Schrems, Ernst Cassirer and Political Thought

Ernst Cassirer and Political ThoughtAuthor(s): John J. SchremsSource: The Review of Politics, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Apr., 1967), pp. 180-203Published by: Cambridge University Press for the University of Notre Dame du lac on behalf ofReview of PoliticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1405664 .

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Ernst Cassirer and Political Thought John J. Schrems

ERNST CASSIRER's renown is the fame of a philosopher, not

of a political theorist. Amongst his voluminous writings only The Myth of the State is regarded as a political treatise and

its precise political character is problematic.' Nevertheless, the rudiments of a Cassirer political philosophy may be derived from an exposition of his understanding of culture and from an exam- ination of his views of freedom, myth, and the state. Cassirer extolled freedom, and he sought to "combat" myth. His own fulfillment of man's "progressive self-liberation," however, presents difficulties which are the subject matter of this essay.

The Crisis of "Self-knowledge" In the first chapter of the Essay on Man Cassirer sketched the

history of man's knowledge of himself - "the highest aim of philosophical inquiry."2 The path traces man's gradual approach to freedom, but ends in what Cassirer calls the crisis of our age: the "loss of intellectual center." We have achieved a complete anarchy of thought in which each individual thinker gives his own picture of human nature and of culture.3 In our "materialization of culture"4 there is lost "a general orientation, a frame of reference, to which all individual differences might be referred." There is no "central power capable of directing all individual efforts."5 It is critical in that for Cassirer himself, as he said of Pico, "the problem of freedom is closely allied to the problem of knowledge."6 With the modern crisis freedom itself is endangered.

'Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven, 1946). Hereafter cited as MS. Various reviews raise the question of the meaning of the myth of the state. Cf., esp. Thomas I. Cook, "Review of The Myth of the State," Amer- ican Political Science Review, XLI (1947), 331-33; Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? (Glencoe, 1959), p. 292; George Sabine, The Philosophi- cal Review, LVI (1947), 315-318.

2 Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven, 1944), p. 1. Hereafter cited as EM.

8EM, p. 21. 4 Ernst Cassirer, "Naturalistic and Humanistic Philosophies of Culture," in

The Logic of the Humanities, trans. Clarence Smith Howe (New Haven, 1961), p. 12.

5 EM, p. 21. 6 Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans.

Mario Domandi '(New York, 1963), p. 121.

180



ERNST CASSIRER AND POLITICAL THOUGHT 181

For Cassirer there is an answer, a "common center," which, despite "multiplicity and disparateness," finds "harmony in con- trariety, as in the case of the bow and the lyre."7 This center is found and determined by a philosophy of culture.8 The Essay on Man subtitled "An Introduction to a Philosophy of Culture" takes its significance from this. To appreciate Cassirer's proposed solution it is necessary to investigate his understanding of the development of human freedom and its role in human life.

Freedom and the Social Order The history of man's knowledge of himself, culture,9 is a his-

tory of man's progressive self-liberation. A decisive step is taken in the modem age when the study of man parallels the development of the modern (Copernican) cosmology and takes as its postulate "the removal of all the artificial barriers that had hitherto separated the human world from the rest of nature." Presuppo- sitions such as the hierarchic order of man in the universe, the concept of man as the end of the universe, the belief that there is a general providence ruling over the world and the destiny of man were no longer relevant to understand the "true nature and essence of man." Now the "imaginary boundaries ... erected by a false metaphysics and cosmology" are eliminated and man achieves an independence and autonomy in his own consciousness and his own existence.10

For Cassirer, Machiavelli is one of the great contributors to freedom. With him "we stand at the gateway of the modern world,"" for he is "the founder of a new science of politics."'12 Like Galileo, he was a revolutionary: he set his science along a new path by cutting the political world off from all the strings that tied it to the past. But in this blow for freedom Cassirer does not overlook the "dangerous consequences." Not only does the sharp knife of Machiavelli's thought cut the religious and metaphysical strings from the past, but the political world is severed from "all the . . . forms of man's ethical and cultural life." It is "completely isolated."'3 That is, the state is even isolated by

7EM, p. 228. 8 EM, p. viii. 9 EM, p. 228. lo EM, pp. 13-15. 11 MS, p. 140. 12 Ibid., p. 128. 13 Ibid., p. 128.



182 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

Machiavelli from a morality based on the reason which is nature itself, considered as the original formative and sufficient principle. That is, it is even cut off from a morality which man gives himself - as the natural right theorists were to do --by a method which is, as Cassirer says, "analytical and deductive"; it is cut off from a method which derives "political principles from the nature of man and the nature of the state."14

It is through this latter source of morality in the reason of nature that the political thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries "counterbalanced," as Cassirer put it, Machiavelli's splendid wickedness and prevented Machiavellism from coming to its full maturity. The partisans of the "Natural Right theory of the state," Grotius, Pufendorf, Rousseau, and Locke, who looked upon the state "as a means, not as an end in itself," regarded the state as bound by certain limits and hence restricted, theoretically at least, from certain actions.15 These thinkers who counterbalanced the influence of Machiavellism also took their inspiration for political theory, Cassirer explains, from the "great historical example of Galileo." Through mathematical language Galileo exposed the reason of nature which gave man a knowledge of the universe and its law that is not inferior to that of God.'6 The thinkers of the seventeenth century sought to create a theory of the body politic "equal to the Galilean theory of physical bodies - equal in clarity, in scientific method, and in certainty."'7 They sought "to demonstrate truth." What was needed in this en- deavor was for political theory to find out and formulate certain axioms and postulates that are incontrovertible and infallible. The needed "principle" was found in a rejuvenated Stoicism.'8

The reason for turning to Stoicism was its neutrality in dis- putes between creeds, sects, and nations. Stoicism provided a natural foundation for a restoration of man's ethical dignity rest- ing exclusively on "the moral will - on the worth that man attributes to himself."19 In the Essay on Man Cassirer explained

14 Ibid., p. 165. 15 Ibid., p. 141. See also: Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment

(Princeton, 1951), Chapter VI, "Law, State, and Society." 16 Cassirer, "Galileo: a New Science and a New Spirit," The American

Scholar, XII (1943), 8. 17 MS, p. 165. 18 Ibid., p. 166. 19 Ibid., pp. 167-170.




that Stoic human dignity "does not depend on external circumstances; it depends exclusively on the value he gives to himself."20 With no dependence on external help the philosophic thinkers of the seventeenth century rely on the autonomous and self-dependent human reason. This very reliance finds expression and fruition, politically, in the "doctrine of the state-contract."

