The Yijing and Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

Shuchen XiangUniversity of Hawai‘i Manoa University of York

What is the Yijing?

• Dated between 10th and 4th centuries BC. (Michael Nylan, The Five "Confucian" Classics. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 218.

• In its received form, it is based on a system of 64 hexagrams. Each symbol comes with a judgment. Each line of the Hexagram comes with a judgment. • Considered the root of ancient Chinese science and cosmology,

Chinese medicine, feng shui and ethical guidance, in short Chinese civilisation itself. • Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and Carl Gustav Jung (1875-

1961) were its most famous western interpreters

From Trigrams to Hexagrams

Comparative Philosophies

• How to bring an ancient philosophy into dialogue with twentieth century/contemporary philosophy

• “Modern” philosophy is demarcated by Kant’s Copernican Revolution in which his “transcendental philosophy” made human cognition co-creative in knowledge formation. Kant found a half-way point between the rationalists (the world is inherently rational, and we are its passive observers) and the empiricists (you can’t prove causality).

• Ernst Cassirer is a Neo-Kantian philosopher who extended Kant’s philosophy. Cassirer regards Kant as passing from the system of pure reason, presented in the First Critique in terms of the transcendental analysis of mathematics and physics, to the realm of ethical freedom in the Critique of Practical Reason and to the realm of art and that of organic natural forms as represented in the Critique of Judgment.

• Cassirer’s fundamental insight follows the Kantian observation that the world is unknowable apart from the categories for understanding Whilst Kant, through his Critiques tried to find the philosophical grounds which ensured the validity of Newtonian physics; Cassirer’s project is more comprehensive. From the idea that we have no access to immediate perceptual experience, Symbolic Forms understands the symbol as the intermediary between sensory experience and meaning. • In Cassirer's view, the truth of human beings isn't that they are logical animals;

rather, they are animals who create symbols; who engage and understand the world through representation. It is through this medium of representation which allows human to even begin to understand themselves and the world beyond themselves; as such it is futile to say which is prior: the object or its representation. In place of Kant’s categories, is Cassirer’s notion of the Symbol.

• "Bei Cassirer mach sich die Einsicht geltend, dass >Kulture< die Welt des Menschen, die Stelle der Alten Metaphysik einnimmt. Damit wird das Kulturproblem zum philosophischen Problem schlechthin. (Ernst Wolfgang Orth, Von der Erkenntnistheorie zur Kulturphilosophie: Studien zu Ernst Cassirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann GmbH, 2004), v.

• Cassirer made the insight that >Culture< that is to say, the world of man, takes the old place of metaphysics. With this does the problem of culture become a philosophical problem per se. (My translation)

• Following the Kantian Copernican revolution, the various disciplines of the human sciences took root. Implicit in these new endeavours, is the ethos of the human being and his associated activities as the starting point of intellectual enquiry. As Helmuth Plessner (1892-1985) explained, "When [our] ancient metaphysical and ontological guarantees are no longer regarded as beyond question, then man and humanity become a problem." "It is no longer a matter of ... It is a matter of humanity as such ... [a matter that concerns] the question, what it means and how it is possible to be a man."

• When man and his associated activities are not orientated by anything beyond his empirical reality, then the human being becomes his own focus of investigation. The truth of the human being, instead of being some facet of the divine, is to be located in himself. This turn to the human subject is manifested by the rise of the cultural sciences of the 19th century and 20th century: anthropology, archeology, sociology, ethnography, history, philology, psychology, philosophical anthropology; a term typically applied to Georg Simmel, Helmuth Plessner, Ludwig Klages, Jacob von Uexküll, Max Scheler, the art historians, Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, Heinrich Wölfflin and Ernst Cassirer.

Humanism and Immanence • 聖人設卦觀象 , 系辭焉而明吉凶 […]• The sages instantiated the hexagrams in order to observe phenomenon (symbols), while the

Great Commentary clarifies the nature of omens […] (My translation) • 子曰 : 書不盡言 , 言不盡意 . 然則聖人之意 , 其不可見乎﹖子曰 : 聖人立象以盡意 , 設卦以盡情偽• The Master said: “literature does not exhaustively capture or bring to fulfilment speech,

speech does not exhaustively capture or fulfil meaning or intention. Thus, is it impossible for the sage’s meaning or intention to be presented? The Master said: “The sages instantiated the symbols in order to exhaustively capture or bring to fulfilment meaning or intention, and instantiated the hexagrams in order to exhaustively capture people’s real and unreal dispositions. (My translation)

• All the situations of the world are captured by the hexagrams; not only that, they are co-creative in the creation of meaning itself.

Thanks for listening!