sweden. In it Cas-sirer speaks of Uexklls biology of the organism but does not

. Albert Schweitzer as Critic of Nineteenth-Century Ethics, inThe Albert Schweitzer Jubilee Book, ed. A. A. Roback (Cambridge, Mass.:Sci-Art Publishers, ), .

. Ibid., .

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carry his discussion as far as his definition of man as animal sym-bolicum.The three basis phenomena of the I, action, and thework (das

Ich-Phnomen, das Wirkens-Phnomen, das Werk-Phnomen), asexplained in Bayers commentary, are absolutes of the humanworld for Cassirer. Cassirer says we either accept these phe-nomena or we do not; we cannot give any further explanationand cannot want to. 55The basis phenomena appear to be analo-gous or at least partially analogous to his later formulation ofUexklls biology: the reactor system to the I, action to the ef-fector system, and, most clearly, the symbolic system to the phe-nomenon of the work. The work (das Werk) is not labor or toilbut work in the sense of a cultural product, the result of artistic,ethical, scientific, or other such activity.Cassirer ends his phenomenological presentation of his meta-

physics with the connection of the work to culture and cultureto the Socratic project of self-knowledge. As Bayer brings out inher commentary, this is one of Cassirers strongest statements ofthe Socratic standpoint of his philosophy. Cassirer says: Thiscall now means: know your work and know yourself in yourwork; know what you do, so you can do what you know. . . . Thediscovery of this imperative of the workits autochthonic andautonomous sense, its binding characterthat is Socrates realdeed. 56 Cassirer sees the I and the action (as driven by the will)as merging in the work, and the phenomenon of work as culmi-nating in the self as it makes a knowledge of itself. He regardsSocrates as the image of philosophy in which the theoretical andthe moral are not separable. Socrates at one moment appears tobe the pure thinker and at another is the presence of the moralspirit.

. PSF, : .. PSF, : . See the discussion of Socrates in Chap. of this book.

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The Myth of the State remains the final moment of Cassirersphilosophy, and, like An Essay on Man, it is both a theoreticaland a moral work. Unlike any other major contemporary phi-losopher, Cassirer was able to grasp the nature of the Nazis useof myth to create a politics of the modern state, because he hadat his disposal a complete analysis of myth as the original sym-bolic form of human culture. This theory of myth, developed asa response to problems in the theory of knowledge, has now be-come the key for the philosophical understanding of the role ofmyth in twentieth-century politics. Cassirer saw that the prob-lem of modern politics was not the Nazi state itself. The largerproblem is the connection of the form of mythical thought withthe techniques of modern politics that has taken place in thetwentieth-century state.The techniques of mass communication that would today be

called themedia are the basis ofmodern political power, and thatpower is not the vehicle for a rational understanding of issues,ideas, and facts.Through such techniques themodern politicianuses the thought form of the myth to influence the emotionsand feelings of the masses, which respond above all to the powerof the image. Cassirer says: We no longer observe the flight ofbirds nor do we inspect the entrails of slain animals. . . . But ifour methods have changed the thing itself has by nomeans van-ished. Our modern politicians know very well that great massesare much more easily moved by the force of imagination thanby sheer physical force. The politician, Cassirer says, becomesa sort of public fortune-teller. Thus, the most improbable oreven impossible promises are made; the millennium is predictedover and over again. 57

In regard to Nazism as a particular phenomenon of the twen-tieth century, Cassirer was able by means of this theory of myth

. The Myth of the State, .

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to explain the reasons for the attack on the Jews. In an article forContemporary Jewish Record (), Cassirer says that in orderto understand the campaign against Judaism launched by theleaders of the New Germany it is not enough to consider thereasons usually given. Cassirer asks why Hitler, in his last ad-dress, marking the eleventh anniversary of his regime, abandonsthe theme of the conquest of the world by the German race; heis obsessed with only one thingthe threat posed by the Jews.When no Jew could breathe in Germany, what worries Hitleris not the future destiny of Germany, but the triumph of theJews. 58

Cassirers explanation for why the Jews became the particu-lar scapegoat of Nazi Germany is one that could not even havebeen envisaged in the absence of his philosophy of culture. Inthe development of Western culture it is the Jews that first con-front the system of totem and taboo within mythical life. In AnEssay on Man Cassirer describes how the Hebrew prophets arethe bringers of the new sense of ethical life, of individual re-sponsibility, and of self-conscious ethical ideals that break thecircle of primitive society based on totem and taboo. The Jewsremain the bearers of the ethical spirit that threatens the mythi-cal reliance on the power of the image to hold consciousness inthe immediacy of theworld and to inhibit the power of thought.Nazism became a reenactment of the original ancient strugglebetween the mythical and the ethical-religious consciousness atthe beginning of culture.In a lecture given at Princeton University in , Cassirer

asked: What can philosophy do in this struggle against thepolitical myths? He said: Myth cannot be overcome by logicaland rational arguments. Cassirer says that if philosophy can-not reform the political myth directly, it can make us under-

. Symbol, Myth, and Culture, .

