Today, the domination of the world by Europe and the United States is being challenged politically, ethically, and philosophically. Throughout this challenge, will the moral image of the world associated with Kant’s critical philosophy survive? Should it, indeed, survive this challenge? Can we reconcile the grand vision of universality evoked by the ideal of humanity that makes its own history even if under conditions our humanity does not make or choose? The great Kantian ideal of humanity still allows for and, indeed, demands the struggle for a more just world worthy of that ideal. Did this idea, beginning with Kant yet informing so many important philosophical and political struggles such as Marxism, die with the fall of the Berlin Wall? Are we left with nothing but local struggles on the ground? Philosophically are we fated to a relativism that argues there can be no universal standards by which we judge the different efforts of human beings to survive in the world culturally, politically, and ethically?
Heidegger’s ominous witnessing to the danger of technology, even if it encounters critical philosophy, remains tied to both a grand vision of the place of Dasein in the world and of the true dignity of Dasein. Thus, Heidegger critiques critical philosophy because it remains spellbound by a subjectivity that blinds us to our destiny as the being that must ultimately care for beings. Yet, Heidegger is certainly not with the relativists or those who would reduce human beings to mere statistical analysis and objects for instrumental study, prediction, and control. Heidegger, ironically, remains tied to the moral image of the world that insists on the grandeur of humanity precisely because he insists on a more cosmological sense of the state of things and the special place of Dasein in the universe. Of course, Heideggerian pessimism has now been challenged as just one more form of Eurocentrism. If European culture and society are in demise, so the story goes, the world and our humanity finds itself in a similar position of demise. As we have seen in his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger still not only retains but seeks to protect the dignity of Dasein, even as he also argues that Kant’s critical philosophy undermines the dignity he seeks to make the hallmark of a moral image of the world.
Throughout the rest of this book we will return to the ethical and political significance of challenges to Eurocentrism for critical theory and critical philosophy. We need to begin to confront this challenge so as to start considering the philosophical and ethical terms framing the debate. We will do so by acknowledging the debate is not between relativism and universalism, but between a universality that respects the plurality of cultural forms and symbols as integral to the moral demand put on us by the ideal of humanity itself. In this chapter, we will focus on the work of Ernst Cassirer, who reinterpreted the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant and, indeed, the central place of the Critique of Judgment in critical philosophy as the basis for a philosophy of symbolic forms that shows us the inevitable plurality of such forms and yet does so as part of the ethical commitment to the moral vision of the world in which human beings can take responsibility for the world into which we are thrown.
Cassirer’s contribution, as we will review it for the purposes of this book, is fourfold. First, Cassirer defends a sophisticated understanding of symbolic form that can undo the pessimism Heidegger holds about Dasein’s efforts to reform the world and a social order dominated by technocratic reason. Second, Cassirer overcomes the famous dualism ascribed to Kant by interpreting our freedom as a force that makes us in our personhood and which we in turn reshape through symbolic formation, allowing us to grapple with the world in the first place. Cassirer’s understanding of symbolic forms is not reducible to the naive humanism to which it has so often been reduced. Rather, Cassirer does indeed defend the possibility of transformation and our responsibility for the state of the world in which we live.
Third, Cassirer is one of the first thinkers to recognize the inevitable plurality and infinite variability of symbolic forms giving rise to the worlds inherent within such forms. Cassirer rejects the idea that any one symbolic form can simply exist in a privileged space above other symbolic forms. As such, there is no one justified position to suggest “scientific man” renders all other symbolizations of reality obsolete. All simple neo-Hegelian versions of history culminating in the victory of “European Man” are rejected. If there is progress in Cassirer, and there is, it is through the increasing complexity of symbolic forms and their intertwinement with one another. I will not deny that there is a lingering Eurocentrism in Cassirer, but I will argue that it is not at the heart of his philosophy and indeed runs against his profound understanding of the inevitable plurality of symbolic forms.
Fourth, if Cassirer critically reworks the insights of Kant into the central distinction of human thought as the ability to distinguish between reality and possibility, he does so in such a way as to place human beings in a continuum with animals. Cassirer is one of the first thinkers to give animals their rightful place as creatures that can think, plan, or indeed have a future. The difference between animals and humans along this continuum ultimately presents itself in the fact that animals have a less rich vocabulary and do not have the capacity to distinguish between the possible and the actual. We are no longer to understand “man” as “the” rational animal. Part and parcel of this rethinking of what makes human beings significant as symbolic creatures stands aligned with the insight by Kant regarding the finitude of human thought as now reconciled with a historical dimension, since forms of thought even as basic as time and space are represented and expressed differently in different symbolic forms.
In Cassirer we cannot and should not choose between historicism and the fundamental insight offered by Kant that human beings always experience a world that has already been represented in the transcendental imagination. Our thought is limited by the forms of time and space and the “I” of the transcendental apperception; however, these very limitations simultaneously enable us to know our world in the specific form of knowledge available to a creature whose sensible experience of the world can indeed produce images of both possibility and actuality. It is impossible to even begin the project of fully elaborating the rich philosophical work of Cassirer, but we can at least begin to show its place in rethinking neo-Kantianism so as to make it more salient; indeed, this is a necessary beginning if we are to meet the challenge of what has been mundanely dubbed multiculturalism, on the one hand, and postmodernism, on the other hand.
Cassirer begins The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms by arguing that the conception of the human being as the rational animal is completely inadequate to its own aspirations, which is to distinguish what is unique in our humanity and why we have a special place in the chain of being. Cassirer reveals the symbolic quality of reason, and the realization of such truth, as integral to the development of civilization:
Reason is a very inadequate term with which to comprehend the forms of man’s cultural life in all their richness and variety. But all these forms are symbolic forms. Hence, instead of defining man as an animal rationale, we should define him as animal symbolicum. By so doing we can designate his specific difference, and we can understand the new way open to man—the way to civilization.1
Cassirer, as we have already suggested, was one of the first thinkers to take animals seriously as having complex intellectual processes through which they relate to the world. Cassirer makes the crucial distinction between animals and humans as one between signals and symbols. Cassirer was a careful reader of research on animals conducted during his lifetime and strongly defends the notion that animals are capable of grasping signs and expressing signals to one another. Through these signs animals both emotionally articulate feeling and communicate at even a rudimentary level with one another. Animals can manipulate tools and learn from their experience while teaching this experience to other animals, and they can self-correct if a tool being used does not achieve the desired result. In one sense, then, animals do live in some sort of temporal sequence and can distinguish between past and future as learning demands at least a primitive sense of time.
