T L C S

FIVE STUDIES

Ernst Cassirer

Translated and with an Introduction by S. G. Lofts

Foreword by Donald Phillip Verene

Yale University Press/New Haven and London

Published with the assistance of the Ernst Cassirer Publications Fund.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cassirer, Ernst, ‒.[Logik der Kulturwissenschaften. English]

The logic of the cultural sciences : five studies / Ernst Cassirer ; translated with anintroduction by S. G. Lofts ; foreword by Donald Phillip Verene.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN --- (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN --- (pbk. : alk. paper)1. Humanities. I. Lofts, Stephen G., – . II. Title.

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C

F Donald Phillip Verene vii

T’ A xi

T’ I

The Historical and Systematic Context of The Logic of the Cultural Sciences xiii

S .

The Object of the Science of Culture

S .

The Perception of Things and the Perception of Expression

S .

Concepts of Nature and Concepts of Culture

S .

The Problem of Form and the Problem of Cause

S .

The “Tragedy of Culture”

I

F

Donald Phillip Verene

If we look back over the major thinkers in philosophy of the twentiethcentury, Ernst Cassirer is the figure most associated with the philosophyof culture. Philosophy of culture is one of the youngest fields of philoso-phy, and the work of Cassirer, more than that of anyone else, has given itshape.

Culture is the problem of the twentieth century. Never before hasthere been such an awareness of the range and variety of cultures. Thisawareness of the variations on the human condition has been made vividto the point of being overwhelming. Offsetting this plural sense of culturein which all cultures are different is Cassirer’s sense of the constancy ofhuman culture itself. Cassirer has held to a singular sense of culture, withmultiple basic or “symbolic forms” that underlie the diversity of cultures.

In explaining the intent of his major work, the Philosophy of Symbolic

Forms, published in the s, Cassirer said that in it “the critique of rea-son becomes the critique of culture.” He sought to expand the Kantianproject of a presentation of the principles of human knowledge based onan analysis of science, ethical judgment, and aesthetic and organic formsto the areas of myth, religion, language, art, and history. In so doing heexpanded the problem of knowledge from its traditional connectionswith forms of cognition and theoretical thought to areas of human expe-rience that depend primarily upon imagination and memory, areas thatare the subject matter for study in the various fields of the humanities.

To accomplish this conception of knowledge Cassirer sought a com-mon denominator of these areas and found it in the phenomenon of the

vii

symbol. On Cassirer’s view, one area of human experience is not moresymbolic than another. All human experience depends upon the distinc-tively human capacity to form the world through the medium of mythsand aesthetic images, the words of natural languages, and systems of for-mal notations and numbers such as are found in mathematics and sci-ence. In his late work An Essay on Man (), in which he summarized andreformulated his philosophy of symbolic forms for his American audi-ence, Cassirer recast the Aristotelian definition of man as animal rationale

into man as animal symbolicum. Cassirer regarded all areas of culture as ex-pressions of the human power to form the ongoing immediacy of life invarious ways by means of symbols. Each area of culture, whether it ismyth, language, or science, has its own inner form. Each has its own“tonality” in an overall harmony of forms that make up human culture asa whole.

The task of the philosophy of culture, for Cassirer, is to understandand articulate a sense of the whole while preserving the integrity of eachsymbolic form. Cassirer understood this unity as functional so that all ar-eas of culture, all “symbolic forms,” stand in a dynamic relation to eachother. Cassirer approaches each area of culture in the manner of Kant-ian critique, analyzing the form of each in terms of space, time, number,causality, object, and so on. But his concern for culture as a whole owesmuch to Hegel. He explicitly endorses Hegel’s dictum that “the True isthe whole,” and he states that the phenomenology of knowledge he pre-sents in the third volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is to be under-stood in terms of Hegel’s sense of phenomenology rather than moremodern senses. Cassirer understands the dynamics of culture as dialecti-cal, but he does not wish all of the internal oppositions of cultural life andthought to culminate in the one form of logic as he finds in Hegel.

Cassirer’s scholarship is so vast and encyclopedic that, in addition tothe influence of Kant and Hegel, his philosophy incorporates elementsfrom the work of most modern European thinkers, including Goethe,Herder, Vico, Leibniz, Schelling, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. It is saidthat every great thinker is a complete university, and in Cassirer’s case thisis easily seen. Little escapes his gaze, and he can elicit just the rightamount of value in another’s thought. He concentrates always on thegreat achievement that human culture is and on the sense in which itsgreatest interpreters carry in their thought its greatest ideals.

viii FOREWORD

In founding his philosophy of culture, Cassirer relies upon the com-prehension of the various areas of cultural life in the fields that studythem—mythology, history of religion, linguistics, aesthetics, literary crit-icism, art history, history and historiography, anthropology, and so on—the Kulturwissenschaften (literally: “cultural sciences”), as these fields can becalled in German. In the work which follows, whose German title is Zur

Logik der Kulturwissenschaften, Cassirer turns his attention from the subjectsthat these fields study to the form or logic of the fields themselves. In hisearly work on Substance and Function (), Cassirer had presented a the-ory of concept formation in the natural sciences which he carriedthrough into his later works. In the present work, Cassirer turns to a the-ory of concept formation for the cultural sciences. The contrast and re-lation between these two types of concept formation is specifically thesubject matter of the third and pivotal study of this work. Cassirer’s phi-losophy of culture comes full circle from extending the problem ofknowledge to those areas of thought that are distinctively human, inwhich the human self specifically confronts its own nature, to a philo-sophical reflection on those fields on which the philosophy of culturemust rely to construct its account.

S. G. Lofts offers a valuable translation of this most rewarding andcrucial work of Cassirer, replacing the earlier translation of ClarenceSmith Howe, which has been out of print for some years. English-speak-ing readers of Cassirer and those generally interested in the study of cul-ture are in his debt, and that of Yale University Press, for making avail-able this important work in this new translation.

FOREWORD ix

T ’ A

The following translation has been made from the original edition: Zur

Logik der Kulturwissenschaften: Fünf Studien in Göteborgs Högskolas Årsskrift (), pp. –. The German pagination provided marginally refers,however, to the more accessible edition published by WissenschaftlicheBuchgesellschaft Darmstadt. The translation of the title follows Cas-sirer’s own translation in a bibliography of his works compiled by himshortly before his death. Cassirer’s precise translation was “Logic to Cul-tural Sciences, Five Essays” (cf. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Li-brary at Yale University, Gen Mss , Box , folder ). I wish to thankJohn M. Krois for drawing this to my attention. The difficult task oftranslating has been made easier by the generous help of ProfessorPhilipp W. Rosemann, of the University of Dallas, who has kindly readthe entire manuscript and made numerous comments concerning boththe letter and the spirit of Cassirer’s text. Professor Rosemann has alsoprovided me with the translations for the Greek and Latin. I thank himfor his work and valuable help. I would also like to thank the Alexandervon Humboldt Foundation for providing the means to complete thistranslation.

xi

T ’ I

The Historical and Systematic Context ofThe Logic of the Cultural Sciences

Because of his Jewish heritage, Ernst Cassirer was forced in to resignfrom his functions at the University of Hamburg, where he had served asrector only two years before, and take up a life of exile. He taught at AllSouls College at Oxford for two years before moving in to Sweden.He held a position at the University of Göteborg until , at which timehe left Europe to teach at Yale University. Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften:

Fünf Studien was written in the spring of , just as all of Europe was en-tering into war. Toni Cassirer’s remarkable account in Mein Leben mit Ernst

Cassirer of this period in her husband’s life not only sets the historical stagefor this treatise and explains the existential context of its writing but alsoprovides us with a valuable clue to the important systematic role that itplays in the overall work of Cassirer:

A few days after Ernst finished his lectures we left Göteborg, wherewe had to leave behind the children and Peter, and put ourselves upin a wonderfully situated old manor whose accommodations hadbeen converted for guests. It was near a small town, Alingsås, by alarge lake about an hour from Göteborg.

Suddenly transported from the oppressive atmosphere of thecity to the wonderful Swedish landscape, we breathed a sigh of re-lief. The lake in front of our house was still frozen when we arrived,and we experienced in the next few days and weeks the opening ofSwedish spring—a process, the beauty of which hardly has itsequal. We learned then that in no situation is it possible to escape

xiii

the impression of the awakening of nature. Although we encoun-tered wire enclosures and patrols, although the air hummed withthe noise of planes and each wagon that we met carried field equip-ment, although we listened anxiously to each broadcast, alwaysprepared to hear it suddenly announced that the Germans had en-tered Sweden, we enjoyed the nature surrounding us more in-tensely than ever before.

In these weeks everything that could happen politically hap-pened, except that which was expected. Holland, Belgium wereoverrun, France had been conquered, and only Sweden escaped.We no longer wondered at the shortsightedness of anyone; but tothe horrible idea of the subjugation of the Western countries wasadded for us the thought that all the German fugitives, who hadbeen victims of political or religious persecution, had now comeunder Hitler’s power. In this situation, Ernst suddenly decided toundertake a new work. In the morning he took a walk with me andtold me about what he was working on, and that this new work ac-tually signified the fourth volume of the symbolic forms.1

The improvement of his physical state had filled him, in justsuch an incomparably dreadful moment in world history, with anew desire for life and work. I worried now mostly about mybrother Walter and his young wife, who lived in Toulon, which as anaval port appeared to be in special danger. . . . After the invasionof Paris, Walter, who was always optimistic and positive, suddenlylost all vigor. Seriously ill with diabetes for many years and keptalive only through insulin, he had mastered his life wonderfully as aresult of his happy character. Now he used the disease to escape thedisaster. He was no longer prepared to witness the collapse ofFrance and to see German soldiers turn up in Toulon. He refusedto inject the necessary dose of insulin, and died two weeks later. . . .

One week after our return to Göteborg, thus six weeks after ourdeparture for Alingsås, Ernst had given the finished manuscript ofthe new book, which received the title The Logic of the Cultural Sciences,

xiv TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

. “In dieser Situation beschloß Ernst plötzlich, sich an eine neue Arbeit zumachen. Vormittags ging er mit mir spazieren und erzählte mir von dem, was erarbeitete, und daß diese neue Arbeit eigentlich den vierten Band der symbolischenFormen bedeutete.” (My italics in translation.)

to a typist, and a few days later he began to write the fourth volumeof the Problem of Knowledge, which he finished in November of thesame year. This unusual pace was the first indication of the urgencythat showed itself in his otherwise very quiet mode of working. Hehad always been a very fast worker without wanting to be or inten-tionally forcing it. However, the pace that he maintained from thetime of the invasion of Norway up to his death had a completelynew driving force. The effort to be “finished” had become all determining.2

The contrast between the splendor of spring and the “awakening of na-ture” on the one hand, and the death and destruction of war on the other,between the renewed “desire for life and work” on Cassirer’s part and thelost hope and tragic death of his brother-in-law, forms quite a remarkablebackground for The Logic of the Cultural Sciences. It was “in this situation,”in this “dreadful moment in world history,” that The Logic of the Cultural

Sciences was written, and it is in this light that it should be read. Some yearslater, in Myth of the State, Cassirer criticized those trends in philosophy, ex-emplified most notably by Spengler’s work The Decline of the West and byHeidegger’s concept of thrownness (Geworfenheit), which admittedly hadnot directly brought about the political ideas and events of Nazi Ger-many and the war but which nevertheless had “enfeebled and slowly un-dermined the forces that could have resisted the modern political myths.A philosophy of history that consists in somber predictions of the declineand the inevitable destruction of our civilization and a theory that sees inthe Geworfenheit of man one of his principal characters have given up allhopes of an active share in the construction and reconstruction of man’s

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION xv

. “Ernst hatte eine Woche nach unserer Rückkunft nach Göteborg, also sechsWochen nach dem Tage unserer Abreise nach Alingsås, das fertige Manuskript desneuen Buches, das den Titel ‘Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften’ erhielt, zumAbschreiben gegeben und begann wenige Tage später mit der Niederschrift desvierten Bandes des Erkenntnisproblems, die er im November desselben Jahresbeendete. Dieses ungewöhnliche Tempo war das erste Anzeichen von Eile, das sichin seiner sonst so ruhigen Arbeitsweise zeigte. Er war von jeher, ohne es zu wollenoder absichtlich zu forcieren, ein sehr schneller Arbeiter gewesen. Das Tempoaber, das er von der Zeit der Besetzung Norwegens bis zu seinem Tode bewahrte,hatte eine ganz neue Triebkraft. Das Bestreben, ‘fertig’ zu werden, war aus-schlaggebend geworden.” Toni Cassirer, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (Hildesheim:Gerstenberg-Verlag, ), pp. – (my translation).

cultural life. Such philosophy renounces its own fundamental theoreticaland ethical ideals.”3 Throughout the spring and summer of Cas-sirer experienced the consequences of this attitude of “fatalism” in themost intense and personal terms, both in the military successes of NaziGermany and in the resignation of his brother-in-law to the fall of Eu-rope. The Logic of the Cultural Sciences can be read as Cassirer’s response tothis attitude. For this treatise, and especially its final part, entitled “The‘Tragedy of Culture,’” provides us with a philosophy of history and cul-tural events in which there is no final decline, no destiny other than theone we ourselves create through our proper activity. Both The Logic of the

Cultural Sciences and the fourth volume of the Problem of Knowledge (Philoso-

phy, Science, and History Since Hegel)—which Cassirer wrote back-to-back ina period of five months of intensive work—are concerned with over-coming the “crisis” in man’s knowledge that Cassirer diagnoses as beingdue to the “growing fragmentation” in philosophy and science since the“death of Hegel.”4 The fourth volume of the Problem of Knowledge seeks to“overcome the separatist tendencies” that are “the distinguishing markand to a certain extent, the stigma of the theory of knowledge during thepast century” through an essentially historical approach to the problem.5

By contrast, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences provides us with a systematicapproach to the “crisis” in knowledge. One of its principal tasks is to es-tablish the logical and methodological difference between the sciences ofnature and the sciences of culture, while at the same time determiningtheir respective places in the general and unified “logic of research” ofscience as a whole.6

xvi TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, ),p. .

. The original German title of the fourth volume actually translates as The

Problem of Knowledge in the Philosophy and Science of Recent Times: From Hegel’s Death up to

the Present (Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft derneueren Zeit: Von Hegels Tod bis zur Gegenwart).

. Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge, vol. , Philosophy, Science, and History

Since Hegel, trans. William H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, ), p. .

. To translate Kulturwissenschaften as “humanities” instead of using the some-what unusual English term, “sciences of culture,” would thus have meant to ob-scure Cassirer’s aim of searching for the unity behind the “sciences” of culture andof nature.

That this “internal crisis” “is not merely a grave theoretical problembut an imminent threat to the whole extent of our ethical and cultural lifeadmits of no doubt” for Cassirer.7 This is why, in the words of Toni Cas-sirer, “the effort to be ‘finished’” had become “all determining” for herhusband from onward. For it was in the rise of the myth of Nazismand the historical events of the spring of that Cassirer saw the con-crete effects of the fragmentation of the theoretical realm, of the failureof philosophy to provide an intellectual center around which to organizeour critical forces, either theoretical or ethical.8 “Of all the sad experi-ences of these last twelve years,” Cassirer writes in Myth of the State, “themost dreadful” was to have seen his colleagues, “men of education andintelligence, honest and upright men . . . suddenly give up the highest hu-man privilege. They [had] ceased to be free and personal agents.”9 Theforce of critical reason, weakened by the “cultural pessimism” of thetimes, had failed to fulfill its theoretical and ethical duty in the momentthat it had been most urgently needed. Already in his inaugural address atthe University of Göteborg in Cassirer spoke of the problem ofthe “unity of knowledge” and of the “failure” of philosophy to achieve its ethical vocation: “‘in the hour of peril’” Cassirer said, quotingSchweitzer, “‘the watchman slept, who should have kept watch over us.So it happened that we did not struggle for our culture.’”10 Cassirermaintains that the whole of theoretical philosophy, including himself, hasits share in this failure:

I do not exclude myself and I do not absolve myself. While endeav-oring on behalf of the scholastic conception of philosophy . . . we

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION xvii

. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture

(New Haven: Yale University Press, ), pp. ff.. As Fabien Capeillères has shown, Cassirer, in writing The Myth of the State

seems to have had in mind Alfred Rosenberg’s declaration of the necessity to cre-ate a “new myth of the state.” Rosenberg is the author of Der Mythus des 20.