This doctrine becomes a "self-evident axiom of political thought." Here the state is explained wholly from within. There is no external natural law that imposes law from without. The state and its laws are founded in, and explained by, a "natural law," expressed "in a classical way" by Grotius,21 which the moral subjects give entirely to themselves. The doctrine of the social contract becomes, according to Cassirer, the legal basis of the state, the foundation for "the validity of the social and political order." This is the decisive step. The legal and social order is reduced to a voluntary human contract, perfectly clear to all.22 What is present in the state-contract is "the principle of the state - its raison d'etre," not its historical origin.23 Thus the contract- thinkers seek to explain the state by an inner principle and not from without as happens in the "empirical origin" accounts. In this way the new political theories come to parallel even more closely the example of the physical sciences, which, as indicated above, it was their intention to do.

Speaking of "Nature and Natural Science," in his treatment of The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Cassirer explained that here the scientist proceeds on the premise: "The law which governs individual entities is not prescribed by a foreign lawgiver, nor thrust upon them by force; it is founded in, and completely know- able through, their own nature."24 Likewise the seventeenth-

20 EM, p. 7. Such external circumstances from which man is freed are "riches, rank, social distinction, . . . health or intellectual gifts," but also those external circumstances of "the end for which man lives" and "that which is perfective of the end, namely the Good."

21 Ibid., p. 172. We should note precisely what Cassirer has in mind as Grotius' classical expression of natural law. Cassirer writes: "Even the will of an omnipotent being, said Grotius, cannot change the principles of morality or abrogate those fundamental rights that are guaranteed by natural laws. These laws would maintain their objective validity even if we should assume- per impossible-that there is no God or that he does not care for human affairs."

22 MS, p. 173. 23 Ibid., pp. 173-174. 24 Philosophy of Enlightenment, p. 41.




century philosophers of natural right proceed on the identical premise:

Just as the mind is capable of constructing the realm of quantity and number entirely from within itself by virtue of its "innate ideas," so it has the same constructive ability in the field of law. Here too the intellect can and should begin with fundamental norms, which it creates from within itself. . . .25

This notion of a principle entirely "from within" rather than "from without," Cassirer has treated in abstract general application in his "'Spirit' and 'Life' in Contemporary Philosophy."26 He applied the notion more concretely to the social and political order when he wrote that the political thinkers of the Enlightenment were convinced: "The ability to overcome the evils of the state and of society can only arise from a real 'enlightenment,' from clear insight into the grounds and origins of abuses."27

"Rational insight" overcomes the evils of the state and society, and in line with this view Cassirer finds that Rousseau especially contrary to the views of many, qualifies as a rationalist.28 Rousseau, according to Cassirer, "did not overthrow the world of the Enlight- enment; he only transferred its center of gravity to another position. By this intellectual accomplishment he prepared the way for Kant as did no other thinker of the eighteenth century."29 What Rousseau possessed was the clear insight of a "firm law within himself before he [sought] the laws of external objects."30 With this insight Rousseau undertook his peculiar reform of the social and political order.

The character of the reform does not matter - "the whole political and social edifice is razed"31 - what is important is that he provided Kant with the clue to the "real man": "Man should seek the real law of his being and his conduct neither below nor above himself; he should derive it from himself, and should fashion himself in accordance with the determination of his own free

25 Ibid., p. 238. 26 Reprinted in Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (Evanston,

1949), pp. 24-25. 27 Philosophy of Enlightenment, p. 267. 28 Ibid., p. 268. 29 Ibid., p. 274. 30 Ibid., p. 273; cf. Cassirer, The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau, tr.

and ed. by Peter Gay (Bloomington, 1954), p. 57. 31 Philosophy of Enlightenment, p. 272.




will."32 Kant's argument according to Cassirer, was that in order to derive this real law man "requires life in society as well as inner freedom from social standards and an independent judgment of conventional social values." Cassirer's own humanism, James Gut- mann concluded,33 derives from this Kantian humanistic ideal; indeed, from his understanding of Kantian humanism Cassirer de- velops his philosophy of culture.

Many scholars have supported this conclusion about Kant's influence on Cassirer. Robert S. Hartmann stated that "Cassirer's philosophy . . . completes and substantiates empirically Kant's 'Copernican revolution.' ",34 David Bidney believed that with Cas- sirer there is a transformation of the Kantian Critique into the critique of culture.35 William H. Werkmeister appears to agree with Bidney; he regards Cassirer's Philosophy of Culture as an "expansion of Kant's 'Copernican revolution,' " which, incidentally, involves "a step beyond orthodox neo-Kantianism" that "leaves many questions unanswered."36

From all these witnesses and from the evidence assembled it becomes quite clear that this tracing of Rousseau's contribution to Kant is of singular importance to this study for it is a contribution, through Kant, to Cassirer and the development of his own philosophy. Rousseau's insight as expressed by Kant is reflected by Cassirer in this statement:

Man's social consciousness depends upon a double act, of identi- fication and discrimination. Man cannot find himself, he cannot become aware of his individuality, save through the medium of social life. But to him this medium signifies more than an external determining force. Man, like the animals, submits to the rules of society but, in addition, he has an active share in bringing about, and an active power to change, the forms of social life.37

32 Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant and Goethe, tr. James Gutmann, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr. (Princeton, 1945), pp. 20, 23. See also: Question of Rousseau, pp. 36, 50-51.