Animals also have some sense of identity, of existing as a being separate from other things and other similarly appearing animals, suggesting perhaps also a rudimentary sense of spatiality. Cassirer describes the difference between human intelligence and animal intelligence as follows:
If by intelligence we understand either adjustment to the immediate environment or adaptive modification of environment, we must certainly ascribe to animals a comparatively highly developed intelligence. It must also be conceded that not all animal actions are governed by the presence of an immediate stimulus. The animal is capable of all sorts of detours in its reactions. It may learn not only to use implements but even to invent tools for its purposes. Hence some psychobiologists do not hesitate to speak of a creative or constructive imagination in animals. But neither this intelligence nor this imagination is of the specifically human type. In short, we may say that the animal possesses a practical imagination and intelligence whereas man alone developed a new form: a symbolic imagination and intelligence.2
Animals are also capable of responding to simple commands and are thus capable of language in the limited sense of reacting to signs and signals as well as expressing emotions. For Cassirer, then, animals clearly have intelligence and some sense of being individuals with emotions and learning capacities. However, the faculties of human intelligence are capable of constituting a different level of symbolic formation.
Throughout his work, Cassirer uses three dimensions distinguishing symbolic forms and explaining their coherent formation: representation, expression, and significance.3 While animals can express emotion and have practical representations of their world, they do not have the experience of significance in a way entirely similar to human beings. Significance, as Cassirer defines it, is the possession of an established set of symbols. Symbols must be established through conventional meaning so that these symbols can come to have universal applicability for those fluent in a particular language. It is this universal applicability that allows human beings to designate an object that can be recognized as an object repeatedly, even if the actual object is not present in our immediate experience. The images that animals have are triggered by receiving information from the concrete world around them. They cannot, in other words, proceed directly from the abstract to the concrete. Again to quote Cassirer:
Diverse as the animal cries and calls may be——cries of fear or pleasure, mating calls, and calls of warning—they do not go beyond the sphere of mere sounds expressing sensation. They are not “significant” in the sense of being correlated as signs with definite things and happenings in the outside world. According to the observations of W. Koehler, even the language of the most highly developed anthropoid apes, rich as it is in direct expressions for the most diverse subjective states and desires, remains confined to this sphere: it never produces a sign or designation for an object.4
To draw out the significance for a human being of a designated world of universal names, Cassirer movingly tells the story of Helen Keller being mesmerized by the world of objects that appears to her once she finally grasps the profundity of naming. For Cassirer, a human world arose for Helen Keller only when she was able to master this function of universal applicability. Said differently, we are able to learn what water means through all of the experiences we have with water, ranging from putting our hands under a faucet to running across the falling tides coming in from the sea. Water can operate in many different ways in the experiences of human beings and we are still able to give significance to water as a universalizable object. Yet while animals can also have different experiences of wetness, they are not capable of representing water outside their practical experiences of wetness because they do not have a symbolic system that can designate it beyond a particular moment of temporality and spatiality.
For Cassirer, the capacity for objects to have a name of potential universal applicability within a symbolic form is only one of the prerogatives of human language. Cassirer steadfastly rejects empiricist notions of language, and instead reminds us that there is no thing existing outside the designation of language. Such designation not only gives us the world in symbol but also provides our very experiential relationship to the world in actuality. This means that different languages naming with the force of different symbolic formations are indeed representing different things in the world. What is important in Cassirer is not the designated world per se or that that words actually function as names; rather, Cassirer aims to explain that human beings who speak different languages do indeed live in different and divergent worlds of things. Yet, despite this particular difference in naming our linguistic experience, human beings share important commonalities. The key, for Cassirer, is the general function of the architectonic form of human language. While Eskimos may indeed have more than thirty different names for snow, making our sensible understanding of snow seem simple and indeed lackluster in comparison, Cassirer would remind us that the architectonic function of language vivifies so as to allow language to make the signs speak the whole of the world to those wielding a given language.
It is this vivifying power of language that allows human beings to share knowledge of sameness across forms of language, even if they live in seemingly different worlds of symbolic forms. Thus, the architectonic function of language also allows for the possibility of translation as it emerges through a constantly negotiated struggle to come to terms with the designation of words vivified in other languages. Thus, the inherent flexibility given in the infinite malleability of symbolic forms operates as a bridge between the worlds of different languages, demanding those who wish to pass over such a linguistic bridge open themselves to how material signs vivify the world differently in diverse languages. Through such thinking, Cassirer contributes to the continuing debate of commensurability and incommensurability and suggests that by grasping architectonic forms of language we can understand not only how human language designates but also the fact that different languages designate differently. By struggling with our experience of forms of designation, we can potentially open ourselves to the worlds of others as they have signified the worlds they are living in.
If universal applicability is one key component to the form of human language as symbolic form, another is versatility; again, it is the versatility of human symbolization as well as the architectonic function of a name that allows for the possibility of translation. Designation and versatility, in turn, allow human beings to abstract relationships between objects so that it is only the relationship that can become the focus of symbolization. Symbols can be brought into a relational system that is further abstracted from sensory experience. It is the versatility of symbolization that Cassirer often refers to as the free ideality of language, allowing human beings not only to abstract from actual relations between symbols but also to reflect on those relationships. Reflection is broadly described by Cassirer as the power to isolate certain elements and focus only on those while excluding others. We are both enabled by our human process of symbolization and also in a profound sense ensnared within such a system. Truly, there is no human experience outside our symbolic systems. To quote Cassirer:
Man cannot escape from his own achievement. He cannot but adopt the conditions of his own life. No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art, and religion are parts of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. All human progress in thought and experience refines upon and strengthens this net. No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium. His situation is the same in the theoretical as in the practical sphere. Even here man does not live in a world of hard facts, or according to his immediate needs and desires. He lives rather in the midst of imaginary emotions, in hopes and fears, in illusions and disillusions, in his fantasies and dreams. “What disturbs and alarms man,” said Epictetus, “are not the things, but his opinions and fancies about things.”5
While Cassirer anticipated what has now been called the linguistic turn in philosophy, speech as we live in it and language as we write with it are only two of the symbolic systems Cassirer studies.
For Cassirer, work and economic action are symbolic systems. Capital, as Karl Marx told us long ago, is a symbolic form even as it turns itself through the fetishism of commodities into the fantasy of reality. Cassirer, then, is not making a distinction between symbol and material since what is material for us always already comes to us in a symbolized form. Giving his own interpretation of Kant, Cassirer suggests that it is not that human beings know the world around them in language and that it is the only world we can know as important, but rather that as finite creatures we must always come to the world represented to us through the distinction of actuality and possibility. Cassirer rightly notes it is only in the Critique of Judgment that Kant finally articulates the distinction between possibility and actuality as what is truly unique to human knowledge. Specifically, Kant contrasts our human distinction between possibility and actuality to divine knowledge. In the realm of divine knowledge, actus purus, everything conceived is ontically created by God. Kant was not defending the actuality of a God with this kind of ontic power, but instead was deploying divine knowledge so as to contrast it with human knowledge and the limits of finite human understanding. Heidegger also emphasizes the significance of finitude for Dasein as not ontically creative. Ultimately, the distinction between the actual and possible is a crucial difference between humans and animals whose practical intelligence remains within the sensory world.
Kant famously wrote in the Critique of Pure Reason that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”6 It is only, however, according to Cassirer, in the Critique of Judgment that Kant fully understands that it is the heterogeneous elements of our discursive understanding that also undergird the faculty of our reason to make distinctions between actuality and possibility. For Cassirer, and this is a crucial aspect of his original contribution to critical philosophy, we need to also realize that human intelligence is not only in need of images but human knowledge is crucially in need of symbols. Cassirer achieves this remarkable addition to the large body of critical philosophy through his original recasting of the schema in Kant.