Jahrhunderts, which is considered to contain the official “philosophy” of Nazism. Cf.Capeillères, “Cassirer penseur politique: The Myth of the State contre Der Mythus des

20. Jahrhunderts,” in Cahiers de philosophie politique et juridique (): –.. Cassirer, Myth of the State, p. .. Ernst Cassirer, “The Concept of Philosophy as a Philosophical Problem,”

in Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, –, ed. Don-ald Phillip Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), p. .

have all too frequently lost sight of the true connection of philoso-phy with the world. But today we can no longer keep our eyesclosed to the menacing danger. Today the urgency of the timewarns us more strongly and more imperatively than ever that thereis once again a question for philosophy which involves its ultimateand highest decisions. Is there really something like an objectivetheoretical truth, and is there something like that which earlier generations have understood as the ideal of morality, of humanity?. . . In a time in which such questions can be raised, philosophy can-not stand aside, mute and idle. If ever, now is the time for it againto reflect on itself, on that which it is and what it has been, on its systematic, fundamental purpose, and on its spiritual-historicalpast.11

We must reject, on the one hand, that “cultural pessimism” which be-lieves that “the hour of destiny for our culture has struck”: “to this pes-simism and fatalism we do not wish to resign ourselves. On the otherhand, we can give ourselves over today less than ever before to that opti-mism which Hegel’s famous words express: ‘what is rational is real; whatis real is rational.’”12 The reader will recognize here both the passagefrom The Myth of the State cited above and the opening paragraph from thefifth study of the present volume. The Logic of the Cultural Sciences was, as Ihave said, Cassirer’s response to the crisis of his time. This also explainswhy Cassirer employs the term Kulturwissenschaften in the title rather thanthe term Geisteswissenschaften, which he generally employs—and which, infact, better depicts the project of the “critique of culture.” For in so doingCassirer was explicitly associating himself, not with such neo-Kantians asWindelband and Rickert, as we might first think,13 but rather with theWarburg Library for the Science of Culture (Kulturwissenschaften) and with the

xviii TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

. Ibid., pp. –. It is clear that from on Cassirer was rethinking hiswhole philosophical enterprise from a more profound and more concrete perspec-tive. The Logic of the Cultural Sciences is, in a certain sense, only the tip of the iceberg,a brief résumé of a much more vast project which, with the outbreak of the war,could no longer wait.

. Ibid., pp. –.. Cassirer in fact critiques Windelband and Rickert’s concepts of Kulturwissen-

schaften in the second study of The Logic of the Cultural Sciences.

ideal of “universal humanity,” a universal humanitas, which was the spiritof that institution.14

In her account Toni Cassirer also suggests how Cassirer himself seemsto have understood the place of The Logic of the Cultural Sciences in his oeuvre. On one of their daily morning walks, Cassirer mentioned thatthe “new work” on which he was working “actually signified the fourthvolume of the symbolic forms.” She then informs us that one week afterreturning to Göteborg, Cassirer gave “the finished manuscript of the newbook, which received the title The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, to a typist.”By “the new book” Toni Cassirer is almost certainly referring back to the“new work” that Cassirer had “suddenly decided to undertake” upontheir arrival at Alingsås only six weeks earlier. The Logic of the Cultural Sci-

ences, therefore, in some way represented or signified (bedeutete) for Cas-sirer the fourth volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Whether ToniCassirer’s account is accurate or not we will never know. It does seemrather clear, however, that the two works are certainly connected. Thisconnection can been seen if we turn for a moment to consider the projectof the philosophy of symbolic forms as it was originally presented in thepreface of the first volume in and as it came to be realized in thethree volumes.

After completing his analysis of the structure of the mathematical sci-ences of nature in Substance and Function, Cassirer turned his attention tothe “sciences of spirit” (Geisteswissenschaften) only to discover that tradi-tional epistemology was wholly inadequate for this task. Only after a“morphology of spirit” that accounted for the “various fundamentalforms of man’s ‘understanding’ of the world” could a proper “method-ological approach to the individual cultural sciences” be established. This“morphology of spirit” was undertaken in the philosophy of symbolic

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION xix

. Edgar Wind, Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliographie zum Nachleben der Antike, vol. ,Die Erscheinungen des Jahres 1931 (London: Cassell, ), p. xvi. In this introductionWind describes the spirit and structure of the Warburg Library. Reading this intro-duction one almost has the impression that it was written by Cassirer himself. Thisis due, no doubt, to the fact that Wind was a student of Cassirer’s and to the closeaffiliation between the philosophy of Cassirer and the spirit of the Warburg Library. (I thank Professor John M. Krois for drawing my attention to this link between the title of Cassirer’s text and the project of the Warburg Institute.)

forms. The first volume of this project dealt with language, the secondwith myth and religion, and the third provided a “morphology of scientific

thought.”15 However, when we examine this third volume, we discover toour surprise that Cassirer treats only the structure of the mathematicalsciences of nature; there is no mention of the sciences of culture. It is onlyin The Logic of the Cultural Sciences that Cassirer finally returns to the projectof establishing the logical foundations and structure of the sciences ofculture in contradistinction to the sciences of nature.

As we know, the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms waspublished in without the final section that Cassirer had planned for it.The volume as it appears today had already been completed by . Cas-sirer continued to work on the final section until , at which time he fi-nally decided to publish the volume without the concluding chapter so as“to avoid making the present volume even longer than it is, and to avoidweighting it with discussions which, in the last analysis, lie outside the ter-ritory prescribed by its specific problem.”16 This missing section was not,however, to deal with the problem of the sciences of culture. Rather it wasto “define and justify the basic attitude of the philosophy of symbolicforms toward present-day philosophy as a whole.” By “present-day philos-ophy” Cassirer is referring to “life philosophy” (Lebensphilosphie) and inparticular to such philosophers as Bergson, Simmel, Dilthey, Schopen-hauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. When we examine the problem of lifephilosophy as it is presented by Cassirer at the end of the introduction tothe third volume, we discover that it is, in fact, the same problematic that isaddressed in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, though from a more systematicperspective. Bergson advocates an immediate intuitive knowledge of thereal beyond all symbolic expression, a “pure vision” without symbols. Hecritiques all symbolic formation as a process of “mediation” and “reifica-tion” which causes life to “dry up” and die.17 Now the problem of the me-

xx TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. , Language, trans. RalphManheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), p. . Cassirer abandons theuse of the term morphology in the three volumes of the The Philosophy of Symbolic

Forms. The principle of morphology reappears in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (cf.also “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics,” Word (): –).

. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. , Phenomenology of Knowl-

edge, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), p. xvi.. Ibid., p. .

diation of the symbol and the loss of any immediate contact with the realis a recurring theme throughout The Logic of the Cultural Sciences. In both theintroduction to the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and in The Logic of the Cul-

tural Sciences, Cassirer maintains that the expression of the I in the objectiveforms of spirit constitutes a genuine act of discovery and determining ofthe I, and not a simple act of alienation. In both, the general philosophicalpoint remains the same: the return to “pure vision” through the negationof symbols desired by life philosophy ends by destroying the preconditionsfor “vision” as such.18 Only by externalizing itself in its “work” andthrough the symbolic forms can spirit manifest itself; only in the mirror ofits work can spirit discover itself.

When we turn to consider even schematically the fragments and notesfor the fourth volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, it becomes evenmore apparent that The Logic of the Cultural Sciences is closely tied to thisplanned fourth volume, as Toni Cassirer’s account suggests. In chapter we find that Cassirer’s protagonist is Georg Simmel.19 The problemsraised and the answers given there are identical to those found in Cas-sirer’s discussion of Simmel in the last part of The Logic of the Cultural Sci-

ences. In both, the problem is how we are to reconcile the “immediacy” oflife with the “mediacy” of thought. If we compare the structure of whatCassirer says about “philosophical anthropology” in the second chapterwith what he says on the same topic at the beginning of the second part ofthe first study of The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, we discover the same ar-guments and the same examples employed. The problem is that man hascome to be defined in naturalistic terms by the Darwinian theory of evo-lution. In both texts, Cassirer turns to the vitalism of J. von Uexküll in or-der to distinguish the specific difference between nature and spirit, be-tween “organic forms” and “symbolic forms.” In the text on the “basicphenomena,” Cassirer distinguishes, following Goethe, among the “I,”the “you,” and the “it.”20 These three fundamental elements are also

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION xxi

. Ibid., p. .. It should perhaps be mentioned here that Cassirer was a student of Georg

Simmel’s in Berlin. Simmel, in fact, introduced Cassirer to the work of Kant andof Cohen.

. Cassirer, Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, p. (Nachgelassene Manuskripte und

Texte, vol. , Zur Metaphysik der symbolischen Formen, ed. John Michael Krois [Ham-burg: Felix-Meiner-Verlag, ], p. ).

found in Cassirer’s phenomenology of the structure of perception in The

Logic of the Cultural Sciences. In both, the I perceives the “resistance” (Wider-

stand) of the outside world, and it is in the consciousness of this resistancethat consciousness of the alterity of the “object” as something “standingover against” (Gegen-Stand) the I arises. Now this Gegen-Stand, this alterity,can be understood either as a “you” or as an “it.”21 But there is no imme-diate knowledge of the you. We recognize others, and others recognizeus, “not through what we live or are, but through the objectivization,

through the ‘work’ that we create.”22 The work is experienced by the I asa “restraint” of its unformed stream of consciousness, indeed as a factorof “alienation.”23 Finally, the movement from nature to culture repre-sents a movement of liberation through symbolic activity. All thesethemes are, as we shall see, central throughout The Logic of the Cultural Sci-

ences.

The Object of the Science of Culture

The Logic of the Cultural Sciences begins by way of a seemingly objective andimpartial account of the history of the problem of objectivity in Westernthought. Upon closer scrutiny, however, we discover that it introducesmany of the central themes and problems that will recur again and againin the pages that follow, and that it presupposes the theoretical and sys-tematic position developed in the next four studies. Here, as elsewhere,Cassirer shows us that there is no fact without theory. The principal ob-jective of the first part of Study is to situate the philosophy of symbolicforms in the Western intellectual tradition as a “re-establishment” (in theHusserlian sense of Nachstiftung) of the Greek idea of knowledge (whichconstitutes its essence), while at the same time determining its specific dif-ference from that tradition. The philosophy of history that underlies thishistory of philosophy becomes explicit only in the course of our readingand especially in the final study. There Cassirer establishes the dialecticalrelation between the forces of conservation, which constitute a tradition,and the forces of renewal, which continue to give that tradition new lifethrough its active transformation.

xxii TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

. Ibid., p. in the English and p. in the German.. Ibid., p. in the English and p. in the German.. Ibid., p. in the English and p. in the German.

All philosophy begins from “astonishment,” from the awareness of“lawful order,” from the intuition of the logos (lovvgo~) that orders the cosmos

(kovsmo~), be it the cosmos of nature or the cosmos of man. However, thephilosophical attitude is established in its own right only in the momentthat it not only questions reality but turns toward establishing a “method”by means of which it can “answer” these questions. “This step occurs forthe first time in Greek philosophy—and herein lies its meaning as thegreat spiritual turning point in history.” Thought no longer contents itselfwith a multitude of individual mythical explanations, it seeks the “idea”of an overriding “unity of being” to which an identical “unity of causes”necessarily corresponds. “This unity is accessible only to pure thought”that goes beyond the limitations of our concrete perception of reality.Such is the “new task” and “new direction” that characterize and deter-mine “the whole of Western thought.”

In contrast to Greek intellectualism stands the Christian religion ofsalvation and revelation. Both seek to establish the “logos” or the “truth”of the world. However, the worldview of religion places this logos beyondthe reach of rational philosophical thought, beyond the finitude of thehistorical world of man. For Greek philosophy, logos is wholly immanentwithin being, and in fact the two form a homogeneous whole. “The dual-ism of the Christian worldview brings this identity to an end.” The con-flict between the two worldviews can never be reconciled. They are dif-ferent symbolic forms, and as such each possesses its own mode of seeingthe world and its own mode of understanding and objectivity. Between“revelation” and “reason” there can be no harmony of coexistence. Eachstrives to subject the other to its own criteria of objectivity: philosophyplaces religion within the limits of reason, while religion places reasonwithin the limits of revelation.

The “mathematical science of nature” marks a reestablishment of “the an-cient ideal of knowledge.” However, this ideal has assumed a new formand a “new meaning.” The new science is able to determine the unity be-tween the “intelligible” and the “sensuous” that had eluded the Greeks.“Matter as such proves to be permeated with the harmony of numberand to be ruled by the lawfulness of geometry. . . . The world is one, assurely as the knowledge of the world, the mathematics of the world is and canonly be one.” Everything is subjected to the power of mathematicalthought: everything, expect perhaps “history,” as Vico, whom Cassirer

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION xxiii

views as the first thinker to question this pan-mathematical worldview, in-sists. The originality of Vico’s Scienza nuova lies not in the answers that itprovides but in the question that it poses and the new direction of re-search that it opens up. Here “for the first time logic dares to breakthrough the circle of objective knowledge, the circle of mathematics andthe science of nature to constitute (konstituieren) itself instead as the logicof the science of culture, as the logic of language, poetry, and history.” Itis Herder, however, whom Cassirer credits with having developed the fullimplications of Vico’s position. Herder criticizes the “tyranny” of reasonwhich must “enslave and suppress all of man’s other mental and spiritualforces” in order to ensure the “victory” of “reason.” It is necessary, asCassirer himself will show, to understand all the different spiritual forcesas a “whole” and in their “unity.” What is more, this unity of spirit is to besought not in some substantial thing underlying the different activities ofspirit, nor in some metareality that exists beyond them, but rather in afunctional unity that must be determined through a “phenomenology ofspirit.”

What we learn from Vico and Herder is that “the physical cosmos, theuniverse of the science of nature, constitutes only a special case and par-adigm for a much more general way of posing problems. It is this way ofposing problems that now gradually supplants that ideal of the pan-mathematic, the mathesis universalis, which had dominated philosophicalthought since Descartes.” The science of nature and the science of cul-ture are but two expressions of one and the same symbolic activity, that ofscience as such. Vico and Herder’s thought constitutes yet anotherreestablishment of the Greek ideal of knowledge by giving it a new form.

Cassirer now takes a step further that leads him to the philosophy ofsymbolic forms. This step involves a generalization of the problem of“objectivity.”24 “The rule of . . . a structural law: this is the most generalexpression of what we denote, in the largest sense of the term, by ‘objec-tivity.’ In order to render this fully clear for us, we need only refer to theessential meaning of the concept of cosmos, which ancient thought had al-ready established.” Science is now seen as forming only one mode of law-ful ordering, so that scientific reality comes to represent only one dimen-

xxiv TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

. Concerning the generalization of the problem of “objectivity” see Cassirer,Language, pp. ff.

sion of objectivity. For this reason, science is unable to treat the generalproblem of objectivity as such. “For this problem belongs, if we take it inits full generality, to a sphere that cannot itself be grasped and exhaustedby science even taken as a whole. Science is only one member and onefactor in the system of ‘symbolic forms.’” The philosophy of symbolicforms seeks to establish the “systematic unity” of the “various ways anddirections of our knowledge of the world,” and in this way it, too, marksa reestablishment of the Greek ideal of knowledge. Alongside the logicalmode of structuring there are not only other ways of structuring theworld that are determined by other laws of formation, but these othermodes of formation prove to be “prelogical.” That is to say, they are pre-supposed by the conceptual and theoretical activity of science. “Theworld of language and the world of art offer us direct proof for this pre-logical structuring [vorlogische Strukturierung], for this ‘stamped form’ thatprecedes and underlies the work of concepts.” It is not by accident thatCassirer returns throughout The Logic of the Cultural Sciences to the exam-ples of language and art. For Cassirer, it is above all through the forces oflanguage and art that perception is first constituted as the objective per-ception of the world.25

Having determined that the science of nature and the science of cul-ture are two expressions of a more general theoretical attitude—that is,science—Cassirer must now establish the specific difference between theobjects of the two sciences, between nature and culture. In the secondhalf of the first study Cassirer thus addresses the question: “what isman?” The reader will no doubt recognize Cassirer’s definition of man asan animal symbolicum in the pages that follow.26 Cassirer combats the natu-ralistic reduction of man to nature defended by the Darwin theory ofevolution, with the aid of Uexküll’s theory of living organisms. It is onlyin Study that we will understand the full significance of Cassirer’s ap-proach here. For the morphology of vitalism marks the return and

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION xxv

. Cassirer, Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, pp. ff.: “The true foundation, thelegitimation, of this union [between language and art] is found only if we under-stand both language and art as basic ways of objectification, of raising conscious-ness to the level of seeing objects. This raising is in the end possible only when ‘dis-cursive’ thinking in language and the ‘intuitive’ activity of artistic seeing andcreating interact so as together to weave the cloak of ‘reality.’”

