SOURCE: "From Language to the Art of Language: Cassirer's Aesthetic," in The Quest for Imagination, edited by 0. B. Hardison, Jr., The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971, pp. 87-112.

In the following essay, Eggers compares Cassirer's views on language with those of other aesthetic philosophers.

Ernst Cassirer's interest in the symbolic form called language arises directly out of his allegiance to the long tradition of idealist philosophy. The history of attitudes toward language which comprises the introductory chapter of his Phenomenology of Linguistic Form (the first volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms) reaches from Plato to Croce, and whatever impedes the gradual revelation of Kantian epistemology in the realm of language analysis gets short shrift. For example, he dismisses the dull mechanics of modern descriptive linguistics as an evasion of that same, fundamental problem of language which empiricism in all its historical shapes could never solve. A...