## 1. Biography



Cassirer was born on July 28, 1874 to a wealthy and cosmopolitan
Jewish family,in the German city of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland).
Part of the family lived in Berlin, including Cassirer's cousin
Bruno Cassirer, the distinguished publisher, who later published most
of Cassirer's writings. Cassirer entered the University of
Berlin in 1892. In 1894 he took a course on Kant with Georg Simmel,
who recommended Hermann Cohen's writings on Kant in particular.
Cohen, the first Jew to hold a professorship in Germany, was the
founder of the so-called Marburg School of neo-Kantianism, famous for
interpreting Kant's transcendental method as beginning with the
"fact of science" and then arguing regressively to the
presuppositions or conditions of possibility of this
"fact." Kant was thus read as an "epistemologist
[*Erkenntniskritiker*]" or methodologist of science
rather than as a "metaphysician" in the tradition of
post-Kantian German idealism. After learning of Cohen's writings
from Simmel, Cassirer (then nineteen years old) proceeded to devour
them, whereupon he immediately resolved to study with Cohen at
Marburg. He studied at Marburg from 1896 to 1899, when he completed
his doctoral work with a dissertation on Descartes's analysis of
mathematical and natural scientific knowledge. This appeared, in turn,
as the Introduction to Cassirer's first published work, a
treatment of Leibniz's philosophy and its scientific basis
[Cassirer 1902]. Upon returning to Berlin in 1903, Cassirer further
developed these themes while working out his monumental interpretation
of the development of modern philosophy and science from the
Renaissance through Kant [Cassirer 1906, 1907a]. The first volume of
this work served as his habilitation at the University of Berlin,
where he taught as an instructor or *Privatdozent* from 1906 to
1919.



In 1919 Cassirer was finally offered professorships at two newly
founded universities at Frankfurt and Hamburg under the auspices of
the Weimar Republic. He taught at Hamburg from 1919 until emigrating
from Germany in 1933. During these years Cassirer completed his
three-volume *Philosophy of Symbolic Forms* [Cassirer 1923,
1925, 1929b], which broke fundamental new ground beyond the
neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School and articulated his own original
attempt to unite scientific and non-scientific modes of thought
("symbolic forms") within a single philosophical vision.
In 1928 Cassirer offered a defense of Weimar [Cassirer 1929a] at the
University's celebration of the tenth anniversary of the
Republic, and in 1929-30 he served as the rector of the
University, as the first Jew to hold such a position in Germany. In
the Spring of 1929 Cassirer took part in a famous disputation with
Martin Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland, where Heidegger explicitly
took Cohen's neo-Kantianism as a philosophical target and
defended his radical new conception of an "existential analytic
of Dasein" in the guise of a parallel interpretation of the
philosophy of Kant [Heidegger 1929]. Cassirer, for his part, defended
his own new understanding of Kant in the philosophy of symbolic forms
- against Heidegger's insistence on the ineluctability of
human finitude - by appealing to genuinely objectively valid,
necessary and eternal truths arising in both moral experience and
mathematical natural science (see [Friedman 2000] [Gordon 2010]).



After his emigration Cassirer spent two years lecturing at Oxford and
then six years at the University of Goteborg in Sweden. During
this time he developed his most sustained discussion of morality and
the philosophy of law as a study of the Swedish legal philosopher Axel
Hagerstrom [Cassirer 1939a] (see [Krois 1987, chap. 4]). He
also articulated his major statement on the relationship between the
natural sciences and the "cultural sciences" [Cassirer
1942], which contained, among other things, an explicit rejection of
Rudolf Carnap's "physicalism" (see [Friedman 2000,
chap. 7]). Cassirer, like so many German emigres during
this period (including Carnap) then finally settled in the United
States. He taught at Yale from 1941 to 1944 and at Columbia in
1944-45. During these years he produced two books in English
[Cassirer 1944, 1946], where the first, *An Essay on Man*,
serves as a concise introduction to the philosophy of symbolic forms
(and thus Cassirer's distinctive philosophical perspective) as a
whole and the second, *The Myth of the State*, offers an
explanation of the rise of fascism on the basis of Cassirer's
conception of mythical thought. Two important American philosophers
were substantially influenced by Cassirer during these years: Arthur
Pap, whose work on the "functional a priori" in physical
theory [Pap 1946] took shape under Cassirer's guidance at Yale,
and Susanne Langer, who promulgated Cassirer's philosophy of
symbolic forms in aesthetic and literary circles (see, e.g., [Langer
1942]). Cassirer's American influence thus embraced both sides
of his philosophical personality. One can only speculate on what this
influence might have been if his life had not been cut short suddenly
by a heart attack while walking on the streets of New York City on
April 13, 1945.


