At his death in 1945 Cassirer left a quantity of unpublished papers, among which were manuscripts concerning a “metaphysics of symbolic forms.” These manuscripts were on a topic not previously thought to be part of his conception of a philosophy of symbolic forms. They have only recently come to light, and their appearance invites a new perspective, a new understanding of Cassirer’s philosophy.
Cassirer left his professorship at the University of Hamburg in May of 1933, following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of Germany in January. As a Jew, Cassirer had no future in his homeland, and two months later he was formally dismissed, in absentia, from his university position. Cassirer taught for two years (1933-1935) at All Souls College, Oxford, before taking up a professorship at the University of Gôteborg, Sweden. In 1941 he accepted a position at Yale University, and that summer the Cassirers came to the United States on the last ship to leave Sweden. At the time of his death, Cassirer had moved to an appointment at Columbia University. He died suddenly of a heart attack on the Columbia campus on April 13, 1945.
In the summer of 1946, after the end of World War II, Mrs. Cassirer returned to Sweden and brought to the United States the papers which her husband had left on their departure. The papers remained in storage and unexamined by any Cassirer scholar until 1972, when I surveyed them. They are now permanently housed at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
My survey of the papers led to the publication of a volume of twelve of Cassirer’s essays and lectures from the last decade of his life, Symbol, Myth, and Culture.1 These were pieces in which Cassirer summarized and introduced to new audiences, in Sweden and principally in the United States, his conception of culture and symbolic form. Most prominent among the papers remained two manuscripts marked as an unpublished text of a fourth volume to his three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, publishedin the 1920s and translated into English in the 1950s. The first of these three volumes concerns language, the second, mythical thought, and the third is a phenomenology of knowledge, showing the genesis of scientific thought from pretheoretical expressive and representational functions of consciousness.2
1. For a description of the papers see Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935-1945, ed. Donald Phillip Verene (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 293-98.
2. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 3 vols., trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953-1957). Hereinafter cited as PSF.
Missing in Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms was a treatment of the metaphysical principles that supported it. One of the principal criticisms made by Cassirer’s first commentators, the contributors to a volume of twenty-three essays published on Cassirer’s work in the Library of Living Philosophers series, was that Cassirer had no metaphysics or was in fact antimetaphysical. Several of these essays make this point quite strongly.3 Because Cassirer died during the preparation of this volume, which appeared in 1949, he made no reply to his critics as is usual in this series.
Cassirer had indicated in the preface to the third volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms that he intended to publish a discussion of the principles of spirit (Geist) and life (Leben).4 He never did so, but in an essay on Max Scheler’s philosophical anthropology that was printed in lieu of a reply in the Library of Living Philosophers volume, he made some leading comments about these two principles.5 The view that Cassirer had a philosophy without a metaphysics reinforced the popular view that his philosophy of symbolic forms was basically an extension of Marburg neo-Kantianism.
The Marburg neo-Kantians had focused their account of knowledge quite narrowly on forms of scientific and theoretical cognition. Cassirer was understood as simply extending the principles of Kantian critique to noncognitive areas of symbolic formation as found n myth, religion, art, and history. His philosophy was commonly seen as a series of analyses of various areas of human culture to show how each employs Kantian categories in different ways and how each can be understood as a type of knowledge.
3. The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston, 111.: Library of Living Philosophers, 1949); see the essays of William Curtis Swabey, Felix Kaufmann, Robert S. Hartman, and Wilbur M. Urban.
4. PSF, 3: xvi.
5. ‘“Spirit’ and ‘Life’ in Contemporary Philosophy,” trans. Robert Walter Bretall and Paul Arthur Schilpp, in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, 855-80.
But what understanding of reality, especially human reality, did this entail? Cassirer seemed not to have given a reply to this. His thought appeared to his readers and commentators as an expansion of Kantian epistemology coupledwith work in the history of thought, represented by the ground-breaking studies he had written on the problem of knowledge in modern philosophy, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Platonic renaissance in England, and individual studies of various philosophers. Brand Blanshard, in a review of the last work Cassirer published, An Essay on Man (1944), saw Cassirer’s philosophy still to be a series of scholarly researches not mobilized in the interest of any metaphysical theory.6
The manuscripts that make up the fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms appeared in a German edition in 1995 as the first volume in what is planned to be a twenty-volume edition of Cassirer’s unpublished papers.7 The following year, this volume appeared in an American edition, which John Michael Krois and I edited.8 Cassirer’s title for this volume is The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms. The first part of it, written in 1928 at the time he was finishing the third volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, concerns the principles of spirit (Geist) and life (Leben).
6. Philosophical Review 54 (1945): 509-10.
7. Zur Metaphysik der symbolischen Formen, ed. John Michael Krois, vol. ι of Ernst Cassirer, Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, ed. John Michael Krois and OswaldSchwemmer (Hamburg: Meiner, 1995).
8.The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, ed. John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene, trans. John Michael Krois (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996).
The second part, written in Sweden about 1940, shortly before his departure for the United States, introduces his concept of “basis phenomena” (Basisphànomene), an idea Cassirer writes of nowhere else in his publishedor unpublishedworks. These phenomena, for which Cassirer uses various terms, including “I,” “action,” and“the work,” underlie all human experience and make human reality possible. The concept of basis phenomena, coupled with the great distinction between spirit and life, constitute Cassirer’s metaphysics and of fer the most that he has said about how his concept of symbolic form is grounded in a concept of the real.
It was a unique event in twentieth-century philosophy that an unknown major work of a major philosopher came to light so long after his death. The papers of figures such as Husserl and Peirce have, as a body, influenced the understanding of their thought. In Cassirer’s case, here is a single, complicated work that changes one’s opinion of his philosophy and how he ultimately understood his philosophy.
It is a work that requires a commentary, and the exposition by Thora Ilin Bayer that follows is extraordinarily useful—indeed, essential—for the comprehension of Cassirer’s metaphysics. No other commentary currently exists on this work. Bayer’s commentary is keyed to the text with references to the pages of the English and German editions, but it is also written as a narrative that can be read on its own, which allows the reader to see much of what Cassirer himself saw when reflecting on his own philosophy. Bayer does not propose to solve problems that may lie within Cassirer’s metaphysics. Her method of commentary takes the reader progressively through Cassirer’s claims, and she reminds the reader how each point stands in relation to the general themes of Cassirer’s position.