For Cassirer, the significance of the Critique of Judgment is in part due to the advance that Kant made from the abstract schematism appearing in the Critique of Pure Reason to the more concrete forms that Kant studies in both nature and art in the Critique of Judgment. For Kant, the schema is the solution to the dilemma as to how an abstracting, transcendental logic can be applied to sensuous content. Kant is not concerned with how this actually happens, as the very word happens suggests that the matter could be otherwise when indeed Kant argues that there is no experience without the melding of concepts and intuitions. So, we need then to think via media between conceptual intuition and the actual construction of specific knowledge by the human understanding. The schema, in Kant, is the underlying representation, or the synthetic medium, in which forms of the understanding and sensuous intuitions are assimilated so they can constitute experience. While the schema compresses the categories of the understanding it also at the same time contains more than the categories can supply. In this respect, we can say that the schema is something beyond the simplicity of a mere “category,” for it is what makes possible an experience that neither logical form nor sensuous content could yield by themselves. Thus, the schema holds something of both sensuous and intellectual form. But, the schema is not merely the medium through which the sensual and intellectual are brought into unity.
We are not to forget that whatever is a matter of sensuous apprehension always appears in the universal form of time. The schema, then, must be a relation of the concepts of the understanding with temporal appearances. Thus, for example, cause and effect is a concept relevant to the succession of events in the world and makes definite the necessary connection of things that occur in time. The schemata of pure concepts are both schemata of sensibility and the first realization of the categories as they give us a knowable world. In this fashion, the schema is more complete than either the category or the form of time or sensuous content, for a schema is all of these together in their synthesis. No wonder, to paraphrase Kant, he marveled at the schema as a mysterious power of the soul. As such, the schema is not merely logical but it is real in the sense of a phenomenon of being, a concrete constituent of appearances. It is striking that the schema itself should be called a phenomenon insofar as it is consistent with the form of understanding, for this means that the schema is no longer a hidden transcendental factor only conceivable in and of analysis, but it is a real presence because there is no phenomenon in its absence.
Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is in many ways a development of Kant’s notion of the schema. Indeed, Cassirer saw many of the key developments of German Idealism as rooted in creative reworkings of the schema. For Cassirer, the Critique of Judgment brings forward the best articulation by Kant of the way in which human experience is inevitably formed through schematization. It is the unity of concept and intuition that remains central to Cassirer’s understanding of symbolic forms, as these forms also bring together concept and intuition as the experience of the sensuous. For Cassirer, the Kantian notion of the schema pushed Kant himself beyond his own conceptualizations of how human beings only know their world through an already represented set of forms starting with time and space. Cassirer in a sense began where Kant left off: in comprehending symbolic form as a union between intuition and structural form in a manner similar to the schema. For Cassirer, language itself can be understood to possess this schema as an architectonic form whose function is precisely to vivify a world through sensuous signs which come to be understood as a system of representation, expression, and significance.
However, Cassirer does not mean to suggest that Kant was mistaken about the absolute necessity of images for human knowledge, as images remain an integral, core component of symbolic function. However, the productive and reproductive imagination now recast is the difference between the passive images necessary for the representation of our world in time and space and the symbols that are created by the intellect itself. Said differently, the images of the reproductive imagination are delimited differently than the symbols used to communicate with the productive imagination. While symbols are in part created, they, of course, are not shaped out of nothing, but instead out of the established resources of symbolic forms such as language, myth, and science that have been inherited throughout human history and kept alive in conventional usage. And, although human beings cannot be ontically creative, there is still a profound sense in which symbols are made with something like a power of creation. We can use the example of language to help clarify this relationship. Words are themselves sensuous images in all of the capacities in which they are experienced. Anyone who has ever listened to a rap song knows that the art of rap involves bringing language to its full potential for sensuous representation where the whole world can live in a single word. But, words are used with meaning and so they are also employed so as to abstract from the reality which they seek to represent. As Cassirer writes at the end of the first volume of Philosophy of Symbolic Forms:
The characteristic meaning of language is not contained in the opposition between the two extremes of the sensuous and the intellectual, because in all its achievements and in every particular phase of progress, language shows itself to be at once a sensuous and an intellectual form of expression.7
For Cassirer, life and Geist—the sensuous and the spiritual—are always mediated by one another in symbolic form. Language, as one symbolic form, is part of the sensuous world and makes the intellectual world of abstract ideas possible at the same time. This way of thinking about language affirms the unity of the sensual and spiritual which Cassirer argues is crucial for recasting the Kantian notion of the schema.
What is involved when an image is used to serve as a symbol is a complex relationship of expression, significance, and representation. The special function of symbolization must now be elaborated, and this is exactly the project Cassirer undertakes in his four-volume work. There have, of course, been many meanings of symbolization prior to Cassirer’s neo-Kantian interpretation. In regards to language, for instance, it had been supposed in the eighteenth century that the mind notes similar properties of things and then pins a label upon each one of these images. This word-label then serves to recall any one of those designated objects. But, in this understanding of symbolization in language, language serves only to recapitulate what has been given and does not have the power to reveal or develop a new meaning. This notion of a word-for-thing symbolization is precisely what Cassirer challenges. Remember here that Cassirer is always working with what he sees to be the unique distinction of our human finitude: our distinguishing between actuality and possibility. Language is inseparable from this fundamental distinction in the service it provides us. Language actually serves humans better than the thing-for-word notion of symbolization. Language is also a means to new knowledge and indeed allows us to disclose new worlds. The reason language is able to do so is that much more is involved in the function of symbolization than was defended and articulated in the eighteenth-century model of a symbol.
For Cassirer, nothing is truly a symbol if it is only a mark of something already given and enables us merely to talk about it again. The “it” we denote with a word is only perceived in the first instance in light of our whole previous experience of the world already revealed to us in language. It is identified as what it is, even as an object necessarily in space and time by the relations of whatever is given by other known contexts of experience. There is such a whole, always present, in the moment of remaking any particular given, since that given only takes on meaning in relationship with other known contexts of experience. There is also such a whole, always present, in the moment of remaking any particular given as any symbol derives its own significance from that whole experience represented in language. For readers more familiar with Wittgenstein, Cassirer is emphasizing the point that meaning only arises in a form of life that also then represents the very meaning of its symbolic system. For Cassirer, language as symbolic form only exemplifies what is universally the case of how human beings come to know their world. Cassirer, as we have seen, retains the Kantian conception of consciousness as a holding of the many contents of experience together in unity, but he reframes this notion of synthetic unity by redefining it through a symbolic function which expresses the meaning of experience in and through the same content which is represented against the whole. Particular symbols, in other words, are full of meaning conferred upon them by the totality of experience already represented. But, the symbolic does not hold solely to the image or content taken as representative or expressive of meaning, for it pertains no less to the forms in which meaning is intelligible so that they are in a deep sense capable of their symbolizing function only as part of a system of established and conventional meaning and forms.