## 2. Early Historical Writings



As indicated above, Cassirer's first writings were largely
historical in character - including a discussion of
Leibniz's philosophy in its scientific context [Cassirer 1902]
and a large-scale work on the history of modern thought from the
Renaissance through Kant, *Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie
und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit* [Cassirer 1906, 1907a]. The
latter, in particular, is a magisterial and deeply original
contribution to both the history of philosophy and the history of
science. It is the first work, in fact, to develop a detailed reading
of the scientific revolution as a whole in terms of the
"Platonic" idea that the thoroughgoing application of
mathematics to nature (the so-called mathematization of nature) is the
central and overarching achievement of this revolution. And
Cassirer's insight was explicitly acknowledged by such seminal
intellectual historians as E. A. Burtt, E. J. Dijksterhuis, and
Alexandre Koyre, who developed this theme later in the century
in the course of establishing the discipline of history of science as
we know it today (see, e.g., [Burtt 1925], [Koyre 1939],
[Dijksterhuis 1959]). Cassirer, for his part, simultaneously
articulates an interpretation of the history of modern philosophy as
the development and eventual triumph of what he calls "modern
philosophical idealism." This tradition takes its inspiration,
according to Cassirer, from idealism in the Platonic sense, from an
appreciation for the "ideal" formal structures
paradigmatically studied in mathematics, and it is distinctively
modern in recognizing the fundamental importance of the systematic
application of such structures to empirically given nature in modern
mathematical physics - a progressive and synthetic process
wherein mathematical models of nature are successively refined and
corrected without limit. For Cassirer, it is Galileo, above all, in
opposition to both sterile Aristotelian-Scholastic formal logic and
sterile Aristotelian-Scholastic empirical induction, who first grasped
the essential structure of this synthetic process; and the development
of "modern philosophical idealism" by such thinkers as
Descartes, Spinoza, Gassendi, Hobbes, Leibniz, and Kant then consists
in its increasingly self-conscious philosophical articulation and
elaboration.



In both the Leibniz book and *Das Erkenntnisproblem*, then,
Cassirer interprets the development of modern thought as a whole from
the perspective of the basic philosophical principles of Marburg
neo-Kantianism: the idea that philosophy as epistemology
(*Erkenntniskritik*) has the articulation and elaboration of
the structure of modern mathematical natural science as its primary
task; the conviction that, accordingly, philosophy must take the
"fact of science" as its starting point and ultimately
given datum; and, most especially, the so-called "genetic"
conception of scientific knowledge as an ongoing, never completed
synthetic process (see below). From a contemporary point of view,
Cassirer's history may therefore appear as both
"Whiggish" and "triumphalist," but it cannot
be denied that his work is, nevertheless, extraordinarily rich,
extraordinarily clear, and extraordinarily illuminating. Cassirer
examines an astonishing variety of textual sources (including both
major and minor figures) carefully and in detail, and, without at all
neglecting contrary tendencies within the skeptical and empiricist
traditions, he develops a compelling portrayal of the evolution of
"modern philosophical idealism" through Kant which, even
today, reads as extremely compelling and acute.



Cassirer must thus be ranked as one of the very greatest intellectual
historians of the twentieth-century - and, indeed, as one of the
founders of this discipline as it came to be practiced after 1900. He
continued to contribute to intellectual history broadly conceived
throughout his career (most notably, perhaps, in his fundamental
studies of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment [Cassirer 1927a,
1932]), and he had a major influence on intellectual history
throughout the century. Aside from the history of science (see above),
Cassirer also decisively influenced intellectual historians more
generally, including, notably, the eminent intellectual and cultural
historian Peter Gay and the distinguished art historian Erwin Panofsky
(see, e.g., [Gay 1977], [Panofsky 1939]). As we shall see below,
intellectual (and later cultural) history is an integral part of
Cassirer's distinctive philosophical methodology, so that, in
his case, the standard distinction between "historical"
and "systematic" work in philosophy ends up looking quite
artificial.


## 3. Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science



It was noted above that Cassirer's early historical works
interpret the development of modern thought as a whole (embracing both
philosophy and the sciences) from the perspective of the philosophical
principles of Marburg neo-Kantianism, as initially articulated in
[Cohen 1871]. On the "genetic" conception of scientific
knowledge, in particular, the a priori synthetic activity of thought
- the activity Kant himself had called "productive
synthesis" - is understood as a temporal and historical
developmental process in which the object of science is gradually and
successively constituted as a never completed "X" towards
which the developmental process is converging. For Cohen, this process
is modelled on the methods of the infinitesimal calculus (in this
connection, especially, see [Cohen 1883]). Beginning with the idea of
a continuous series or function, our problem is to see how such a
series can be a priori generated step-by-step. The mathematical
concept of a differential shows us how this can be done, for the
differential at a point in the domain of a given function indicates
how it is to be continued on succeeding points. The differential
therefore infinitesimally captures the rule of the series as a whole,
and thus expresses, at any given point or moment of time, the general
form of the series valid for all times,