The publication and analysis of Cassirer’s metaphysics comes at a time of new international interest in Cassirer studies. Several of Cassirer’s works of original philosophy have been continuously in print since their first publication in English. This has been true of the three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms since their translation into English in the 1950s, and of An Essay on Man (1944) and The Myth of the State (1946).9 These last two works, which Cassirer wrote in English while at Yale, have been translated into every major European and Asian language. This is a remarkable record of readership. Cassirer is one of those philosophers, along with Dewey, Whitehead, Nietzsche, and the Existentialists, to mention a few, whose works have attracted continual attention beyond professional philosophy and academics.
Almost since their publication, Cassirer’s The Philosophy of the Enlightenment and The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy have been standard texts in the history of ideas.10 But it is only within the last decade that Cassirer’s original philosophy has begun to receive systematic scholarly attention. The beginning of this period is marked by the appearance of John Michael Krois’s Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History, for some time the only major study in English of Cassirer’s philosophy.11 Although before that some valuable critical writings on Cassirer had appeared, it is only in the past few years that a body of work on Cassirer has begun to accumulate and that a common interest in Cassirer’s work has developed that has brought together scholars from various countries and in various fields.
9. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944); The Myth of the State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1946).
10. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951); The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (New York: Harper and Row, 1964).
11. John Michael Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987).
Evidence of this is the formation in the last several years of an International Ernst Cassirer Society (Internationale Ernst Cassirer-Gesellschaft), which has been involvedin several conferences and meetings heldon Cassirer’s philosophy in Europe and in the publication of various volumes of essays on Cassirer. A yearlong cycle of lectures on Cassirer was organized at the University of Hamburg, the papers of which have appeared as Ernst Cassirers Wesen und Wirkung12
Two major international and interdisciplinary conferences heldin the past few years brought together scholars principally from the UnitedStates, Germany, France, andlsrael; one in October 1996 at Yale University, the other in May 1998 in Israel. Both of these focusedattention on Cassirer’s metaphysics, including his conceptions of symbol and culture. In addition to the edition of Cassirer’s unpublished papers just mentioned, the publication of a twenty-five volume edition of all of Cassirer’s previously published works has begun to appear in German.13 New studies and editions of Cassirer’s works continue to appear in Germany as well as in France and Italy.
All of this was inconceivable only a few years ago. The danger is that Cassirer will become an industry, as has occurred with other figures. But these publishing commitments and the memberships in the Cassirer society represent a genuine new interest in Cassirer’s work, which attracts not only philosophers but scholars from across the humanities.
12. Ernst Cassirers Wesen und Wirkung: Kultur und Philosophie, ed. Dorothea Frede andReinoldSchmücker (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997).
13. Between 1998 and 2006, the complete edition is to appear, the first volume of which is Ernst Cassirer, Gesammelte Werke: Hamburger Aus-gabe, ed. Birgit Recki, vol. i, Leibniz’ System in seinen Wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen (1902) (Hamburg: Meiner, 1998).
The cause of this pattern of interest is probably two fold. Perhaps one cause is simply that the existence and nature of an archive of unpublished work by a major thinker, who writes about topics of contemporary appeal, has been brought to light. This in itself excites interest. The second cause very possibly lies in the connection between Cassirer’s thought and certain movements in contemporary thought, such as structuralism, phenomenology, linguistics, and hermeneutics. To cite one example, Cassirer’s posthumous article in the first volume of the journal Word, titled“Structuralism in Modern Linguistics” (1946), became a source for the term “structuralism.”14
Beyondits connections with these movements and their methods, which have strongly influenced the fields of the humanities, Cassirer’s approach to culture offers a total philosophy. In Cassirer’s philosophy the perennial questions are still alive. Cassirer’s thought proceeds without a technical vocabulary and offers a way to consider the ancient Socratic questions about the nature of the human worldand the nature of self-knowledge. Cassirer offers intellectual morale. His works are readable, and he brings the whole of human culture back into view, and with it the viability of a metaphysics of culture.
Beyond the incorporation of Cassirer’s ideas in the works of Susanne Langer, no school of Cassirerian philosophy was ever formed. Cassirer had to leave Germany just at the time when many scholars there were beginning to study critically his volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. He left Oxford after only two years for Gôteborg and six years later came to the United States, while the war was still in progress. Cassirer never had a proper place or a good situation in which to present his new philosophy in a sustained manner to advanced students or to colleagues. He would in all like lihood have enjoyed more favorable conditions in the United States following the war, but his sudden, untimely death precluded him from doing so.
14. Cassirer, “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics,” Word 1(1946): 99-120.
To approach Cassirer’s metaphysics, which is a new key to his thought, the reader may wish to have in mind the development of his philosophy. Cassirer published more than 125 books and articles in a period of nearly fifty years, including several items that appearedposthumously. These works comprise 11,380 pages, not including Cassirer’s unpublished papers—more pages than the Prussian Academy edition of Kant’s collected works. In what follows I have divided Cassirer’s work into four periods. Within each of these, and throughout his career, there is a dialectic between his works of systematic philosophy and his historical studies. Each of these supplements the other.
Cassirer never wished to “throw his ideas into empty space” but always saw the need to groundhis philosophy in the history of thought. This dialectic between philosophy proper and history is both Cassirer’s strength and his weakness. The meaning and originality of his philosophical ideas are revealed through their connections with the thought of others, yet his continual quotations and historical discussions tend to absorb his ideas and inhibit his ability to develop further statements of them on their own terms. This is his style of thought, even in his work on metaphysics. One of the virtues of the commentary that follows is that it allows us to focus on the ideas themselves and their structure. Because Cassirer moved back and forth throughout his career between so many subjects, the four divisions that follow should not be regarded as sharp divisions in his thought. They are general positions from which most of the various threads of his thought can be grasped.
Cassirer wrote his doctoral dissertation under Hermann Cohen at the University of Marburg in 1899, “Descartes’ Critique of Mathematical and Natural Scientific Knowledge.”15 This became the introduction to his first book, which appeared three years later, Leibniz’ System (1902).16 Cohen had founded the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism about 1870. When Cassirer came to Marburg to attendCohen’s seminars, he had already readCohen’s works on Kant; he regarded Cohen as the most important interpreter of Kant in Germany. Neo-Kantianism had developed in the last half of the nineteenth century as a reaction to Hegelianism, from a belief that Hegelian philosophy attempts to grasp all of human knowledge in one swoop, in a total system developed from the top down, leaving the specific bases of the individual fields of knowledge insufficiently examined. Hegelian speculation was thought to have turned its back too quickly on the method of critical philosophy.
