Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

Cassirer was both a genuine philosopher and an historian of philosophy. His major work,
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (3 vols., 1923–1929) is considered a benchmark for a
philosophy of culture. Man, says Cassirer later in his more popular Essay on Man (1944), is a
"symbolic animal". Whereas animals perceive their world by instincts and direct sensory
perception, man has created his own universe of symbolic meaning that structures and shapes
his perception of reality - and only thus, for instance, can conceive of utopias and therefore
progress in the form of shared human culture. In this, Cassirer owes much to Kant's
transcendental idealism, which claimed that the actual world cannot be known, but that the
human view on reality is shaped by our means of perceiving it. For Cassirer, the human world
is created through symbolic forms of thought which are linguistic, scholarly, scientific, and
artistic, sharing and extending through communication individual understanding, discovery
and expression.

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.

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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

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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. (The final volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms, The Phenomenology of Knowledge [1929b], articulates this embedding most
explicitly, where the significative function of symbolic meaning is depicted as dialectically
evolving — in just the sense of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit — from the expressive and
representative functions.)

An Essay on Man
An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture

by Ernst Cassirer
Yale University Press, 1944

Ernst Cassirer (1874--1945) was a Jewish German intellectual historian and philosopher, the
originator of the ``philosophy of symbolic forms.'' After a distinguished teaching career in
Germany, he fled the Nazis, first to Oxford, then Goteborg, then finally Yale, which gives an
annual series of lectures in philosophy in his honor; he died as a visiting professor at
Columbia. Having read and admired his historical works, particularly The Philosophy of the
Enlightenment, I was curious about his own doctrines. The summary of them included in his
semi-historical book The Myth of the State left me quite confused: reading it gave me no sense
of what a symbolic form was, except that it had something to do with what Kant called forms
of apperception (no surprise: Cassirer was a neo-Kantian). Similarly, on that basis I couldn't
have told you what Cassirer thought a myth was, though it had something to do with emotions
whose ``motor-expressions'' were rituals.

Now, I don't think I'm a stupid man, or a bad reader. In the line of professional duty I've read a
great deal on subjects which are fairly tricky conceptually, like mathematical logic and
quantum field theory and learning theory, and it at least felt like I understood them. And I'm
not normally blocked by dense prose, either. Nonetheless, what I got from those passages was
a diffused feeling of frustrated incomprehension: there was something there, and I just wasn't
getting it. (I may add that, pursuing my hobby of psychoceramics, I've read a great deal of
dense prose where there really isn't anything to be grasped, and the difference is palpable.)
Such befuddlement is, of course, the reason why introductory books are written, so I started
looking around for an introduction to Cassirer. Lo: the man wrote one himself, An Essay on
Man. The preface tells us it was intended for those who hadn't German enough to tackle the
three volumes of his The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, supposedly even for those who aren't
scholars. Having read it, matters are a bit clearer, but not much.

The start is good. There is, Cassirer declares, a ``crisis in man's knowledge of himself.'' I dare
say it takes a philosopher, perhaps even a German philosopher, to deem the absence of an

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adequate and generally accepted philosophical anthropology a ``crisis,'' but this dramatization
is harmless, and Cassirer has a real point.

No former age was ever in such a favorable position with regard to the sources of our
knowledge of human nature. Psychology, ethnology, anthropology, and history have amassed
an astonishingly rich and constantly increasing body of facts. Our technical instruments for
observation and experimentation have been immensely improved, and our analyses have
become sharper and more penetrating. We appear, nevertheless, not yet to have found a
method for the mastery and organization of this material.... Unless we succeed in finding a
clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can have no real insight into the general
character of human culture; we shall remain lost in a mass of disconnected and disintegrated
data which seem to lack all conceptual unity. [End of ch. 1]
Slightly more Englishly: it'd help if we had a big picture about what people are like, and why
they are that way. What Cassirer set out to do was to master the actual facts of the relevant
particular sciences (in which, very soundly, he included biology, logic, mathematics and
physics, in addition to those in the quotation above), and to produce a synthesis, a body of
general doctrine about human beings and human culture in light of which the discoveries of
the sciences, and the existence of the sciences, would make sense. It was an ambitious and
worthwhile undertaking, though Cassirer was engagingly modest about it: note that his
subtitle says a philosophy of culture, not the. There is also a pleasing whiff of the
Enlightenment about the project (and, of course, the title).