. Cassirer, Essay on Man, p. .

reestablishment of the Aristotelian concept of form in the sciences of na-ture, and thus helps determine the basis for the science of culture, whichcannot function without the concept of form. When reading Cassirer’sdescriptions of Uexküll’s conception of “organic forms,” one cannothelp but think of Cassirer’s conception of the “symbolic forms”: “Ac-cording to [Uexküll], precisely the study of anatomy is capable of fur-nishing strict proof that every organism presents a self-enclosed world inwhich everything ‘weaves itself into the whole.’ The organism is no ag-gregate of parts but a system of functions that are mutually dependent oneach other. In the ‘blueprint’ [Bauplan or structural plan] of every animalwe are able to read off immediately the nature of this interconnection.”

The differentia specifica between “organic forms” and “symbolic forms”is not found in any physical difference between the two, but rather in acharacteristic “change of function.” Spirit is able to achieve a new “free-dom” that is closed to nature and the animal world. It achieves this newfreedom not by removing itself from the determination of the natural or-der—spirit for Cassirer is always embodied spirit—but rather by becom-ing aware of these determinations:

This becoming conscious is the beginning and end, the alpha andomega, of the freedom that is granted to man; to know and to ac-knowledge necessity is the genuine process of liberation that“spirit,” in opposition to “nature,” has to accomplish.

The individual “symbolic forms”—myth, language, art, andknowledge—constitute the indispensable precondition for thisprocess. They are the specific media that man has created in orderto separate himself from the world through them, and in this veryseparation bind himself all the closer to it. This trait of mediationcharacterizes all human knowledge, as well as being distinctive andtypical of all human action.

Once again our attention is drawn to the simultaneous processes of “sep-aration” and “reunification” that characterize all spiritual and symbolicactivity. Anticipating behaviorism, which sees in the activity of language,art, and so on nothing that essentially differs from the ritual actions of an-imals, Cassirer further characterizes the difference between animal “re-actions” and human “actions” in terms of their temporal orientation. Allanimal “reactions” to the world are always oriented toward the concrete

xxvi TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

present and are preorchestrated by the blueprint of the species. “Whatwe term animal ‘instincts’ are nothing other than such fixed chains of ac-tion, whose individual links engage each other in ways predetermined bythe nature of the animal.” What distinguishes all human actions is theirorientation toward the “future.”27 Cassirer illustrates this new temporalorientation by way of the tool: “The intent that the tool serves containswithin itself a certain foresight. The impulse does not originate only fromthe spur of the present, but belongs also to the future, which must in someway be ‘anticipated’ in order to become effective in this manner. This‘idea’ of the future characterizes all human action. We must place some-thing not yet existing before ourselves in ‘images,’ in order, then, to pro-ceed from this ‘possibility’ to the ‘reality,’ from potency to act.”

The philosophy of symbolic forms must determine and organize thevarious “cardinal directions” of the “symbolic function” as it unfolds inhuman culture. And in fact “it is the totality of these structures that iden-tifies and distinguishes the specifically human world.”

Having defined man as an animal symbolicum, Cassirer introduces oneof the central questions of The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, the questionthat lies at the heart of the worldview of life philosophy: does not this“mediation” of the symbolic function come at too high a price? Does itnot bring with it a certain “self-alienation” and “self-loss of human exis-tence”? Do the symbolic formations not “separate” and “remove” usfrom nature and engulf us in a myriad of “artificial needs”? Must we notrather overcome all symbolic formation and “return to nature”? Cassireracknowledges that a certain alienation and loss of self results from allsymbolic formation, but at the same time he insists that “no humanknowledge and no human action can ever find its way back to [the] un-questionable existence and unquestionable certainty” of the animalworld. The negation of the symbols of language, art, myth, religion, andscience would not bring us closer to reality, nor would it establish any type

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION xxvii

. Concerning the futurality of the symbolic forms, cf. Cassirer, Phenomenology

of Knowledge, p. : “The symbol hastens ahead of reality, as it were, showing it theway and clearing its path. It does not merely look back upon reality as existing andhaving become [that is, as something already finished], but becomes a momentand motif of its very becoming. It is this form of the symbolic vision that specifi-cally distinguishes the spiritual, the historical will from the mere ‘will to live,’ merevital instinct.”

of pure immediate vision of the real, for the different symbolic forms arethe preconditions of all vision as such, and it is only through them thatwhat we know as reality can be given. Cassirer considers once again theexamples of language and art. In both cases Cassirer aims to show thatneither language nor art “copies” an already determined and given real-ity. Rather, it is only through their formative activity that anything thatcan rigorously be called the presence of reality comes about. “In thiscase, the ‘given’ of objects is transformed into the ‘task’ of objectivity.And this task, as it can be shown, does not involve theoretical knowledgealone; rather, every energy of spirit participates in its own way. Now language and art can also be assigned their particular ‘objective’ mean-ings—not because they imitate a reality existing in itself but because theypreform it, because they are determined ways and directions of objectifi-cation.” Each of the symbolic forms determines the relation between the“subject pole” and the “object pole” according to its specific law of for-mation. The two poles are not to be thought of as substantially separatedentities, one existing before the other, that the different symbolic formsmust somehow unite. Rather, their separation and subsequent reunifica-tion are brought about in and through one and the same act: the act ofsymbolic formation. Here there can be no separation of the “symbol”and “object.”

The Perception of Things and the Perception of Expression

Cassirer begins the second study by stating the thesis that he was later towork out historically in the fourth volume of the Problem of Knowledge: thatphilosophy has failed to establish a unified structure of knowledge, toprovide a single intellectual center from which the different sciences canbe given a unified orientation and direction.28 The result of this failure,he says in An Essay on Man, has been “a complete anarchy of thought.”29

Here he proclaims: “The internal crisis in which science and philosophyhave found themselves for the past hundred years, since the deaths ofGoethe and Hegel, stands out in no other feature as clearly as in the rela-

xxviii TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

. Cf. Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge, vol. , Philosophy, Science, and His-

tory Since Hegel, p. .. Cassirer, Essay on Man, p. . Cf. also Cassirer, Philosophy, Science, and History,

p. .

tion existing between the science of nature and the science of culture.”Hegel’s philosophy was the last great attempt “to embrace the whole ofknowledge and to organize it by virtue of one ruling thought.” TheHegelian system failed, however, because it reduced nature to spirit. In itnature retained none of its “alterity.” The logic of science proved in thefinal analysis to be only a logic of the science of spirit (Geisteswissen-

schaft).30 Since then the different sciences have all gone their own ways,and philosophy has broken up into “the two hostile camps of naturalismand historicism.” This polar opposition manifested itself even withinneo-Kantianism, as he later observed in the fourth volume of The Problem

of Knowledge: “In the development of neo-Kantianism the theory of Co-hen and Natorp is sharply opposed to that of Windelband and Rickert: adissimilarity that flows of necessity from their general orientation, deter-mined in the one case by mathematical physics, in the other by history.”31

In order to overcome this crisis it is necessary to determine the specificlogical structure of the concepts at work in both the science of nature andthe science of culture. However, before undertaking this analysis of con-cepts, Cassirer returns to a “deeper level” through a “phenomenology ofperception” in order to ground the different orientations of the science ofnature and the science of culture in the “structure of perception” itself.At this level the phenomena we find before us are basic phenomena thatare “showable” but not “provable.”

Within the “simple phenomenal state” of perception we can distin-guish between an “I-pole” and an “object-pole.” Perception is always theperception of something standing over against someone who perceives.Perception is thus always the awareness of something other. Now this “al-terity” may be perceived either as an “it” or as a “you”: “The world thatthe I encounters is in the one case a world of things and in the other aworld of persons. . . . In both cases the alterity persists; but in this very al-terity a characteristic difference reveals itself. The ‘it’ is quite simply another, an aliud; the ‘you’ is an alter ego.” Our perception of other persons isno more and no less certain or questionable than is our perception of

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION xxix

. Lebensphilosophie commits the opposite error by defining life as “the ‘whollyother,’ as the contradictory opposite of Spirit” (“‘Spirit’ and ‘Life’ in Contempo-rary Philosophy,” trans. R. W. Bretall and P. A. Schilpp, in The Philosophy of Ernst

Cassirer, ed. Paul A. Schilpp [LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, ], p. ).. Cassirer, Philosophy, Science, and History, p. .

things. Why then, Cassirer asks, does the theoretical attitude time andagain attempt to restrict perception to the perception of things? Thereare two reasons for this. The first concerns the general nature of the crit-ical attitude itself. The scientific worldview establishes itself in andthrough the negation of the mythical worldview, through the overcomingof all individual subjective perceptions of reality. Science seeks to negatethe individual subjectivity of our perception of the world. It achieves thisby replacing the “expressive qualities” of perception by universally deter-minable and objectively measurable qualities. However, if the problemhere were due simply to the nature of the critical scientific attitude, thepossibility of a science of culture would be excluded from the beginning.Thus the more profound problem is due to a limited conception of scien-tific objectivity. Since Galileo, the mechanistic and naturalistic model ofscience has provided the sole paradigm for all scientific methodology andinquiry. Such a naturalistic and physicalistic approach to culture ends upnegating the very phenomena it sets out to explain. In the various culturalactivities it sees only the mere physical movement and actions without be-ing able to understand their “meaning” and thus without being able todistinguish, for example, the “holy actions” of religion from other actionsbelonging to the “profane” world. In the move from nature to culture thephysical takes on a “new function”: “The ideal exists only insofar as it rep-resents itself sensuously and materially in some manner and embodies it-self in this representation. Religion, language, art: these are never tangi-ble for us except in the monuments that they themselves have created.They are the tokens, memorials, and reminders in which alone we cangrasp a religious, linguistic, or artistic meaning. And it is just in this recip-rocal determination that we recognize a cultural object.”

We recognize in this “reciprocal determination” Cassirer’s definitionof “symbolic pregnance” developed in the third volume of the Philosophy

of Symbolic Forms.32 Consciousness is the awareness of meaning, but allmeaning, even the ideal meaning of pure signification, is necessarily tiedto a physical presence that renders it present. All physical presence func-

xxx TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

. Cassirer, Phenomenology of Knowledge, p. : “It is with a view to expressingthis mutual determination that we introduce the concept and term ‘symbolic preg-nance.’ By symbolic pregnance we mean the way in which a perception as a sen-sory experience contains at the same time a certain nonintuitive meaning which itimmediately and concretely represents.”

tions as a means of representation, just as all representation demands aphysical presence. Cassirer distinguishes a third element that defines allcultural objects and that is not found in the chapter dealing with symbolicpregnance in the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: the presence of the “sub-ject” who is expressed in and through the creation of the cultural object.When, for example, we listen to someone speak, we can focus our atten-tion upon the purely physical sound of language. This is often how we ex-perience a language that we do not understand. The sounds articulatedhave no linguistic meaning for us, and so we experience only the physicalsubstratum of language, which nevertheless has a certain aestheticmelody to it. We are never confronted by an unstructured sound—whichis a contradiction in terms. As Cassirer writes in Study , “Not only couldthe structureless not be thought, it could not be perceived or become ob-jectively intuited.” If we turn our attention now to what is being said bythese sounds, we quickly forget about the physical presence of the soundsthemselves and begin to focus instead on what is being said by means ofthem. Here we concentrate upon the meaning that is being objectivelyrepresented. However, beyond both the physical presence of the soundsand the meaningful content that they represent, we may also turn our at-tention to the existence of the speaker who speaks through the words thatwe hear. Cassirer asserts in Study that “these three dimensions—thephysical existence, the objectively represented, and the personal expres-sion—are determining and necessary for everything that is a ‘work’ andnot merely an ‘effect.’” It is thus not surprising that the physical and nat-uralistic worldview of the sciences of nature, which reduces the culturalobject to the physical existence of its material support, quickly rendersproblematic not only the existence of other subjects but also, as the ex-ample of William James shows, the existence of self-consciousness itself(cf. p. ). What James denies, of course, is only “the substantial nature”of the I and the you, and not their “purely functional meaning.” For Cas-sirer the I and the you are not substantial things existing in total isolationfrom one another, but rather two points in a functional relation: “Forboth can no longer be described as independent things or essences, as ob-jects existing in themselves, which are separated, so to speak, by a spatialgulf across which nevertheless there occurs some kind of effect at a dis-tance, an actio in distans. Rather, the I and the you exist only insofar as theyare ‘for one another,’ only insofar as they stand in a functional relation of

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION xxxi

being reciprocally conditioned. And the fact of culture is simply theclearest expression and the most incontestable proof of this reciprocalconditioning.”

Every reference to the I is made by way of a reference to an alter ego,which the I is not. The I and the you are binary poles of the same reality,which is brought about through their mutual activity. Each of the differ-ent symbolic forms constitutes a different mode of action, a specific kindof relation between the I and the you that at once differentiates them andyet binds them together. “In the beginning is the act: always, in the use oflanguage, in artistic formation, in the process of thinking and research aspecific activity expresses itself, and it is only in this activity that the I andthe you at once find each other, and separate themselves from each other.They are in and with each other, as they preserve their unity throughspeaking, thinking, and all kinds of artistic expression.” As a linguisticsubject I come to know the other only in and through a dialogue with theother, and by recognizing beyond language the presence of that personwho is expressing himself or herself through language. Through this actof communication we distinguish ourselves from each other, the one byan act of speaking, the other by an act of listening. Each has its functionin the exchange of words that we call speaking. One of the greatest illu-sions that the I has cast upon itself is its belief that it exists prior to the actof speaking, when in fact it comes to be only in the moment that it ac-tively engages itself in dialogue with another.

We have already seen that the move from the animal world to culturecomes about when human beings no longer react to the presence of astimulus according to a predetermined chain of actions but rather actwith the intent to achieve a particular result. Animals possess a certain ca-pacity to express themselves. However, animal expression remains essen-tially “passive expression,” whereas human expression alone is “active.”All the symbolic forms are “active ‘forms’ of expression.” Behaviorism, as Ihave said, sees in the different cultural activities nothing more than a se-ries of learned responses to given situations that are distinguished fromthe animal world only in their complexity. We learn through imitationand repetition. Speaking is reduced to nothing more than a “languagehabit.” Although Cassirer recognizes that a “large part of that which isspoken in daily life falls under this scathing criticism,” he nevertheless in-

xxxii TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

sists that it does not apply to the whole of human speech. Within thesphere of “active expression” he thus distinguishes between “passivespeech” and “true speech” which is alone truly “productive.”

Cassirer concludes the study by preparing the way for his confronta-tion with the life philosophy of Georg Simmel in the fifth study, “The‘Tragedy of Culture.’” Again and again “philosophy and mysticism” seein the symbolic only a “barrier.” They desire to go beyond the symbolsthat separate them from the real, to enter into direct communication withthe world and the other. However, such a “yearning for a direct commu-nication in thought and feeling, which could dispense with all symbolismand all mediation through the word and image, rests on a self-deception.”Once again Cassirer returns to the theme of separation and reunificationthat he now tells us is the “double function of everything symbolic.”Every true unity presupposes the separation of that which it brings to-gether as a unity. Where there is no separation, no difference, there canbe no unity or identity. The different symbolic forms differentiate the Iand the you while at the same time uniting them in a common world ofaction. The I exists as I only in the alterity of the you and vice versa.Through all symbolic activity, the one reaches out to the other, but it isprecisely this act of reaching out that creates the distance between them,a distance that differentiates them from one another while at the sametime uniting them. Evidently, this distance can never be fully overcomewithout at the same time destroying that which it creates. All this appliesto the presence of the I to itself, to the knowledge the I can have of itself.Self-consciousness is possible only insofar as the subject is “split,” insofaras the I becomes something other than itself, that is, its own alter ego. Foronly insofar as it has become an object for itself can the I come to knowitself. It must cease to be an “individual” and become a “ ‘person’—in thebasic etymological meaning of the word, which goes back to the maskand the role of the actor.” Here too there remains a certain degree ofalienation, a difference that can never be closed without destroying thatwhich it creates. The I can never become one with its “persona.” It knowsitself only in the reflections of its works: “Every initial enunciation is al-ready the beginning of a renunciation. It is the destiny and, in a certainsense, the immanent tragedy of every spiritual form that it can neverovercome this inner tension. With the resolution of the tension the life of

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION xxxiii

spirit would also be extinguished; for the life of spirit consists in this veryact of severing what is, so that it can, in turn, even more securely unitewhat has been severed.”