The roots of this return to Kant lie in the works of Hermann von Helmholtz, Friedrich Albert Lange, Eduard Zeller, and Otto Liebmann. Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp were the central figures of the Marburg school, which emphasizedthe epistemology of the natural sciences. Another tendency of neo-Kantianism, known as the Southwest (Baden) school, was founded by Wilhelm Windel band and carried on by Heinrich Rickert. It focusedon the logical problems of history and the cultural sciences.
15. “Descartes’ Kritik der mathematischen und naturwissen schaftlichen Erkenntnis” (inaugural dissertation, Marburg, 1899). I have given all titles of Cassirer’s works in the text in English.
16. Leibniz’ System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen (Marburg: Elwert, 1902).
Cassirer, in his article “Neo-Kantianism” for the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1928) said, of the various forms of the neo-Kantian movement, “But, not withstanding differences of detail, there is a certain methodical 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 says that it was “in Hermann Cohen that neo-Kantianism reachedits climax.” Cohen’s exposition of the fundamental doctrines of Kant, Cassirer said, brought “one single systematic idea into the centre of the investigation. This idea is that of the ‘transcendental method.’’ 17
Cassirer’s thought developed from this neo-Kantian position. In textbooks and discussions of twentieth-century philosophy, his philosophy is commonly typed simply as neo-Kantian. In his famous debate with Heidegger at Davos, Switzerland, in 1929 concerning Kant and the problem of human freedom, Heidegger 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 its origin, to create the impression that it is just a narrow form of Kantianism.
Cassirer bristles at this implication and replies that neo-Kantianism must be understood in “functional terms,” meaning that although his philosophy began at Marburg, he does not intend an understanding of his philosophy to end there. Cassirer reiterates this claim that neo-Kantianism must be understood in functional terms in the preface to his later work in the philosophy of science — Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics (1936), in which he wishes to show how the Kantian position can be revisedto of fer an account of the new non-Newtonian conceptions of causality and quantum theory.19
17. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed., s.v. “Neo-Kantianism.”
18. See Symbol, Myth, and Culture, 36-42.
19. Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics: Historical and Systematic Studies of the Problem of Causality, trans. O. T. Benfrey (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1956), xxiii-xxiv.
Cassirer’s origins are certainly in the Marburg tradition. The use of the term “critique” in relation to Descartes in the title of his doctoral dissertation is no accident. His interpretations of Descartes and Leibniz are crucial for bringing the perspective of critical philosophy to bear on an understanding of modern philosophy. At Cassirer’s hands, Descartes and Leibniz appear not simply as formulators of rationalist metaphysics but as fundamental sources for the approach to knowledge of critical philosophy.
While editing an edition of Leibniz’s works, Cassirer began to publish his multi volume work The Problem of Knowledge in Philosophy and Science in the Modern Age, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1906-1907.20 His aim was to show how the problem of knowledge developed, from the speculations of Nicholas of Cusa, regarded as the first modern philosopher, to the critical philosophy of Kant. The problem of knowledge, conceived as the central problem of modern philosophy, culminates in the stage of Erkenntniskritik, and this culmination can be understood only by comprehending the interconnections between the conceptions of knowledge within the development of modern philosophy and those present in the rise of modern science.
These two volumes were an enormous accomplishment of learning and philosophical scholarship. Later, Cassirer decided to continue his treatment of the problem of knowledge in a third volume, published in 1920, taking his history through the figures of post-Kantian thought, especially Hegel.21 The very full treatment of Hegel’s philosophy in this volume has a resonance with his use of Hegel as a source for the phenomenology of knowledge in the third volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, which was written in 1927 but published in 1929.22 While in Sweden, Cassirer wrote a final, fourth volume of The Problem of Knowledge, treating developments since Hegel up to 1932 and expanding his discussion to the areas of biology and history.23
20. Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neuern Zeit, 2 vols. (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1906-1907).
21. Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neuern Zeit, vol. 3, Die Nachkantischen Systeme (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1920).
22. Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, vol. 3, Phánomenologie der Erkenntnis (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1929).
23. 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).
Three years after the appearance of the secondvolume of The Problem of Knowledge, Cassirer’s first work of original philosophy, Substance and Function (1910), was published.24 This contained a philosophy of science, but it was more than this, for it had the subtitle “Investigations Concerning the Fundamental Questions of the Critique of Knowledge [Erkenntnis-kritik].” The first chapter demonstrated that Aristotelian class logic based on a metaphysics of substance could not account for the way in which mathematically based concepts were employed in modern science.
Cassirer shows that substance basedlogic must be replaced with a new theory of the concept, basedon the idea of the functional order of a series. Cassirer’s model was F(a,b,c…), in which F is the principle or law by which the series is constructed and the variables are the particulars, each of which is fixedin a determinate position within the series by the law of the series. The Fcan also stand as a variable in some other series, and thus an ever-expanding system of serial orders is conceivable in which each variable in each series is completely determined, yet the system itself and the series within it have ultimately no set limits.
24. Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, trans. William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (Chicago: Open Court, 1923).
This model of the functional concept in which the universal element is held in an inseparable bond with the serial particular becomes the master key to Cassirer’s later conceptions of the symbol itself and to his sense of a system of symbolic forms in which the whole of culture is ordered in terms of its own set of functional relations, harmoniously graspedand portrayed by philosophy. This conception of a system of symbolic forms does not appear in Substance and Function, nor does the concept of symbolic form itself, but Hermann Cohen, on reading this work, felt that Cassirer had departed from the Marburg neo-Kantian epistemology. He was dissuaded by friends from pursuing this view, but in retrospect Cohen was certainly right that Cassirer was moving in a new direction.
Cassirer had laid the groundwork for taking the “transcendental method” further than the elucidation of the principles of cognition and scientific thought to which Marburg neo-Kantianism was tied. In these same years Cassirer was following his practice of combining scholarly work and original philosophy by preparing his ten-volume edition of Kant’s Works (1912), to which he later added a volume on Kant’s Life and Work (1918).25 This contains his highly original discussion of Kant’s third Critique, in which he shows the connection between aesthetic and organic form that is crucial for his own conception of culture as a system of symbolic forms. In the literature on Kant, Cassirer’s discussion of the third Critique remains the best work written on it to date.
25. ImmanuelKants Werke, 10 vols. (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1912); Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981).