Cassirer's first "systematic" work, *Substance
and Function* [Cassirer 1910], takes an essential philosophical
step beyond Cohen by explicitly engaging with the late
nineteenth-century developments in the foundations of mathematics and
mathematical logic that exerted a profound influence on
twentieth-century philosophy of mathematics and natural science.
Cassirer begins by discussing the problem of concept formation, and by
criticizing, in particular, the "abstractionist" theory
characteristic of philosophical empiricism, according to which general
concepts are arrived at by ascending inductively from sensory
particulars. This theory, for Cassirer, is an artifact of traditional
Aristotelian logic; and his main idea, accordingly, is that
developments in modern formal logic (the mathematical theory of
relations) allows us definitively to reject such abstractionism (and
thus philosophical empiricism) on behalf of the genetic conception of
knowledge. In particular, the modern axiomatic conception of
mathematics, as exemplified especially in Richard Dedekind's
work on the foundations of arithmetic and David Hilbert's work
on the foundations of geometry, has shown that mathematics itself has
a purely formal and ideal, and thus entirely non-sensible meaning.
Pure mathematics describes abstract "systems of order"
- what we would now call relational structures - whose
concepts can in no way be accommodated within abstractionist or
inductivist philosophical empiricism. Cassirer then employs this
"formalist" conception of mathematics characteristic of
the late nineteenth century to craft a new, and more abstract, version
of the genetic conception of knowledge. We conceive the developmental
process in question as a series or sequence of abstract formal
structures ("systems of order"), which is itself ordered
by the abstract mathematical relation of approximate
backwards-directed inclusion (as, for example, the new non-Euclidean
geometries contain the older geometry of Euclid as a continuously
approximated limiting case). In this way, we can conceive all the
structures in our sequence as continuously converging, as it were, on
a final or limit structure, such that all previous structures in the
sequence are approximate special or limiting cases of this final
structure. The idea of such an endpoint of the sequence is only a
regulative ideal in the Kantian sense - it is only progressively
approximated but never in fact actually realized. Nevertheless, it
still constitutes the a priori "general serial form" of
our properly empirical mathematical theorizing, and, at the same time,
it bestows on this theorizing its characteristic form of
objectivity.



In explicitly embracing late nineteenth-century work on the
foundations of mathematics, Cassirer comes into very close proximity
with early twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Indeed, Cassirer
takes the modern mathematical logic implicit in the work of Dedekind
and Hilbert, and explicit in the work of Gottlob Frege and the early
Bertrand Russell, as providing us with our primary tool for moving
beyond the empiricist abstractionism due ultimately to Aristotelian
syllogistic. The modern "theory of the concept,"
accordingly, is based on the fundamental notions of function, series,
and order (relational structure) - where these notions, from the
point of view of pure mathematics and pure logic, are entirely formal
and abstract, having no intuitive relation, in particular, to either
space or time. Nevertheless, and here is where Cassirer diverges from
most of the analytic tradition, this modern theory of the concept only
provides us with a genuine and complete alternative to Aristotelian
abstractionism and philosophical empiricism when it is embedded within
the genetic conception of knowledge. What is primary is the generative
historical process by which modern mathematical natural science
successively develops or evolves, and pure mathematics and pure logic
only have philosophical significance as elements of or abstractions
from this more fundamental developmental process of "productive
synthesis" aimed at the application of such pure formal
structures in *empirical* knowledge (see especially [Cassirer
1907b]).



Cassirer's next important contribution to scientific
epistemology [Cassirer 1921] explores the relationship between
Einstein's general theory of relativity and the
"critical" (Marburg neo-Kantian) conception of knowledge.
Cassirer argues that Einstein's theory in fact stands as a
brilliant confirmation of this conception. On the one hand, the
increasing use of abstract mathematical representations in
Einstein's theory entirely supports the attack on Aristotelian
abstractionism and philosophical empiricism. On the other hand,
however, Einstein's use of non-Euclidean geometry presents no
obstacle at all to our purified and generalized form of
(neo-)Kantianism. For we no longer require that any particular
mathematical structure be fixed for all time, but only that the
historical-developmental sequence of such structures continuously
converge. Einstein's theory satisfies this requirement perfectly
well, since the Euclidean geometry fundamental to Newtonian physics is
indeed contained in the more general geometry (of variable curvature)
employed by Einstein as an approximate special case (as the regions
considered become infinitely small, for example). Moritz Schlick
published a review of Cassirer's book immediately after its
first appearance [Schlick 1921], taking the occasion to argue (what
later became a prominent theme in the philosophy of logical
empiricism) that Einstein's theory of relativity provides us
with a decisive refutation of Kantianism in all of its forms. This
review marked the beginnings of a respectful philosophical exchange
between the two, as noted above, and it was continued, in the context
of Cassirer's later work on the philosophy of symbolic forms, in
[Cassirer 1927b] (see [Friedman 2000, chap. 7]).



Cassirer's assimilation of Einstein's general theory of
relativity marked a watershed in the development of his thought. It
not only gave him an opportunity, as we have just seen, to reinterpret
the Kantian theory of the a priori conditions of objective experience
(especially as involving space and time) in terms of Cassirer's
own version of the genetic conception of knowledge, but it also
provided him with an impetus to generalize and extend the original
Marburg view in such a way that modern mathematical scientific
knowledge in general is now seen as just one possible "symbolic
form" among other equally valid and legitimate such forms.
Indeed, [Cassirer 1921] first officially announces the project of a
general "philosophy of symbolic forms," conceived, in this
context, as a philosophical extension of "the general postulate
of relativity." Just as, according to the general postulate of
relativity, all possible reference frames and coordinate systems are
viewed as equally good representations of physical reality, and, as a
totality, are together interrelated and embraced by precisely this
postulate, similarly the totality of "symbolic forms"
- aesthetic, ethical, religious, scientific - are here
envisioned by Cassirer as standing in a closely analogous
relationship. So it is no wonder that, subsequent to taking up the
professorship at Hamburg in 1919, Cassirer devotes the rest of his
career to this new philosophy of symbolic forms. (Cassirer's
work in the philosophy of natural science in particular also
continued, notably in [Cassirer 1936].)