Concepts of Nature and Concepts of Culture

Having historically and systematically determined the object of the sci-ence of culture in the first study, and having phenomenologicallygrounded the different orientations found in the science of nature andthe science of culture in the structure of perception in the second, Cas-sirer now turns to the task of defining the logical structure of the conceptsemployed in the two sciences and indicating how these concepts are ap-plied to the individual phenomena that are studied by them. Cassirer be-gins by analyzing two examples taken from the sciences of culture in or-der to demonstrate concretely how the problem of the science of form ormorphology is brought into play in each. Given the importance of lan-guage and art in the construction of perception, it is not surprising thatthe two sciences from which Cassirer chooses his examples are the sci-ence of language and the science of art. In his approach to languageHumboldt seeks to establish the “structure” of the “inner form” of lan-guage. Wölfflin too is brought from the consideration of the “structural

concepts” of the science of art to the problem of form and the “science ofform.” For Humboldt what distinguishes one language from another isnot a “mere difference in ‘sounds and signs.’ Rather, according to him,each linguistic form expresses its own ‘worldview,’ a certain fundamentaldirection of thinking and representing.” Cassirer shows that we discoverthe same basic idea in Wölfflin’s investigation of art. Wölfflin “transfersthe Humboldtian principle from the world of thought and representationto the world of intuition and seeing.” Here too the essential difference be-tween one style and another is found in the “total worldview” that it em-bodies.

But what is the logical character of these concepts and how do theycompare with the concepts of the natural sciences? It is important to re-member that for Cassirer the science of nature and the science of cultureare two expressions of one and the same general critical and theoreticalattitude. As such, both constitute a conceptual understanding of theworld. “We understand a science in its logical structure only once we have

xxxiv TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

clarified the manner in which it achieves the subsumption of the particular and

the universal.” Each science achieves this subsumption according to its ownparticular logic, and it is this particular logic that determines its specificworldview. We cannot simply relegate the investigation of universal prin-ciples to the sciences of nature, while limiting the sciences of culture tothe investigation of particular facts. Such an interpretation of the func-tion of the concept would destroy its organic structure. The unity be-tween the universal and the particular must be thought of not as an “ag-gregate” of independent elements but rather as an “organic unity,”whereby the universal is immanent in every particular.33

For Cassirer the division, within the general sphere of conceptualthought, into the sciences of nature on the one hand and the sciences ofculture on the other, stems, as we have seen, from the two essentially dif-ferent orientations present within the structure of perception: “It is, as itwere, the logical translation of a definite opposition of direction, whichas such does not appear solely in the domain of concepts, but whose rootsdescend deep into the soil of perception. Here the concept expresses ‘dis-cursively’ what perception contains in the form of a purely ‘intuitive’knowledge.” Science thus constitutes itself through a critique of percep-tion.

Every perception, however simple, already proves to be a process offormation and selection through concepts that establish a certain degreeof constancy in the flux of contents that fill it. “Science is distinguishedhere from perception—in a highly significant way, to be sure—only bythe fact that it requires a strict determination, whereas perception contentsitself with a mere estimate.” The ideal at which all the sciences of natureaim is to express “the universal in the form of a concept of a law from whichthe individual ‘instances’ can be deductively derived.” Here the sub-sumption of the particular under the concept leaves no room for differ-ence. The particular must meet all the “properties” designated by the law.Thus, for example, “a determined empirically existing substance, a cer-tain metal, can be subsumed under the concept gold if, and only if, it ex-hibits the relevant basic property and consequently all the other proper-ties that can be derived from it.”

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION xxxv

. Ibid., p. . For a concise treatment of the structure of the concept by Cassirer see ibid., part III, chapter , “Toward a Theory of the Concept.”

In the case of the sciences of culture, however, the concept can neversubsume the particular under the universal “in the same way.” The particu-lar possesses a certain “indeterminateness” that cannot be overcome.Burckhardt has provided us with a concept of the “Renaissance man,”but no one individual answers to all the properties of this concept. If weturn to consider the particulars of a culture, “we will perceive them to benot only thoroughly different, but even opposed. What we assert of themis just this, that, this opposition notwithstanding, and indeed perhaps justthrough it, they stand in a certain ideal connection to one another; thateach in its own way cooperates in the construction of what we call the‘spirit’ of the Renaissance or the culture of the Renaissance.” The con-cepts of culture thus represent a “unity of direction,” a “common task,”and not a “unity of being.” They “characterize” but do not “determine” theparticular that they subsume under the universal. The aim of the sciencesof culture is to establish the structure and form of this common task andactivity. Like the science of nature, the science of culture realizes itselfthrough a critique of perception. “We understand one another in speechwithout requiring the science of language or grammar; and the ‘natural’artistic feeling does not require art history or stylistics. But this ‘natural’understanding soon reaches its limits. We can no more reach the depthsof culture with the elements of intuition than simple sense perceptioncan penetrate the depths of space.” The science of culture aims at deter-mining the totality of forms of activity in and through which human ex-istence realizes itself. “These forms are infinitely differentiated and yetthey are not deprived of a unified structure. For it is ultimately the ‘same’human being that meets us again and again in a thousand manifestationsand in a thousand masks in the development of culture.”

There is, however, a curious difficulty inherent in this task. The scien-tific attitude seeks to remove the object to an ideal distance. However, inthe case of the sciences of culture we are the object of study, and thus it isconsiderably more difficult to achieve this ideal distance. Here “thereemerges a barrier to knowledge that is difficult to overcome. For the reflex-

ive process of the understanding is opposed in its direction to the productive

process; both cannot be accomplished together at one and the sametime.” Our only access to this productive process is through the worksthat it creates. The “science of culture teaches us to interpret symbols in

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order to decipher their hidden meaning—in order to make the life fromwhich they originally emerged visible again.”

The Problem of Form and the Problem of Cause

In Study Cassirer has determined the specific logical structure of theconcepts employed by the sciences of nature on the one hand and thoseemployed by the sciences of culture on the other. In this way he has es-tablished their unity within the overall logic of theoretical and concep-tual research as a whole. The division between the two families of scien-tific concepts expresses in discursive terms the two fundamental differentorientations that were discovered within the structure of perception inthe second study. In the fourth study Cassirer continues the task of estab-lishing the systematic unity of science. If the difference between the sci-ences of nature and the sciences of culture represents a vertical divisionwithin the structure of science taken as a whole, the distinction betweenthe concepts of form and the concepts of cause represents a horizontaldivision: for “the concept of form and the concept of cause constitute thetwo poles around which our understanding of the world rotates. They areboth indispensable if our thought is to succeed in establishing a fixedworld order.” The “problem of form” and the “problem of cause” aretherefore as important to the sciences of nature as they are to the sciencesof culture. However, as Cassirer’s historical review reminds us, since the“great turning point” in Greek philosophy, “form thinking” and “causalthinking” have not only “diverged” but have opposed each other as “an-tagonistic oppositions.” For a long time the Aristotelian concept of formal

cause seemed to have achieved a reconciliation of the two concepts and tohave established a truly unified system of reality, but only at the price of“absorbing the one into the other.” With the advent of the modern math-ematical sciences the concept of causality was separated from the con-cept of form and transformed. Now “only the mathematical cause is acausa vera.” The mechanical worldview quickly became the dominantmethodological paradigm for all the sciences. Everything that spoke of“form” was now viewed as being “unscientific.” However, with this the“gulf” between the science of nature and the science of culture openedup and became evident. “For the latter cannot negate the concept of

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form without abandoning itself. In the sciences of language, art, and reli-gion, what we are trying to understand are particular ‘forms’ that wemust have understood in their pure existence before we can attempt toreduce them to their causes.” The causal model of explanation was pro-gressively applied to one domain after another. With the development ofthe theory of “historical materialism” culture too finally seemed to havefallen under the principle of causality.

The challenge to the “mechanical worldview” did not come from thedomain of the science of culture, which found itself helpless before theexplanatory power of the principles of causality, but rather from a “revo-lution in our mode of thinking” within the sphere of the science of na-ture itself. For at the turn of the century we witness a reestablishment ofthe Aristotelian concept of form in all its different fields. Cassirer demon-strates how in the spheres of physics, biology, and psychology the conceptof wholeness has become the new dominant paradigm in the natural sci-ences. However, the category of wholeness here no longer includes theidea of purposiveness that was inherent to the Aristotelian concept of form.

All of this has by no means removed the difference between the sci-ences of nature and the sciences of culture, “but it has eliminated a sepa-rating barrier that until now has stood between them. . . . Form analysesand causal analyses now appear as orientations that do not conflict witheach other but rather complement each other, and that must interrelatein all knowledge.” Distinguishing among four types of analysis, Cassirernow turns to establish the general methodological approach of the sci-ences of culture. The “analysis of work” forms the “true bedrock” of thescience of culture. We must first acquire a broad knowledge of the worksof language, art, history, religion, science, and so on. The process bywhich we come to understand their various meanings possesses “its ownmethod of interpretation; an independent and highly difficult and com-plex ‘hermeneutics.’” Unfortunately, Cassirer does not elaborate uponthe nature of this “hermeneutics” by which the different essential formsof understanding that create the myriad works of culture come to be ab-stracted. Once the different forms of culture have been established, an“analysis of form” is required to establish the “what” or “essence” of eachform and its “function” within the whole of culture. “Here we arrive at a‘theory’ of culture that in the end must seek its conclusion in a ‘philoso-

xxxviii TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

phy of symbolic forms’—even if this conclusion appears as an ‘infinitelydistant point’ that we can approach only asymptotically.” Cassirer em-phasizes that we must attempt to apply the concept of causality not to theforms of culture but only to their content, to the “phenomena within aspecific form.” The forms themselves are “fundamental phenomena”(Urphänomene) in the Goethian sense of the term: they appear and are, butcannot be traced back to their “causes.” Only now can we inquirethrough an “analysis of act” into the “mental processes from which they haveemerged and of which they constitute the objective expression.” Againwe see that we can come to know man only through his works, that is tosay, “in the mirror of his culture.”

The “Tragedy of Culture”

Having expounded his conception of human spirit and culture, in the fi-nal study Cassirer devotes himself to the task of combating the “culturalpessimism” that results from the critique of spirit advanced by such lifephilosophers as Georg Simmel. For Simmel, the life of spirit is caught upin a paradoxical and tragic structure. On the one hand, spirit can achieveits existence only by externalizing itself in the objective forms of culture.These cultural formations reify the life of spirit, the “pure self-movementof the I,” thus giving it an objective presence in the world. Only throughthis objective presence can spirit become an object of consciousness—become, that is to say, self-conscious. However, this process of external-ization leads to an alienation of spirit from itself. The objective forms ofculture prove to be a limitation and burden on the I that endanger its live-liness, its free spontaneous movement. Spirit invests itself in its work, andin fact must invest itself in its work, but this work stands before it as some-thing other, as something fixed and stable, something external and objec-tive, something dead. As Simmel writes: “it is . . . as if the creative motionof the soul were to die in its own products” (quoted p. ). The I nolonger recognizes its own creative impulse in the dead works culture.There thus exists between the life of spirit and its work a tension that “inthe end threatens to become a relation of complete antithesis.” “Theprofound strangeness and enmity that exists between the living and cre-ative process of the soul on the one hand and its contents and creations

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on the other admits of no settlement and no reconciliation.” There isnothing that spirit can do to overcome this alienation, for it is spirit’s ownactivity that has brought it about, and every further act of spirit can onlyheighten this alienation and fortify the cultural barriers that restrict itsmovement. Hence the “tragedy of culture.” For in order for spirit toknow itself, it cannot remain within itself, as a being-in-itself, but must ex-ternalize itself in the objective forms of culture. It is only in these externaland fixed forms that the subjective life of spirit achieves its objective pres-ence, if not its very existence. However, the anonymous structures andformations of objective spirit mark the death of the spontaneous freemovement of the I which created them. Cassirer equates Simmel’s posi-tion on this point with that of the Christian mystics. Both want to negatethe image worlds of culture, to free themselves from “name and image”(that is to say, language and art), in order to overcome the distance anddifference that separates the I from its own objective expression on theone hand and from God (as the true self of the I) on the other.

However, the reunification that the negation of the image worlds ofculture holds out would destroy the I for whom this reunification is sup-posed to take place. We have already seen that “the separation betweenthe ‘I’ and the ‘you,’ and likewise the separation between the ‘I’ and the‘world,’ constitutes the goal and not the starting point of spiritual life.”From this perspective we see that “the consolidation that life undergoes inthe various forms of culture—in language, religion, and art—constitutesnot the simple opposite to that which the I requires by its very nature butrather a prerequisite for it to find and understand itself in its own essence.”As Cassirer writes in the introduction to the third volume of the Philosophy

of Symbolic Forms: “Life cannot apprehend itself by remaining absolutelywithin itself. It must give itself form; for it is precisely by this ‘otherness’ ofform that it gains its ‘visibility,’ if not its reality.”34

We must not think of the separation between the I and the you interms of “spatial imagery.”35 Such spatial metaphors of inside and out-side are wholly inadequate for understanding the nature of the dynamic

xl TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

. Ibid., p. .. Concerning the limits of spatial thinking and metaphors cf. ibid., p. , and

Cassirer, Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, p. .

relation between the I and the you. Even if the I could break out of itssolipsistic world and “enter” into another, this would not explain how“the ‘I’ can know of the ‘you,’ or the ‘you’ of the ‘I.’” How, in other words,does the I come to be recognized by another? “A subject does not becomerecognizable or understandable to another by passing over into thatother but by placing himself in an active relation to the other.” That is tosay, through their common activity of creating the works of culture.

Cassirer acknowledges the tragedy of culture, the alienation of spiritin its work, but this appears to him as being only part of the story. Wemust follow this creative process to its very end. “For the work, in whoseenduring existence the creative process congeals, does not stand at theend of this path, but rather the ‘you,’ the other subject who receives thiswork in order to incorporate it into his own life and thus transform it backinto the medium from which it originates.” The creative process is one inwhich the activity of one subject is awakened in another by means the ac-tive exchange of cultural works. The function of the work, its true signifi-cation, is found in this passage from one subject to another, which unitesand separates them in one and the same creative act. “The living processof culture consists in the very fact that it is inexhaustible in its creation ofsuch mediations and passages.” Cassirer examines a number of examplesof the passage of this creative process from one individual to another,from one epoch to another. However, in each case the point remains thesame: “The thing created does not simply stand vis-à-vis or over againstthe creative process; on the contrary, new life continually pours into these‘molded forms,’ preserving them and ‘preventing their rigidification.’”

The preservation of the works of culture requires their constant re-newal through their re-creation. Every act of creation must begin fromsomething that it takes up and reestablishes in a renewed expression.Within the dynamic and living process of creativity Cassirer identifiestwo binary forces that give birth to each other: “The productive is in con-stant opposition to the traditional. . . . The tendencies that are directedtoward preservation are no less significant and indispensable than thosethat are directed at renewal, because renewal realizes itself only upon thebasis of permanence, and because the permanent can exist only by virtueof a constant self-renewal.” Cassirer demonstrates this dynamic processthrough the example of language and art. Language exists only insofar as

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it is spoken, insofar as it is passed from one subject to another, from onegeneration to another. Each speaker preserves a language by renewing itand thus re-forming it. “The recipient does not take the gift as he woulda stamped coin. For he can take it up only by using it, and in this use he im-prints upon it a new shape.” Each subject thus speaks a language in aunique way, and through these different ways of speaking, language istransformed from within, and thus revitalized. The works of culture aretherefore never completely fixed once and for all; they exist only in andthrough their constant transformation. And through this transformationthere occurs the revitalization of the spiritual force from which they firstemerged and of which they constitute the objective expression. The artisttoo is always working within a tradition that must be taken up and trans-formed:

We thus encounter the same uniform process in its basic composi-tion in the different domains of culture. The competition and op-position between these two forces, the one seeking conservationand the other seeking renewal, is endless. Any equilibrium that mayoccasionally appear to have been attained between them is nevermore than an unstable balance, which can at any moment changeinto a new movement. At the same time, with the growth and de-velopment of culture, the pendulum keeps widening its swing: theamplitude of the oscillation increases more and more. And withthis, the inner tensions and oppositions gain an ever greater inten-sity. Nevertheless, this drama of culture never becomes a complete“tragedy of culture.” For just as little as there is an ultimate victoryso there is no ultimate defeat.

