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Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) |
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German philosopher and historian of ideas, often typed as one of the leading exponents of neo-Kantian thought in the 20th century. Ernst Cassirer's major works include The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923-29). Cassirer saw that human beings were above all a symbolizing animals. The whole range of our achievements, science, religion, arts, history, political thought, religion, language – they all are unique parts of our evolutionary process and help us to understand our experience and the world. "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." (An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture,by Ernst Cassirer, New York: Doubleday, 1956, p. 43; originally published by Yale University Press, 1944) Ernst
Cassirer was born in Breslau, Silesia (today Wroclaw,
Poland) into a prominent Jewish family. He was the third of seven
children of Eduard Cassirer (1843-1916), a merchant, and his wife
Eugenie (Jenny) (1848-1904). Cassirer's cousins included the publisher
Bruno
Cassirer, the writer and art collector Paul Cassirer, and the Gestalt
psychologist
Kurt Goldstein. Paul Cassirer was an atheist; Judaism or Christianity
mattered little at that time for many of the family. Cassirer's first interest was science, but when he entered in 1892 the University of Berlin, he studied there law. He soon changed to literature and philosophy, pursuing further studies in history, languages, and the sciences at the Universities of Leipzig, Heidelberg, and Munich. In Berlin he was introduced to the work of Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) and became in 1896 one of his students at the University of Marburg. Cohen had earned a reputation of being the most rigorous idealist of his time. His primary aim was to purify Kant's fundamental concept "das Ding an sich" (the thing-in- itself). Other influential thinkers for Cassirer were Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Goethe, Leibniz, and Vico. The Marburg school was at that time known as an important advocate of neo-Kantian though. In Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant claimed that the fundamental concepts and categories by means of which we organize experience – among them space and time – are universal and immutable. They determine the way we experience the world. Cassirer accepted the idea of categories but saw that they are open to constant development. He criticized Hegel who though he had found "absolute knowledge" and had developed unchanging categories of history. The great symbol systems from science to mythology are not modeled on reality but model it. Kant had started a "Copernican revolution" in philosophy by concentrating upon the form of knowledge rather than upon its contents. The principal term in Cassirer's philosophy is the symbolic form, which could be undersood as an expession of the human mind or spirit (Geist). Symbolic forms do not merely reflect the human experience in its diversity but rather produce it. "Like all the other symbolic forms art is not the mere reproduction of a ready-made, given reality. It is one of the ways leading to an objective view of things and of human life. It is not an imitation but a discovery of reality," Cassirer wrote in An Essay on Man. "We do not, however, discover nature through art in the same sense in which the scientist uses the term "nature." Language and science are the two main processes by which we ascertain and determine our concepts of the external world." (Ibid., p. 183) The Kantian conceptual framework, "symbolic universe", that enables us to experience the world the way we do became Cassirer main object of study. Cassirer's doctoral dissertation on Descartes' theory of knowledge was accepted in 1899. It appeared in 1902 with a critique of Leibniz which he had completed in two years at Marburg. The first two volumes of Das Erkenntnisproblem came out in 1906 and 1907. He also worked with an edition of Kant's collected works, published by his cousin Bruno Cassirer. The last opus in the series was Cassirer's Immanuel Kants Leben und Lehre, which appeared in 1918. In 1902 Cassirer married his distant cousin, Toni Bondy; they had three children. Cassirer's position as Privatdozent at the University of Berlin was secured in 1906. Behind the slow start of his university career was more or less veiled anti-Semitism. His international reputation grew steadily and in 1914 Das Erkenntnisproblem won the Kuno Fischer Gold Medal from the Heidelberg Academy. After World War I Cassirer left Berlin when he was offered a position as full professor at the newly founded University of Hamburg. He came into contact with the circle surrounding the art historian Aby Warburg, and moreover, there he had all the first class resources of The Warburg Library at his disposal. Cassirer's colleague at both the university and the Warburg Institute from the early 1920s onwards was the art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), whose essay 'Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie' (1924) was inspired by Cassirer’s lecture on Platon. Cassirer's study Einstein’s Theory of Relativity Consodered from the Epistemological Standpoint ( 1921), contained a preface from Einstein himself. They both shared similar new, revolutionary way of thinking. Cassirer also met Einstein in Hamburg, where the physicist gave a lecture on his theory. The years in Hamburg marked Cassirer's shift from the great theories of science and philosophy to the world of art, language, myth, and culture. Once when he visited the Warburg Library, Cassirer said: "This library is dangerous. I shall either have to avoid it altogether or imprison myself here for years." The first volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms was published in 1923. Originally, according to Toni Cassirer, the idea for his new system of philosophy came on a crowded streetcar on a summer day in 1917. However, his principal philosophical concept, symbolic form, Cassirer derived from Heinrich Hertz's conception of the symbol in the art of the Hegelian aesthetician, Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887). The second volume, Language and Myth, followed two years later, and the third in 1929. At Davos in the spring of 1929 Cassirer gave lectures
before an invited international audience and had a debate with Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), a charismatic younger
philosopher, who had little interest in the concept of the symbol,
central to Cassirer's philosophy. The place had also been the scene of
Thomas Mann's novel Magic Mountain (1924), which depicted a
fight between liberal and conservative values, enlightened civilized
world and nonrational beliefs. The debate marked the clash of two
worlds of philosophy – the rich humanistic tradition represented by
Cassirer and antihistorical, modern brand of phenomenology. At the opening dinner Heidegger was dressed in a ski suit. (Ernst
Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture by Edward Skidelsky, 2011, p. 209) Heidegger's
major work, Sein und Zeit (1927), had just appeared; ahead lay
his decision to join the the Nazi Party. Cassirer had been warned of
Heidegger's rejection of all social conventions, whereas Cassirer's
gentlemanlike behavior was his weapon against the attacks of the new
star in philosophy. Later Heidegger complained that this prevented the
problems from being given the necessary sharpness of formulation.