Cassirer said that the entire conception of the philosophy of symbolic forms flashed before his mind in 1917 as he entered a streetcar in Berlin. This was while he held his first academic position at the University of Berlin (1906-1919), before he accepted his professorship at the University of Hamburg. He was already at work on what was to be his magnum opus when he arrivedin Hamburg. There he encountered the Warburg Library, the extraordinary collection of books and materials assembled by Aby Warburg and organized according to a concept of culture nearly parallel to that of Cassirer. The library placedemphasis on myth as the basis of human culture and displayed through the order of its shelfclassifications the basic forms of symbolism upon which all culture rests.
Cassirer gave his first definition of symbolic form in an essay that appeared in one of the publications of the Warburg Library, “The Concept of Symbolic Form in the Formation of the Cultural Sciences” (1921-1922): “Under a ‘symbolic form’ should be understood each energy of spirit [Geist] through which a spiritual [geistig] content or meaning is connectedwith a concrete, sensory sign and is internally adaptedto this sign.”26 A symbolic form, then, has as its internal structure a bond between a universal meaning and the particular sensory sign in which the meaning inheres. This parallels the two elements of the functional concept of Substance and Function: the principle of order of a series and the particular that is ordered by it. A symbol is at once inseparably “spiritual” ( geistig) and“sensible” (sinnlich).
26. “Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geistes-wissenschaften,” in Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956), 175.
In the third volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1929), Cassirer ties this to the idea of “symbolic pregnance” (symbol-ische Pràgnanz), a term Cassirer takes from the “law of pregnance” of Gestalt psychology. There Cassirer 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 presents.”27
In the final chapter, titled“The Theory of Relativity and the Problem of Reality,” of his Einstein’s Theory of Relativity Considered from the Epistemological Standpoint (1921), Cassirer spoke of a system of symbolic forms in which theoretical as well as ethical, aesthetic, and religious understanding would be included. He says: “It is the task of a systematic philosophy, which extends far beyond the theory of knowledge, to free the idea of the world from this one-sidedness. It has to grasp the whole system of symbolic forms.”28
The term “symbolic form” is Cassirer’s own. It is the one term that is wholly characteristic of his philosophy. Its source is twofold. One source is in the field of aesthetics — an essay by the Hegelian aesthetician Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Das Symbol,” that appeared in a Festschrift for Eduard Zeller in 1887.29 In this important and influential essay, Vischer uses the term der Symbolbegriff and similar formulations, but never does he precisely use die symbolische Form. Cassirer refers to Vischer in the same passage in the 1921-1922 essay quote dearlier, in which he first defines the term “symbolic form.”
27. PSF, 3: 202.
28. Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, 447.
29. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Das Symbol,” in Philosophische Auf- sàtze: Eduard Zeller, zu seinem funfzigjàhrigen Doctor-Jubilàum gewidmet (Leipzig: Fues’s Verlag, 1887), see esp. 169-73,192-93.
The other source is in the field of science, in the work of Heinrich Hertz. In presenting the concept of his philosophy of symbolic forms in the first volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923), Cassirer says: “Mathematicians and physicists were first to gain a clear awareness of this symbolic character of their basic implements. This new ideal of knowledge to which this whole development points, was brilliantly formulated by Heinrich Hertz in the introduction to his Principles ofMe-chanics.”30 Hertz understood that scientists do not grasp the object of their investigations in its immediacy but grasp the world by means of the system of their symbols.
If not by 1910, in Substance and Function, then certainly by the beginning of the 1920s Cassirer was well beyond the Marburg neo-Kantianism of Cohen, but throughout his career he always held Cohen in the highest regard. He hadnot abandonedthe central principle that the Marburg school took from Kant, the “transcendental method.” In his general introduction to his philosophy in the first volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms he states that in the philosophy of symbolic forms “the critique of reason becomes the critique of culture.” 31 He sees Kant as having educed, through his transcendental method, the forms of science, ethical life, aesthetics, and organic natural forms. Through the medium of the symbol Cassirer intends to extend this approach to include myth, religion, art, and language, to show that these traditionally noncognitive forms which use symbols in different but fundamentally related ways are in fact forms of knowledge.
30. PSF, 1: 75.
31. PSF, 1: 80.
In An Essay on Man (1944), he reinforces the importance of art as a symbolic form by writing a chapter on it, and he adds history to his original list. In the preface to the second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms he mentions the possibility of, but does not discuss, various symbolic forms of social life: economics (die Wirtschaft), technology (die Technik), ethics (die Sitte), and law (das Recht)?32 Art, history, and these social forms presuppose the emergence in culture of science from the pretheoretical forms of myth, religion, and language. Art draws upon the symbols of myth and religion and appears in culture as a counterpart to science. History needs the power of art to re-create the sense of the past, but it depends on science to establish the validity of its data. In similar fashion, the social forms are essentially cognitive, although, like science, they presuppose the worlds of myth and language for an account of their origins.
All these forms depend on symbols, and the formations of experience they produce differ from one another within the structure of culture as a whole. Cassirer has found in the symbol, as the key to all human knowledge, the phenomenological presence of Kant’s schema. In his doctrine of the schema Kant reaches only abstractly, through his transcendental analysis, the principle of a concrete bond of intuition and concept. Cassirer finds this present in the phenomenon of the symbol as the “observable” medium of all thought and culture.
In the logic of Cassirer’s system, Substance and Function is the first volume of his conception of the philosophy of symbolic forms because in it Cassirer presents the symbolic form of science and theoretical knowledge. As mentionedabove, vol-umeiin The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is Language (1923), volume 2 Mythical Thought (1925), and volume 3 is titled The Phenomenology of Knowledge (1929). In this third volume Cassirer presents three functions of consciousness, which recapitulate, in reverse order of their publication, the three fundamental forms of the earlier works.
32. PSF, 2: xv.
The expressive function (die Ausdrucksfunktion) of consciousness corresponds to myth. The representational function (die Darstellungsfunktion) of consciousness corresponds to language as 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 Cassirer’s account of science in Substance and Function. The third volume presents the philosophy of 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 is never purely given. Its nature is formed by the power of the symbol. Cassirer asks the reader to consider a Linienzug or graph like line drawing. He says that we may apprehend this line as a purely expressive object, as we grasp the tension in its shape, feel its motion, and so forth. Then we may shift perspective and apprehendit as having theoretical significance, as a mathematical object, a geometric figure showing certain proportions and relations.