33 James Gutmann, "Cassirer's Humanism," in Schilpp, op. cit., pp. 459- 461.

84Robert S. Hartmann, "Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms," in Schilpp, op. cit., p. 321.

s David Bidney, "The Philosophical Anthropology of Ernst Cassirer and Its Significance in Relation to the History of Anthropological Thought," in Schilpp, op. cit., p. 499.

36 William H. Werkmeister, "Cassirer's Advance Beyond Neo-Kantianism," in Schilpp, op. cit., pp. 759-798, esp. pp. 795-796.

87 EM, p. 223.




Cassirer, like Rousseau and Kant, requires for man a life in society and yet requires a distinction and independence from society. This line of thought, then, finally contributes to an understanding of the conception of freedom in the philosophy of culture and its role in social life. It does so by investigating what Cassirer calls Rousseau's insight into the "true nature of the 'social bond.' "38

Rousseau regards his own conception of the social bond, and indeed of natural law to which the social compact is tied, as superior to the theories of men such as Hobbes and Grotius. The latter theorists, to follow Cassirer, fail because they derive the "social contract" from a contract involving subjection - in Hobbes from an agreement between rulers and ruled, in Grotius from an actual enslavement in the course of conquest. For Rousseau the social bond "cannot be something imposed on the wills of [freely acting] persons from without; they must constitute and create it themselves.""39 Thus, Rousseau's notion of law as a "universal voice" is a law from within, a "heavenly voice that dictates to each citizen the precepts of public reason, and teaches him to act in accordance with the maxims of his own judgment, and not to be in contradiction to himself."40 The basic principle of individual freedom contained in this, Rousseau's conception of law and society, finds expression, freed of its "various ambiguities" and its lack of precise statement, in Kant's "categorical imperative."41

With respect to the central thought of the social contract Cas- sirer pointed out that

in the Metaphysical Basis of the Theory of Law [Kant] declares that "the act through which a people constitutes itself a state, or to speak more properly the idea of such an act, in terms of which alone its legitimacy can be conceived, is the original contract by which all (omnes et singuli) the people surrender their outward freedom in order to resume it at once as members of a common entity, that is the people regarded as the state (universe) .42

It was, however, only in this "one sense" that Kant could grasp and elaborate clearly and unequivocally Rousseau's central thought. Only in their "great common task" "to establish and validate in

38 Rousseau, Kant and Goethe, p. 30. 39 Ibid., p. 31. 40 Ibid., pp. 30-31. 41 Ibid., p. 32. 42 Ibid., p. 35.




an objective sense ... the pure idea of right" are Kant and Rous- seau united, otherwise in the fulfillment of this task "there fell to their lot quite different missions."43 Kant was to go on to achieve "a new and distinctive attitude toward life" in which civilization "is not the source of happiness, . . . it is rather the setting in which man is to test and prove his freedom."'44 Thus, Cassirer related, freedom advances beyond the eudaemonism to which it is tied in Rousseau45 to where in Kant it constitutes man's "distinctive dignity." In this way "life achieves that meaning with which man alone can endow it.

... ."46

Kant's new and distinctive attitude toward life is one in which man achieves his distinctive dignity by "creating" freedom. Free- dom, for him, is "a special kind of determinism" according to which "the law which we obey in our actions is not imposed from without but ... the moral subject gives this law to itself."47 Free- dom is given by the subject to himself. It is like the truth of autonomous and self-dependent reason which Cassirer has described as the "principle" and "cornerstone" of all the systems of natural right.48 Autonomous natural reason is the "source of all truth" ;49 likewise, it is equivalent to freedom.50 But as man must "discover" truth, so freedom must be produced. "It is no datum, but a de- mand; an ethical imperative."51 Kant's "new ... attitude toward life" views freedom as a task which must be constantly achieved in order to be maintained.

43 Ibid., pp. 57, 58. 44 Ibid., p. 42. 45 Ibid., p. 40; cf. Question of Rousseau, p. 70. 46 Ibid., p. 43. 47 MS, p. 287. 48 Ibid., p. 172. 49 Cassirer has defined rationalism in these terms in his article on rationalism

in the 14th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1929). There he states: "Rationalism is that trend of philosophy which intercedes for the rights of 'natural reason' and sees in it the source of all truth. Common to all historical forms of rationalism is the belief in the 'autonomy of thought,' i.e., that view that thought can discover by its own strength, without support from a super- natural revelation and without appeal to sense perception, a system presented to thought within its own realm and comprehended by thought as necessary." He goes on to say that according to the fundamental idea of rationalism "reason can recognize completely only that which it can produce according to its own design." This "fundamental idea" plays an essential role in Cassirer's understanding of modern thought, and, indeed, in our understanding of Cassirer.

5o MS, p. 287. 51 Ibid., p. 288.