Cassirer himself said, that the antirational philosophy "renounces its
own fundamental theoretical and ethical ideals. It can be used, then,
as a pliable instrument in the hands of political leaders." (Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos: The Philosophical Arguments by Simon Truwant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, p. 44) In spite of the political climate Cassirer was elected Rector
of the University of Hamburg in 1929 – the first Jew to gain such
position in German universities. Cassirer's speech in which he defended
republicanism triggered protests and polemics. The republican
parliamentary constitution was not a stranger in the history of German
thought, he argued, but "it grew from its own soil and was nurtured by
its most genuinely own forces, by the forces of idealist philosophy."
He spent some time in Paris in 1931 and wrote there The Philosophy
of the Enlightenment (1932). After Hitler was elected chancellor
of Germany in 1933, a law was passed which would make it impossible for
Jews to held official positions. Cassirer decided to leave
Germany when he read from a newspaper an
official declaration that "Recht ist, was dem Führer dient" (Law is
what serves the Führer), and no one protested. Before being dismissed from the university, Cassirer moved to England. He spent two years at Oxford, and then accepted a professorship at the University of Göteborg in Sweden. Due to his almost photographical memory Cassirer learned Swedish as quickly as he had learned English. Refusing to follow events in Germany, he would leave the room whenever Hitler's voice was broadcast on radio. During this period he wrote a work on Descartes’ influence on the Swedish queen Christine and her conversion to Catholicism. The art historian Ragnar Josephson (1891-1966) said that Descartes was the first foreign philosopher of stature to visit the country, Cassirer the second. (Ernst Cassirer: The Swedish Years by Jonas Hansson and Svante Nordin, 2006, pp.101-102) Cassirer also lectured on Goethe, partly because the loss of the change to use German had begun to trouble him, and partly to save Goethe from the ideologists of the National Socialism. His publications were still in German; it was not until settling in the United States, however, that he began to publish in English rather than his native German. In 1935 Ernst and Toni Cassirer became Swedish citizens. Many of the contemporary Swedish philosophers and intellectuals were their friends, including Åke Petzäll (1901-1957), the editor-in-chief of the philosophical journal Theoria, and the philosopher Malte Jacobsson. Cassirer's book on Axel Hägerström (1868-1939), the most controversial philosopher in his country, was commented by Ingemar Hedenius (1908-1982) in 'Über den alogischen Charakter de sog. Werturteile.' (Theoria, vol. 5. no. 3, 1939). This article, in which Hedenius pointed out a mistake Cassirer made on Sophist moral theory, sparked the beginning of his career as a moral philosopher. ('Between the National and the International – Theoria and the Logical Empiricists' by Johan Strang, in The Vienna Circle in the Nordic Countries: Networks and Transformations of Logical Empiricism, edited by Juha Manninen and Friedrich Stadler, 2010, pp. 84-87) After the outbreak of World War II and the German occupation of France, the Cassirers sailed from Göteborg to New York on the little freighter Remmaren; it was the first Swedish ship to arrive in the U.S. in several moths. "One of the finest little ships that the port of New York has ever seen is the Swedish freighter Remmaren, which arrived yesterday from Gothenburg on a trip through North Sea floating mines. In service only six months, the ship is the last word in everything, Including interior decoration. (The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, on June 5, 1941) Also the Russian structuralist theorist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), who had escaped the Nazis to Sweden, sailed on the same freighter to the United States. Their daily conversations stirred Cassirer's interest in structuralism. Some weeks before his death, Cassirer was invited by Jakobson to deliver a lecture at the New School for Social Research.Remmaren was sunk by a mine in 1942 off the Norwegian coast. Originally Cassirer
planned to return to Sweden, his second home country, after he finished
teaching in the United
States. He was visiting professor at Yale University during the period
1941-1944, and went then to Columbia University. He died on April 13,
1945, of a heart
attack on the street outside of Columbia University. Cassirer had finished The Myth of the State(1946),
an
analysis of the archaic forces of myth, which he held to be
dangerous to mankind. Referring to the lure of Nazism, he said:
"It may be compared to the experience of Odysseus on the island of
Circe. But it is even worse. Circe had transformed the friends and
companions of Odysseus into various animal shapes. But here are men, of
education and intelligence, honest and upright
men who suddenly give up the highest human privilege. They have ceased
to be free and personal agents." (The Myth of the State by Ernst Cassirer, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946, p. 285) Toni Cassirer told in a letter to
Malte Jakobsson of her fantasy that her husband would be buried on the
university hill in Göteborg, but later, when the subject was taken up