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. 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.33 This phenomenological experiment reaffirms Cassirer’s original conception of the symbol as simultaneouslygeistig and sinnlich, and his later principle of symbolic pregnance. It also demonstrates what he states 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.”34
33. PSF, 3: 200-201.
34. The Myth of the State, 34.
Only the philosopher is in a position to see that all symbolic forms are variations of one another and that the truth of the nature of the object of knowledge is dependent on a coordination of each with the others, so that they coalesce into a whole. This is Cassirer’s version of Hegel’s principle, “The true is the whole” (Das Wahre ist das Ganze). In order for Cassirer to arrive at the conception of symbolic forms as a totality, he adds this speculative principle of Hegel to his transcendental analysis of the various areas of culture. His primary difficulty with the Hegelian standpoint is its propensity to resolve all other forms into that of logic. Cassirer regards Hegel as engaging in this type of reduction in the system of categories in his Science of Logic.
Cassirer’s attachment to Hegel is basedon his interest in The Phenomenology ofSpirit. In the preface to The Phenomenology of Knowledge, the third volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer says that he is using the term “phenomenology” in Hegel’s sense, not in the modern (Husserlian) sense.35 In the preface to the second volume, on myth, he says, like Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit, that he wishes to of fer the individual a ladder by which to ascend from the most rudimentary to higher forms of consciousness. He says Hegel begins at the level of the things of the empirical world. He wishes to take the ladder one step lower, and to begin with myth.36
In these prefaces and in other places, such as the first sentence of his draft for the introduction to The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, where he says: “We start with the concept of the whole: the whole is the true (Hegel),” Cassirer casts his project in its broadest outlines in Hegelian terms.37 He conceives all the symbolic forms as standing in dialectical relation to one another and as developing always through dialectical oppositions, beginning in myth.
35. PSF, 3: xiv.
36. PSF, 2: xiv; see also PSF, 3: xv.
37. PSF, 4: 193.
Cassirer’s dialectical oppositions remain free-floating. He is unwilling to order the symbolic forms into a metaphysical logic of categories. Cassirer’s method of philosophizing is that of “systematic review” (systematischer Rückblick) or “systematic overview” (systematischer Überblick), in which, given the principle that the true is the whole, taken from Hegel, and the principle of the transcendental, taken from Kant, he can enter into any particular content of culture. Taking the symbol as the medium of this particular, he can begin to give a systematic account of the meaning of the particular, which includes its relation to the totality of symbolic forms.
Cassirer’s dialectic is a functional dialectic. All contents of consciousness are products of the symbol. They fall within the various symbolic forms that characterize human culture. The symbolic forms exist in opposition to one another. Human culture is the totality of these oppositions. The task of philosophy in relation to culture is to elucidate these oppositions, showing in its account of them both the divisions within and the overall harmony of human culture.
Each symbolic form develops according to a dialectic of its own mode of symbolism from its beginnings in myth. Each symbolic form, like human culture as a whole, originates in forms of mythic expression. Cassirer gives an extended example of this sense of dialectical development of phases within a symbolic form at the end of the second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, where he outlines the dialectical stages through which myth passes to become religion. In the first volume he gives an account of the phases of the development of language. Within culture the internal dialectical development of any symbolic form involves its confrontation with the presence of other symbolic forms. These two senses of dialectical opposition— that among symbolic forms and that among the phases of the internal development of each—are interlocked.
Although Cassirer subscribes to Hegel’s principle of wholeness, he does not adhere to the traditional sense of the Hegelian Aufhebung—that there is a progressive synthesis in which the forms of consciousness cancel and transcendone another as they merge into the whole. Cassirer claims that there are of ten sharp contrasts and oppositions within culture that do not clearly resolve themselves into a higher synthesis, even though culture itself is a whole. Hegel’s dialectic is a dialectic of the Absolute. Hegel’s aim is to produce a total account that comprehends all moments of experience in a progression. The Absolute is the standpoint of the whole that emerges when this progression is articulated. It is a single story, determinate in all its parts.
Cassirer’s dialectic does not proceed from the Hegelian perspective of the Absolute. Cassirer’s dialectical account of culture begins in medias res and is committed to the aim of “systematic review.” Cassirer understands the symbol as internally dialectical, comprising at once a particular content and a universal meaning, like Hegel’s Begriff (“concrete universal”). Cassirer can begin with any particular content of culture andarticu-late its dialectical relationships with other symbolic forms in a discussion that expands in various directions. In principle, from this functional perspective the account can be taken as far as the whole. But the account does not attempt to achieve comprehension of a total progression of forms in order to illuminate the oppositions in question. Oppositions are explained in terms of themselves, not through their relation to the Absolute.
Cassirer wrote the first part of his Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms (1927) at the time he was writing the third volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. He sees spirit (Geist) and life (Leben) as dialectically related, such that these principles of reality are in dynamic tension with each other: life continually transforming itself into spirit and spirit constantly renewing itself in the immediacy of life. The relationship of spirit and life parallels that of the functional bond that is inherent in the symbol—the universal meanings achieved by spirit are attained by its mediations of life. Life is the immediate particularity that spirit requires. From the nature of the symbolic form itself Cassirer generates a metaphysics of the reality that underlies the human.
In a fragment written between 1921 and1927 that has come to light with Cassirer’s manuscripts on The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms and is discussed by Bayer in the commentary that follows, Cassirer unequivocally states that philosophy is not in itself a symbolic form. This does not mean that philosophical thought dispenses with symbols, for it uses them, especially in language. Philosophical thought does not have symbolic form of its own, separate from other symbolic forms. Philosophy is thought that can grasp the symbolic forms as a totality, while, in Hegel’s terms, showing each to have its own determinate identity and“inner form.” Cassirer says: “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 entire modalities as that which they are : as characteristic symbolic forms.” Thus, Cassirer says, “philosophy is both criticism [Kant] and the fulfillment [Hegel] of the symbolic forms.”38
In the preface to The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), Cassirer says that this work, together with The Individual and Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (1927), and The Platonic Renaissance in England (1927),39 constitute a “phenomenology of the philosophic spirit” (Phánomenologie des philosophischen Geistes), playing on the title of the work of Hegel to which he is most attracted.40 The fragment mentioned earlier, part of Cassirer’s metaphysical writings, is the only place in his corpus where Cassirer truly makes clear that philosophy is not a symbolic form. Even if philosophy is not a separate symbolic form having independent access to the object, Cassirer still has the problem of saying what philosophy is. Philosophy is certainly apart of spirit. How are we to understand philosophy as such a phenomenon?
38. PSF, 4: 226. See also Chap. 2 in this book.
39. The Platonic Renaissance in England, trans. James P. Pettegrove (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1953).