It is the doctrine that "freedom is equivalent to autonomy" and the whole doctrine of natural rights which Cassirer credits with "counterbalancing" the influence of Machiavellism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The "fertile seeds . . . of Kant's social philosophy" are found by Cassirer to have influence in the development of socialistic theories, of the nineteenth century. However, he finds that the "immanent ideal force" behind the principles of freedom of these theories was "superior" to the varying historical developments and interpretations. Hence, for an understanding of the essence of freedom it is sufficient to recognize it in its formulation in the "language and systematic relations of critical philosophy."52 In other words, the Kantian formulation appears sufficient for an understanding of the principle of freedom in its modem role. According to the Kantian "idea of freedom," we see that

the greatest problem for the human race and the greatest con- crete task placed before it become the attainment of a universal law administering civil society; i.e., a society which is not founded on a mere relationship of might, a relationship of rulers and ruled, but which considers every one of its members as an end in itself, as a free agent who participates in the constitution and adminis- tration of the whole and who to that extent heeds the laws only because he has given them to himself.53

In the statement just quoted we meet Kant's "idea of freedom," and that of Cassirer as well. Incorporated in this proposition are these ingredients: Stoic autarky, the "social bond" of Rousseau, and Kant's arduous task. According to Cassirer, after Machiavelli's revolutionary but liberating blow only two paths are possible for men to follow: either the enslavement of totalitarianism which is the logical term of splendid wickedness, or the freedom of natural right which counterbalanced Machiavellism. For Cas- sirer the first alternative is unthinkable; it is contrary to the highest aim of philosophy and human culture, that is, self-knowledge and self-liberation through self-realization. In the "great and decisive" step of the natural right and the state contract theory the "wickedness" of the Machiavellian tyrant is avoided. For Cassirer, then, man achieves freedom with the natural right theory counterbalanc-

52 Cassirer, "Kant," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. VIII, 540- 541.

53 Ibid., 540a.




ing the dangerous consequences of Machiavelli's liberating efforts; man himself in his voluntary activity is accountable for his freedom and for the (legal) origin of civil society. With this new development the founding of the state depends "exclusively on ... himself" and the man achieves ethical dignity.

The contract theory, however, avoids only the wickedness which is determined by "no one but the prince himself." Since the contract state has no limits other than those which it itself sets, then any common good of which the contract theory might speak is easily reducible, like the common good of Machiavelli,54 to the common evil. Here again "self-interest" will dictate what is "good," but now as a principle. Now there is no limit, not even a moral one, on what self-interest might desire. Even the Kantian categorical imperative is no real limit, for there is no ultimate restriction on what it may universalize. Moreover, the counterbalance that Cassirer here envisaged allows a greater wickedness. Indeed, it was the ground for his rejection of the myth of the state in favor of a philosophy of culture.

Myth and the Validity of the Social and Political Order For Cassirer "the most important and most alarming feature

in ... modern political thought" is the appearance of myth. This phenomenon, while understandable in ancient thought, is incon- gruous in a scientific and technical age.55 The Myth of the State is designed to explain myth and trace its history. The development parallels the process of self-knowledge and self-liberation: man is increasingly freed of myth and correspondingly his life comes more under rational direction and control. Why, then, does myth appear in the twentieth century, and especially in the "secular sphere" from which even ancient thought had precluded it? Cassirer makes it clear that the glorification of myth and the prep- aration found elsewhere in the nineteenth century, while instru- mental to its development, are not the principal cause for the twentieth-century myth.56 Instead, he relates, the technical and scientific abilities of our age combine the skills of "homo magus" and "homo faber" and these effect the return of myth on its grand scale.57 Myth has gained a position beyond its due proportion

54 MS, p. 145. 55 Ibid., p. 3. 56 Ibid., pp. 183-184. 57 Ibid., Chapter XVIII, "The Technique of the Modem Political Myths."




because the forces ("intellectual, ethical, and artistic") responsible for holding it in check have not maintained their strength.5s8 Thus, myth will always have its place, but it is, Cassirer tells us, a limited place. It might for a time achieve "great triumphs," and extend its bounds, nonetheless its success will be ephemeral. "For there is, after all, a logic of the social world just as there is a logic of the physical world. There are certain laws that cannot be violated with impunity."59

It is the power of philosophy which helps man to understand and contain myth. Particularly a philosophy of culture, that is, the philosophy of symbolic forms, can maintain the cosmic order, like, Cassirer suggested, Marduk of Babylonian mythology. The philosophy of culture has a proper but limited place and function for myth. Myth is one of the symbolic forms (along with art, science, religion, language) of man who is, according to Cassirer, a symbol- making animal. Further, the philosophy of culture provides a "broader basis" for understanding man, a broader basis in which the whole of human nature is seen in an ethical and nonmythical light. This view of man is made possible through a "new and positive power of 'self-knowledge.' "60

The central portion of The Myth of the State is precisely a tracing of "the struggle against myth in the history of political thought" culminating in the ethical light of a revived Stoic attitude toward man. This is the climactic point of the historical process: the social-contract theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries restoring man to his ethical dignity. Plato's postulate of a "rational theory of the State," replacing the earlier, and mythical, theories, is finally achieved in the "perfectly clear and understandable fact" of voluntary contractual submission-the social contract.61 The right of personality, of the autonomous self- dependent individual reasoning being-consonant with the "en- lightened" philosophies of the natural right theories of Rousseau and Kant which attain autonomy and achieve an understanding of law as a "universal voice"--establishes the "validity of the social and political order." Where in the beginning with Plato man was explained in terms of the state, we have progressed through the medieval period and Machiavelli to the point where now "all

58 Ibid., p. 298. 59 Ibid., p. 295. 60 Ibid., p. 60. 61 Ibid., p. 113




mystery is gone" and the state is explained in terms of man. The process has culminated in the "clear and understandable fact" of "free individual acts."

With this understanding we are in a position to appreciate what, for Cassirer, are the "laws of the social world." Most certainly they cannot be laws related to religion or metaphysics. Rather they would be laws, eschewing myth, related to the doctrine which insists that the dignity of man "rests exclusively on the worth that man attributes to himself," that reason "recognizes completely only that which it can produce according to its own design," and that reason makes only those judgments that "depend upon a free act which creates a world of its own."62 In brief, they will be laws in keeping with the autarky of human reason and the autonomy of nature. The rules of the social world are designed in the "new science" by Galileo and his successors who perceived that "reason has insight into that only which she herself produces on her own plan." The "contract-natural right theory" fulfills all require- ments. But, with the state reduced to the clear fact of human personality, the further, and ancient, question remains as to the nature or character of man. This Cassirer provided in his philosophy of symbolic forms.

