Cassirer, Ernst
CASSIRER, ERNST (1874–1945), German philosopher of culture. Cassirer was born in Breslau, Silesia. He studied at the universities of Berlin, Leipzig, Heidelberg, and Marburg and completed his inaugural dissertation under the direction of the Neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen at Marburg in 1899. Between 1903 and 1919 Cassirer taught as privatdocent at the University of Berlin, and in 1919 he assumed the chair of philosophy at the newly founded University of Hamburg. Cassirer left Germany in 1933 with the rise of Nazism; he taught for two years at Oxford before accepting a professorship at the University of Göteborg in Sweden in 1935. Cassirer left Sweden for the United States in the summer of 1941, teaching first at Yale and then at Columbia.
Cassirer's published writings comprise nearly 125 items, ranging from short articles to books of eight hundred pages. They treat a wide range of subjects in history, linguistics, mythology, aesthetics, literary studies, and science. Because he wrote continuously on so many subjects it is difficult to form a sense of Cassirer's thought as a whole. The largest division within his writings is between his works on the history of philosophy and those that state his own philosophical position. In addition to these are subcategories of works on literary figures, especially Goethe, and on the philosophy of science.
The center of Cassirer's work in the history of philosophy is his four-volume study Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neuern Zeit (The Problem of Knowledge in Philosophy and Science in the Modern Age). The first two volumes (1906–1907) trace the problem of knowledge from Nicholas of Cusa to Kant. The third (1920) and fourth (first published in English translation in 1950) continue the theme through Hegel and into the first decades of the twentieth century. In addition to this large study, Cassirer's works on the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, Descartes, and Leibniz have become classics in their areas. The central work of Cassirer's original philosophy is his three-volume Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms; 1923–1929), the groundwork of which was laid in his theory of scientific concept formation in Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (Substance and Function) in 1910. He extended his theory of concept formation to humanistic thought in Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften (The Logic of the Humanities; 1942). Cassirer recast his conception of symbolic forms in An Essay on Man (1944). This was followed by The Myth of the State (1946); both works were written in English.
Cassirer regards religion as part of the symbolic form of myth. In An Essay on Man he labels this as the symbolic form of "myth and religion" within a series of symbolic forms that includes also language, art, history, and science. Each of these areas of human culture represents a way in which people form their experience through symbols. Cassirer defines the human as an "animal symbolicum." Consciousness forms its object in many different ways. No one mode of formation offers a "literal" presentation of the real; all human activities are equally "symbolic." The symbol is the medium of all people's cultural activity, whether mythic-religious, linguistic, artistic, historical, or scientific. The interrelationships of all these manners of symbolizing form the system of human culture.
Religion arises as a stage within the mythical mode of symbolizing. In the second volume of Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (see part 4) Cassirer says that the break between religious consciousness and the mythical symbol occurs when consciousness begins to regard the images and signs of myth as pointing to meanings beyond immediate existence. Like true linguistic signs, Cassirer says, religious signs are understood as referring to an order of reality beyond the plane of immediate sensuous existence. In mythical consciousness the dancer who wears the mask of the god is the god; he does not signify the god who exists in another realm of being. Religion introduces a distinction between a finite and an infinite realm, a distinction that is beyond the power of the mythic symbol. For mythical consciousness, symbol and symbolized occupy a single plane of reality. In religious consciousness the sensuous and the spiritual divide, but they remain in this division as continuously pointing to each other in a relationship of analogy.
In An Essay on Man Cassirer approaches the relationship between myth and religion less in terms of the epistemology of the symbol and more in sociocultural and moral terms: "In the development of human culture we cannot fix a point where myth ends or religion begins. In the whole course of its history religion remains indissolubly connected and penetrated with mythical elements" (p. 87). Cassirer says that myth and religion originate in the "feeling of the indestructible unity of life" and in the fear of death as a break in this unity. In his phenomenology of the third volume of Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Cassirer connects myth with the Ausdrucksfunktion of consciousness, with the primordial phenomenon of "expression." Religion never loses its roots as an expression of the unity of life and the fear of death.