40. The Philosophyofthe Enlightenment, vi.
In his trilogy on the philosophic spirit, Cassirer looks at modern philosophy historically, as it develops itself from the Renaissance forward as a self-conscious activity, independent of its ties with religion and theology in the medieval world. Cassirer regards the origins of philosophical idealism as lying with the Greeks, specifically with Plato’s conception of the idea as form. He regards self-knowledge as the true aim of philosophical reasoning, which he considers as having originated with the Greeks, specifically with Socrates. These classical origins needed to be rediscovered in the Renaissance in order for philosophy to be reborn as a self-confident, self-conscious enterprise. Cassirer attempts historically to trace this philosophic spirit as it develops from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.
He begins with Nicholas of Cusa, as he did in the first volume of The Problem of Knowledge in 1906, but now his question is not the development of the critical problem of knowledge; it is to understand philosophy as a development of spirit. This approach to the same general development of modern philosophy, presented in Kantian terms in the early volumes of The Problem of Knowledge, here assumes a distinctly Hegelian tenor. Here the problem is what philosophy itself is, as a part of culture. Cassirer in this trilogy regards the Platonic renaissance in England as created in the thought of the Cambridge Platonists— Shaftesbury and others — as a missing link in the revival of classical humanism. Typical of humanist philosophy generally, none of the thinkers in this phenomenology of the philosophic spirit are system-builders in the traditional sense. They force us to understand each of them as particular thinkers who are part of the universal spirit of their age.
In approaching the thinker in relation to the age, Cassirer is employing the logic of culture-concepts (die Kulturbegriffe) that he explains in his later work The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942).41 With nature-concepts (die Naturbegriffe), as opposed to culture-concepts, a specific principle can be employed to determine their object. If we wish to determine whether a specific metal is goldwe can do so unambiguously, for, as Cassirer says, “gold” means only what possesses a certain specific weight, a specific electrical conductivity, a specific coefficient of expansion, and so on, and has a specific place on a table of metals. But Cassirer says that when we turn to form and style concepts in the humanities or cultural sciences (die Kulturwissenschaften), we lose this power of specific determination.
In the cultural sciences the particular can be coordinated with the universal, but the particular cannot be subordinated to the universal in the way it can be in the natural sciences. Cassirer says that when we characterize Leonardo da Vinci and Aretino, Ficino andMachiavelli, Michelangelo and Cesare Borgia as “men of the Renaissance” we can coordinate their particular properties only by means of the universal; we cannot assign to each a specific determinate meaning. We cannot subsume their individual oppositions under some common principle, but the concept does allow us to grasp an ideal connection among them such that each of these figures can be seen as contributing to the spirit (Geist) of the Renaissance. Cassirer employs such culture-concepts in his treatment of the Enlightenment, in which the philosophers he discusses are, each in his own way, coordinated with the spirit of the age.
41. The Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Five Studies, trans. S. G. Lofts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000).
This holistic approach in which philosophy, understood in cultural, not simply logical, terms, is also foundin Cassirer’s later studies of individual philosophers, such as The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1932), Descartes: Doctrine, Personality, and Influence (1939), and his posthumous Rousseau, Kant, and Goethe (1945).42 Here, his approach, different from that of the early volumes of The Problem of Knowledge, is to come to grips with the philosopher in light of the interrelationships of his life, work, and times. Philosophy thus understands itself to be part of the human spirit. There is a culture of philosophy that exists within and is made possible by the wider processes of human culture.
This is not to reduce philosophy to its history. In The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms Cassirer is firm on the point that philosophy 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 history of philosophy must be critically considered in terms of their truth. Cassirer strongly engages in this critical process in his attack on the copy theory of knowledge in volume 1 of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, in his evaluation of types of philosophies of life and philosophies of spirit in The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, and in his attack in The Myth of the State on Heidegger’s and Spengler’s lack of a conception of freedom.
42. The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. Peter Gay (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954); Descartes: Lehre-Personlichkeit-Wirkung (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 1939); Rousseau, Kant, and Goethe, trans. James Gutmann, Paul Oscar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1945).
43. PSF, 4: 187.
Philosophy, for Cassirer, is more than the history of philosophy, and philosophy is also more than an adjunct to science. Unlike the positivists, Cassirer regards philosophy as more than a clarification of the logic of the sciences. For Cassirer, philosophy is oneofthe Kulturwissenschaften; like them, philosophy employs culture-concepts to understand its own spirit, to understand itself as part of culture, and to understandculture itself. Cassirer does not explicitly state a theory of concept formation for philosophical reasoning, but philosophic concepts would seem to be arrived at through a transformation of culture-concepts in which particulars are illuminated but not formally determined by thought.
The aim of philosophy is not to attach itself to a specific symbolic form but to understandhuman culture and the nature of the human as such. The philosopher must coordinate all the symbolic forms under the universal of the human being. What guides philosophical reasoning in this process is a sense of organic form, a sense of the whole as something ordered within itself. Cassirer’s source for this is Hegel, to an extent, andVico, whom Cassirer heldthroughout his career to be the founder of the philosophy of the Geistes- or Kulturwissenschaften.44
44. Cassirer makes this claim from his earliest work, Leibniz’ System (1902), to his last works. The references to Vico throughout Cassirer’s writings are tracedout in my “Vico’s Influence on Cassirer,” New Vico Studies 3 (1985): 105-11.
But more than these, Cassirer’s inspiration is Goethe. Cassirer’s various writings on Goethe occupy a place in the field of Goethe scholarship in their own right. They run from “Goethe’s Pandora” (1918), early in his career, through his Goethe and the Historical World (1932) to its very end, with an essay on “Thomas Manns Goethebild” (1945).45 Goethe’s lively sense of nature and poetic form was for Cassirer an embodiment of the aesthetic and organic natural forms with which Kant struggled in the third Critique.
It is to Goethe that Cassirer turns for the basic formulations of his conception of the three basis phenomena in The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, and it is Goethe whom Cassirer quotes to Heidegger at Davos in answering questions about the nature of human freedom. It is Goethe who allows Cassirer to stand between the poles of Kant and Hegel, between the restrictions of critical philosophy and the excesses he perceives in speculative logic. For Cassirer, Goethe is not only a source of the conception of organic form; he is also the poet of the humane spirit, reminding us of what culture is and can be.