Cassirer, in his comprehensive meditations on language, returns to what he takes as the basic insight of Kant’s conception of the schema. As we have seen, every schema of the understanding is a phenomenon of the imagination which is at once intellectual and sensuous. Because of the latter aspect there is sensible meaning through reference to objects, and because of the former there is agreement with the categories or forms through which anything whatsoever has meaning to the human mind. Thus, we symbolize our images in order to know anything at all, and these symbols are intermeshed with the phenomena themselves. There is no thing outside of the word, and the word becomes a sensuous reality when it vivifies things. This basic symbolic function has various directions and symbolic forms are precisely those directions in which meaning is realized and revealed in human consciousness as this consciousness, in turn, always unfolds in and through systems of representation that give to us a seemingly unified world.
From his understanding of the constitutive function of symbolization in all experience, Cassirer concludes that science, as one of the “artificial” symbolizations of human beings along with myth, language, religion, and art, is but one of the directions of the symbolizing process of human consciousness. While there are basic forms such as space and time and the categories of the understanding, there are also special constructions for each one of the symbolic forms. Indeed, each one of the sciences has a different theoretical constitution in terms of the divergent symbolic forms of its language. The meaning of concept in any scientific discourse depends upon the whole structure or system in which it is used and will vary within the general theory in which it is conceived. As Cassirer succinctly writes, “The facts of science always imply a theoretical, which means a symbolic, element.”8 Thus, for example, even the symbols of mathematics will be deployed differently and indeed have a different meaning within the context of a different science because such different science will inevitably be based on different theoretical assumptions. When we move any mathematical system from one context to another we will have to be sensitive to the way in which the symbols themselves and the principles in which they are given meaning will also shift in signification. For example, algebra can be used in social science, but it will only be effectively used if it is consciously deployed within the recognition that what this science studies implies a different objective reality than that of natural objects and therefore a different set of theoretical assumptions. We will return to a longer discussion of Cassirer and objectivity shortly, but the point here is that even mathematics as a symbolic system only derives its ultimate meaning within the context of the theories in which it is used. As those theories differ, the type of the mathematics employed will also have to differ.
Every symbolic form, including science, is a condition either of the knowledge of meaning or the human expression or representation of meaning. Within the symbolic realm of art the image or content has its significance in virtue of the formal structure according to which the work of art is made. There is a form of music and poetry, and myriad other symbolic forms in more general and particular terms. Besides the general form of art there is the individual form or style of the particular artist. Always some universal form of discourse is involved in anything that has significance. Mythical thinking, for example, has its own symbolic form of constructing a world. Myth as a formal mode of symbolization both expresses the world of things we live in and also, according to Cassirer, has a poeticizing function. The manner of art is not identical to it since it is a separable form. Cassirer suggests that “myth embraces the first attempt at a knowledge of the world, since it perhaps also represents the earliest and most universal product of the aesthetic fantasy.”9 One crucial aspect of mythical consciousness is its concrete richness, which is related to its own form of producing an inner world that seeks to limit the abstract factors of understanding things—including the limit imposed upon the richness of a concrete universe by reflection—and thus distance from the sign itself. Cassirer understood myth as a form of separation of human beings from their reality in which they were vulnerable; however, this separation in which human beings seek to reintegrate themselves into a reality that includes them creates a magical world where we can both know our human place and find some sense of design in the things themselves as they create a reality as cognitively palatable to our ability to orient ourselves in existence.10
The creative aspect of myth in Cassirer inheres in the generative aspect of language, and they both have their roots in metaphor. Myth is primarily expressive and representative. The significance of meaning itself is caught in the rich concreteness of the images of myth and their representations as the basis of a magical world. This does indeed create a medium of thought, but it does so in such a way so as to constrain abstract reflection on the meaning of the images. But as in any symbolic form, expression, representation, and significance interact; thus, for Cassirer, there is absolutely nothing irrational about myth, even if as a symbolic form it limits attention to the conceptual which also inheres in the condensation of meaning in language. It is beyond the scope of this book to explore what Cassirer has right and wrong about the form of mythical consciousness; however, he was one of the first thinkers not only to recognize myth as an important form of knowledge but also to forcefully argue that mythical thinking—and indeed, for Cassirer, it is thinking—can never be eclipsed by another symbolic form such as science because it is integral to metaphor and metaphor inheres in the expressive capacity of language. It is no wonder that Cassirer remains a deep friend of so many anthropologists.
Language is symbolic in the same way as myth, art, and science. So-called realist theories of language are wrongheaded for Cassirer, as indeed are nominalist theories of language because they fail to understand the world disclosing power of language as a symbolic form. World disclosure is not simply discovery but also an act of recollective imagination which creates new possibilities in all forms of our shared human endeavors. The properties and other aspects of objects are only defined by the symbolizations and experience which lies behind the intent to use words to designate things. An already symbolized world then is drawn upon in every word which is used in the process of naming. Words and mathematical symbols are always given meaning in a system of thought that proceeds them, allows them to be understood, and also allows the bigger picture to leave open the possibility of reshaping or redefining any word or symbol, which in turn, of course, will ultimately have an impact on the system of thought in which it is encased. As Cassirer remarks, the diversity of language—since it is always caught up in what Wittgenstein called a form of life such as our day-to-day speech or a conceptual system such as algebra—is always connected to a particular approach to the world and an outlook on the world connected to that approach. In a sense, language should be considered the basic artifice by which all cultural forms are related.
Mathematical language is the most extreme example of the conceptualizing, abstracting power inherent in everyday language which then can be effectively translated into an organization of relational systems. Each symbolic form has its own autonomy even as it is ultimately connected back to some relationship to language and the autonomy of its own image world. For Cassirer, science, too, has an image of the world, an image, of course, that must be symbolized in mathematics, but mathematics for Cassirer is never freed from the image of the world of a law-like nature in which it is embedded. We never confront a reality just given to us for there is no content whatsoever that is not construed in some form and no form that is not embedded in an image of the world. Whatever human consciousness appropriates for any purpose whatsoever is already possessed of a form. It is not just the mode of knowledge that is different; it is not what we usually think of as an epistemological question only. Cassirer argues that the bases of phenomena are actually different in different forms of knowledge. There are also different ways to understand knowledge and things as they are represented and given significance in their different forms.
There is no kind of knowledge that is better or more accurately expressive of the world than the rest. Science, in other words, does not bring us closer to reality than art, but it simply gives us a different reality. Cassirer remarks:
Categories such as “empiricism” or “rationalism” relate to the question of the “origin” of knowledge, not in the genetic sense, but in the sense of their “dignity.” Must we look for the “origin” of knowledge and the criterion of its truth in “reason” or strictly in “experience”? Is “sense” or the “understanding” the foundation of certainty and of validity, and to which does truth originally belong? The different schools of thought in the theory of knowledge part company according to how they answer this question.11
Cassirer has shown us how any symbolization always gives us a world of both actual and possible objects. For Cassirer, even scientific hypotheses precede through an as-if of conjectural reasoning. The scientist often proceeds through the seeming paradox of projecting what cannot exist in order to grasp what does exist as a law of nature. Nature, as we have seen in Kant, is not the assemblage of material things; nature, as Kant famously writes, “is the existence of things insofar as it is determined according to universal laws.”12 Galileo and other great scientists project this order onto nature, a rule-like order which projects a system of unified rules as a regulative ideal. This regulative ideal is, in a sense, a second order of possibility that inheres in human knowledge. The system is not real but is projected as a possible unity. Cassirer is now emphasizing that science often conjectures about this image of nature often by imagining objects that do not and will probably never actually exist. There never will be a knowable actual object that is still in space, unmoved by any external force. And yet, it is precisely this imagined object that Galileo projects in order to grasp one of the laws of modern physics.