The Philosophy of Culture Cassirer intended a philosophy of culture which, while aware

of the "various powers of man," does not lose sight of "humanity."'63 In the philosophy of symbolic forms the various powers of man, seen in language, art, religion, science, are "looked upon as so many variations of a common theme."64 This common theme of "symbolic expression" is the "common denominator of all [of man's] cultural activities: in myth and poetry, in language, in art, in religion, and in science."65 Such a philosophy of humanity looks not at the results of the various human activities but at the "unity of action." What is sought is "not a unity of products but a unity of the creative process." Man in his activities "creates" myth, religious rites or creeds, works of art, scientific theories.66 It is in the light of this notion of human, creative, symbolic activity that Cas-

62 Cf. supra, notes 19 and 20, and MS, p. 101. 6s EM, p. 228. "Ibid., pp. 228 and 71. 15 MS, p. 45. 6e EM, p. 70.




sirer can say: "It is this work, it is the system of human activities, which defines and determines the circle of 'humanity.' "67 For Cassirer, man is characterized and distinguished by his work: the work of creation through symbolic expression. Through this understanding of man's work Cassirer comes to a different application of the philosophical adage, man is what man does, whereby in the past man was defined as an animal rationale. Reason "is a very inadequate term with which to comprehend the forms of man's cultural life in all their richness and variety." For him the old definition was the expression of a "moral imperative" not a desig- nation of man's "specific difference." In order to arrive at the specific difference it must be observed that all forms of man's cultural life are "symbolic forms." The clue to the nature of man is "the symbol." "Hence, instead of defining man as an animal rationale, we should define him as an animal symbolicum."68 Here we have a profoundly new conception of man. He is an animal symbolicum who builds upon his own world. "Symbolic thought ... overcomes the natural inertia of man and endows him with a new ability, the ability constantly to reshape his human universe."69

With this understanding there is found a "clue of Ariadne," the philosophy of symbolic forms, which can lead us out of the labyrinth of our "mass of disconnected and disintegrated data" concerning human nature. Myth and religion, language and art, science and history, previously considered "disparate and heterog- enous" are, with a philosophy of symbolic forms, "one subject. They are different roads leading to a common center."70 The way to overcome "the myth of the twentieth century" and "the loss of intellectual center" is revealed in a philosophy of culture. Cassirer's statement that "myth ends where philosophy begins"7' can now be read as "myth of the State" ends where philosophy of culture- philosophy of symbolic forms-begins.

The process of man's progressive self-liberation culminates in the notion of man creating culture, in the notion that man "builds up a world of his own, an 'ideal' world." This is the liberal, that is, liberating, conclusion of the philosophy which begins with the

67 Ibid., p. 68. 68 Ibid., p. 26. 69 Ibid., p. 62. 70 Ibid., pp. vii-viii. 71 MS, p. 182.




maxim that "self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophical inquiry." Here in the philosophy of culture eudaemonism is aban- doned; any notion of a goal or an end is, as with Aristotle's final causes, now characterized as a mere "asylum ignorantiae."72 In the philosophy of culture we are even free of happiness as a goal. Now it is held that "true worth does not lie in that which man receives from nature and Providence; it resides only in his own act and in what he creates through these acts."73 It might be further argued that the new "true worth" amounts to self-glorification in culture without happiness even as a result.74

Thus Cassirer's resolution of the paradox of our age gives way to an unnoticed dilemma. He began his Essay on Man and The Myth of the State by lamenting the crisis of our age and the presence of the totalitarian mythical state where every thinker gives his own "conception and evaluation of human life" and where human life falls prey to the twentieth-century myth. In Cassirer man is set free: set free to "reshape his human universe," "to build up his own universe . . . and universalize his human expe- rience."75 But this self-liberating activity is done in such a way that not only is an intellectual center lost but now man himself is lost. Man himself is lost in that: "The artist, the scientist, the founder of a religion, are able to perform truly great achievements only if they abandon themselves completely to their work, if they neglect their own being for it."76 This loss of self is what Cassirer, using George Simmel's Philosophische Kultur, identifies as the "tragedy of culture." The dilemma of the advancement of culture and the abandonment of self is resolved, for Cassirer, in the realization that "a work of culture" is "only a point of passage" in the "living process of culture.""77 This "living process of culture" Cassirer has elsewhere referred to as a development of the forms of social life into a state of social consciousness, "a society of

72 EM, pp. 18-19. 3 Cassirer, Logic of Humanities, p. 183. Italics mine. 74This is not an unlikely point, for Maritain in Moral Philosophy (New

York, 1964), pp. 92-116, appears to make a similar suggestion concerning the closely related Kantian ethics. From my reading of Maritain the absence of love, the absolute rejection of a "subjective moral end," and the apotheotic reverence for law all seem to suggest that ethics void of happiness as an end makes impossible any condition of happiness, or any condition of being worthy of happiness.