## 4. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms



At Hamburg Cassirer found a tremendous resource for the next stage in
his philosophical development - the Library of the Cultural
Sciences founded by Aby Warburg. Warburg was an eminent art historian
with a particular interest in ancient cult, ritual, myth, and magic as
sources of archetypal forms of emotional expression later manifested
in Renaissance art, and the Library therefore contained abundant
materials both on artistic and cultural history and on ancient myth
and ritual. Cassirer's earliest works on the philosophy of
symbolic forms appeared as studies and lectures of the Warburg Library
in the years 1922-1925, and the three-volume *Philosophy of
Symbolic Forms* itself appeared, as noted above, in 1923, 1925,
and 1929 respectively. Just as the genetic conception of knowledge is
primarily oriented towards the "fact of science" and,
accordingly, takes the historical development of scientific knowledge
as its ultimate given datum, the philosophy of symbolic forms is
oriented towards the much more general "fact of culture"
and thus takes the history of human culture as a whole as its ultimate
given datum. The conception of human beings as most fundamentally
"symbolic animals," interposing systems of signs or
systems of expression between themselves and the world, then becomes
the guiding philosophical motif for elucidating the corresponding
conditions of possibility for the "fact of culture" in all
of its richness and diversity.



Characteristic of the philosophy of symbolic forms is a concern for
the more "primitive" forms of world-presentation
underlying the "higher" and more sophisticated cultural
forms - a concern for the ordinary perceptual awareness of the
world expressed primarily in natural language, and, above all, for the
mythical view of the world lying at the most primitive level of all.
For Cassirer, these more primitive manifestations of "symbolic
meaning" now have an independent status and foundational role
that is quite incompatible with both Marburg neo-Kantianism and
Kant's original philosophical conception. In particular, they
lie at a deeper, autonomous level of spiritual life which then gives
rise to the more sophisticated forms by a dialectical developmental
process. From mythical thought, religion and art develop; from natural
language, theoretical science develops. It is precisely here that
Cassirer appeals to "romantic" philosophical tendencies
lying outside the Kantian and neo-Kantian tradition, deploys an
historical dialectic self-consciously derived from Hegel, and comes to
terms with the contemporary *Lebensphilosophie* of Wilhelm
Dilthey, Henri Bergson, Max Scheler, and Georg Simmel - as well
as with the closely related philosophy of Martin Heidegger.



The most basic and primitive type of symbolic meaning is
*expressive* meaning, the product of what Cassirer calls the
expressive function (*Ausdrucksfunktion*) of thought, which is
concerned with the experience of events in the world around us as
charged with affective and emotional significance, as desirable or
hateful, comforting or threatening. It is this type of meaning that
underlies mythical consciousness, for Cassirer, and which explains its
most distinctive feature, namely, its total disregard for the
distinction between appearance and reality. Since the mythical world
does not consist of stable and enduring substances that manifest
themselves from various points of view and on various occasions, but
rather in a fleeting complex of events bound together by their
affective and emotional "physiognomic" characters, it also
exemplifies its own particular type of causality whereby each part
literally contains the whole of which it is a part and can thereby
exert all the causal efficacy of the whole. Similarly, there is no
essential difference in efficacy between the living and the dead,
between waking experiences and dreams, between the name of an object
and the object itself, and so on. The fundamental Kantian
"categories" of space, time, substance (or object), and
causality thereby take on a distinctive configuration representing the
formal a priori structure, as it were, of mythical thought.



What Cassirer calls *representative* symbolic meaning, a
product of the representative function (*Darstellungsfunktion*)
of thought, then has the task of precipitating out of the original
mythical flux of "physiognomic" characters a world of
stable and enduring substances, distinguishable and reidentifiable as
such. Working together with the fundamentally pragmatic orientation
towards the world exhibited in the technical and instrumental use of
tools and artifacts, it is in natural language, according to Cassirer,
that the representative function of thought is then most clearly
visible. For it is primarily through the medium of natural language
that we construct the "intuitive world" of ordinary sense
perception on the basis of what Cassirer calls intuitive space and
intuitive time. The demonstrative particles (later articles) and
tenses of natural language specify the locations of perceived objects
in relation to the changing spatio-temporal position of the speaker
(relative to a "here-and-now"), and a unified
spatio-temporal order thus arises in which each designated object has
a determinate relation to the speaker, his/her point of view, and
his/her potential range of pragmatic activities. We are now able to
distinguish the enduring thing-substance, on the one side, from its
variable manifestations from different points of view and on different
occasions, on the other, and we thereby arrive at a new fundamental
distinction between appearance and reality. This distinction is then
expressed in its most developed form, for Cassirer, in the linguistic
notion of propositional truth and thus in the propositional copula.
Here the Kantian "categories" of space, time, substance,
and causality take on a distinctively intuitive or
"presentational" configuration.