``Symbolic form'' is still maddeningly vague, but my impression is that it is almost, but not
quite, a ``universe of discourse'' in the sense of logic. Tentatively, I'd suggest it be defined as
``a subject matter plus patterns of employing symbols to deal with it.'' I can sort of see how
this might be related to a form of apperception, but the details aren't so much left vague in the
Essay as non-existent. The canonical symbolic forms Cassirer discusses are: myth, language,
art, religion, history and science. I think Cassirer would have said that people sometimes have
``mythic'' perceptions, and artistic (``aesthetic'') ones, but probably not scientific or historical
ones. Mythic or magical perceptions would be ones colored by a vaguely-described vague
feeling that everything is alive, interconnected and significant. (I have severe doubts about
that: the people who came up with the myth of Armageddon don't seem to have thought of
themselves as fused with the Adversary in an all-encompassing web of life.) The material on
aesthetics was very interesting, but mostly because Cassirer was very good at explaining what
others had thought about the puzzles, and what the problems with their ideas were, his
positive ideas being quite impenetrable to me. ``Religion'' here blurs into ethics, which may or
may not be adequate; in any case it's a very interior sort of religion. (Perhaps cultic activities
were to fall under ``myth''.) Even when he talks about history he's mostly talking about the
historian's ``bringing the past to life,'' illustrated by our understanding the motives of
particular persons. Human beings as social animals do not interest him --- though presumably
the means we use to order our lives in common qualify as symbolic forms within the meaning
of the act. The chapter on science is mostly devoted to the idea that science is a means of
bringing conceptual order to our experience of the physical world, and to illustrations from
the development of mathematics and its applications. (At one point Cassirer says that material
objects are composed of our sense impressions; but I think he meant that our representations
of material objects are constructions or inferences from sense impressions.)

``Symbol,'' naturally a key and much-employed term, is never clearly defined or described.
Symbols are to be distinguished from mere ``signs,'' but I couldn't tell you how. Animals are
allowed signs, but symbols are reserved for us forked radishes. I think the idea is that a given

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symbol has many possible meanings, while a given sign has only one. Unfortunately, the
example Cassirer gives in this connection (ch. 3) is that multiple phrases can have the same
reference, which is not only irrelevant to how many senses a symbol can have (in different
contexts), but is even true of conditioned stimuli, which he takes to be prototypical signs.
Cassirer ignores the problem of how to gradually evolve symbolic capacity in merely signing
animals (if the chasm is that profound). To be fair, at the time macromutations were still being
defended by Goldschmidt, so he had a biological authority for big sudden jumps. Likewise, he
has some very odd-seeming comments about language, the brain, the effects of brain-lesions,
etc., which seem to derive from the German school of holistic neuropsychology, now quite
discredited. But clearly his impulse to respect what the brain-fanciers and the animal-trainers
had discovered was eminently sound. (I can't help but wonder whether Dennett will look
similarly antiquated in fifty years.) I am uncomfortable with his statements about how
symbols exist in a parallel world to the merely physical universe: the real problem, I should
think, is to explain how physical objects and events can come to be symbolic --- how
semantics emerges from physics (taking both very generally).

I learned a good deal from reading An Essay on Man, and if I'd read it three years ago I'd have
learned a hell of a lot. (Since then my subjects have over-lapped with Cassirer's more than I'd
suspected.) Cassirer's erudition was profound, and he is always exceptional at explaining what
other people thought, and both acute and generous about their merits and defects. The
problem is, I learnt very little about Cassirer's ideas, and I still don't know whether this is
because he's bad at self-exposition, or whether I'm just too dumb to twig him.