If Goethe was Cassirer’s ideal of the humane spirit of the cultural thinker, Albert Schweitzer was Cassirer’s example of the spirit of the ethical thinker—of the true Ethiker. In his inaugural lecture, at the assumption of his professorship at the University of Gôteborg in Sweden in 1935, Cassirer’s topic was “The Concept of Philosophy as a Philosophical Problem.” 46 Cassirer put this in ethical terms. He began by quoting Goethe’s view of the two types of philosophy representedby Plato and Aristotle — that Plato relates himself to the world as a blessed spirit that penetrates it to its depths but is here to stay only for a while. Plato seeks heaven like an obelisk, like a pointed flame, whereas Aristotle is the master builder who piles up materials from all sides, pyramidfashion, and ascends to the top. Goethe says it is as though these two figures divide humanity between them, and their two properties are not easily reconcilable.
45. “Goethes Pandora,” Zeitschrif für Asthetik und allgemeine Kunst-wissenschaft 13 (1918): 113-34; Goethe und die geschichtliche Welt: Drei Aufsâtze (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1932); “Thomas Manns Goethebild: Eine Studie über Lotte in Weimar,” Germanic Review 20 (1945): 166-94.
46. “The Concept of Philosophy as a Philosophical Problem,” in Symbol, Myth, and Culture, 49-63.
From there, Cassirer moves to Kant’s distinctions between two kinds of philosophy—one is the Scholastic conception of philosophy and the other is the conception of philosophy as related to the world. Cassirer holds himself responsible along with others for having pursuedthe former to the detriment of the latter. Cassirer is speaking as an exile in the midst of the destruction of the ideals of Western culture at the hands of the Nazis.
Cassirer quotes Schweitzer, saying that philosophy as such is not responsible for the disintegration and crumbling of “our spiritual and ethical ideals of culture.” But, as Schweitzer explains, “Philosophy is to be blamed for our world in that it did not admit the fact.” Every effort should have been made, led by philosophy, to direct our attention to the disintegration of culture. “But in the hour of peril,” Schweitzer says, “the watchman slept, who should have kept watch over us. So it happened that we did not struggle for our culture.” 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.”47
47. Ibid., 60.
As World War II took shape, Cassirer began to bring out the normative dimension of his philosophy of symbolic forms. But his earlier analyzing of culture had never been wholly without normative direction. His response to the conditions of World War I was Freedom and Form (1916), which from one point of view appears to be a work on aesthetics, but as the thrust of the subtitle, “Studies of German Cultural History [Geistesge-schichte],” indicates, he intended it to serve as a reminder of the connection between freedom and culture.48 This is the same theme Cassirer attempts to emphasize in his confrontation with Heidegger a decade after the war at their meeting at Davos— that 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 finitude of existence and to enter into the Geworfenheit (being thrown into existence). And He goes on to say, “I believe what I call Da-sein (existence) is not translatable into Cassirer’s vocabulary.”49 As Heidegger puts it, freedom cannot be a project of Geist in Cassirer s sense. In explaining his position, Cassirer quoted from Goethe, arguing that freedom is an ideal for human beings and can be understood as the purpose of all the finite configurations of culture that, when traversed, point us toward the infinite. For Heidegger, freedom requires a “breakthrough, an Ein-bruch, which is not necessary to the nature of human beings but is wholly contingent (zufâllig).
Cassirer was convincedthat Heidegger s conception of Da-sein of feredno ethics. He also was convinced that the emotivist ethics deriving from modern positivism was unacceptable. In Sweden he wrote a critical work on the views of an exponent of this position, Axel Hâgerstrôm (1939).50 To reduce ethical judgments to subjective states of approbation or disapprobation is to ignore the sense in which values are objectively present in culture and the sense in which ethical ideals exert a real force in human affairs.
48. Freiheit und Form: Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1916).
49. Symbol, Myth, and Culture, 40.
50. Axel Hâgerstrôm: Eine Studie zur schwedischen Philosophie der Gegenwart, Gôteborgs Hôgskolas Arsskrift, vol. 45 (Gôteborg: Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag, 1939).
When Cassirer arrivedin the UnitedStates in 1941, friends and colleagues began to press him to translate The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms into English so that his philosophy of culture wouldbe available to an American audience. Theyalso expressed the wish that he would apply his philosophy to an understanding of politics and the events of the twentieth century. These urg-ings ledhim to write two books: An Essay on Man (1944) and The Myth of the State (1946), which was left in manuscript at his death. Cassirer decided not to put the three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms into English but instead to summarize, recast, and update his views in a new form. He now presentedhis conception of symbolic forms not as an expansion and revision of the critical problem of knowledge but as a philosophical anthropology, using Pope’s title An Essayon Man with 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 the ability to connect reason and imagination with human freedom. Human beings are to be understood through an examination of the whole cycle of human cultural activity, rather than through a reduction of their being to any one form of activity. Cassirer says there is a “crisis in man’s knowledge of himself,” in that human nature is so fragmentedthat human beings cannot confront the human as a whole in the mirror of culture. Instead we find human beings reduced to one aspect of the human, to Nietzsche’s will to power, to Freud’s sexual instinct, to Marx’s economic instinct. Theologians, scientists, politicians, sociologists, biologists, psychologists, ethnologists—all approach the problem from their own viewpoint. We have no common context from which to understand human nature.
Cassirer transforms the Aristotelian definition of man as animal rationale into man as animal symbolicum.51 The symbol not only provides the universal medium of human knowledge; it provides the moral medium for human nature understood as the system of cultural activity in which man can act. Cassirer now connects his conception of the philosophic spirit with the classical project of self-knowledge. Cassirer opens An Essay on Man with the sentence: “That self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophical inquiry appears to be generally acknowledged.” 52
Cassirer employs the biological theories of Jakob von Uex-küll to explain the human organism that underlies culture. Uexküll claims that each organism is a functional circle in which there are two poles — a reactor system and an effector system. Each organism is surrounded by its own environment, its own Umwelt. Thus the world of the sea urchin is full of “sea urchin things” and the world of the fly is full of “fly things.” In the human organism, Cassirer says, there is a third and mediating factor—a symbol system such that the world of the human is always full of “symbolic things.”
The power of the symbol to transform itself into systems of symbols whose meanings self-consciously reside in other symbols involves human freedom to create ideals. The ideal frees human beings from the immediacy of their existence and allows life to take on moral direction. The duty of philosophy is to present the harmony of all the symbolic forms of culture, to counter the tendency within any symbolic form to dominate the others. This is a moral ideal for philosophy, not simply a task of dialectical logic. Cassirer’s emphasis on this need for harmony in An Essay on Man is a version of Schweitzer’s metaphor of philosophy as the watchman.