5 EM, p. 221. 17" Logic of Humanities, pp. 192-193. 77 Ibid., pp. 184-192.




thought and feeling." Here, it is said, man "has discovered a new way to stabilize and propagate his works." Thus we are told that, "Language, myth, art, religion, science are the elements and the constitutive conditions of this higher form of society," but what is more important is that these "expressions of life" "have a life of their own, a sort of eternity by which they survive a man's individual and ephemeral existence."78

Cassirer's statement that for man the medium of social life "signifies more than an external determining force," and that man "has an active share in bringing about, and an active power to change, the forms of social life" is nonetheless to be understood in terms of man defining himself only in "the living process of culture." For we must note that even with the active ingredients man "cannot find himself save through the medium of social life."79 This is the same theme of the individual found in the creation of culture and yet lost in his own "ephemeral existence." This situa- tion, according to Cassirer, is justified in terms of what is proper to the "spirit" and "life," what is proper to the "spirit" of culture and what is denied to the species of "life." And "spirit" of course consists of the "symbolic forms," the expressions of life that survive man's individual and ephemeral existence:

"Spirit" has accomplished what was denied to "life." Here the coming-to-be and the activity of individuals are linked to that of the species in a very different and profoundly formative man- ner. What the individual feels, wills, and thinks does not remain enclosed within himself; it is objectified in his work. These works of language, poetry, plastic art, and religion, become the "monu- ments," the symbols, of recognition and remembrance of human kind. They are "more lasting than bronze"; for within them there remains not only something material; in addition, they are the manifestation of a spirit - manifestation which can be freed from its material covering and awakened to new power when- ever a sympathetic and sensitive soul encounters it.so80

This notion of the "sort of eternity" of the individual objectified in his work through the "manifestation of a spirit" as opposed

78s EM, pp. 223 and 224. 79 EM, p. 223. 80 Logic of Humanities, p. 215. Cassirer has in another place (cf. Cassirer

"Spirit and Life" in Schilpp, op. cit., pp. 865, 875-877) made it clear that when he speaks of the "Spirit . . . which enters into the world of Life" he does not speak of an Aristotelian "spirit" "from without" but instead of a spirit "from within."




to the notion of "man's individual and ephemeral existence," is also found in the "objectified humanity" of Cassirer's conception of historical knowledge. And thus in history is also revealed the loss of individual man in Cassirer's notion of humanity. For Cassirer history is an essential link in the evolution of "the organism of human civilization"; it is "an indispensable instrument for building up our human universe." Thus it is that Cassirer says that "in the great works of history . .. we begin to see . .. the features of the real individual man."8' But it must be carefully noted that this real, individual man found in history is not "a mere individual self." The self found in history "is anthropomorphic but it is not egocentric."82 The historian, it is true, "looks for a human and real cultural life-a life of actions and passions, of questions and answers, of tensions and solutions."83 But this life and culture must be understood as one that, for Cassirer, "may be described as . .. protest against the fact of death, . . . challenge [to] the power of time, ... striving to eternize and immortalize life." Cul- ture is viewed as the product of man's striving, through his work, "to break the chain of his individual and ephemeral existence."84 Thus the life and culture which the historian is concerned with is the life which is short-lived and the culture which, so to speak, survives. In this way real life is effaced for culture; individual real man is effaced for the "historical self." "The enrichment and enlargement ... of the self, of our knowing and feeling ego, which is the aim of historical knowledge"8s5 is achieved in the "real man" of objectified humanity, the man "eternized and immortalized" through culture. The traditionally individual self, Cassirer's "mere" man of ephemeral existence, is replaced by the "real" man of universal culture, the amorphous man who creates culture and the historical self.

This understanding marks the full development of self-knowledge: the definition of man in terms of human culture. For Cassirer, as with Alexander Pope, the title of whose poem he borrowed for his Essay on Man, "the proper study of mankind is man."86 How-

81 EM, p. 206. For a further discussion on history see: Francis William Kearney, O.F.M., "On Cassirer's Conception of Art and History," Laval Theologique et Philosophique, I, no. 2 (1945), 131-153.

82 EM, p. 191. 83 Ibid., p. 187. 84 Ibid., p. 184. 85 Ibid., p. 191. 86 James Gutmann, "Cassirer's Humanism," in Schilpp, op. cit., p. 449.



ever, as James Gutmann put it, Cassirer, following Pico, went farther than this maxim of Pope, holding that "for man to know himself ... is to recognize the rich and varied potentialities of his nature."87 This richness and this variety are found in culture and thus "Cassirer seeks to understand human nature by exploring culture, . . . he seeks to understand man in terms of culture.""88 But the important thing to note is that "this understanding," as Gutmann added, "is rooted in the rich soil of humanism." It is based on what Gutmann calls "Cassirer's Humanism." In this humanism man is conceived of as a functional developer of cultural forms: "Man is no longer considered as a simple substance which exists in itself and is to be known by itself. His unity is conceived as a functional unity."89 Gutmann commented: "The common focus of all cultural forms is man--and man, in turn, must be conceived in terms of his functional unity in the development of these forms." Robert Hartman described this blend of man and culture as "the horizontal-vertical integration of man's soul and culture-a symbolic cross, to which man will not be fixed in agony, but in which he will live."90 And in Hartman's view the ethical era to come must be built to a large extent on Cassirer's "symbolic cross" of culture.

It is this new cross in which man will live and on which is founded the new morality of "the comprehensive love of life and of all its forms." What is so new about this development is that it is the fulfillment of the self-liberation of man through symbolism, it is, in other words, man made. With this the cross of agony is replaced by the symbol of culture. This latter is by no means an impossible proposition for, as Fritz Kaufmann related,

according to Cassirer man learns to recognize his own capacities as a free agent by projecting them into the figure of his God. In this way it is man who is understood in the symbol of his God, instead of God's being approached, however inadequately, through the human symbols. The God-man relationship in which man is confronted by another, infinitely superior (if not altogether

87 Ibid., p. 451. 88 Ibid., p. 461. 89 Ibid., pp. 461-462. Gutmann quotes from EM, p. 222. 90Robert S. Hartmann, "Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms," in

Schilpp, op. cit., p. 333.




different) being is re-absorbed by one of the forms of the cultural process, one of the modes of objectification.91

Kaufmann further related that with Cassirer, "the inadequacy of the religious symbol is emphasized . . . almost to the point of ne- glecting the insufficiency of the human being. The gap between the human and the divine is said to be 'created' by consciousness."92 On this point, however, it should be noted that the insufficiency of human beings appears, in Cassirer's philosophy, to be completely neglected in favor of man's creative life. It is precisely the point of Cassirer's philosophy that man should be liberated from "all the imaginary boundaries" which have been erected by earlier religious as well as metaphysical and cosmological thought. Man is set free from the "primitive" symbolic creations in order that he "might build up a world of his own."