As Kant famously tells us, the scientist comes as a judge and actually puts a demand on nature that it be graspable according to the principles that science endeavors to use to understand it, not as it is but as it is ordered by the human mind. Galileo could not have measured the magnitude of acceleration in the freefall without the conception of acceleration itself as well as having a measuring apparatus adequate to this task. But, he begins his experiments with an imagined object that will never exist.13 Cassirer, then, emphasizes how science depends on the human ability to distinguish between actual and possible objects, both in that symbolic forms often proceed by projecting imaginative objects and because it proceeds by projecting a system of nature that is not actual but only a possible unity. This possible unity is not only a regulative ideal but also an absolutely necessary one for the great ambitions of modern science. To put this idea in its most radical and succinct form: even in science we must imagine otherwise to know the truth of what is. Of course, in political philosophy this distinction between actuality and possibility also has a long history. Cassirer’s analysis of Rousseau’s famous state of nature defends this state of nature as an imagined object used by Rousseau to vivify what is wrong with the France of the Third Estate. Imagining otherwise becomes the envisioned standpoint for a critical assessment of current social reality. Of course, then, imagining otherwise is also the basis for all of the great aesthetic ideas we discussed in chapter 1, including Rawls’s famous experiment in which we imagine ourselves as behind a veil of ignorance. If we could not distinguish real from actual objects we would not be able to imagine the veil of ignorance, let alone symbolize the significance of this representation of the otherwise for the meaning of equality in a theory of justice.
Imagining otherwise, of course, as an act in and of itself does not necessarily bring about a new and more just world. No one has ever been foolish enough to think such; only political struggle and ethical commitment can accomplish such a task. What we learn from Cassirer—and we will return to this point in the next chapter when we discuss Frantz Fanon and the challenge by black philosophers of existence—is that these political and ethical struggles also inevitably have a symbolic projection, including the projection of a better and more just future. But, we cannot emphasize this point enough since it runs against the grain of the empiricist and even the materialist versions of Marxism that drove so many of the Communist parties. All material reality is always grasped by human beings as always already symbolized. Capital, as a symbolic form of human life, can only be replaced by another symbolic form of life. This is the significance of Cassirer’s insight that there is no material and ideal dualism for human beings; our material forms of life are always also symbolic. The versatility of symbolization not only makes, to coin a word often used in current debates, the iterability of language possible, but it in a certain sense makes it inevitable. The transformative power of language in Cassirer is not reducible to iterability, for language always has within it a pull toward stabilization and toward transformation of the possible worlds embedded in any symbolic form. Various symbolic forms differently organize this tension between transformation and stabilization but the pull and tension is present in Cassirer for each one. Language has a free ideality, to use Cassirer’s expression, as the other side of the universal applicability inherent in the power to name. Language, then, pushes us to generalization precisely through this power to name. But it is not simply this push to generalization and abstraction that explains the full force of the free ideality of language, for naming is not the true key to language.
Following Wilhelm von Humboldt, who plays such an important role in Cassirer, language is also a productive force because the very power to name ultimately relies on an appeal to a world image and some form of accepted significance. In this context, any linguistic proposition appears not as a mere copy of meaning which is already fixed and given in the consciousness of the speaker, but as a vehicle for the conferring of meaning and the disclosure of possible new worlds. Cassirer uses his own interpretation of Humboldt to articulate a new meaning for Kant’s fundamental distinction between possibility and actuality as the hallmark of human thinking. Language is, therefore, no longer merely instrumental as constituted by human beings who are always a necessary link in the process of symbolization. Our creativity, then, is always part of how symbols come to mean something in our lived experiences. For Cassirer, the inner subjective domain of language is both energia and ergion, creative rule and creative potential. This is why he refuses to oppose Geist, or spirit, to life as he argues against Bergson.14
Language vivifies our world and our experience in it because although we are marked and delimited by language, we are also enabled by it to express, represent, and give significance to our lives. Different symbolic forms may mark out the “I” that is the necessary link in the chain of being represented, even if this “I” standpoint as a judgmental possibility is expressed differently; there is, however, an “I” standpoint in all symbolic forms, including myth, and therefore the “I” who judges for Cassirer is not some unique development for modernity. To quote Cassirer:
Every kind of symbolic formation works in its own way and with its own aim toward such a pure sense of the I, which is specifically distinguished from a mere ego-meaning. This sense of the I appears in language most characteristically where it is able to achieve the kind of expression most adequate to it, where it sharply and clearly distinguishes the “is” of the copular—which expresses the validity and stability of a pure relation—from assertions of mere existence, assertions about spatial and temporal Dasein.15
This “I” standpoint is true in science as a judgmental possibility, as it is true in art and as it is true in religion. To put this in the language of the current debates: symbolic forms that do indeed delimit us, also produce an “I” standpoint that endows us with some kind of creative productivity because the space for judgment in one form or another is allowed. Cassirer, then, enters into the modern debate about the social construction of the self in an important way. Yes, we are produced by language, socially constructed, or more precisely symbolically constructed. But, in those constructions there is also an “I” that is constituted through judgmental possibility. Again, to emphasize this point, the subject is constituted through an ascertainability whose other side is transformability. Outside of symbolic form there is no subject and there is no world. Cassirer, then, consistently gives a new meaning to Kant’s privileging of judgment over the conceptual as a practice of freedom that inheres in the human distinction between the actual and the possible, as this is now, in turn, understood to be integral to all symbolic forms. To use Heidegger’s language, Dasein’s being in the world is integrally tied to the projection of possibility.
However, is there objectivity for our judgments in the different symbolic forms for Cassirer? The answer is yes. In each symbolic form, given the limits of our humanity, there is something like an inner necessity. This is, for example, what Kant demonstrated in respect to scientific representation of phenomena. All phenomena in Kant are necessarily represented in time and space and this inner necessity allows us to represent a law-like nature. But, as Cassirer tells us, even Kant in his Critique of Judgment concluded that his defense of scientific objectivity was too narrow to include the many forms in which the human mind displays its world. In both Kant and Cassirer, what delivers the necessary form, and thus objective character of any phenomenon, is always exactly the element of form that is inseparable from the image world in which it is embedded. It is the conforming of the factual with the theoretical that enables the former to have its inner necessity not only in science but also in art and myth. Yet, we would and should not ever collapse the specific objectivity of any symbolic domain into that of something specific like scientific cognition. The key for Cassirer is to grasp the form of the various human projects by which we come to know and live in our world. This means that for Cassirer there is no ontic, let alone ontological, distinction between the symbolic form and its contents. We can only struggle to know the form as it is represented and expressed with full respect given to its own autonomy. There is no privileged place for science as there is also no privileged place for philosophy if we identify philosophy as producing an overarching standard by which to judge other symbolic forms. Nor, for Cassirer, can we root any of these forms in some ultimate ontology of man or Dasein separate from the actuality of these forms. As we will see this is the heart of Cassirer’s disagreement with Heidegger.