51. Essay on Man, 26.
52. Ibid., ι.
In this same periodCassirer wrote “Albert Schweitzer as Critic of Nineteenth- Century Ethics,” which appearedposthu-mously in 1946.53 Schweitzer remainedCassirer’s inspiration as an ethicist of culture. In this essay, Cassirer uses Schweitzer’s views to oppose the Hegelian view that philosophy is its “time apprehended in thoughts,” that philosophy has only a passive role in culture. Cassirer thus opposes the view that philosophy “always 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, when it yields to the pressure of external forces instead of using its own powers and confiding in these powers.” Schweitzer stands for the “courage of truth” as well as the “en oyment of knowledge.” The ideals of harmony and self-knowledge that are crucial to the “courage of truth” can be held up by philosophy against the disintegration of culture. “But to this end,” Cassirer says, “philosophy must first reconstruct and regenerate itself. It must recognize its fundamental duties before it can regain its place in modern cultural life.” 54
Until the appearance of The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, the discussion of the human organism in An Essay on Man was all that was known of Cassirer’s grounding of his conception of culture in a doctrine of the human. The second part of The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, as mentioned, is the essay “Basis Phenomena,” which he wrote about 1940, in Sweden. In it Cassirer speaks of Uexküll’s biology of the organism but does not carry his discussion as far as his definition of man as animalsym-bolicum.
53. “Albert Schweitzer as Critic of Nineteenth-Century Ethics,” in The Albert Schweitzer Jubilee Book, ed. A. A. Roback (Cambridge, Mass.: Sci-Art Publishers, 1946), 241-57.
54. Ibid., 256-57.
The three basis phenomena of the I, action, and the work (das Ich-Phànomen, das Wirkens-Phànomen, das Werk-Phànomen), as explainedin Bayer s commentary, are absolutes of the human world for Cassirer. Cassirer says we either accept these phenomena or we do not; we “cannot give any further ‘explanation and cannot want to. 55 The basis phenomena appear to be analogous or at least partially analogous to his later formulation of Uexküll’s biology: the reactor system to the I, action to the effector system, and, most clearly, the symbolic system to the phenomenon of the work. The work (das Werk) is not labor or toil but 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 metaphysics with the connection of the work to culture and culture to the Socratic project of self-knowledge. As Bayer brings out in her commentary, this is one of Cassirer’s strongest statements of the Socratic standpoint of his philosophy. Cassirer says: “This call now means: know your work and know ‘yourself in your work; know what you do, so you can do what you The discovery of this imperative of the work—its auto chthonic and autonomous sense, its ‘binding character —that is Socrates real deed.”56 Cassirer sees the I and the action (as driven by the will) as merging in the work, and the phenomenon of work as culminating in the self as it makes a knowledge of itself. He regards Socrates as the image of philosophy in which the theoretical and the moral are not separable. Socrates at one moment appears to be the pure thinker and at another is the presence of the moral spirit.
55. PSF, 4:142.
56. PSF, 4: 186. See the discussion of Socrates in Chap. 4 of this book.
The Myth of the State remains the final moment of Cassirer’s philosophy, and, like An Essay on Man, it is both a theoretical and a moral work. Unlike any other major contemporary philosopher, Cassirer was able to grasp the nature of the Nazis’ use of myth to create a politics of the modern state, because he had at his disposal a complete analysis of myth as the original symbolic form of human culture. This theory of myth, developed as a response to problems in the theory of knowledge, has now become the key for the philosophical understanding of the role of myth in twentieth-century politics. Cassirer saw that the problem of modern politics was not the Nazi state itself. The larger problem is the connection of the form of mythical thought with the techniques of modern politics that has taken place in the twentieth-century state.
The techniques of mass communication that would today be called the media are the basis of modern political power, and that power is not the vehicle for a rational understanding of issues, ideas, and facts. Through such techniques the modern politician uses the thought form of the myth to influence the emotions and feelings of the masses, which respond above all to the power of the image. Cassirer says: “We no longer observe the flight of birds nor do we inspect the entrails of slain animals But if our methods have changed the thing itself has by no means vanished. Our modern politicians know very well that great masses are much more easily moved by the force of imagination than by sheer physical force.” The politician, Cassirer says, becomes a sort of public fortune-teller. Thus, “the most improbable or even impossible promises are made; the millennium is predicted over and over again.”57
57. The Myth of the State, 289.
In regard to Nazism as a particular phenomenon of the twentieth century, Cassirer was able by means of this theory of myth to explain the reasons for the attack on the Jews. In an article for Contemporary Jewish Record (1944), Cassirer says that “in order to understand the campaign against Judaism launched by the leaders of the New Germany it is not enough to consider the reasons usually given.” Cassirer asks why Hitler, in his last address, marking the eleventh anniversary of his regime, abandons the theme of the conquest of the world by the German race; he is obsessed with only one thing—the threat posed by the Jews. When no Jew couldbreathe in Germany, what worries Hitler “is not the future destiny of Germany, but the ‘triumph’ of the ews. 58
Cassirer s explanation for why the Jews became the particular scapegoat of Nazi Germany is one that couldnot even have been envisaged in the absence of his philosophy of culture. In the development of Western culture it is the Jews that first confront the system of totem and taboo within mythical life. In An Essay on Man Cassirer describes how the Hebrew prophets are the bringers of the new sense of ethical life, of individual responsibility, and of self-conscious ethical ideals that break the circle of primitive society based on totem and taboo. The Jews remain the bearers of the ethical spirit that threatens the mythical reliance on the power of the image to hold consciousness in the immediacy of the world and to inhibit the power of thought. Nazism became a reenactment of the original ancient struggle between the mythical and the ethical-religious consciousness at the beginning of culture.
58. Symbol, Myth, and Culture, 239-41.
In a lecture given at Princeton University in 1945, Cassirer asked: “What can philosophy do in this struggle against the political myths? He said: “Myth cannot be overcome by logical and rational arguments. Cassirer says that if philosophy cannot reform the political myth directly, it “can make us understand the adversary”—understand the strength of the myth. “To all of us it has become clear that we have greatly underrated the strength of the political myths. We should not repeat this error. 59
For Cassirer, philosophy has the ultimate duty as the watchman called for by Schweitzer. In Cassirer’s view, this duty is not one that philosophy can choose either to assume or not to assume. It is a duty that is required of philosophy by human culture, by that which originally makes philosophy itself possible. This duty cannot be accomplished simply as an act of goodwill; it requires a full philosophy of culture, a theoretical knowledge of the nature of the human, and a comprehension of the metaphysics upon which the human world rests.
59. “The Technique of Our Modern Political Myths,” in Symbol, Myth, and Culture, 266.