The distinction between appearance and reality, as expressed in the
propositional copula, then leads dialectically to a new task of
thought, the task of theoretical science, of systematic inquiry into
the realm of truths. Here we encounter the third and final function of
symbolic meaning, the *significative* function
(*Bedeutungsfunktion*), which is exhibited most clearly,
according to Cassirer, in the "pure category of relation."
For it is precisely here, in the scientific view of the world, that
the pure relational concepts characteristic of modern mathematics,
logic, and mathematical physics are finally freed from the bounds of
sensible intuition. For example, mathematical space and time arise
from intuitive space and time when we abstract from all demonstrative
relation to a "here-and-now" and consider instead the
single system of relations in which all possible
"here-and-now"-points are embedded; the mathematical
system of the natural numbers arises when we abstract from all
concrete applications of counting and consider instead the single
potentially infinite progression wherein all possible applications of
counting are comprehended; and so on. The eventual result is the world
of modern mathematical physics described in Cassirer's earlier
scientific works - a pure system of formal relations where, in
particular, the intuitive concept of substantial thing has finally
been replaced by the relational-functional concept of universal law.
So it is here, and only here, that the generalized and purified form
of (neo-)Kantianism distinctive of the Marburg School gives an
accurate characterization of human thought. This characterization is
now seen as a one-sided abstraction from a much more comprehensive
dialectical process which can no longer be adequately understood
without paying equal attention to its more concrete and intuitive
symbolic manifestations; and it is in precisely this way, in the end,
that the Marburg "fact of science" is now firmly embedded
within the much more general "fact of culture" as a
whole.


## 5. Cassirer, Hegel and the Cultural Sciences



Cassirer emphasizes the kinship between his *Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms* and Hegel's *Phenomenology of Spirit* in the
Prefaces to both the second (1925) and third (1929) volumes. Recent
commentators ([Skidelsky 2008] [Moss 2015]) have illuminatingly built
on this circumstance in further articulating the relationship between
Cassirer and Hegel. Considerable light is shed on this relationship by
Cassirer's treatment of the problem of the
*Naturwissenschaften* and *Geisteswissenschaften* in
*The Logic of the Cultural Sciences* (1942). We shall return to
this situation in the next section.



Hegel had conceived nature (*Natur*) and spirit
(*Geist*) as two different expressions of a single divine
infinite Reason, which manifests itself temporally from two different
points of view. His project of an encyclopedia of philosophical
sciences had three parts, the logic, the philosophy of nature, and the
philosophy of spirit, where the logic had the task of depicting the
dialectical conceptual structure of infinite divine Reason itself. But
this Hegelian project for securing the ultimate logico-metaphysical
identity of nature and spirit found ever fewer followers as the
century progressed, as the rising tide of neo-Kantianism - aided
by further developments within the natural sciences instigated by
Hermann von Helmholtz - undermined the appeal of the original
*Naturphilosophie* of Schelling and Hegel together with their
Absolute Reason. The result was the problem of the
*Naturwissenschaften* and *Geisteswissenschaften* as it
presented itself to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
[Cassirer 1942] develops a characteristically methodological
perspective on this problem by treating both disciplines as
*empirical* rather than "speculative" sciences (in
the sense of Schelling and Hegel) and elucidating their methodological
relationship within the philosophy of symbolic forms.



[Cassirer 1942] argues that the empirical evidential basis for the
cultural sciences starts from the same realm of perceived physical
objects and processes distributed in space and time as do the natural
sciences - in this case documents, artifacts, rituals,
performances - but it goes on to imbue them with a symbolic
"sense" or "meaning" that is not at issue in
the natural sciences. We must distinguish, in particular, between the
representative function (*Darstellungsfunktion*) and the
expressive function (*Ausdrucksfunktion*) of thought, and only
a prejudice privileging "thing perception
[*Dingwahrnehmen*]" over "expressive perception
[*Ausdruckswahrnehmen*]" can support the idea that the
natural sciences have a more secure evidential basis than he cultural
sciences. (It is precisely this prejudice which, according to
Cassirer, lies behind Carnap's "physicalism.") For
Cassirer, by contrast, both forms of perception are equally
legitimate. While the natural sciences take their evidence from the
sphere of thing perception, the cultural sciences take theirs from the
sphere of expressive perception - and, in the first instance,
from our lived experience in a human community sharing a common system
of "cultural meanings."



Yet we also have the capacity, in the cultural *sciences*, to
extend such meanings beyond their originally local contexts. Whereas
intersubjective validity in the natural sciences rests on universal
laws of nature ranging over all (physical) places and times, an
analogous type of intersubjective validity arises in the cultural
sciences independently of such laws. Although every "cultural
object" has its own individual place in (historical) time and
(geographical-cultural) space, it can still continuously approach a
universal cultural meaning (in history or ethnography) as it is
continually *interpreted and reinterpreted* from the
perspective of other times and places. Universal cultural meaning
thereby emerges only asymptotically, in a way similar to the genetic
conception of knowledge of the Marburg School (now seen as based on
the significative function of thought). Rather than an abstract
mathematical relation of backwards-directed inclusion, however, we are
concerned, in the historical cultural sciences, with a hermeneutical
relation of backwards-directed interpretation and reinterpretation
- and, as a result, there is no possibility, in these sciences,
of reliably predicting the future.