for consideration, she dismissed it. "My question: Is it possible that the homogeneous process of abstraction and symbolic self-definition that Cassirer chronicled as part of the advance of Western civilization was itself only a contingent, and possibly localized, historical phenomenon? From the time of the first advances of the Greeks and the in bumps, jolts, and reversals, the inertial progress finally arrives at out won century—great advances in science, technology, and power, but now an international barbarism. Somewhere, we seem to have missed a fundamental dimension of human nature and thought. Indeed, it has been historically evident. The Western vision of progress earlier absorbed these unsettling realities as mere historical way stations. We can no longer be so selfassured." (Seymour W. Itzkoff in Ernst Cassirer: Scientific Knowledge and the Concept of Man, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, second edition, 1997, p. xxxi) Cassirer argued in Language and Myth
that language and
myth began as one, originally standing in an "indissoluble correlation
with one another, from which they both emerge but gradually as
independent elements", they spring from the same well, from "same
impulse of symbolic formulations . . . a concentration and heightening
of simple sensory experience." (Language and Myth, translated by Susanne K. Langer, New York: Dover Publications, 1953, p. 88)
Language also bears within self, from its very
beginning, the power of logic. In the earliest phases language clings
to the concrete phenomenon, exemplified among others by the Arabic use
of between five to six thousand terms to describe a camel. Myth
develops into art and the development of written language leads
eventually toward mathematics and science, although in poetry language
still has its original power. "For lyric poetry is not only rooted in
mythic motives as its beginning, but keeps its connection with myth
even in its highest and purest products. The greatest lyric poets, for
instance
Hölderlin or Keats, are men in whom the mythic power of insight breaks
forth again in its full intensity and objectifying power." (Ibid., p. 99) From the beginning of his career Cassirer was interested in both natural sciences and humanities – literature, history and the arts. Cassirer considered all forms of intellectual activity creative. As a symbol-creating animal, human being is the product of a new mutation in life. Science, language, art, religion, mythology – they all are man-made worlds, expressing the creativity of spirit, or mind, itself. In this capacity they help us to articulate our experience and our knowledge. Symbolic forms have great creative powers but they can also be destructive. Aware of full horrors of Nazism, Cassirer saw that whole nations could fell victims of political myths. When intellectual, ethical and artistic forces lose their strength, mythical thought start to emerge and pervade the whole of man's cultural and social life. In the United States Cassirer wrote An Essay on Man and The Myth of the State. His work influenced especially Wilbur Marshall Urban (Language and Reality, 1939) and Susan Langer's aesthetic thought in her Feeling and Form (1953). In 1946 Langer published her translation of Cassirer's Sprache und Mythos (1925) into English. Like Cassirer, Langer argued that man is essentially a symbol-using animal and concluded that "art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling". In England, where philosophers were interested in such questions as the distinction between truth and falsity, Cassirer did not have many followers – he was too much product of the classic tradition of German philosophical idealism. In the 1960s John Passmore considered this a serious drawback and a justification for denying that Cassirer is a "philosopher", as the world was then commonly understood by British philosophers (such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred Ayer or Ludwig Wittgenstein). Passmore had also reservations about Cassirer as a historian. "His bold and imaginative analyses of human culture have, indeed, the same sort of suggestiveness as Toynbee's The Study of History, and comparable limitations." (A Hundred Years of Philosophy by John Passmore, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1978, p. 316) After a relative mild interest in his thoughts, Cassirer started to attract again attention in the 1990s. The International Ernst Cassirer Society was founded in 1993. However, many of Cassirer's central works wait for their translation into English. For further reading: The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. by Paul Schlipp (1949); Symbol and Reality by Carl H. Hamburg (1956); Ernst Cassirer: Scientific Knowledge and the Concept of Man by Seymor W. Itzkoff (1971): Ernst Cassirer: The Dilemma of a Liberal Intellectual in Germany, 1914-1933 by David R. Lipton (1978); Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935-1945, ed. by Donald Phillip Verene (1979); Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer by Toni Bondy Cassirer (1981); Ernst Cassirer: A "Repetition" of Modernity by S. G. Lofts (2000); Cassirer and Langer on Myth: An Introduction by William Schultz (2000); Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer by Toni Cassirer (2003); Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History by Karen Ann Lang (2006); Ernst Cassirer: The Swedish Years by Jonas Hansson and Svante Nordin (2006); The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. by Jeffrey Andrew Barash (2008); Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture by Edward Skidelsky (2011); Cassirer by Samantha Matherne (2021); Interpreting Cassirer: Critical Essays, edited by Simon Truwant (2020); The Genesis of the Symbolic: On the Beginnings of Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Culture by Arno Schubbach; translated by D.J. Hobbs (2022); Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos: The Philosophical Arguments by Simon Truwant (2022) For further reading:
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