Now the “capacity for modification is a fundamental characteristic of allorganic things.” Symbolic forms are distinguished from the organicforms of nature in a significant and important way. In the realm of natureeach organism is unique, but the acquired characteristics that distinguishit from other organisms of the same species do not affect the form of thespecies itself. “The variations that realize themselves in individual speci-mens within the sphere of the plant and animal world remain biologi-cally insignificant; they emerge, only to vanish again.” In the domain ofculture, however, we find that every individual difference modifies theuniversal form of which it is a particular representative. “It has rightly

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been emphasized that there is perhaps no individual act of speaking thathas not in some way influenced ‘the’ language.” Not only “the great his-torical figures of world history,” as Hegel would say, but each and everyindividual possesses “an active share in the construction and reconstruc-tion of man’s cultural life” and as such his place in world history.36

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. Cassirer, Myth of the State, p. .

S

The Object of the Science of Culture

Plato has said that astonishment is the authentic philosophical emotion,and that we must see in it the root of all philosophical activity.* If that isso, the question arises as to what objects first awakened this astonishmentin man, and thus led him to the path of philosophical reflection. Werethese objects “physical” or “spiritual”? Was it the order of nature or wasit man’s own creations that took the lead? It may appear that the most ob-vious hypothesis is that the astronomical world first began the ascent outof the chaos. We encounter the veneration of the stars in almost all thegreat cultural religions. Here man was first able to free himself from thestifling spell of feeling and to rise up to a freer and larger intuition overthe whole of being. The subjective passion that strives to subdue naturethrough magical powers receded; in its place there stirs the idea of a uni-versal objective order. In the trajectory of the stars, in the exchange ofday and night, in the regular return of the seasons man found the firstgreat example of a uniform event. This event was raised infinitely abovehis own sphere and completely removed from the power of his will anddesire. It retained nothing of that temperamentality and unpredictabilitythat characterize not only ordinary human action but also the activity ofthe “primitive” demonic powers. That there is an effect and thus a “real-ity” that is enclosed within fixed boundaries and bound to certain un-changeable laws: such was the insight that began to dawn here for the firsttime.

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*Page numbers from the original German edition appear at the side of thepage—Translator’s note.

But this feeling must immediately be connected with another. For evencloser to man than the order of nature stands that order that he finds inhis own world. Here, too, it is by no means mere arbitrariness that rules.From his first movements, the individual sees himself determined andlimited by something over which he has no power. It is the power of cus-

tom that binds him. It watches over his every step and allows scarcely amoment of free space in his activity. Not only his actions, but also his feel-ings and ideas, his beliefs and delusions are governed by it. Custom is theperpetually constant atmosphere in which he lives and exists; he cannotescape from it any more than from the air that he breathes. It is no won-der that in his thought also the intuition of the physical world cannot beseparated from the ethical world. Both belong together, and they are onein their origin. In their cosmology and in their ethics, all the great reli-gions have been based upon this theme. They are in agreement, insofar asthey attribute the creator-god a double role and the twofold task of beingthe founder of the astronomical and ethical order and of saving bothfrom the forces of chaos. In the Gilgamesh epic, in the Vedas, in theEgyptian account of creation we find the same intuition. In the Babylon-ian myth of creation Marduk leads the fight against the shapeless chaos,against the monster Tiamat. After his victory over it, he erects the eternalsigns and symbols of the cosmic and civil order. He determines the tra-jectory of the stars; he sets down the signs of the zodiac; he fixes the suc-cession of the days, months, and years. And at the same time he sets theboundaries to human action that cannot be crossed unpunished; it is hewho “looks into the innermost depths, who does not permit the evildoerto escape, who breaks the insubordinate and succeeds in establishing thelaw.”1

To this miracle of the ethical order, however, others no less imposingand mysterious are joined. For everything that man creates, and thatcomes forth from his own hands, still surrounds him as an incomprehen-sible mystery. When he considers his works, he is very far from suspectinghimself as their creator. They stand far above him; they are not only farbeyond that which the individual is able to achieve but also beyond every-thing that the species is able to achieve. If man attributes them an origin,

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. For more details see Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. , Mythical

Thought, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, ),pp. ff.

it can only be a mythical origin. A god has created them; a savior broughtthem down from heaven to earth and taught man their use. Such mythsof culture traverse the mythology of all times and all peoples.2 What thetechnical skill of man has produced over the course of the centuries andmillennia are not deeds accomplished by him but gifts and presents fromabove. For each tool there exists such a supernatural origin. Among someprimitive peoples still today—for example the Ewe in South-Togoland—sacrifices are offered at the annual harvest banquet to certain individualtools such as the ax, the plane, and the saw.3 And the intellectual instru-ments that man has himself created must appear still further removedfrom him than these material tools. They too are regarded as manifesta-tions of a power that is infinitely superior to his own. This applies aboveall to language and writing, the conditions of all human relations and allhuman community. The god from whose hand writing has emerged al-ways possesses a particular and privileged place in the hierarchy of divinepowers. In Egypt the moon god Thoth appears at once as the “scribe ofthe gods” and as the judge of the heavens. It is he who allows gods andmen to know what is due to them; for it is he who determines the measureof things.4 Speech and writing are considered as the origin of measure;for they are characterized above all by the ability to fix the fleeting andvariable and to remove it from the accidental and arbitrary.

Already in the sphere of myth and religion, we sense in all this the feel-ing that human culture is not something given and self-evident, but ratherthat it is a kind of miracle that requires explanation. But this leads to adeeper self-contemplation as soon as man not only feels himself calledand authorized to pose such questions, but instead goes beyond this to de-velop a separate and independent procedure, a “method” by means ofwhich he can answer them. This step occurs for the first time in Greek phi-losophy—and herein lies its meaning as the great spiritual turning pointin history. Here, for the first time, a new power is discovered which alonecan lead to the science of nature and to the science of human culture. Inthe place of the undetermined multiplicity of mythical attempts at expla-

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. Cf. the material of Kurt Breysig, Die Entstehung des Gottesgedankens und der Heil-

bringer (Berlin, ).. Cf. Jakob Spieth, Die Religion der Eweer in Süd-Togo (Leipzig: Hinrichs, ),

p. .. Cf. Alexandre Moret, Mystères égyptiens (Paris: Brionne, ), pp. ff.

nation, which turn sometimes toward one phenomenon and sometimestoward another, steps the idea of the general unity of being, to which thesame unity of cause must correspond. This unity is accessible only topure thought. The numerous colorful and diverse creations of the myth-forming imagination [Phantasie] are now subjected to the critique ofthinking and thus uprooted. But to this critical task a new positive task iscoupled. Thinking must, out of its own powers and out of its own re-sponsibility, reconstruct that which it has destroyed. In the systems of thepre-Socratics we can follow with what admirable consistency this taskwas tackled and carried out step by step. In Plato’s doctrine of Ideas andin Aristotle’s metaphysics it found a solution that remained for centuriesdecisive and exemplary. Such a synthesis would not have been possible ifit had not been preceded by a monumental work of individual thinkers.In it a number of tendencies are involved which at first sight appear to bediametrically opposed and take very different ways in their approach toposing and solving problems. Nevertheless, if we consider its startingpoint and its goals, it becomes possible for us to sum up this whole monu-mental work of thought to some extent in one fundamental idea, whichGreek philosophy first discovered, and which it developed and expandedupon in all its factors. It is the concept of logos that played this role in thedevelopment of Greek thought.5 Already in its first expression, which itfound in the philosophy of Heraclitus, we sense its meaning and futurerichness. Heraclitus’s doctrine appears, at first sight, to rest completely onthe Ionian philosophy of nature. He too sees the world as a totality of ma-terials that transform themselves reciprocally into each other. However,this appears to him only as the surface of events, behind which he wantsto make visible a depth that has not yet disclosed itself to thinking. TheIonians, too, did not want to content themselves with the mere knowledgeof the “what”; they asked about the “how” and the “why.” But this ques-tion is posed by Heraclitus in a new and much more rigorous sense. Andby putting it this way, he is aware that perception, within whose limita-tions the previous philosophical speculation of nature had moved, is nolonger able to answer them. Only thought can give us the answer: for here,

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. I have developed this view in greater detail in my presentation of early Greekphilosophy which I have given in Dessior’s Lehrbuch der Philosophie, vol. (Berlin: Ill-stein, ), pp. –. Cf. also Ernst Cassirer, “Logos, Dike, Kosmos in der Ent-wicklung der griechischen Philosophie,” Göteborgs Högskolas Årsskrift (): .

and here alone, is man freed from the limits of his individuality. He nolonger follows his “own opinion,” but rather he grasps something generaland divine. A universal world of law has replaced “private” insight, ijdivh�rovnhsi~. It is in this way, according to Heraclitus, that man first escapedfrom the mythical dream world, and from the narrow and limited worldof sense perception. For this is precisely the character of being awake andof having awoken, that individuals possess a common world, while indreams each lives in his own world and remains stuck and immersed in it.

With this the whole of Western thought was given a new task and em-bedded in a new direction from which subsequently it has never beenable to deviate. Ever since this thinking went through the school of Greekphilosophy, all knowledge of reality has, to some extent, been bound tothe fundamental concept of logos—and thus to “logic” in the largest senseof the word. Nor did this change when philosophy was displaced from itssovereign position and the “universal and divine” were sought in anotherplace inaccessible to it. Christianity contests Greek intellectualism butcannot, and does not want to, return to a mere irrationalism: for the con-cept of logos is also deeply embedded in it. The history of Christian dog-matics shows the persistent struggle that the fundamental motives of theChristian religion of salvation had to lead against the spirit of Greek phi-losophy. Considered from the perspective of intellectual history, therewas in this struggle neither a victor nor a vanquished; but nor could a realinternal reconciliation of this conflict ever come about. It will always befutile to attempt to bring the concept of logos of Greek philosophy and ofthe Gospel according to John under one denominator. For the mode ofmediation between the individual and the universal, the finite and the in-finite, man and God is quite different in each case. The Greek concept ofbeing and the Greek concept of truth are to be compared, according tothe simile of Parmenides, to a “well-rounded sphere” that rests firmly onits own center. Both are complete and perfect in themselves; and betweenthem exists not only a harmony but a genuine identity. The dualism ofthe Christian worldview brings this identity to an end. Henceforth no ef-fort of knowledge and pure thought is able to heal this rift that cutsthrough being. Admittedly, Christian philosophy too by no means re-nounced the aspiration toward unity that belongs to the concept of phi-losophy. However, as little as it is able to resolve the tension between thesetwo opposing poles, it nevertheless tries to reconcile them within its own

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sphere and with its own ways of thinking. All the great systems of scholas-tic philosophy have grown out of such attempts. None of them dares tocontest the opposition that exists between revelation and reason, betweenbelief and knowledge, between the regnum gratiae and the regnum naturae

[the realm of grace and the realm of nature]. Reason, philosophy, cannotby its own powers construct a worldview; all elucidation of which it is ca-pable originates not from itself but from another and higher source oflight. But if it holds its gaze firmly directed toward this source of light—if, instead of opposing an independent and automatic power to faith, itallows itself to be guided and directed by it—then it will reach its as-signed goal. The basic force of faith, which can be bestowed on man onlythrough a direct act of grace, through divine illuminatio, determines boththe content and the extent of knowledge. In this sense the term fides

quaerens intellectum [faith seeking understanding] becomes the quintes-sence and motto of all medieval Christian philosophy. In the systems ofhigh scholasticism, and particularly in Thomas Aquinas, it might appearas if the synthesis had been accomplished and the lost harmony restored.“Nature,” “grace,” “reason,” and “revelation” do not contradict eachother; on the contrary, the one points to the other and leads to it. As a re-sult, the cosmos of culture appears once again closed and related to afixed religious center.

But this elaborately constructed structure of scholasticism, in whichthe Christian faith and ancient philosophical knowledge should have re-ciprocally supported and maintained each other, collapses before thatnew ideal of knowledge that has determined and shaped, more than any-thing else, modern science. The mathematical science of nature returns to theancient ideal of knowledge. Kepler and Galileo are able to begin directlyfrom the fundamental ideas of Pythagoras, Democritus, and Plato. But atthe same time, in their research these ideas assume a new meaning. Forthey are able to build the bridge between the intelligible and the sensuous,between the kovsmo~ nohtov~ and the kovsmo~ oJratov~ [the intelligible uni-verse and the visible universe], in a way that had continued to elude an-cient science and philosophy. Before mathematical knowledge the lastbarrier separating the “sensuous world” and the “world of understand-ing” now appears to fall. Matter as such proves to be permeated with theharmony of number and to be ruled by the lawfulness of geometry. Be-fore this universal order all those oppositions that had found their fixation

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in Aristotelico-scholastic physics disappeared. There is no opposition be-tween the “common” and the “superior” world, between the world“above” and the world “below.” The world is one, as surely as the knowl-

edge of the world, the mathematics of the world is and can only be one. Thisbasic idea of modern research found its radical philosophical legitimiza-tion in Descartes’s concept of mathesis universalis. The cosmos of universalmathematics, the cosmos of order and measure, encloses and exhausts allknowledge. It is in itself completely autonomous; it requires no supportand can acknowledge no other support than the one that it finds in itself.Now, for the first time, reason grasps the whole of being in its clear anddistinct ideas, and only now is it able to completely penetrate and domi-nate this whole with its own powers.

That this fundamental idea of classical philosophical rationalism notonly fertilized and expanded science, but that it has given it a completelynew meaning and goal, requires no further elaboration. The develop-ment of the systems of philosophy from Descartes to Malebranche andSpinoza, and from Spinoza to Leibniz, provides continuous evidence forthis. In this development it can directly be demonstrated how the newideal of universal mathematics keeps conquering ever new spheres of theknowledge of reality. Descartes’s ultimate system of metaphysics is not inaccordance with his original conception of a single comprehensivemethod of knowledge, insofar as in the progress of its movement thoughtis in the end led to certain radical differences of being which as such itsimply has to accept and acknowledge. The dualism of substances limitsthe monism of the Cartesian method and sets it a certain boundary. Fi-nally, it seems that the goal that this method sets itself is not achievable forthe knowledge of reality as a whole, but only for certain parts of it. Thecorporeal world is subordinate without any reservation to the power ofmathematical thought. There is no inconceivable remainder in it, nodark “qualities” that, over against the pure concepts of size and number,are independent and irreducible. All this is eliminated and extinguished:the identity of “matter” with pure extension ensures the identity of thephilosophy of nature and mathematics. But apart from the extended sub-stance there is the thinking substance, and both must, in the end, be de-rived from a common universal ground, from the being of God. WhenDescartes sets out to uncover and to prove this original stratum of reality,the guiding principle of his method deserts him. Here he no longer thinks

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in the concepts of his universal mathematics but in the concepts of me-dieval ontology. Only insofar as he presupposes the validity of these con-cepts, insofar as he takes the “objective” existence of ideas as his startingpoint, thence to infer the “formal” reality of things, can his proof suc-ceed. Descartes’s successors attempted with increasing energy and suc-cess to remove this contradiction. They wanted to achieve, in the sameand equally convincing way, for the substantia cogitans and the divine sub-stance what Descartes had achieved for the substantia extensa. It is in thisway that Spinoza is led to his positing of God and nature as one; it is inthis way that Leibniz arrives at the outline for his “universal characteris-tic.” Both are convinced that the complete proof of pan-logicism andpan-mathematicism can be provided for only in this way. The outline ofthe modern worldview is portrayed here in utmost sharpness and clarityover against the ancient and medieval worldviews. “Spirit” and “reality”are not only reconciled with each other but have reciprocally interpene-trated each other. Between them there exists no relation of mere externalinfluence or external correspondence. Here we are dealing with some-thing other than the adaequatio intellectus et rei [rendering equal the mindand thing] that the ancient, as well as scholastic, epistemology had estab-lished as the standard of knowledge. We are dealing with a “preestab-lished harmony,” an ultimate identity between thought and being, be-tween the ideal and the real.