We can further illuminate Cassirer's evolving attempt to situate
himself between Kant and Hegel by considering his evolving
relationship to Heidegger. In the 1929 Disputation at Davos Cassirer
challenged Heidegger's radical "finitism" by
appealing to the presumed necessary and eternal validity found in both
the mathematical sciences and morality. And after the Disputation
Cassirer added five footnotes to *Being and Time* (1927) in
*The Phenomenology of Knowledge* before its publication, where
he suggested that his attempt to begin the Hegelian phenomenology with
mythical thought rather than ordinary sense perception could also
address Heidegger's concerns. In 1931, however, Cassirer
published a review of [Heidegger 1929], which took a different
approach from his remarks at Davos. Instead of primarily emphasizing
the "eternal" validity found in the mathematical sciences,
Cassirer now placed his main emphasis on the ethical and aesthetic
dimensions of Kant's thought, as expressed in the *Critique
of Practical Reason* (1788) and the *Critique of the Power of
Judgement* (1790). His main point was that, whereas the
Transcendental Analytic of the *Critique of Pure
Reason*(1781/1787) may indeed be written from the perspective of
human finitude, the rest of Kant's system embeds this
perspective within a wider conception of "the intelligible
substrate of humanity."



[Cassirer 1931] mirrors his just-completed attempt to embed the
Marburg genetic conception of knowledge within a wider conception of
the development of human culture as a whole. The way in which Cassirer
situates his new philosophy of culture with respect to both Hegel and
Heidegger then illuminates his fundamental divergence from Hegel
- as it came to be expressed in Cassirer's works on
history and culture after he left Germany for good in 1933. By
building the Marburg conception of knowledge, in his new philosophy of
culture, on top of the more primitive forms of mythical thought
[*Ausdruckswahrnehmen*] and ordinary language
[*Dingwahrnehmen*], Cassirer takes himself to have done justice
to the insights of both Hegel and Heidegger while avoiding both the
infinite divine reason of the former and the radical human finitude of
the latter. Yet he has now conceded to Heidegger that Kant's
theory of human cognition involves only the notion of potential rather
than actual infinity. In particular, Kant's treatment of the
regulative use of the ideas of reason from a merely
*theoretical* point of view leaves their actual content quite
indeterminate. In the case of the idea of transcendental freedom, for
example, we are only able to determine it negatively (from a
theoretical point of view), as a species of causality that is
*not* bound by the conditions of time-determination governing
the phenomenal world.



In the *Critique of Practical Reason*, however, Kant asserts
that transcendental freedom acquires a determinate content from pure
*practical* reason, through our immediate awareness of the
moral law as normatively binding on our will (as a fact of reason),
and that the (practical) objective reality thereby conferred on this
idea can then be transferred to the ideas of God and Immortality. This
is because the moral law unconditionally commands us to seek the
Highest Good - the realization of the Kingdom of Ends here on
earth - which is an *infinite* task requiring
*infinite* (practical) faith and hope. The resulting divergence
from the indeterminate and merely potential infinity arising within
theoretical reason is visible in the famous passage on the starry
heavens above me and the moral law within me at the end of the
*Critique of Practical Reason*, from which Cassirer quotes in
his 1931 review of Heidegger. What the *Critique of the Power of
Judgement* adds to this conception is then the further idea that
rigorous mathematical scientific understanding of the phenomenal world
("mechanistic" understanding) runs out considerably before
we arrive at the history of human culture, so that the future is in
principle open to the possibility of our continuously approximating
the Highest Good without limit. But Cassirer, as we have just seen,
has now achieved a parallel result though his methodological
distinction between the natural and the cultural sciences. He is
thereby in a position to replace what he takes to be the oppressive
(speculative) infinity of Hegel's Absolute Reason with the
liberating (practical) infinity of our human (practical) reason. It is
in this way, for Cassirer, that our cultural future always lies open
and is always up to us.


## 6. The Myth of the State



In the Preface to the third volume of *The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms*, the *Phenomenology of Knowledge* (1929), Cassirer
explains that his concept of *phenomenology* is precisely the
Hegelian one [Cassirer (1929, vi-vii)]: "When I speak of a
'*Phenomenology of Knowledge*,' I do not align
myself with modern usage, but I go back to the fundamental meaning of
'phenomenology' as Hegel established and systematically
grounded and justified it. For Hegel phenomenology becomes the
fundamental presupposition of philosophical knowledge, because he
requires of the latter that it comprehend the totality of spiritual
forms, and because this totality, according to him, can only be made
visible in the transition from one form to another. [There follows a
quote from the Preface to the effect that *the individual has a
right to demand that (philosophical) science provide a ladder by which
to reach up to it*.] It cannot be expressed more sharply that the
end, the 'telos' of spirit cannot be grasped and expressed
if one takes it as something self-subsistent, if one takes it as
dissolved and separated from the beginning and the middle.
Philosophical reflection does not set the end against the middle and
the beginning in this way, but rather takes all three as integrating
moments of a unitary total development."