Religion also has roots in the "sympathy of the Whole" that underlies magical practices in primitive societies. But religion arises, Cassirer says in An Essay on Man, when the totem and taboo system of society based on magical practices begins to break down. In the taboo system the individual has no responsibility for his own actions. Religion gives scope to a new feeling, that of individuality. Cassirer regards the prophetic books of the Old Testament as an example of the rise of the new ideal of individual moral responsibility that marks the appearance of religious consciousness out of the taboo system. In religion there develops this first sense of the moral self.
Bibliography
Works by Cassirer
There are two comprehensive bibliographies of Cassirer's writings: a topical arrangement can be found in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, edited by Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton (Oxford, 1936), pp. 338–353, and a chronological listing appears in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, edited by Paul A. Schilpp (Evanston, Ill., 1949), pp. 881–910. Of particular interest to the study of Cassirer's conception of myth and religion are the following: Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1923–1929), translated by Ralph Manheim as The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 3 vols. (New Haven, 1953–1957), especially volume 2, Mythical Thought; Sprache und Mythos (Leipzig, 1925), translated by Suzanne K. Langer as Language and Myth (New York, 1946); Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften: Fünf Studien (Göteborg, 1942), translated by C. S. Howe as The Logic of the Humanities (New Haven, 1961); An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven, 1944); and The Myth of the State (New Haven, 1946). Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935–45 (New Haven, 1949), edited by Donald Phillip Verene, is a volume of Cassirer's previously unpublished papers. It includes a description of the corpus of Cassirer's manuscripts housed at Yale University.
Works About Cassirer
For bibliographies of critical work on Cassirer, see "Ernst Cassirer: A Bibliography," Bulletin of Bibliography 24 (1964): 103–106, and "Ernst Cassirer: Critical Work 1964–1970," Bulletin of Bibliography 29 (1972): 21–22, 24, both compiled by Donald Phillip Verene, and "Bibliographie des textes sur Ernst Cassirer," Revue internationale de philosophie 28 (1974): 492–510, compiled by Robert Nadeau. These bibliographies list critical works on Cassirer in all languages. The main source for critical views on Cassirer's thought remains The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, edited by Paul A. Schilpp (Evanston, Ill., 1949). The essays in this volume cover all aspects of Cassirer's thought, but most are expository. Other book-length works are Carl H. Hamburg's Symbol and Reality: Studies in the Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (The Hague, 1956); Seymour W. Itzkoff's Ernst Cassirer: Scientific Knowledge and the Concept of Man (Notre Dame, Ind., 1971) and Ernst Cassirer: Philosopher of Culture (Boston, 1977); and David R. Lipton's Ernst Cassirer: The Dilemma of a Liberal Intellectual in Germany, 1914–1933 (Toronto, 1978). There are two biographies of Cassirer in essay form, one by Dimitry Gawronsky in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, the other by Cassirer's wife, Toni Cassirer, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (1950; reprint, Hildesheim, 1981).
New Sources
Bayer, Thora Ilin. Cassirer's Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: A Philosophical Commentary. New Haven, Conn., 2001.
Friedman, Michael. A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger. Chicago, 2000.
Graeser, Andreas. Ernst Cassirer. Munich, 1994.
Itzkoff, Seymour W. Ernst Cassirer: Scientific Knowledge and the Concept of Man. 2nd ed. Notre Dame, Ind., 1997.
Krois, John Michael. Cassirer, Symbolic Forms and History. New Haven, Conn., 1987.
Lofts, Steve G. Ernst Cassirer: A "Repetition" of Modernity. Albany, N.Y., 2000.
Strenski, Ivan. Four Theories of Myth in 20th Century History: Cassirer, Eliade, Lévi-Strauss and Malinowski. Iowa City, Iowa, 1987.
Sundaram, K. Cassirer's Conception of Causality. New York, 1987.
Wisner, David A. "Ernst Cassirer, Historian of the Will." Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997): 145–161.
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