With respect to creation, Cassirer appears to agree with Boc- caccio in his Genealogia deorum in distinguishing between two creations: "the one called man into existence, and the other con- ferred upon this existence an intellectual content. . . . The first gave him his physical reality; the second gave his specific form.""93 It is this second creation which, according to Cassirer, man gives to himself and thereby achieves autonomy. Cassirer, however, is also in close agreement with Giordano Bruno in the belief that "the ideal of humanity includes the ideal of autonomy; but as the ideal of autonomy becomes stronger, it dissociates itself more and more from the realm of religion."94 This would explain the emphasis on the inadequacy of the religious symbol and the neglect of human insufficiency noted by Kaufmann. In the process of man's progressive self-liberation in the creation of culture, religion becomes less and less important.

What must be noticed, and this is a primary point, is that despite man's enhanced position in the creation of culture it is culture alone that survives. Only through culture does the "comprehensive love of life and of all its forms" surmount man's "individual and ephemeral existence." It might appear likely that the

91 Fritz Kaufmann, "Cassirer's Neo-Kantianism and Phenomenology," in Schilpp, op. cit., p. 847. Kaufmann refers to Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, II, 252, 261.

92 Ibid., II, 284; and Kaufmann, "Cassirer's Neo-Kantianism and Phenom- enology," in Schilpp, op. cit., p. 851.

93 Individual and Cosmos, p. 95. 94 Ibid., p. 98.




fact of death-individual personal destruction-might disrupt the serenity of the cultural challenge to the power of time. In Cas- sirer's philosophy, however, death is no disturbing factor.

Cassirer explained that mythical thought sought to answer the problem of death by having "the mystery of death ... 'turned into an image'-and by this transformation death ... becomes understandable and supportable." Thus it is taught, he said, that, "death . . . means no extinction of man's life; it means only a change in the form of life. One form of existence is simply exchanged for another." For Cassirer this answer, intended for the "primitive" mind, is not satisfactory because in this homily myth and religion - which is but the metamorphosis of the fear of death-attempt to "deny" or "explain away" the fact of death and its inevitable natural destruction of personal existence. According to Cassirer, "myth could not give a rational answer to the problem of death." The only rational answer is apparently for man to "be reconciled with the fact of death," to "be persuaded to accept the destruction of his personal existence as an inevitable natural phenomenon."95 This answer is, of course, found in the Philosophy of Culture's notion of man's individual and ephemeral existence. Of the Philosophy of Culture's rational answer to the fact of death it can be said, as Cassirer himself said of the victory of death in the dramatic dialogue between the peasant and death described by Johannes von Saaz, that

the destruction of life, the fact that God makes it subject to death, no longer signifies the nullity of life. For though it be destroyed in its being, life nevertheless retains an indestructible value: the value that the free man gives to himself and to the world. The faith of humanity in itself guarantees the re-birth of humanity.96

The victory in death, then, is not for man; it is not even for death pictured as in conflict with life; the victory in death is for humanity.

Cassirer so facilely accepted personal destruction, and found the "simple fact of death" not "painful" and not tragic in the sense that with death man is "knowingly losing the greatest goods"97 in a goal or happiness which he sought. In the "Philosophy of Culture" such a painful loss is not possible, for man seeks no goal

95 MS, pp. 47-49. 96 Individual and Cosmos, p. 94. 97 Aristotle, Ethics, III, 1117b, 11.




inasmuch as "true worth" resides only in action. Further, Cassirer stated:

Not happiness but the condition of being worthy of happiness ["Gliickswiirdigkeit"] is what culture [and civilization] promises to man; it cannot give him more. Its goal is not the realization of happiness in this life, but the realization of freedom - that genuine autonomy which consists . . . [in] man's moral mastery of himself.98

Therefore man loses nothing, for there never was anything that he could gain. Man simply accepts the destruction of his personal existence as an inevitable natural phenomenon and finds fulfillment in "the condition of being worthy of happiness" in the "living process of culture" wherein he is given "a sort of eternity.""99 There is, consequently, in Cassirer's formula for culture a hidden tragedy which Helmut Kuhn touched upon when he commented:

. . the timeless validity of symbolic structures is not enough to forestall tragedy, because the old imperious desire for "world without end" is not entirely put to sleep. The individual is not wholly banished. His ghostlike presence suffuses the great un- concern of the philosophy of Symbolic Forms with an elegiac mood.100

Kuhn's comment need suggest no more than, as already proposed, that in Cassirer's philosophy the individual real man, who, as even Cassirer tacitly acknowledged, seeks a sort of eternity, is lost in the concern with culture. In the comments of Kuhn, Hart- mann, Gutmann, in Cassirer's own explanations of culture, of history, of death, we find the same recurring point: the individual is lost. Despite Cassirer's great attempt to provide an insight into the general character of human culture through a rediscovery of an intellectual center, he did so at the expense of making man a slave to a cultural process in which the individual is a mere point in passage.

Why has this occurred? Why has the myth of the state been replaced with a new philosophy, read myth, of culture in which the individual is once again lost? Cassirer's understanding of the

98 Logic of Humanities, pp. 183-184. 99 Ibid., pp. 183f, and 192f. 100 Helmut Kuhn, "Cassirer's Philosophy of Culture," in Schilpp, op. cit.,

p. 574.




science of politics as seen in his comparison of Machiavelli with Galileo removes from man's social life any natural element which in the past had served as a barrier to the imnpingement of human freedom.l'0 Further, the very liberating process which Cassirer traces can have no other result than the development of a new and most capable and ruthless homo faber who will, using his modem techniques and magic, rise to the top by the very logic of his freedom.,02 Cassirer's homo faber (he may be the majority in a democracy) can, so to speak, with social contract in hand, without hindrance from "artificial barriers," proceed to the making and remaking of society according to his own plan. As all previous "barriers"-like metaphysical and religious principles-are exor- cised from man's life there are no limits-not even that of the contrast between homo faber and homo magus-to the designs of the modem politician. Indeed, Cassirer very explicitly pointed out that the modem politician very methodically and deliberately plans and produces as an artisan the new political myths. Myth is manufactured like any other weapon in our great technical age.l03 This new "creative" power combined with the enhanced sense of freedom explains why the twentieth-century totalitarian myth came about: the modem "mythical monsters" are the result of the very development which allows nothing except that which "reason can produce according to its own design."