The Preface to the second volume, on *Mythical Thought* (1925),
invokes Hegel in the same vein, while also indicating Cassirer's
remaining fundamental disagreement with him. For Hegel [Hegel (GW 9,
23)]: "Science for its part demands that self-consciousness
raise itself into this ether, in order that it may live with and for
science. Conversely, the individual has the right to demand that
science shall at least provide him with a ladder by which to reach to
this height, and show it to him in himself. This right is based on the
absolute independence which he knows himself to possess in every form
of knowledge; for in each form, whether it be recognized by science or
not, and regardless of what its content may be, it is absolute
form - that is, it is the immediate certainty of itself, and, if
this term be preferred, it is therefore absolute being."



Cassirer modifies Hegel in 1925 [Cassirer (1925, ix-x)]:
"Seen in this way, the problem of myth bursts the bounds of
psychology and psychologism and takes its place in that universal
domain of problems which Hegel designated as 'phenomenology of
spirit.' That myth stands to the universal task of the
phenomenology of spirit in an internal and necessary relationship can
be mediately derived from Hegel's own conception and
determination of this concept: 'The spirit which ... knows
itself as developed spirit,' he writes in the preface to the
*Phanomenologie des Geistes*, 'is science.'
[Thus begins a considerably longer quotation from (GW 9, 22-4),
which concludes 'Knowledge in its first phase, or *immediate
spirit*, is non-spiritual, i.e., *sensible*
*consciousness*.'] These propositions, in which Hegel
characterizes the relationship of 'science' to sensible
consciousness, are valid to the full extent and with full precision
for the relationship of knowledge to mythical consciousness. For the
proper point of departure for all becoming of science, its beginning
in the immediate, lies not so much in the sphere of sensible intuition
as in that of mythical [intuition]... If, therefore, in
accordance with Hegel's demand, 'science' is
supposed to offer the ladder to natural consciousness that leads to
itself, then it must set this ladder one more rung lower."



In going beyond sensible consciousness to mythical consciousness,
Cassirer emphasizes a *non-rational* symbolic form as the basis
of all the rest. This emphasis had its most striking philosophical
payoff in one of Cassirer's last works, *The Myth of the
State*, which appeared in the year after his death in 1945.
Cassirer had written this work encouraged by his colleagues at Yale,
as a way in which he could apply his philosophy of symbolic forms to
the great calamity of the time - the rise of National Socialism in
Germany and the resulting Second World War. Cassirer's diagnosis
of this situation is that it depended on the use of modern
technologies of mass communication to awaken, manipulate, and exploit
the essentially non-rational mythical functions of thought that are
always still present in every human being. Cassirer singles out two
German thinkers, Hegel and Spengler, as contributing especially to the
Nazi glorification of the totalitarian state - the former less
culpably as the most important political philosopher in the nineteenth
century background to what Cassirer calls the "modern political
myth," the latter much more culpably as this myth was just
coming into being in the twentieth.



Cassirer developed in Goteborg his characteristic perspective on
the relationship between the natural and cultural sciences, which also
appealed especially to the *expressive* function of thought. It
was in connection with this work that he articulated a pithy defense
of Kant's regulative conception of infinitely distant practical
*ideals* (e.g., the Kingdom of Ends) against what he takes to
be the oppressive (speculative) infinity of Hegel's Absolute
Reason [Cassirer (1939, 28)]: "In his philosophy of history
Hegel wanted to provide the definitive speculative demonstration that
reason is substance and infinite power. For this, however, we must,
according to him, above all attain the insight that reason is
'not so powerless as to pass for a mere ideal, a mere
ought.' *This* form of proof has become shaky; the
critique of the foundations of the Hegelian system has pulled the
ground out from under it. If we turn back from the Hegelian meaning of
idea to the Kantian, from the idea as 'absolute power'
back to the idea as 'infinite problem,' we must of course
give up the speculative optimism of the Hegelian view of history. But,
at the same time, we thereby also avoid fatalistic pessimism with its
prophecies and visions of decline [*Untergangsprophezeiungen und
Untergangsvisionen*]. [Our] acting again has a free path to decide
for itself out of its own force and responsibility, and it knows that
the direction and future of culture will depend on the manner of this
decision."



Here one already sees, in the two penultimate sentences, the fateful
juxtaposition of Hegel and Spengler: the former as philosopher of
history and of right; the latter as the author of *The Decline of
the West* (1918), which can only be called a totalitarian social
technology.



Hegel's historical and political writings should be
distinguished from the earlier *Phenomenology of Spirit*. Hegel
was then a creature of the Enlightenment - albeit at a time later
than Kant's when the aftermath of the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic wars had begun in earnest along with the Industrial
Revolution.