Cassirer forcefully argued that no philosophy can aspire to such rationalization of itself, as Hegel famously attempted, because all formations of Geist, including that of philosophy, rest on image worlds. We are creatures marked by an “ideality” from which we are inseparable. Ideality is not quite the right word here because it echoes the dualism Cassirer rejected. But, there is another sense in which the retention of the human need to think, live, and work through images of a specific kind rooted in the finite imagination remains the basis of Cassirer’s thought. Our ideality, as we discussed in the last chapter, is also definitively reworked by Heidegger as the other side of our finitude. But in Cassirer, it is the space of judgment inseparable from the form of symbolization that allows us to claim our freedom and to assume our responsibility. Cassirer always insists that our ethical world is always in the making and there is no one but ourselves who makes it. It is in a sense, then, in the character of a human being to judge, which is inseparable from our finitude and makes us responsible. We can at least struggle to live up to our own ideals of justice even if we accept and respect these as symbolic formations. There is, for Cassirer, a moral image of the world implied in all forms of human endeavor. It is as this being capable of moral judgment and action, the very being who judges and poses questions before physical nature, in which Cassirer finds the grandeur of the ideal of humanity. Judgment in all forms testifies to a “subject” not lost among the phenomena of any objective world, even if it is ultimately, of course, part of a world of symbolization. In judgment we find the “I” that remains even if that “I” following Kant can never be theorized as an outside place where we can safeguard our judgments of what “I” means.
Cassirer read the history of human beings as a Bildung, as a ground of self-discovery, or at least he did so in his more optimistic moments and he famously ends his Essay on Man with the ethical task he argued informs his philosophy as a whole:
Human culture taken as a whole may be described as the process of man’s progressive self-liberation. Language, art, religion, science, are various phases in this process. In all of them man discovers and proves a new power—the power to build up a world of his own, an “ideal” world. Philosophy cannot give up its search for a fundamental unity in this ideal world. But it does not confound this unity with simplicity. It does not overlook the tensions and frictions, the strong contrasts and deep conflicts between various powers of man. These cannot be reduced to a common denominator. They tend in different directions and obey different principles. But this multiplicity and disparateness does not denote discord or disharmony. All these functions complete and complement one another. Each one opens a new horizon and shows us a new aspect of humanity. The dissonant is in harmony with itself; the contraries are not mutually exclusive, but interdependent: “harmony in contrariety, as in the case of the bow and the lyre.”16
Cassirer did believe that reflection on the plurality of symbolic forms could enlarge our understanding of our own creativity, which ultimately allows us to appreciate all the richness of these forms and at the same time seek to understand their own unique inner necessity and ultimate interdependence. But, as the modest man Cassirer was, he knew that he had just begun and that this project lay in the future. It is certainly the case that the spirit of his work is to fight against what Amartya Sen has defined as the miniaturization of the human spirit.17
Ultimately, if there is development or progress of human knowledge in Cassirer, it is through the appreciation of complexity that would allow us to see our way more clearly through the shadows that might ensnare human beings in fears driven by their vulnerability. Although Cassirer sometimes spoke as if the modern European world gave us an appreciation of complexity that was not present in myth, he did so provisionally and in the name of that complexity. Cassirer emphasized again and again that we can only know the truth of symbolic forms in and through them, and that this insistence has led to the charge against him that he is a relativist. Before we turn to two of his great critics, Levinas and Heidegger, I want to emphasize again that Cassirer is not a relativist in the sense often used: a refusal of any universal truth about Dasein. Cassirer does offer us a universal insight as we have seen throughout this chapter through his original reinterpretation of the uniqueness of human knowledge given in symbolic form: the distinction between possibility and actuality. In this sense, he offers us an insight into the formal aspect of our humanity as symbol-making creatures. Cassirer is mistakenly called a relativist even by his great critics because, given his central insight into what is universal about what constitutes the uniqueness of our being human, we can never know the content separately from the form and each symbolic form will have its own objectivity. I want to emphasize here that Cassirer leaves us, however, with an ethical call that is often confused with relativism: his ethical call is a demand for the respect of the plurality of symbolic forms as integral to the Kantian ideal of humanity.
In 1929 the young Heidegger met Cassirer in Davos to debate their differences. Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms was already in print and had been for a number of years. Cassirer had become a controversial figure within the circle of neo-Kantians because of his radical interpretation of the transcendental imagination into a new form of symbolization. The debate with Cassirer was over his continuing emphasis on the imagination and his insistence on the central place of the Critique of Judgment in Kant’s philosophy. Many of the neo-Kantians in Germany at that time, including those who identified with the Marburg School, had defended the position that the transcendental imagination was both an inconsistent and unnecessary idea for Kant’s logical derivation of the categories of the understanding. The focus of the Marburg school was almost entirely on the Critique of Pure Reason with some attention to the Critique of Practical Reason. Cassirer enters the debate with Heidegger as if they were allies when it came to the fundamentals of the reading of Kant. Heidegger refused this alliance. Unfortunately, I cannot spend as much time on the debate as it deserves, but the setting was undoubtedly dramatic.
Germany was in a state of serious crisis. The Nazi Party was gaining popularity. The young Emmanuel Levinas was present at Davos and like so many of the other graduate students he was enamored with Heidegger. A group of graduate students put on a skit mocking the old-fashioned, scholarly Cassirer. Levinas played Cassirer and later in life deeply regretted that decision, and it is the essay that he wrote on Cassirer’s work that will be the focus of my own discussion. The drama of the setting as it has come to be understood in the horrific events that followed has undoubtedly marked the scholarly reception of the debate. Perhaps we should not separate the debate from the violent aftermath of history within which it was situated. In the ten years that followed Davos, Cassirer would be fired from his professorship and exiled from Germany because he was Jewish and Heidegger was to become the rector of the University of Freiburg for a brief period of time. Levinas was to spend the war years in a concentration camp. What has sadly been forgotten as a result of the taboo against taking Heidegger seriously in some circles due to his Nazism is precisely that the young Heidegger was in part inspired by Kant.