The first restriction that this pan-mathematical worldview encounteredstems from a complex of problems that for the newly beginning philoso-phy as such still hardly existed, or in any case was seen only in its initialoutlines. The second half of the eighteenth century first represented anew great demarcation, as it recognizes more and more the characteristicfeatures of this complex of problems and finally moves it simply into thecenter of philosophical self-reflection. Classical rationalism had not con-tented itself with the conquest of nature; it had also wanted to constructa coherent “natural system of the sciences of spirit.” The human spirithad to cease forming a “state within a state”; the project was to make itknown by the same principles and to subject it to the same lawfulness asnature. Modern natural law, as it is founded by Hugo Grotius, appeals tothe thorough analogy that exists between the knowledge of law andmathematical knowledge—and Spinoza creates a new form of ethics,which follows the model of geometry and allows it to determine its own

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goals and its own means. With this, the circle appeared for the first time tobe closed; the circle of mathematical thought has been able to embrace inthe same way the corporeal world and the spiritual world, the being ofnature and the being of history. But at this point a first decisive doubt nowsettles in. Is history capable of the same mathematization as physics or as-tronomy? Is it nothing more than a special case of the mathesis universalis?The first thinker to pose this question in all its pungency was Giambat-tista Vico. The original contribution of Vico’s “philosophy of history”does not lie in what its contents teach us with regard to the historicalprocess and the rhythm of its individual phases. The differentiation ofthe epochs of the history of mankind and the attempt to demonstrate inthem a determinate rule of succession, a transition from the “divine” tothe “heroic,” from the “heroic” to the “human” age: all this is in Vico stillthoroughly mixed with purely fantastic features. But what he clearly saw,and what he has defended with utmost decisiveness against Descartes, isthe methodical peculiarity and the intrinsic methodical value of histori-cal knowledge. And he does not hesitate to place this value above that ofpurely mathematical knowledge and to find in it the genuine fulfillmentof that sapientia humana [human wisdom], the concept that Descartes es-tablished as the ideal in the first sentences of his Regulae ad directionem in-

genii. According to Vico, the real goal of our knowledge is not the knowl-edge of nature but human self-knowledge. If philosophy, instead ofcontenting itself with this, demands divine or absolute knowledge, then itoversteps its limits and permits itself to be enticed into a dangerous error.For the cardinal rule of knowledge is, according to Vico, the statementthat each creature truly understands and penetrates only that which it it-self produces. The circle of our knowledge extends no further than the cir-cle of our creative work. Man understands only insofar as he is creative—and this condition can in all rigor be satisfied only in the world of spiritand not in nature. Nature is the work of God, and consequently it is com-pletely transparent only to the divine mind that has brought it forth.What man can truly understand is not the essence of things, which forhim is never completely exhaustible, but the structure and particular na-ture of his own works. Mathematics too owes the self-evidence and cer-tainty it possesses to this fact. For it refers not to physically real objectsthat it wants to copy but to ideal objects that thought produces throughfree design. But of course its characteristic value denotes at the same time

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the limit that it cannot overstep. The objects [Objekte] with which mathe-matics is concerned possess no other being than that abstract being thatspirit has lent them. Hence the inevitable alternative before which ourknowledge sees itself placed. It can either direct itself toward “realthings”; in which case, however, it cannot completely penetrate its object[Gegenstand], but only describe it empirically and piecemeal according toindividual features and marks. Or it obtains a complete insight, an ade-quate idea, which denotes the nature and essence of the object; but thenit does not step out of the circle of its own concept formation. In this case,the object [Objekt] possesses only that condition which knowledge has at-tributed to it by virtue of an arbitrary definition. According to Vico, wegain a way out of this dilemma only once we go beyond the sphere ofmathematical knowledge as well as beyond that of the empirical knowl-edge of nature. The works of human culture are the only ones that unite inthemselves both conditions in which perfect knowledge is based; theyhave not only a conceptually apprehended existence but also a thor-oughly determined, individual and historic one. However, the internalstructure of this existence is accessible and open to the human spirit onlybecause it is its creator. Myth, language, religion, poetry: these are the ob-jects [Objekte] that are truly appropriate to human knowledge. And it isabove all to these that Vico turns his gaze in the construction of his“logic.” For the first time logic dares to break through the circle of objec-tive knowledge, the circle of mathematics and of the science of nature toconstitute [konstituieren] itself instead as the logic of the science of culture,as the logic of language, poetry, and history.

Vico’s Scienza nuova rightly bears its title. For in it a true novelty wasfound; but of course this novelty manifests itself less in the solutions thatthe work offers than in the problems that it has posed. The treasure ofthese problems was not entirely uncovered by Vico himself. It is onlythrough Herder that what still slumbers in half-mythical twilight in Vicois raised into the light of philosophical consciousness. Herder too is not arigorously systematic thinker. His relationship to Kant shows how un-sympathetic he is to a “critique of knowledge” in the proper sense of theterm. He does not want to analyze but to regard: he considers as emptyall knowledge that is not concrete and determined throughout, that is notsaturated with intuitive content. Nevertheless, Herder’s work is signifi-cant not only for its content, not only for what it contains in new insights

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in such spheres as the philosophy of language, the theory of art, and thephilosophy of history. Together with this, what we are able to study in thiswork is the rising up and final breakthrough of a new form of knowledge,which, to be sure, cannot be abstracted from its matter but which be-comes visible only in the free formation of this matter and in its spiritualdomination and penetration of it. Just as Vico had turned againstDescartes’s pan-mathematics and against the mechanism of his view ofnature, so Herder turns against the Scholastic system of Wolff andagainst the culture of abstract understanding of the Enlightenment pe-riod. What he combats is the tyrannical dogmatism of this culture,which, in order to help “reason” to victory, must enslave and suppress allof man’s other mental and spiritual forces. Against this tyranny he ap-peals to that fundamental maxim that had first been implanted in him byhis teacher Hamann: what man has to achieve must spring from the syn-thesis and unbroken unity of his powers; everything isolated is reprehen-sible. At the outset of his philosophy this unity still appears to Herder inlight of a historical fact that stands at the beginning of human history. Itis for him a lost paradise, from which humanity has alienated itself moreand more with the progress of the much-praised civilization. Only poetryhas, in its oldest and original form, still preserved a remembrance of thisparadise for us. Accordingly, it is regarded by Herder as the original“mother tongue of the human race”—just as Hamann and Vico had re-garded it. In it he seeks to recall and revitalize that original unity that, inthe beginning of human history, had fashioned language and myth, his-tory and poetry into a genuine totality, an undivided whole. But thisRousseauistic longing for the “primitive” and the primeval is more andmore overcome in Herder the further he progresses along his way. In thedefinitive form that his philosophy of history and culture attained in theIdeen, the goal of totality no longer lies behind us but before us. With thisthe entire emphasis of his doctrine shifts. For now the differentiation ofthe spiritual powers is no longer regarded simply as a secession from theoriginal unity and as a kind of original sin of knowledge but has attaineda positive meaning and value. The true unity is one that presupposes theseparation and that restores itself from the separation. Every concretespiritual event, all genuine “history,” is only the appearance of this per-petual process of “systole” and “diastole,” of separation and reunifica-tion. Only after Herder has risen to this universal conception can the in-

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dividual elements of the spiritual obtain for him their true independenceand autonomy. None of them is any longer simply subordinate to an-other; each intervenes as an equal factor in the whole and in its construc-tion. Even in the purely historical sense there is as such no “first” or “sec-ond,” no absolute “earlier” or “later.” History, considered as a spiritualfact, is by no means a mere succession of events that replace and displaceeach other in time. It is an eternal present, a oJmou pan [everything to-gether], in the midst of this change. Its “meaning” is in none of the indi-vidual moments alone—and yet, on the other hand, it is complete and un-broken in each of them.

As a result, however, the historical “problem of origins,” which playedsuch an important role in Herder’s first investigations, particularly in hisprize essay on the origins of language, is transformed and raised to ahigher level of consideration. The historical perspective is never super-seded; but it becomes apparent that the historical horizon cannot be-come visible in its full scope and freedom if we do not unite the historicalproblem with a systematic one. What is required now is no mere develop-mental history but a “phenomenology of spirit.” Herder does not under-stand this phenomenology in the sense in which Hegel has understood it.For him there is no fixed course, predetermined and prescribed by the na-ture of spirit, which in a uniform rhythm in the three steps of the dialec-tic, and with immanent necessity, leads from one form of manifestationto another, until at last, after running through all the forms, the end re-turns again to the beginning. Herder makes no such attempt to capturethe ever-flowing life of history in the circular movement of metaphysicalthought. But instead of this another problem becomes apparent to him,which, to be sure, is visible in his work only in its initial and still undefinedoutline. As he continues to penetrate more deeply into the peculiar “na-ture” of language, into the nature of poetry, into the world of myth andthat of history, the question as to our knowledge of reality assumes anever more complex form and undergoes an ever richer structuring. It nowbecomes clear and unmistakable that this question not only cannot besolved but cannot even be stated in its proper and full sense, so long as“physical” objects constitute the only theme and the only aim of reflec-tion. The physical cosmos, the universe of the science of nature, consti-tutes only a special case and paradigm for a much more general way ofposing problems. It is this way of posing problems that now gradually

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supplants that ideal of the pan-mathematic, the mathesis universalis, whichhad dominated philosophical thought since Descartes. It is not only in themathematical and physico-astronomical cosmos in which the idea of acosmos, the idea of a thoroughgoing order, presents itself. This idea is notlimited to the lawfulness of the phenomena of nature, to the world of“matter.” We encounter it wherever a determinate unified structural lawbecomes apparent within multiplicity and diversity. The rule of such astructural law: this is the most general expression of what we denote, inthe largest sense of the term, by “objectivity.” In order to render this fullyclear for us, we need only refer to the essential meaning of the concept ofcosmos, which ancient thought had already established. A “cosmos,” anobjective order and determinateness, is readily available wherever differ-ent subjects relate to a “common world” and consciously participate in it. The construction of the physical worldview through the medium ofsense perception is not the only case of this. What we grasp as the “mean-ing” of the world we encounter everywhere is that, instead of enclosingourselves in our own image of the world [Vorstellungswelt], we turn towarda world that is transindividual, general, and valid for all. And nowheredoes this possibility and this necessity of breaking through the individualbarriers emerge so unquestionably and so clearly as in the phenomenonof language. The spoken word never exhausts itself in the mere sound ornoise. It wants to signify something: it unites with others to form thewhole of a “discourse,” and this discourse “is” only in that it passes fromone person to another and links them together in dialogue. Thus the lin-guistic understanding becomes for Herder, as it already was for Heracli-tus, the original and typical expression of the understanding of theworld. Logos establishes the bond between the individual and the whole;it assures the individual that instead of being enclosed within the capriceof his I, in ijdivh �rovnhsi~ [private insight], he can reach a universal exis-tence, a koino;n kai; qeion [general and divine].

From reason, which is invested in language and which expresses itselfin its concepts, the path leads on to scientific reason. With its characteris-tic means, language cannot generate nor even arrive at scientific knowl-edge. But it is a necessary stage on the way to it; it constitutes the mediumin which alone the knowledge of things can emerge and continue to grow.The act of naming is the indispensable preliminary stage and conditionfor the act of determination that constitutes the characteristic task of sci-

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ence. It follows from this that—and why—the theory of language consti-tutes a necessary and integral factor in the construction of a theory ofknowledge. Whoever begins the critique of knowledge with the theory ofscience, with the analysis of the fundamental concepts and principles of mathematics, physics, biology, or history applies, so to speak, the leverat too high a point. But those for whom knowledge is nothing more thana simple observation of what is immediately given to us in elements ofsense perception likewise miss the correct approach. Psychological analy-sis, insofar as it is conducted without epistemological prejudices, alsomakes this fact stand out clearly. For it shows us that language is ab-solutely not a simple impression of contents and relations that sensoryperception immediately presents to us. Its ideas are in no way the merecopies of impressions, as the dogma of sensationalism would have it. Onthe contrary, language is a specific fundamental tendency of spiritual ac-tivity: a sum of psychospiritual acts, and in these acts a new side of the re-ality, the actuality of things, first opens itself up to us. For this state of af-fairs Wilhelm von Humboldt, a student of both Herder and Kant, coinedthe expression that language is a function and not an affection. It is not asimple product but a continuous, permanently self-renewing process; andthe more this process progresses, the clearer and more determinate thecontours of his “world” become for man. Thus the name is not simply at-tached to a finished and readily available objective intuition as an exter-nal label, but in it a determinate path, a way and direction of learning toknow, expresses itself.*

Indeed, everything that we know about the development of children’slanguage confirms this basic view. For it is evidently not the case that inthis development a certain stage of already acquired objective intuitionjoins itself to another stage, in which this given property is now named, inwhich it is denoted and grasped by words. It is rather linguistic conscious-ness, the awakening of symbol-consciousness, which impresses its stampupon perception and intuition to the extent that it grows stronger and ex-tends and clarifies itself. Both perception and intuition become “objec-tive” inasmuch as the energy of language succeeds in clarifying, differ-

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*Cassirer employs a play on words here between Kennzeichen (mark or label) andKennen-Lernen (to come to know) which is difficult to render into English. Zeichen is anoun whereas Lernen is a nominalized verb. Cassirer is playing with the contrast be-tween a static sign and the activity of learning—Translator’s note.

entiating, and organizing the dull and undifferentiated chaos of simplestates of affairs. Linguistic symbolism opens up a new phase of the men-tal-spiritual life. A life in “meanings” supplants the life of mere impulses,of being absorbed by the immediate impression and into the variousneeds. These meanings are repeatable and recurring; something thatdoes not cling to the bare here-and-now but is meant and understood incountless life-moments and in the appropriation and use by countless dif-ferent subjects as being the selfsame something, identical with itself. Byvirtue of this identity of intention, which rises above the multifariousnessand diversity of momentary impressions, there emerges, gradually, andby stages, a determined “continued existence” [Bestand], a “common cos-mos.” What we call “learning” a language is therefore never a purely re-ceptive or reproductive process but one that is productive in the highestdegree. In this productive process the I not only gains insight into an ex-isting order but has its part in constructing this order; it gains its share inthis order, not insofar as it inserts itself simply into it as if it were some-thing given and readily available, but rather insofar as each individual ac-quires it for himself and by virtue of this acquisition cooperates in its con-servation and renewal. From a genetic point of view we may therefore saythat language is the first “common world” into which the individual en-ters, and that it is through its mediation that the intuition of an objectivereality is first made accessible to him. Even in relatively advanced phasesof this development it is often evident how closely and indissolubly lin-guistic consciousness and the consciousness of objects are bound to-gether and intertwined with each other. Even the adult who learns a newlanguage does not simply acquire more new sounds or signs. As soon ashe enters into the “spirit” of the language, as soon as he begins to thinkand live in it, a new sphere of objective intuition has also opened itself upto him. Intuition has not only gained in breadth but also in clarity and de-terminateness; the new world of symbols begins to arrange, to articulate,and to organize the contents of experience and intuition in new ways.6

Only on the basis of such considerations can we bring to full clarity the

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. In the present considerations I have attempted only to provide a short outlineof these matters; for a more detailed justification, I must refer the reader to thethorough exposition of the problem which I have given in my essay “Le languageet la construction du monde des objets,” trans. P. Guillaume, Journal de Psychologie

Normale et Pathologique (): –.

contrast between the problem of objectivity for philosophy and for theparticular sciences. Aristotle is the first to have brought this contrast to aprecise formula. He declares that philosophy is a general theory of being,that it is concerned with “being as being.” The individual sciences focuson a particular object and inquire into its nature and determination;metaphysics, prwvth �iloso�iva [first philosophy], directs itself toward be-ing as such, toward o}n úh| o[n [being as being]. However, in Aristotle, and inall who have followed him, this distinction of kinds and goals of knowl-edge leads to a distinction within the field of objectivity itself. To the log-ical difference corresponds an ontological difference. By virtue of theform of this knowledge, what is known philosophically is removed be-yond the sphere of empirical apprehension. In contrast to the empiricallyconditioned, it becomes something unconditioned, something existing initself, something absolute. Kant’s critical philosophy has put an end tothis absolutism of metaphysics. But this end was at the same time a newbeginning. Kant’s critique, too, intends to differentiate itself from the em-piricism and positivism of the individual sciences; it, too, strives for a uni-versal grasp of and a universal solution to the problem of “objectivity.”Kant was able to accomplish this solution only because he inquired intothe particular sciences themselves, and by following closely their struc-ture. He begins with pure mathematics, in order thence to advance to themathematical science of nature; and in the Critique of Judgment he widensthe sphere of examination, again, as he inquires into the fundamentalconcepts that make a knowledge of the phenomena of life possible. Hehas not attempted to give a structural analysis of the “sciences of culture”in the same sense in which he has given it for the natural sciences. But thisby no means signifies an immanent and necessary limit to the problem ofcritical philosophy. It indicates merely a historical and in this respect ac-cidental limit, which resulted from the state of science in the eighteenthcentury. With the disappearance of this limitation, with the emergence,since Romanticism, of an independent science of language, science ofart, and science of religion, the general theory of knowledge found itselffaced with new tasks. At the same time, however, the present formation ofthe individual sciences shows us that we can no longer make the same cutbetween philosophy and the individual science that was made by the em-pirical and positivistic systems of the nineteenth century. We can nolonger relegate the particular sciences to the extraction and collection of

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“facts,” while we reserve the study of “principles” for philosophy. Thisseparation between the “factual” and the “theoretical” proves to be thor-oughly artificial; it dissects and cuts to pieces the organism of knowledge.There are no “naked” facts—no facts other than those that can be ascer-tained by reference to, and with the aid of, determinate conceptualpremises. Every observation of fact is possible only within a particularcontext of judgments, which for its part is based on certain logical condi-tions. Consequently, “appearance” and “validity” are not two spheresthat admit, as it were, of being spatially separated from one another, andbetween which there runs a fixed boundary. Rather, they are correlativefactors that belong to each other and that constitute the basic and origi-nal stock of all knowledge only in this belonging together. It is the scien-tific empirical method itself that in this respect contains the most decisiverefutation of certain theses of dogmatic empiricism. In the sphere of exactscience, too, it has turned out that “empirical method” and “theory,” fac-tual knowledge and the knowledge of principles, are united to each other.In the construction of science, the Heraclitean saying, that the way upand the way down are the same, holds good: oJdo;~ a[nw kavtw mivh. Themore the edifice of science develops, and the more freely it rises into theair, the more it requires the examination and the continual renewal of itsfoundations. To the influx of new facts the “deepening of foundations”must correspond, which according to Hilbert belongs to the essence ofevery science. If this is true, it is clear that—and why—the work of dis-covering and securing the principles cannot be taken away from the indi-vidual sciences and allocated to a particular “philosophical” discipline, toa “theory of knowledge” or a methodology.* But what claim and whatparticular sphere still remain for philosophy if even this domain of ques-tions is more and more claimed by the individual sciences? Must we notnow finally abandon the old dream of metaphysics and the old claim ofphilosophy to establish a theory of “being as beings” and instead leave itto each individual science to implement its own conception of being anddetermine its object in its own way and with its own means?