It is now possible for myth to pervade the whole of man's life. In finding a "clue of Ariadne" to remedy the anarchy of thought of our age Cassirer fashioned a philosophy which in its rational explanations, and rational organization of society, loses sight of, and abandons the individual man who, for Cassirer, first started out to "know himself." And not only is the individual lost, but, in order to guarantee the rational constructs of the Philosophy of Culture it is necessary to "combat" and "subdue" all that is mythical,104 which is all that is outside of the rational and scientific, or, more correctly, all that reason has not produced according to its own design. Furthermore, this very intolerant rationalism seems

1o01 Charles N. R. McCoy, Structure of Political Thought (New York, 1963), pp. 158-166.

o102 Charles N. R. McCoy, "Review of The Myth of the State," Modern Schoolman, XXV (May, 1948), 271-278.

103 MS, p. 282. 104 Ibid., p. 296.




to point to, and culminate in, though unwittingly, a scientifically devised return of myth.

Cassirer suggested that the way to overcome the "myth of the twentieth century" and to recover "the loss of intellectual center" is revealed in a "philosophy of culture." The reason the solution is sought in a philosophy of culture is because it alone can make room for myth as one of the symbolic forms of man who is, according to Cassirer, a symbol-making animal. The place of myth, we will recall, is seen as a symbolic expression of the desire for the "unity of life"; it is an expression of the nonrational, interpreted as all that lies outside the competence of human reason. Hence, there is a place and function for myth. But, the place for myth is not in, what Cassirer called, the "secular sphere." The "secular sphere" is the sphere of "rational theory" and is expressed by the symbols of science. Cassirer's very understanding of science, however, seems to point to myth as the highest form of knowledge.

Cassirer stated that for scientific thought to describe and explain reality,

it is bound to use its general method, which is that of classification and systematization. Life is divided into separate provinces that are sharply distinguished from each other. The boundaries between the kingdoms of plants, of animals, of man - the differences between species, families, genera - are fundamental and ineffaceable.105os

What Cassirer considered to be Darwin's contribution to science, however, appears to run counter to what Cassirer described as the "scientific method": "The theory of evolution had destroyed the arbitrary limits between the different forms of organic life. There are no separate species; there is just one continuous and uninter- rupted stream of life."'106 Indeed, it should be noticed that this Darwinian biological principle appears exactly to express the approach and method of the primitive mind (whose characteristic use of symbols is in myth):

But the primitive mind ignores and rejects [the boundaries between species, families, genera]. Life is not divided into classes and sub- classes. It is felt as an unbroken continuous whole which does not admit of any clean-cut and trenchant distinctions. ... There

105 EM, p. 81. 106 Ibid., p. 20.




is no specific difference between the various realms of life. Noth- ing has a definite, invariable, static shape.107

Finally, it must be noticed, Cassirer gave approval to this primitive view as containing a deep insight into reality. Speaking immediately of the naturalist's desire to classify things, and of the division of sciences into theoretic and practical, he wrote:

In this division of sciences [into theoretic and practical] we are prone to forget that there is a lower stratum beneath them both. Primitive man is not liable to such forgetfulness. ... [In] his conception of nature and life all these differences are obliterated by a stronger feeling: the deep conviction of a fundamental and indelible solidarity of life that bridges over the multiplicity and variety of its single forms.10s

This same admiration of the primitive insight over the scientific stratification appears, once again, in an entirely separate writ- ing by Cassirer where he says: "Aristotle's logic is unexcelled in the precise working out of contradictions, in setting up the cate- gories by which the classes of being are distinguished. But it is unable to overcome this opposition between the various classes of being; it does not press on to their real point of unification."109 For Cassirer then, it seems, that science reaches its ultimate stage when it presses on to the "real point of unification" of all things; and this is the "chaos" of the primitive mind given "classification" in mythical symbols (this real point of unification of all things is the Darwinian type unity given in scientific classification and systematization). Consequently, if the production of myth is one function of the symbol-making animal and the production of science is another, and if science itself points to myth as the expression of the "real point of unification" of all things, there is nothing to keep the man of science from converting his own "secu- lax sphere" into, what Cassirer called, that "new, entirely irrational and mysterious religion" of the twentieth-century political myths. Myth will, as Cassirer himself says, have a different quality-it

107 Ibid., p. 81. 108 Ibid., p. 82. 109 Cassirer, "Giovanni Pico della Mirandola" Journal of the History of

Ideas, III (1942), 322. For a critique of the point made by Cassirer, see Charles De Koninck, "Concept, Process, and Reality," Laval Theologique et Philosophique, II '(1946), 141-146. Italics in the quote are mine.




will be "manufactured," "technically produced.""11 And now it will do so of necessity according to the "rational" and "scientific" bases of the philosophy of culture.

Cassirer, to be sure, did not intend these results. But that is beside the point. The subsumption of the individual in culture rests soundly on the reduction of the state to the clear fact of human personality expressed in freedom. It appears once again that before the laws of the social world are discovered, the question "What is Man?" (and further, "What is the State?") must be re-examined.

110 MS, p. 282.



Schrems, Ernst Cassirer and Political Thought

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