Cassirer, Ernst

Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), Jewish German philosopher, was one of the leading proponents of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism and made a significant contribution to a philosophy of culture through his investigations into the role [Page 81]of symbolic representation in the constitution of human environments. He claimed that “symbolic forms,” such as myth, art, religion, and language, are the irreducible building blocks that frame and structure human perception and cultural reality. Cassirer studied philosophy and science in Munich, Berlin, and Heidelberg. Influenced mainly by the work of his mentor Hermann Cohen, in Marburg, Cassirer successively developed his own stand toward the epistemological issues raised in Kantian philosophy. He taught at Berlin and Hamburg, and after fleeing the Nazi state in 1933 continued his career at Oxford, Gothenburg, Yale, and Columbia. Despite his enforced exile, Cassirer never directly engaged in the political debate of his time. Still, his writings in Myth of the State (1946) can be regarded as an attempt to grasp the intellectual roots of a totalitarian state.

While his most prominent contribution to the laying of new foundations of modern European philosophy has to be seen in his attempt to provide a phenomenology of symbolic forms, he also made distinct contributions to the philosophy of science and is still considered to be one of the most intriguing interpreters of Kant. His most influential work is the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (3 volumes), in which he attempts to give a unified account of the various forms of “symbolic representation.” In volume 1, Language ([1923] 1953), Cassirer provides a detailed analysis of linguistic forms and their development throughout history. Volume 2, Mythical Thought ([1925] 1955), provides an attempt to outline myth both as a form of thought and perception as well as an all-embracing life form. Finally, in volume 3, Phenomenology of Knowledge ([1929] 1957), Cassirer gives an account of the forms of knowledge involved in generating objective and subjective worlds, with special emphasis given to the scientific worldview and its abstract forms of symbolic language.

During the peak of his writing career, Cassirer's name also became linked with what can be seen as a landmark in European philosophy. In March/April 1929, he engaged in a series of lectures and disputations with his younger contemporary Martin Heidegger at Davos. The Davos disputations marked a first direct encounter between modern and postmodern philosophy. Influenced by this encounter, but more so by his time in American exile, Cassirer provides in An Essay on Man (1944), published shortly before his death, a more anthropologically based summary of his thoughts toward a symbolic understanding of human culture and the humanities alike. Cassirer's ideas on idealization and symbolization influenced Alfred Schütz's approach toward the structuration of the lifeworld. More recently, after a period of relative obscurity, in which Cassirer's work lived on mainly through the work of Susan K. Langer, there seems to have been a revival of interest in his ideas during the 1980s and 1990s.

Cassirer's theoretical approach, though usually located within neo-Kantianism, has some affinities to phenomenology, too. In the legacy of Kant's concept of a priori categories, Cassirer's aim is to analyze the fundamental concepts and categories by means of which the human mind organizes experience and thus human reality. But Cassirer departs from Kant in two crucial points. He does not accept that these fundamental structures of human experience are universal and immutable; rather, they are open to constant development and regional variation. Moreover, unlike Kant, Cassirer is skeptical about the idea of things-in-themselves and instead assumes that reality reveals itself solely through our symbolizations. By placing science in-line amongst other symbolic forms, Cassirer also departs from his fellow neo-Kantians Cohen and Natorp, with their emphasis on cognitive categories. The “Critique of Pure Reason” is extended toward a “Critique of Culture.” In pursuit of this intellectual program toward a “phenomenology of human culture,” he realizes some affinity toward the nonpsychologizing analysis of the configurations of intersubjectivity in the lifeworld as developed in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.

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