However, even if the time had come when philosophy itself must de-cide on a new vision of its own concept and task, we would still find our-

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*There is a misprint in the German text: “der Einzelwissenschaften nichtabgenommen” should be “den Einzelwissenschaften nicht abgenommen”—Translator’s note.

selves confronted with the enigmatic problem of “objectivity,” whose so-lution could not be imposed on the individual sciences alone. For thisproblem belongs, if we take it in its full generality, to a sphere that cannotitself be grasped and exhausted by science even taken as a whole. Scienceis only one member and one factor in the system of “symbolic forms.” Ina certain sense it may be regarded as the copestone in the edifice of theseforms; but it does not stand alone and it could not accomplish its specificperformance if it were not for the other energies that share with it in thetask of “synoptic vision,” of spiritual “synthesis.” The statement thatconcepts without intuitions are empty also holds good here. The conceptseeks to encompass the whole of the phenomena; and it reaches this goalby way of classification, subsumption, and subordination. It arranges themanifold into species and genera, and determines it through generalrules, which in themselves constitute a tightly unified system in whicheach individual phenomenon and each particular law is assigned itsplace. But in this kind of logical structure the concept must be tiedthroughout to intuitional structures. It is by no means the case that“logic,” conceptual scientific knowledge, carries out its work as if it werein the void. It encounters no absolutely amorphous stuff on which to ex-ercise its formative power. Even the “matter” of logic, even that particu-lar that it presupposes in order to raise it to universality, is not as suchstructureless. Not only could the structureless not be thought, it could notbe perceived or become objectively intuited. The world of language andthe world of art offer us direct proof for this prelogical structuring, forthis “stamped form” that precedes and underlies the work of concepts.They show us ways of coordination that move along other paths andobey other laws than the logical subordination of concepts. We have al-ready made this clear in the case of language, but it holds equally for theorganic nature of the arts. Sculpture, painting, and architecture seem tohave a common object. What comes to be represented in them appears tobe the comprehensive “pure intuition” of space. And still the spaces ofpainting, sculpture, and architecture are not “the same”; but rather ineach of them a specific and unique manner of apprehension, of spatial“vision” is expressed.7 All of these multifarious “perspectives” must on

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. Cf. esp. Adolf Hildebrandt, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture (NewYork: Steckert, ).

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the one hand be separated from one another, and on the other hand berecognized in their reciprocal relation and thus unite under a higherpoint of view.

This separation and reintegration, diavkrisi~ and suvgkrisi~, is whatPlato considered as the task of “dialectic,” the authentic and philosophi-cally basic science. Based upon Platonic dialectic, ancient thought con-structed a metaphysical worldview that has dominated and shaped all in-tellectual development for two millennia. The “revolution in the way ofthinking” that begins with Kant declares this worldview to be scientifi-cally ungroundable. But although Kant thus renounced the claims of anymetaphysical doctrine of being, in doing so he by no means meant to re-linquish the unity and universality of “reason.” This was not to be shakenby his critique; rather, it was to be safeguarded and grounded upon a newbasis. Now the task of philosophy is no longer to grasp a universal beingrather than the particular being that is accessible only to the individualsciences, or to ground an ontologia generalis as the knowledge of the “tran-scendent” rather than the knowledge of the empirical. This form ofknowledge of o]n úh| o[n, this hypostasis toward an absolute object [Objekt] isrenounced. For Kant too “rational knowledge” [Vernunfterkenntnis] is stillrigorously and sharply distinguished from the mere “knowledge of theunderstanding” [Verstandeserkenntnis]. But instead of seeking its own objectbeyond the latter, which is free of the conditions of the knowledge of theunderstanding, it seeks the “unconditioned” rather within the systematictotality of conditions themselves. In place of the unity of the object wehave here a unity of function. In order to achieve this goal, philosophy nolonger needs to compete with the particular sciences in their own fields. Itcan allow them their full autonomy, their freedom and their self-legisla-tion. For philosophy does not seek to restrict or suppress any of these par-ticular laws; but rather it seeks to sum up their totality within a systematicunity and to recognize it as such. In place of a “thing in itself,” an object“beyond” and “behind” the world of appearances, it seeks the multifari-ousness, the fullness and inner diversity of “appearing itself.” This full-ness can be grasped by the human spirit only by virtue of the fact that itpossesses the power of differentiating itself within itself. For each newproblem that it encounters here it constitutes a new form of conception.In this respect a “philosophy of symbolic forms” can maintain the claimof unity and universality that metaphysics had to abandon in its dog-

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matic form. Not only can it unite these various ways and directions of ourknowledge of the world in itself, but in addition it is capable of recogniz-ing the legitimacy of every attempt to understand the world, every inter-pretation of the world that the human spirit is capable of, and of under-standing them in their specificity. It is in this way that the problem ofobjectivity first becomes visible in its full scope, and taken in this sense itencompasses not only the cosmos of nature but also that of culture.8

After countless and continually renewed attempts, and after unendingquarrels between schools of philosophy, nineteenth-century science fi-nally appeared to have assigned the problem of “philosophical anthro-pology” to its proper place. The question “What is man?” had repeatedlyled to insoluble aporias and antinomies whenever—in conformity withthe basic doctrines of Platonism, Christianity, and Kantian philosophy—man had to be made into a “citizen of two worlds.” Only in the science ofthe nineteenth century did this boundary finally appear to be removed. Itcould hold fast to man’s special place without having to set him overagainst and above nature. The concept of evolution was declared to be thekey that would unlock all previous mysteries of nature and all “mysteriesof the universe.” Seen from this standpoint, the antithesis between “cul-ture” and “nature” also had to lose all dialectical sharpness. This antithe-sis was resolved as soon as the problem was successfully shifted from theterrain of metaphysics onto that of biology and considered and treatedwithin a purely biological perspective.

To be sure, the concept of evolution as such could not be claimed as anachievement of the modern sciences of nature. Rather, it goes back to thefirst beginnings of Greek philosophy, and it appears, at the high point ofthis philosophy, as one of the most important means with which to breakthe sway of the Platonic “dualistic” worldview. This task is set forth withfull consciousness by Aristotle. But in its Aristotelian form the concept ofevolution is not yet equal to this task. For it breaks down just before the

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. The interpretation of the nature and task of philosophy maintained here hasbeen more thoroughly presented and substantiated in the introduction to Cassirer,Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. , Language, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven:Yale University Press, ), pp. –.

last crucial question on which it must prove itself. Aristotle depicts or-ganic nature, and the series of living beings, as an ascending develop-ment that leads from one form to the next. Even the human soul, in thebroad sense—understood merely as “vegetative” or “sensitive” soul—is,for him, nothing but a natural form that is as such bound to a particularbody. It is the “entelechy” of an organic body. Still, the Aristotelian psy-chology as a whole did not admit of being reduced to biology. For a residueremained that could not be completely expunged by Aristotle himself,nor by any of his students or followers. The “thinking” soul defied all at-tempts to reduce it to the elementary function of the nutritive or sensitivesoul. It affirmed its own and exceptional position; accordingly, it eventu-ally had to be assigned another and independent origin. If, in the Aris-totelian psychology, we proceed from perception to memory, from this toimagination (�antasiva), and from here to conceptual thought, the prin-ciple of continuous evolution maintains itself at each of these advances.But then we suddenly find ourselves led to a point at which a leap is un-avoidable. For the “power of thought” in its highest and purest activitycannot be reached in this manner. It is and remains an accomplishmentunto itself. The “active intellect” belongs to the world of the mind, with-out any possibility of successfully explaining it in terms of the elements oforganic life. Thus here again the dualism breaks through—and it re-ceives its unequivocal expression when Aristotle declares that the powerof thought (nou~) descends from the outside (quvraqen) into the world oflife.

It is understandable that Aristotelian metaphysics and psychologywere not able to close the gap that they found here. For the Aristotelianconcept of form is based on the Platonic concept of ideas and remainsbound, even when it appears the farthest removed from it, to the same es-sential presuppositions. It is only the modern theory of evolution that isdetermined to draw the final consequence. It takes the requirement ofcontinuity seriously and extends it to all domains. Just as the higher lifeforms are bound through smooth transitions to the more elementaryforms, so likewise there can be no capacity in them that goes beyond thedimension of organic existence as such. Whatever towers above this di-mension and appears to belong to “another world” is and remains a merecastle in the air, insofar as it is not possible to show in what way it emergedfrom a fundamental and elementary level of life and continues to be con-

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nected with it. It is here that a truly biological worldview must apply thelever. What the speculative concept of evolution—whether that of Aris-totle, Leibniz, or Hegel—failed to accomplish should and will be accom-plished by the empirical concept of evolution. Only through it did theway to a strictly “monistic” conception appear to be opened; only nowdid the cleft between “nature” and “spirit” appear to be closed. Viewedfrom this perspective, the Darwinian theory promises to contain not onlythe answer to the problem of the evolution of man but also the answer toall questions concerning the origin of human culture. When Darwin’stheory first appeared, it finally seemed, after centuries of vain efforts, tohave discovered the uniting bond that embraces the “science of nature”and the “science of culture.” In August Schleicher published hiswork The Darwinian Theory and the Science of Language. The new program fora science of culture based upon Darwinian principles is fully definedhere. Schleicher himself originally began from Hegel’s doctrine. He nowbelieved to see that and why the solution could not lie there. He de-manded a fundamental reshaping of the method of the science of lan-guage that would, for the first time, elevate it to a knowledge equal to thatof the science of nature.9 Here, a foundation finally appeared to havebeen laid that was common to physics, biology, and the science of lan-guage—and hence indirectly for all that called itself a “science of spirit.”It was one and the same causality that embraced all three fields of studyand erased all essential differences between them.

A first reaction against this conception took place when, in the lastdecades of the nineteenth century, doubts concerning the validity of theDarwinian theory became ever more pronounced in biology itself. Atten-tion now came to be drawn not only to the empirical limits of the theorybut also, and in far stronger measure than before, to the certainty of itsphilosophical foundations. And here suddenly the concept of form expe-rienced a new resurrection. Vitalism immediately fell back upon this con-cept; and with this support it attempted to put into practice its thesis ofthe “autonomy of the organic” and the autonomy of life. We shall pursuehere this movement only insofar as it has influenced the question of lay-ing the foundations for the sciences of culture and their particular logical

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. For further details concerning Schleicher’s theory see Cassirer, Philosophy of

Symbolic Forms, : ff.

nature. This question, as such, was foreign to the true champions of vi-talism. Even as a metaphysician Driesch remained a pure naturalist. Atno time did he attempt to construct a logic of the sciences of spirit; in-deed, on the basis of his systematic presuppositions he had to doubt thepossibility of such a logic. For he vigorously contested the scientific valueof history. Nevertheless, the new orientation in thinking that was intro-duced by vitalism also influenced our problem—though only indirectly,to be sure. It is instructive to pursue this influence; for it was in an effec-tive way the preparation for later work, which received its original and es-sential impulses from wholly other motives and spheres of problems, andin many respects cleared the ground for it. Uexküll once stated that thematerialism of the nineteenth century, in teaching that all reality subsistsand exhausts itself within matter and force, has completely overlooked athird essential factor. It had blinded itself to form, which alone is decisiveand determining.10 Uexküll wants to restore this factor to its rightful po-sition in his Theoretical Biology; but he wants, on the other hand, to keep itfree of all extraneous metaphysical and psychological concepts. Hespeaks solely as an anatomist, as an objective naturalist. However, ac-cording to him, precisely the study of anatomy is capable of furnishingstrict proof that every organism presents a self-enclosed world in whicheverything “weaves itself into the whole.” The organism is no aggregateof parts but a system of functions that are mutually dependent on eachother. In the “blueprint” of every animal we are able to read off immedi-ately the nature of this interconnection. “The theory of the living being,”according to Uexküll, “is a pure natural science and has only one goal—the research into the blueprint of living beings, their origin and their re-sults.” No organism can be thought of as existing for itself, isolated fromits “environment.” What constitutes its specific nature is its particular re-lation to this environment: the manner in which it receives its stimuli andtransforms them within itself. The study of these blueprints shows us thatin this respect there is no difference between the lower living creaturesand the most highly developed. For each ever-so-elementary organismwe can establish a determinate “receptor system” and a determinate “ef-fector system”; in each we can clarify how its various “functional spheres”

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. Cf. J. von Uexküll, Die Lebenslehre (Potsdam: Müller and Kiepenheuer Ver-lag, ), p. .

mesh with each other. According to Uexküll, this relation is the expres-sion and the basic phenomenon of life as such. The stimuli of the exter-nal world, which an animal is able to receive by virtue of its blueprint,constitute the only reality present for it, and by virtue of this physicallimit, it closes itself to all other spheres of existence.11

This problematic of modern biology, which in Uexküll’s writings isdisplayed in a very original way and carried out in an extraordinarilyfruitful way, can point us to a path that we can pursue to a clear and defi-nite delineation of the boundary between “life” and “spirit,” between theworld of organic forms and the world of cultural forms. Time and againthe attempt has been made to describe the difference which exists here as a purely physical difference. We have searched for certain external features by which to characterize man as such, and by which he was supposed to be elevated out of the ranks of the other living creatures. It iswell known what fantastic constructions have been tied to suchfeatures—for example, the fact of the upright gait of man. But the ad-vance of empirical knowledge has torn down all of these separations thatwe have sought to erect between man and organic nature. Monism heldits ground here with ever increasing clarity and success. In his discoveryof the intermaxillary bone Goethe saw one of the most beautiful andmost important confirmations that no form of nature is absolutely de-tached and isolated from the others. The difference that we are lookingfor here, and that alone we are able to demonstrate with confidence, isnot a physical but a functional difference. The novelty that comes forwardin the world of culture cannot be understood and described by pointingout individual features. For the decisive change does not lie in the ap-pearance of new marks and qualities but in the characteristic change of

function that all determinations undergo as soon as we pass from the ani-mal world to the human world. Here and here alone is established a realmetavbasi~ eij~ a[llo gevno~ [transition to another class/genus]. The “free-dom” that man is able to achieve for himself does not mean that he hasstepped out of nature and can elude its existence or its effect. He cannotovercome or break through the organic limits that are fixed for him just asfor any other living being. But within these limits, indeed by means of

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. Cf. J. von Uexküll, Theoretical Biology, trans. D. L. MacKinnon (New York:Harcourt, ). Cf. also Die Lebenslehre (Zurich: Orell Füssli Verlag, ).

them, he creates a breadth and self-sufficiency of movement that is ac-cessible and attainable only by him. Uexküll once said that the blueprintof each living being, and the relation that it determines between its “re-ceptor world” and its “effector world,” encloses this being as firmly as thewalls of a prison. Man escapes from this prison not by tearing down itswalls but rather by becoming conscious of them. Here the Hegelianstatement holds good, that he who knows about a limit is already beyondit. This becoming conscious is the beginning and end, the alpha andomega, of the freedom that is granted to man; to know and to acknowl-edge necessity is the genuine process of liberation that “spirit,” in opposi-tion to “nature,” has to accomplish.