There are two main points that should be highlighted in this rich debate so that we can grasp the significance of the larger exchange at Davos. Cassirer emphasizes what the two share in their reading of Kant as follows:
On one point we agree, in that for me as well the productive power of imagination appears in fact to have a central meaning for Kant. From there I was led through my work on the symbolic. One cannot unravel this [the symbolic] without referring it to the faculty of the productive power of the imagination. The power of the imagination is the connection of all thought to the intuition. Kant calls the power of imagination Synthesis Speciosa. Synthesis is the basic power [Grundkraft] of pure thinking. For Kant, however, it [pure thinking] does not depend simply on synthesis, but depends instead primarily upon the synthesis which serves the species. But the problem of the species leads into the core of the concept of image, the concept of symbol.18
As we saw in the last chapter, Heidegger’s response accepts that he does indeed begin with a reworking of Kant’s notion of the transcendental imagination. But this reworking will demand a completely different kind of ontology of finitude that, according to Heidegger, Kant did not undertake but only anticipated. Both thinkers agree that truth is indeed relative to Dasein and that they are following Kant in saying as much. To quote Heidegger’s summation of what was at stake in their difference:
In this question of the going-beyond of finitude, we find a wholly central problem. I have said that it is a separate question to ask about the possibility of finitude in general, for one can formally argue simply: As soon as I make assertions about the finite and as soon as I want to determine the finite as finite, I must already have an idea of infinitude. For the moment this does not say much—and yet it says enough for a central problem to exist here. From the fact that now this character of infinitude comes to light precisely in what we have emphasized as the constituent of finitude, I want to make it clear that I would say: Kant describes the power of the imagination of the Schematism as exhibito originaria. But this originality is an exhibito, an exhibito of the presentation of the free self-giving in which lies a dependency upon a taking-in-stride. So in a certain sense this originality is indeed there as creative faculty. As a finite creature, the human being has a certain infinitude in the ontological. But the human being is never infinite and absolute in the creating of the being itself; rather, it is infinite in the sense of the understanding of Being. But as Kant says, provided that the ontological understanding of Being is only possible within the inner experience of beings, this infinitude of the ontological is bound essentially to ontic experience so that we must say the reverse: this infinitude which breaks out in the power of imagination is precisely the strongest argument for finitude, for ontology is an index of finitude. God does not have it. And the fact that the human being has the exhibito is the strongest argument for its finitude, for ontology requires only a finite creature.19
Both philosophers also put pride of place on the centrality of freedom for Dasein. And, indeed, the two men argue that they are providing a radical reading of Kant that insists that it is only the theoretical ungraspability of freedom that allows Dasein’s freedom as a possibility.
However, for Heidegger this possibility must be revealed as the truth of Dasein through a new ontology of Dasein’s existence as a creature who is marked by being toward death. Heidegger defines the difference between his understanding of freedom and Cassirer’s as follows. In Cassirer, we have seen that freedom is our power to reshape things even as we are shaped by them because symbolic forms always leave open a space for judgment. Heidegger responds as follows:
Cassirer’s point is to emphasize the various forms of the shaping in order, with a view to these shapings, subsequently to point out a certain dimension of the shaping powers themselves. Now, one could say: this dimension, then, is fundamentally the same as that which I call Dasein. But that would be erroneous. The difference is clearest in the concept of Freedom. I spoke of a freeing in the sense that the freeing of the inner transcendence of Dasein is the fundamental character of philosophizing itself. In so doing, the authentic sense of this freeing is not to be found in becoming free to a certain extent for the forming images of consciousness and for the realm of form. Rather, it is to be found in becoming free for the finitude of Dasein. Just to come into the throwness of Dasein is to come into the conflict that lies within the essence of freedom. I did not give freedom to myself, although it is through Being-free that I can first be I myself. But now, not I myself in the sense of an indifferent ground for explanation, but rather: Dasein is the authentic basic occurrence in which the existing of man, and with it every problematic of existence itself, becomes essential.20
The task of the philosopher as it is articulated in this debate is to unveil the truth of Dasein’s freedom as transcendence. We are, as we saw in chapter 2, always ahead of ourselves, thrown into the world, one out of which we yet project a future partially marked by our own making but that ultimately takes us toward the nothing of our own death. We are, in other words, the being who knows at the deepest level that we ourselves are only who we are by confronting nothingness. In this confrontation, however, with what is not and can never be known we find our authentic humanity and we transcend the conditions of sociality that bog down most human beings in the chatter and distractions of the “they.” Transcendence inheres in our throwness into a world of objects in which we are also other. In our experience and confrontation with the nothingness that marks our finitude we find what Heidegger calls the eccentric character of man.21
Freedom comes to us as transcendence, a future project by which we make ourselves into an authentic being whose freedom is unveiled in the confrontation with nothingness, and this means for Heidegger that the traditional metaphysical notion of “man” as a thinking subject is completely inadequate to the true dignity of humanity. As we have already seen, it was Kant, not Heidegger, who first undermined the possibility of a theory of the subject. Heidegger does not seek such a theory, but he does aspire to a new existential analytic of the fundaments of our being in time. And, it is through understanding Dasein that we would also understand the particularities of any form of Dasein’s objectification, such as mythical thinking. Hence, Heidegger accuses Cassirer of relativism and uses his discussion of the form of myth as pointing to a fundamental problem in Cassirer’s philosophy:
Yet if this interpretation of myth is to be judged not only with regard to what it achieves as a guide in the positive sciences but also with regard to its own philosophical content, then the following questions arise: is the predetermination of myth as a functional form of creative consciousness adequately grounded on its own terms? Where are the foundations for such an admittedly unavoidable grounding to be found? Are the foundations themselves sufficiently secured and elaborated? Cassirer’s grounding of his guiding predetermination of myth as a creative force [bildender Kraft] of spirit (“symbolic form”) is essentially an appeal to Kant’s “Copernican revolution,” according to which all “actuality” is to be considered as a formation of productive consciousness.22
Cassirer’s response to Heidegger is that, indeed, he will not ground his philosophy of symbolic forms in any philosophy of Dasein which turns on some overarching, philosophical notion of “man‘s” existence, including “man’s” existence as transcendence which gives him an eccentric character.
Thus, for Cassirer it is ironically Heidegger who is retreating from the radicalism of the transcendental imagination. If we are to be faithful to Kant we must remain true to his fundamental lesson that we cannot have any theory of man, even a non-“metaphysical” one. As Cassirer explains his own understanding of Kant’s central insight of the finitude of reason:
What is new in this [Copernican] turn appears to me to lie in the fact that now there is no longer one single such structure of Being, but that instead we have completely different ones. Every new structure of Being has its new a priori presuppositions. Kant shows that he was bound to the conditions for the possibility of experience. Kant shows how every kind of new form now also refers to a new world of the objective, how the aesthetic object is not bound to the empirical object, how it has its own a priori categories, how art also builds up a world, but also how these laws are different from the laws of the physical. For this reason, a completely new multiplicity enters into the problem of the object in general. And for this reason, the new Kantian metaphysics comes into being precisely from out of ancient, dogmatic metaphysics. Being in ancient metaphysics was substance, what forms a ground. Being in the new metaphysics is, in my language, no longer the Being of a substance, but rather the Being which starts from a variety of functional determinations and meanings. And the essential point which distinguishes my position from Heidegger’s appears to me to lie here.23
I agree with Cassirer that he has eloquently summarized his difference from Heidegger. The key difference between the two philosophers for the purpose of this book is that Heidegger’s philosophy cannot yield the respect for the plurality of symbolic forms that is at the very heart of Cassirer’s philosophy. Behind all of the objectifications of Dasein, in Heidegger is a new existential analytic of the fundaments of our finitude. There cannot and should not be such an existential analytic in Cassirer because we only know Dasein in Dasein’s multiplicity. There is no Dasein other than in and through that multiplicity. Thus, even an analytic of the fundaments of our finitude is not possible. It is this call to respect for plurality that makes Cassirer a necessary beginning to defend the continuing ethical importance offered by the moral image of the world. Of course, Heidegger as we saw came to disagree with his own earlier work in Being and Time and correspondingly the position he took with Cassirer in the Davos debate. As we saw, Heidegger critiques himself for holding on to a notion of man as the subject of transcendence that further distances us from the truth of Being and more desperately leads to the complete domination of technocratic reason. The Cassirerian answer to the later Heidegger is that such sweeping pessimism runs afoul of Kant’s insight into our finitude.