The first topic addressed in Hegel's *Phenomenology* is
*consciousness*, beginning with the well-known discussion of
*sense-certainty* and the *this*. The next topic is
*self-consciousness*, which begins with the famous discussion
of *mastery* and *servitude*. It here becomes clear that
the self-consciousness in question is that of what is sometimes called
"modern subjectivity," focusing on the first-person
singular pronoun *I* - but equally, in this case, on the
second-person singular *you* and the first-person plural
*we*. Here Hegel follows in the footsteps of the Fichtean
conception of recognition. But Hegel also adds an essential element of
struggle, conflict, and competition depending on inequalities between
*I* and *you*, or, more generally, among the members of
any community of self-conscious human beings (*we*). This
element is indebted to Rousseau's *Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality* (1755), to which Kant's conception of
"unsocial sociability," introduced in *Ideas towards a
Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim* (1784), is also
indebted. The difference between Kant and Hegel, in this respect, is
that such ideas arise only in the context of Kant's practical
philosophy, while they arise at the beginning of the discussion of
self-consciousness in Hegel's *Phenomenology*. Or, to put
it another way, while Kant distinguishes between theoretical and
practical reason, only then to build a bridge between them in the
*Critique of the Power of Judgement*, Hegel's discussion
of self-consciousness in the *Phenomenology* initiates the
development of a unified conception of reason as such, at once both
theoretical and practical.



What is at issue is the actualization or realization of rational
concepts or ideas, as typified, for Kant, by the ideas of God,
Freedom, and Immortality produced by pure *practical* reason.
Kant holds that, as a matter of fact (the Fact of Reason), we have
such a faculty, which produces these ideas and also gives them
motivating force for us. But there is still always the question of
whether we shall actually choose to follow this purely rational
motivation, and so Kant develops an elaborate theory of how we can
cultivate and develop the means for strengthening and supporting it at
the expense of motivations to the contrary (always still present due
to unsocial sociability).



For Hegel, by contrast, a rational idea is a normative conception or
structure, which, to be normative at all, needs to *function as a
norm* (as a law) *within* some actual human community.
Rational ideas, as such, are actualized or realized in human history,
so that the questions then becomes one of understanding the
historical-conceptual processes that can lead us towards higher forms
of consciousness through increasingly comprehensive and coherent
normative structures. This leads to the pivotal section on
*spirit* in the *Phenomenology*, where the historical
part of the exposition reaches a culmination, of sorts, in the
discussion of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the
historical context wherein Hegel himself is located. And this sets the
stage for the penultimate discussion of religion as the means for
solving the remaining problem of fully internalizing the norms of
morality by all members of a human community located within this same
historical context.



The problem of internalization involves the need to unify the
universal objective laws of morality with the particular individuals
who make up the relevant community. These laws must be incorporated,
that is, within the subjective consciousness of each individual, and
Hegel interprets the doctrine of the incarnation thusly. In
particular, it is within a philosophically enlightened Christianity,
practiced within a philosophically enlightened religious community,
that the divine is incarnated within the lives of human beings. As
Hegel puts it at the end of the section on *morality* [Hegel
(GW 9, 362)]: "[I]t is God manifested in the midst of those who
know themselves in the form of pure knowledge."



Kant develops an Enlightenment version of moral religion in his
*Religion within the Boundaries of Pure Reason* (1793).
*Virtue*, for Kant, is an enduring disposition to follow the
moral law at the expense of motivation to the contrary, and it is this
disposition, in particular, that needs to be cultivated and nurtured
within our moral sentiments. However, since the problem of unsocial
sociability is the primary obstacle to virtue, we need a social
solution to the problem. This solution, for Kant, is an ethical
community or "ethical state" (in contrast to a legal
"juridical state"), in which mutual encouragement and
support in the development of the required disposition (rather than
fear of legal sanctions) is the primary means of achieving the desired
result. Such an ethical community is what Kant calls a
"church." And he goes on to say that we must look to the
history of religion to trace the development of such communities,
asserts (not surprisingly) that Christianity (through the doctrine of
Christ as the redeemer) is the best we have so far, and concludes,
finally, that only the regulative ideal of a universal church
embracing all of humanity - a church of reason - can fully
serve the goal of developing perfect, and therefore universal
virtue.



Kant and Hegel are not so very different in their Enlightenment
ambitions. They are both concerned with universal normative principles
*and* the actualization of these principles in existing human
communities. Moreover, they both find a culmination of this process in
what they take to be the best form of religion of the
time - Christianity, and, in particular, Lutheranism - which
only needs to be fully rationalized and universalized in accordance
with Enlightenment demands. The difference between the two, once
again, is that, while Kant attempts to meet these demands by sharply
distinguishing among different faculties of the mind - in this
case, theoretical and practical reason - between which he then
builds a bridge, Hegel attempts to meet these same demands by
articulating a unified conception of reason as such, at once both
theoretical and practical.



In the case of Cassirer, by contrast, although he is certainly a
follower and champion of the Enlightenment, he is by no means a
thinker *of* the Enlightenment itself. He is instead a creature
of the twentieth century, confronted with forms of science, and also
of socio-political organization, technology, warfare, and much else,
which could not have been envisaged by either Kant or Hegel. Moreover,
the unprecedented horrors of the first half of the twentieth century
put Cassirer in a very different moral universe in which no religious
or cultural tradition could simply be taken for granted. This is clear
in Cassirer's discussion of religion at the end of *Mythical
Thought*, which, in contrast to both Kant and Hegel, ranks art
rather than religion as the highest development of the expressive
function of symbolic meaning. We must, in the end, acknowledge that
Cassirer's discussion of myth sheds a bright light on one of the
most important problems of *his* time, namely, the rise of the
technologically driven totalitarian state - a problem that
continues increasingly to threaten us even today.