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stand the adversaryunderstand the strength of themyth. Toall of us it has become clear that we have greatly underratedthe strength of the political myths. We should not repeat thiserror. 59

For Cassirer, philosophy has the ultimate duty as the watch-man called for by Schweitzer. In Cassirers view, this duty is notone that philosophy can choose either to assume or not to as-sume. It is a duty that is required of philosophy by human cul-ture, by that which originally makes philosophy itself possible.This duty cannot be accomplished simply as an act of good will;it requires a full philosophy of culture, a theoretical knowledgeof the nature of the human, and a comprehension of the meta-physics upon which the human world rests.

. The Technique of Our Modern Political Myths, in Symbol,Myth, and Culture, .

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T E TLife and Spirit

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Life and Spirit

All soul has charge of all that is inanimate, and traverses the wholeuniverse, though in ever-changing forms.Plato, Phaedrus

The central distinction of Cassirers metaphysics is between life(Leben) and spirit (Geist). Cassirer understands all metaphysi-cal systems of the twentieth century as tending in one or theother of these two directions. A full understanding of what lifeand spirit mean for Cassirer requires not only the definition ofthe two concepts but also an understanding of their connectionswith the key ideas of his philosophy of culture, especially hisconceptions of dialectic and symbolic form. Cassirer intends hismetaphysics of symbolic forms to pass between the horns of thedilemma of life and spirit.To accomplish this, hewishes to showthat each of these attains its reality through the transformationof the other.

D L

Life is a principle of unity that is organic, natural, dialectical,subjective, vital, biological, and functional. It possesses featuresthat sharply distinguish it from the principle of spirit. Life is anundivided, unified view of the world experienced by organismsin nature. These organisms see the world as a whole at each mo-ment. Cassirer calls life an undifferentiated unity, the unity ofthe natural world-picture (; ).1 The forms of culture are dif-

. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. , The Metaphysics of Symbolic

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ferentiated, but the features of life are not. Life is a principle ofunion: Taken in itself it is a whole and closed (; ); it is thefinal point of identity (; ) beyond which we cannot go.The unity of life makes life the most fundamental of prin-

ciples. As a unity, life is more fundamental than its productions.Cassirer says that life presents itself to us, so to speak, as a uni-form and simple beam of light, which has not yet been refractedand dispersed bydifferentmediums ofmeaning (; ).To defineitself, spirit requires various forms of meaning; this multiplicitystands in contrast to the sense of unity that typifies life.Life is not a simple unity, because its unity draws together the

diversity present in spirit. These differences are preserved in itsunity. Life is the primordial fact, whose dispersion in amulti-tude of different directions is quite essentialand that preciselyis the primary phenomenon of Life itself, that it asserts its deepunshakable unity in this divergency (; ). Life, as a prin-ciple of unity, must unify.Life is characterized by movement and change. Life is inher-

ently dialectical. Cultural forms of spirit also spring dialecticallyfrom life and resolve themselves back into life. That the differ-ences between cultural forms of spirit are resolved in lifes unitydoes not stop the dialectic; instead, it pushes it back furtherinto the concept of life itself (; ). Life is dependent on itsdialectical movement, its creation of ever new forms, and itsdestruction of them (; ). Life itself is the unity of thesemovements.

Forms, ed. John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene, trans. JohnMichael Krois (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ); ZurMetaphysik der symbolischen Formen, ed. John Michael Krois, vol. ofErnst Cassirer, Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, ed. John MichaelKrois and Oswald Schwemmer (Hamburg: Meiner, ). Page numbersin the American edition are given first, followed by those in the Germanedition.

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Life is also described by Cassirer as subjectivity, and the unityof life is called the focal point of subjectivity (; ). Subjec-tivity is experience composed of nonenduring qualities, insteadof things with enduring characteristics (; ). Withoutan empirical sense of objects, the self, and others, only fleetingexperience can occur. Animals make distinctions, but they can-not add to or change the dimensions of a situation. Their sub-jectivity does not have the ability to move between possible in-terpretations of experience, and it lacks the power to approachthe experience of nature in lawlike fashion. An animal does notorganize its world by making shared, nontemporal interpreta-tions of it. Subjectivity is the wholly individual, closed experi-ence of theworld. Life is subjective experience that both opposesand grounds the divergent, objective formations of spirit.This subjective experience of life is the experience of fate.