The individual “symbolic forms”—myth, language, art, and knowl-edge—constitute the indispensable precondition for this process. Theyare the specific media that man has created in order to separate himselffrom the world through them, and in this very separation bind himself allthe closer to it. This trait of mediation characterizes all human knowl-edge, as well as being distinctive and typical of all human action. Evenplants and animals exist only by means of the fact that they not only con-tinually receive stimuli from their environment but also, in a certain man-ner, “answer” them. And each organism carries out this answer in a dif-ferent way. Here we find, as Uexküll has shown in his Umwelt und Innenwelt

der Tiere, the most diverse and subtle gradations possible.12 For the animalworld on the whole, however, a determined and unified type of action al-ways follows from the same conditions. The answer must follow the stim-ulus in immediate temporal sequence, and it must always proceed in thesame way. What we term animal “instincts” are nothing other than suchfixed chains of action, whose individual links engage each other in wayspredetermined by the nature of the animal. A specific situation works asan impulse to action, which gives rise to certain movements; to this firstimpulse more and more urges add themselves until ultimately a determi-nate “melody of impulses” is played out in the same constant way. Theliving creature plays this melody, but it cannot voluntarily intervene in it.The path that it must traverse in order to solve a certain task is prepared;the organism follows it without having to seek for it and without beingable to alter it in any way.

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. J. von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Berlin: J. Springer, –).

All this changes fundamentally as soon as we enter into the sphere ofhuman action, which is characterized even in its simplest and most ele-mentary forms by a kind of “mediatedness” that is sharply opposed to themanner in which the animal reacts. This transformation in the mode ofaction presents itself most clearly as soon as man makes the transition tothe use of tools. For in order to invent a tool as such, man must look be-yond the sphere of immediate need. In creating it he does not act fromthe impulse and necessity of the moment. Instead of being moved imme-diately by an actual stimulus, he looks to “possible” needs, for which heprepares the means of satisfaction in advance. The intent [Absicht] thatthe tool serves contains within itself a certain foresight [Voraus-Sicht]. Theimpulse does not originate only from the spur of the present but belongsalso to the future, which must in some way be “anticipated” in order tobecome effective in this manner. This “idea” of the future characterizesall human action. We must place something not yet existing before our-selves in “images” in order, then, to proceed from this “possibility” to the“reality,” from potency to act. This basic feature emerges still moreclearly when we turn from the practical to the theoretical sphere. Thereexists no fundamental difference between the two, insofar as all our theo-retical concepts bear within themselves an “instrumental” character. Inthe final analysis they are nothing other than the tools that we have fash-ioned for the solution of specific tasks and that must be continually re-fashioned. Concepts do not refer, like sense perceptions, to any particulargiven, to a concretely present situation; they move, rather, in the sphere ofthe possible and seek, as it were, to delineate the range of the possible.The more the horizon of human ideas, opinions, thoughts, and judg-ments expands, the more complex becomes the system of intermediarylinks necessary to survey it. The symbols of speech are the first and mostimportant link in this chain. However, forms of another kind and anotherorigin, the forms of myth, religion, art, connect themselves to it. One andthe same fundamental function, the function of the symbolic as such, un-folds itself in its different cardinal directions and creates within them evernew formations. It is the totality of these formations that characterizesand distinguishes the specifically human world. The “receptor world”and the “effector world” of animals acquire something new in the humansphere: they are joined by an “image world”; and it is this image worldthat gains more and more power over man as it develops.

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But of course a most difficult question arises here: a question withwhich humanity has had to struggle again and again in the course of thedevelopment of its culture. Is the path that is adopted here not a disas-trous error? Is man allowed to tear himself away from nature in this wayand remove himself from the reality and immediacy of natural exis-tence? Is what he exchanges for this still good, or is it not the gravestthreat to his life? When philosophy remained mindful of its essential andsupreme task, when it was determined to be not only a certain kind ofknowledge [Wissens] of the world but also the conscience [Gewissen] of humanculture, then, in the course of its history, it had to be led to this problemagain and again. Instead of abandoning itself to a naive belief in progress,it had to ask itself not only whether the goal of this alleged “progress” isattainable but also whether it is worth striving for. And once doubt on thishas been awakened, it seems that it will not be quieted. This shows itselfmost forcefully when we fix our attention upon man’s practical relation toreality. Through the use of tools man has set himself up as ruler overthings. However, this power has turned into no blessing for him but ratherinto a curse. The technology that man invented in order to subjugate thephysical world has turned against him. It has led not only to a heightenedself-alienation but ultimately to a kind of self-loss of human existence.The tool, which appeared to provide the fulfillment of human needs, hasinstead created countless artificial needs. Each perfecting of the techno-logical culture is, and remains, in this respect a truly treacherous gift.Hence the yearning for primitive, unbroken, immediate existence mustrepeatedly break forth; and the more numerous the areas of life takenover by technology, the louder the call, “Back to nature!” Uexküll re-marks with respect to the lower animals that each animal is so completelyadapted to its environment that it rests in it as quietly and securely as ababy in its crib. But this calmness comes to an end as soon as we enter thehuman sphere. Each animal species is firmly bound, as it were, to the cir-cuit of its needs and drives; it has no other world than that which is pre-scribed for it by its instincts. But within this world, for which the animal iscreated, there is no wavering and no transgression: the limits of instinctoffer at the same time the greatest of security. No human knowledge andno human action can ever find its way back to this kind of unquestionableexistence and unquestionable certainty. For the intellectual tools thatman has himself created are even more doubtful than his technical tools.

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Time and again language has been extravagantly praised; we have seen init the original expression and unmistakable proof of “reason” that ele-vates man above the animal. But are all the arguments that have beencited in this regard genuine arguments? Or are they perhaps nothing elsethan an empty self-idolatry in which language flattered itself ? Are theymore than rhetorical? Do they have philosophical merit? In the history ofphilosophy there has never been a shortage of important thinkers whohave not only warned against this mixing of “language” and “reason”but who have seen in language the true adversary and antagonist of rea-son. For them it was not the guide but the perpetual seducer of humanknowledge. Knowledge, so they explained, will reach its goal only if it res-olutely turns its back on language and no longer allows itself to be enticedby its content. “In vain do we extend our view into the heavens and pryinto the entrails of the earth,” says Berkeley; “in vain do we consult thewritings of learned men and trace the dark footsteps of antiquity. Weneed only draw the curtain of words to behold the fairest tree of knowl-edge, whose fruit is excellent, and within the reach of our hand.”13

Berkeley himself was able to find no other way out of this conflict thanto absolve philosophy not only of the domination of language but also ofthe domination of “concepts.” For it did not escape him that concepts,insofar as they are “abstract” and “universal,” not only are related to that generality that is manifested in names and words but are insepar-able from it. Only a radical solution could therefore help here: realitymust be freed from concepts and “logic,” and limited to pure awareness[Wahrnehmung], to the sphere of “perception” [Perzeption]. Wherever weleave this latter sphere, wherever we attempt to proceed from percipi toconcipi, we find ourselves again under the power of language that wewanted to escape. All logical cognition carries itself out in acts of judg-ment, in theoretical reflection. But already the term reflection indicates theshortcomings that inevitably adhere to it. The “reflected” object is neverthe object itself—and each new mirroring surface we introduce threatensto remove us more and more from the original and authentic truth of it.Since ancient times such considerations have constituted the real breed-

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. Concerning Berkeley’s criticism of language see Cassirer, Philosophy of Sym-

bolic Forms, : ff. [Quotation from G. Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of

Human Knowledge, p. —Translator’s note.]

ing ground of theoretical skepticism. And in the course of its history notonly the theory of language but the theory of art, too, has had to strugglecontinuously with similar problems. Plato renounces and rejects art. Hereproaches it because in the struggle between truth and appearance itstands not on the side of philosophy but on the side of sophistry. Theartist does not see the ideas, the eternal archetypes [Urbilder] of truth; in-stead, he wanders around in the realm of copies [Abbilder] and turns allhis energy to forming these copies in such a way that, to somebody look-ing at them, they feign reality itself. The poet and the painter, like thesophist, are the perpetual “image makers” (eijdwlopoiov~). Instead of con-ceiving being as it is, both put us under an illusion of being. So long asaesthetics is based on a “theory of imitation,” it is in principle vain to at-tempt to refute this Platonic objection. In order to justify the imitationsome have attempted a hedonistic, rather than theoretical or aesthetical,justification of its value. Aesthetic rationalism has also frequently gone inthis direction. It stressed that the imitation obviously cannot exhaust na-ture, that the “appearance” cannot attain “reality.” Instead, it points tothe value of pleasure that the imitation possesses, which grows strongerthe closer it approaches the model. The very first lines of Boileau’s Art poé-

tique exhibit this train of thought in classic conciseness and clarity. Even amonster, Boileau explains, can please in the artistic representation, be-cause the pleasure concerns not the object as such but the excellence ofthe imitation. With this there seemed to arise at least the possibility of de-termining as such that characteristic dimension of aesthetics and ofgranting it an independent value, even though this goal could be reachedonly by a strange detour. But on the basis of strict rationalism and meta-physical dogmatism a definitive solution to the problem was not to begained. For once we are convinced that the logical concept is the neces-sary and sufficient condition for the knowledge of the essence of things,then everything else, which is specifically different and which does notmeet this standard of clarity and distinctness, ends up being only an un-real appearance. In this case the illusory character of those spiritualforms that remain outside the sphere of the purely logical cannot be con-tested; it can, as such, be demonstrated, and in this respect explained andjustified, only to the extent that we inquire into the psychological origin ofthe illusion and attempt to illustrate its empirical conditions in the struc-ture of human imagination and human fantasy [Phantasie].

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However, the question takes a completely other turn if, instead oftreating the essence of things as having been fixed from the beginning, wesee in it, on the contrary, the infinitely distant point toward which allknowing and understanding aim. In this case, the “given” of the objects[Objekt] is transformed into the “task” of objectivity. And this task, as it canbe shown, does not involve theoretical knowledge alone; rather, every en-ergy of spirit participates in its own way. Now language and art can alsobe assigned their particular “objective” meanings—not because they im-itate [nachbilden] a reality existing in itself but because they pre-form [vor-bilden] it, because they are determined ways and directions of objectifica-tion. And this holds as much for the world of inner experience as it doesfor the world of outer experience. For the metaphysical worldview andthe theory of two substances, “soul” and “body,” “inner” and “outer” sig-nify two spheres of being strictly divorced from one another. They areable to influence each other, even though the possibility of this influencebecomes ever more mysterious and problematic the more metaphysicsdraws its own consequences; however, the radical difference betweenthem is not to be overcome. Both “subjectivity” and “objectivity” consti-tute a sphere in themselves; and the analysis of a specific form of spiritualenergy would appear to be successful and complete only once we have ar-rived at clarity as to which of the two spheres it belongs. Here an either-or, a “this side” or a “that side,” applies. The determination is thought ofaccording to a type of spatial arrangement, which attributes a phenome-non its place in consciousness or in being, in the inner world or in theouter world. However, from the critical perspective, precisely this alterna-

tive dissolves into a dialectical illusion. It shows that inner and outer expe-rience are not two foreign and separated things but rather that they arebased upon common conditions and that they can constitute themselvesonly together and in constant reference to one another. In lieu of sub-stantial separation there is correlative relation and completion.

It is by no means the case that this characteristic reciprocal determi-nation holds only in the sphere of scientific knowledge. It is also foundwhen we look beyond the circle of knowledge and theoretical concepts.No simple opposition of “I” and “world” prevails in language, nor in art,nor indeed even in myth and religion. Here, too, the intuition of both de-velops in one and the same process that leads to a continual and progres-sive “clash” of the two poles. This clash would be deprived of its true

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meaning if it sublated the relation, if it could lead to an isolation of thesubject pole or the object pole. The separation: symbol or object, alsoproves to be impossible, as closer analysis shows us that it is precisely thefunction of the symbolic itself that is the precondition for the grasp of all“objects” or facts.14 With this insight the contrast between reality and ap-pearance assumes another character and another significance. In thecase of art it becomes immediately evident that if it wanted to simply dis-pense with “appearance” [Schein] as such, then the “phenomenon” [Er-

scheinung] as well as the object of artistic intuitions and forms would alsobe lost. For it is in the “colorful reflection” and in it alone that art has itsfitting and characteristic life. No artist can represent nature without, inand through this representation, giving expression to his own I; and noartistic expression of the I is possible without setting before us somethingobjective [Gegenständliches] in all its objectivity [Objektivität] and vividness.Subjective and objective, feeling and gestalt must merge into one anotherand must be completely absorbed in one another if a great work of art isto be created. However, it follows from this that—and why—the work ofart can never be a mere reproduction of the subjective or of the objective,of the mental or of the objective world, but that a genuine discovery ofboth takes place here: a discovery that, in its general character, falls shortof no theoretical knowledge. In this respect, Goethe was right in sayingthat style rests in the deepest foundations of knowledge, in the veryessence of things, insofar as we are permitted to have knowledge of itthrough visible and tangible gestalts. Indeed it would remain a highlyquestionable, and in any case a very meager, achievement if art could donothing more than simply repeat an outward existence or an inner event.If it was in this sense an imprint of being, all the reproaches that Plato di-rected against it would be justified: we would have to deprive it of any“ideal” significance. For genuine ideality, the ideality of theoretical con-cepts as well as that of intuitive formation [Gestaltung], always entails aproductive and not receptive or imitative attitude. It must discover some-thing new instead of repeating something old under another form. Artremains an idle entertainment of the spirit, an empty game, if it does notdo justice to this supreme task.

One needs only cast a glance at the truly great works of art of all time

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. Cf. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, , introduction.

in order to become aware of this basic character. Each of these worksleaves us with the impression that we have encountered something new,something we had not known before. It is no mere imitation or repetitionthat we are confronted with here; rather, the world always seems to be dis-closed to us in new ways and from new angles. If the epic could do nomore than capture past events and renew them in man’s memories, therewould be nothing to distinguish it from mere chronicle. But we need onlythink of Homer, Dante, and Milton to be convinced that in every greatepic of world literature it is something quite different that confronts us. Inno way does it concern a mere report of something past; rather, we aretransported by the threads of the epic narrative into a worldview in whichthe totality of events and the entire human world appears in a new light.This feature is characteristic of even the apparently most “subjective”art, the lyricism. More than any other genre of art, lyricism seems to betrapped in the moment. The lyric poem seeks, as it were, to capture inflight, and to hold onto a unique, ephemeral, never recurring mood. Itsprings from a single moment and does not look beyond this moment ofinspiration. And yet it is in lyricism, and perhaps in it above all, that thatsort of “ideality”—which Goethe has described with words—proves thatit is characteristic of that ideal way by which thought makes the eternalvisible in the ephemeral. By immersing itself in the moment and seekingnothing else than to exhaust its entire feeling content, it thereby invests itwith duration and eternity. If the lyrical poem were to do nothing elsethan to fix in words momentary and individual feelings of poets, it wouldnot distinguish itself from any other linguistic expression. All lyricismwould be merely linguistic expression, as all speech would be lyricism.Benedetto Croce has in fact drawn this conclusion in his aesthetics. Nev-ertheless, in addition to the genus proximum of expression we must pay at-tention to the specific difference of lyric expression. Lyricism is no mereintensification or sublimation of a linguistic sensible sound. It is not sim-ply the utterance of a momentary mood, nor does it seek simply to tra-verse the scale of tones between the two extremes of emotion, betweensuffering and pleasure, pain and joy, exaltation and despair. If the lyricpoet is successful in giving “melody and speech” to pain, by so doing, hehas not only enveloped it in a new cover; he has transformed it fromwithin. Through the medium of the emotions he has enabled us to gazeinto a spiritual depth that until now was closed and inaccessible to himself

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as well as to us. Again we need only remind ourselves of the genuine turn-ing points and high points in the development of lyrical style in order tobecome convinced of its basic character. Every great lyricist, while want-ing only to express his I, teaches us to recognize a new feeling of theworld. He shows us life and reality in a gestalt in which we feel we havenever known it before. A song by Sappho, an ode by Pindar, Dante’s Vita

nuova, Petrarch’s sonnets, Goethe’s Sesenheimer Lieder and West-östlicher Di-

van, Hölderlin’s or Leopardi’s poems—each gives us more than a series ofindividual fleeting moods that appear before us only to vanish again andlose themselves in nothingness. Each “is” and “exists”; it discloses to us aknowledge that cannot be grasped in abstract concepts yet neverthelessstands before us as the revelation of something new, something never be-fore known or familiar. It belongs to the greatest achievements of art thatit is able to permit us to feel and recognize the objective even in the indi-vidual, while on the other hand placing all its objective formations con-cretely and individually before us and in this way filling them with thestrongest and most intense life.

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