As we saw in Cassirer’s responses to Heidegger, it is multiplicity that is the other side of our inevitable ensnarement in symbolic forms. More specifically, myth cannot be eclipsed as long as there is language because myth is integrally tied to the metaphoric power of language. Thus, mythical thinking cannot and will not completely die out as long as human beings vivify themselves in language. There are, of course, many reasons for us to be pessimistic about our future but that is what they are: reasons. These reasons will always come to us in symbolic forms embedded in the image of the world in which they are represented. We are not God, but for Cassirer, it is up to us to create a more just world for humanity. Indeed, it is our responsibility to do so. For, a practical ethics can be read into the content of our experiences and the possibility of a future world met in the vivifying power of language. Certainly, a little help from God would be nice, or at least this writer would welcome it, but for Cassirer it is up to us to transform our world, not only with the great ideals of Europe but also with the recognition that they are but one of the symbolic manifestations of humanity.
However, for Levinas the problem with Cassirer’s philosophy was not only that it seemed relativist but that it rooted transformation in a cultural subject even if that subject is to be conceived as a transsubjectivity. In his moving answer to Cassirer, in which he echoes his repentance for his participation in the skit at Davos, Levinas defends the idea of how meaning arises, which is itself critical to understanding his entire work. For Levinas, symbols cannot contain the moral imperatives that ultimately drive them. For example, Levinas argues that the primordial ethical demand “thou shalt not kill” comes before its enunciation in words. This command originates as we confront our encounters with the face of the Other. The face of the Other for Levinas comes beyond any given system of meaning. To quote Levinas:
In other words, before it is a celebration of being, expression is a relation with the one to whom I express the expression and whose presence is already required so that my cultural gesture of expression can be produced. The Other who faces me is not included in the totality of being that is expressed. He arises behind all collection of being, as the one to whom I express what I express. I find myself facing the Other. He is neither a cultural signification nor a simple given. He is, primordially, sense because he lends it to expression itself, because only through him can a phenomenon such as signification introduce itself, of itself, into being.24
Levinas’s worry is that Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms reduces the Other, in Levinas’s own terminology, to an order of the same through the argument that through symbolization we can reach out to others, draw them toward us, and make them present to ourselves. Again, to quote Levinas:
The face is abstract. This abstraction certainly does not correspond to the raw sensible given of the empiricists. Nor is it an instantaneous cut in time, where time would “cross” eternity. The instant pertains to the world; it is a cut that does not bleed. Whereas the abstraction of the face is visitation and advent that disturbs immanence without being set in the horizons of the World. Its abstraction is not obtained from a logical process going from the substance of beings, from the particular to the general. On the contrary, it goes toward beings but is not engaged with them, retires from them, is ab-solved. Its wonder lies in this elsewhere whence it comes and where it already retires. But this coming from elsewhere is not a symbolic reference to this elsewhere as to a term. The face presents itself in its nakedness; it is not a concealing—but thereby indicating—form, a base; it is not a hiding—but thereby betraying—phenomenon, a thing in itself. Otherwise the face would be confounded with a lack that precisely presupposes it. If signifying were equivalent to indicating, the face would be insignificant.25
For Levinas, the expression of the Other can only be represented as unreachable—in that sense before culture—that blows apart any self-certainty of the subject and calls her to an ethical response.
The difference between what Levinas names the Saying and the Said is crucial here. The Saying is the actual discourse, to use Cassirer’s terms, in which we come to symbolize ourselves. The Said is more original than any human Saying. Thus, for Levinas, the spirit, or indeed the Said, of the primordial command “thou shalt not kill” originates not only in the face of the Other but it is paradoxically there before it is proclaimed in the written Torah. The written Torah in that sense only Says what has already been Said in the spirit of the revelation of the face. For Levinas, the ethical relation as the trace can never be contained by any symbolic form. Indeed, the ethical relation breaks up all symbolic forms and points beyond them. It would be impossible to provide anything like a full answer from a Cassirerian point of view without discussing his own writings on religion and ruminations on Judaism as these informed his philosophy. But, Levinas is correct that for Cassirer the finite creatures we are can only know the Other as the other comes to us in symbolic forms. We can already reach out to each other with preestablished forms of meaning even if in that very reaching we seek to break out of the symbolic forms that seek to contain and enable us to understand one another.
In The Philosophy of the Limit I argued that Derrida rightfully points out that the asymmetry of the Other turns on a phenomenological symmetry if we consider that Other as a human face.26 As we have seen, in the discussion of the difference between Heidegger and Cassirer, Cassirer tells us that the sameness of our humanity is rooted in symbolic multiplicity. This sameness cannot even be evoked as the eccentric character of Dasein. We are the same as symbolizing creatures and as the same we are also different, other to one another, because we are never outside the symbolic forms that give us our divergent worlds. It is at the heart of Cassirer’s work that the respect for plurality demands the respect for otherness, and the uniqueness of other cultures, other peoples, and the other worlds they live in. What Cassirer and Levinas share in their disagreement with Heidegger, to use Levinas’s words, is “to find a sense to the human without measuring it by ontology.”27 For Cassirer, the true Copernican revolution begun in Kant leads to respect for the plurality of symbolic forms, and what is more necessary now than such respect in the so-called postcolonial world?
Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 26.
Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 33.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Volume 4: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 4–8.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Volume 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), 109.
Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 25.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 193–194 (A51/B75).
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Volume 1: Language (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955), 319.
Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 59.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Volume 2: Mythical Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955), 23.
Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Volume 2, 24.
Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Volume 4, 167.
Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science, trans. and ed. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), section 14.
Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 16 (and generally chapter 1).
Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Volume 4, chapter 1.
Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Volume 4, 99.
Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 228.
See, generally, Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th ed., trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 194.
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 197.
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 202–203.
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 204.
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 186.
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 206.
Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 30.
Levinas, Humanism of the Other, 39.
See, for example, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992), 54–55, where I argued that “Derrida argues that the relegation of the Other to pure externality is itself a form of self-containment. To be self-enclosed, to deny the ‘trace’ of the Other in oneself, is to be impenetrable, safe from the contamination of the ‘outside.’ ‘Différance is difference under erasure,’ not the glorification of phenomenological asymmetry.”
Levinas, Humanism of the Other, 57.