No alternate explanation of events is available for the creaturethat cannot move between interpretations, between possibili-ties for given, stable occurrences. Cassirer says, Life as such isself-imprisoned, not free.2 Life moves according to fate. Life ismovement without conscious choice; choice requires the con-sciousness of spirit. In the realm of nature, instinct does notprovide organisms, whether as individuals or as a species, withtrue options for action. The outcome of natural events is fatedor determined by instinct, not by choice (; ).Cassirer rejects Georg Simmels spatialized, abstract, and ab-

solute conception of life. Life for Simmel is some absolute be-yond all mediation (; ). If life were an absolute in Sim-mels sense, its dialectical movements, which Cassirer claims

. Spirit and Life in Contemporary Philosophy, trans. RobertWalter Bretall and Paul Arthur Schilpp, in The Philosophy of Ernst Cas-sirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston, Ill.: Library of Living Philoso-phers, ), . Hereinafter cited as S & L.

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must occur, could not occur. Life is not a rigid pole of being ina spatial reality. For Cassirer, life is functional; life ever existsonly insofar as it continually recreates itself. 3

Cassirer also rejects the organological view of life, as devel-oped by the Romantics, and the philosophy of history ofOswaldSpengler. According to the organological view, the temporal andfleeting features of life pervade not only nature but culture. Inthis view, cultural forms are essentially an aspect of life. Spen-gler regards culture as having no independent stability outside itstemporal process; the wilting and decay of cultural structuresis a result of cultures existence as a feature of life (; ).For Cassirer, life and spirit are different in kind, yet they standin a necessary relation to each other. The features of life, suchas immediacy, subjectivity, fate, and pure becoming, are not thefeatures of spirit. Life is the circle ofmerely organic creativity. 4

The experience of life is the experience of organisms in nature;nature and culture are not identical processes.

D S

Spirit is the specifically human principle that grounds Cassirersphilosophy of culture.5 Spirit is also a principle of unity, butone that is cultural, intellectual, dialectical, objective, and func-tional. Spirit cannot be defined in and of itself; it can be defined

. S & L, .. S & L, .. In the American edition of PSF, , Geist is most often rendered

as geist used as an English word (see PSF, : x, n. ), but in some in-stances it is translated as intelligence, mind, intellect, or culture.Throughout this commentary, spirit is used as the English equiva-lent for Geist. All quotations from the translation of PSF, , in whichGeist appears in the original, are amended to read spirit (adj. geistig,spiritual).

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only in relation and contrast to life. The definition of spirit alsorequires that it be understood in terms of the symbolic formsthat make up its internal structure. As a principle of unity, spiritis not mainly theoretical or mainly practical; it is the unifyingprinciple of all spiritual formations. Cassirer says that spirit isthe central point of unity for all varieties and directions of the[spiritual] giving of form (; ) and that it is the true unityof symbolic formation (; ).Plurality and difference between forms is preserved by spirit;

no leveling or blending of these differences occurs. Spirit wouldhave nothing to unify if there were no varieties of activity: Theunity of spirit is to be found only in the plurality of symbolicforms (; ). Spirit has the tendency at once to unify andto diversify. Cassirer says that spirit is the transpersonalsphere ofmeaning (; ). Both spirit and life are describedas circular functions. Life is a circle of action, as described bythe biologist Jakob von Uexkll, in which biological organismsact and react in their environments; spirit is a circle of vision,in which spiritual beings recognize difference, interpret situa-tions, and give meaning to events (; ).Spirit is culture. Cassirer says all culture, the entire devel-

opment of spirit, leads away in fact frommere life (; ).The primary activity of spirit is a movement away from life; thefirst activity of culture is to fix sensation within the flux of lifeand from this to begin to form a world of objects. Spirit is spe-cifically human. It is connected with consciousness in thehuman being and develops through the activity of symbolic for-mation (; ).This consciousness arises when the human being is notmerely

a part of the world but also begins to express and represent theworld. Expression and representation depend on symbolic for-mation and cultural configurations: Through them [the sym-bolic forms], along with the objective configurations of culture,

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that characteristic mode of conscious awareness is achieved thatis found in mankind (; ). Culture is the human worldachieved by spirit through conscious activity. Consciousness andculture are parallel developments within spirit (; ).Another way of describing spirit is as intellect (Intellekt).

Spirit contains all intellectual possibilities, it is the source for allintellectual acts. The quest of the intellect for certainty can beconducted only within spirit. Cassirer says that the Archime-dean point of certitude that we are seeking can never be givento us from the outside of it; the source of ideas lies inside theintellect (; ). The intellect and all its ideas, so to speak, liewithin spirit.The intellectual or spiritual world goes beyond the world of

space and time, the boundaries for the life of the human being.The human being escapes the limits of perception and actionthrough spirit, and so man comes to share in a new heaven andearth, in an intelligible cosmos (; ). This intelligiblecosmos is possible through the power of the symbol present inspirit. Cassirer says, The world of spirit is no more immanentwithin theworld of life than it is transcendent of it; it remainsas little caught up in it as it raises itself above it. This twofoldnature of inside and outside or of above and below is itselfnot something that is already there and given. It is one of manyspiritual aspects; it is only there as the viewpoint of the spirit(; ).Spirit a