Ernst Cassirer
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Ernst Cassirer (July 28, 1874 – April 13, 1945) was a German philosopher. Trained within the Neo-Kantian Marburg School, he initially followed his mentor Hermann Cohen in attempting to supply an idealistic philosophy of science; after Cohen's death, he developed a theory of symbolism, and used it to expand phenomenology of knowledge into a more general philosophy of culture. He is one of the leading 20th century advocates of philosophical idealism. His major work, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (3 vols., 1923–1929) is considered a benchmark for a philosophy of culture, later 'summarized' as Essay on Man. He is also known for the posthumously published The Myth of the State (1946).
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Biography
Cassirer was born in Breslau (Wrocław), Silesia, into a Jewish family. He studied literature and philosophy at the University of Berlin. After long years as Privatdozent at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin (Cassirer turned down the offer of a visiting professorship at Harvard which he and his wife considered obscure and remote), he was elected to a chair of Philosophy at the newly-founded University of Hamburg in 1919, where he lectured until 1933, and supervised the doctoral thesis of Leo Strauss, among others. Because he was Jewish, Cassirer was forced to leave Germany when the Nazis came to power.
After leaving Germany he found first refuge as a lecturer in Oxford 1933–1935; he was then professor at Gothenburg University 1935–1941. When Cassirer—who considered Sweden too unsafe by then—tried to go to the United States and specifically to Harvard; the university turned him down because he had turned Harvard down thirty years earlier. Thus, he first had to work as a visiting professor at Yale University, New Haven 1941–1943, and then moved to Columbia University in New York City, where he lectured from 1943 until his death in 1945. As he had been naturalized in Sweden, he died a Swedish citizen.
His son, Heinz Cassirer, was also a Kantian scholar.
Thought
Spengler
Cassirer opposed the Prussian nationalism of Oswald Spengler (1880–1936). Instead of being apolitical, Cassirer applauded the rise of the Weimar Republic, while Spengler criticized parliamentary and constitutional rule, as well as individual rights, as un-German. Spengler never became a university academic, but his Decline of the West (1918) was a best-seller. Spengler saw technology as a means to transform Western society into a unified collective, while Cassirer was suspicious of technology's ability to exalt the group over the individual. Spengler saw civilization as the decline of culture, according to the physical law of entropy, while Cassirer disagreed with the application of physics to philosophy. Though both thinkers were inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's concept of the symbol, Spengler wrote about cultural souls that can only be observed, not created, while Cassirer saw symbols as being created by individuals. After the rise of Nazism, Cassirer became more committed to changing society and more political. Although Spengler himself opposed the Nazis, Cassirer saw Spengler's anti-liberal philosophy as contributing to Nazi goals.
Enlightenment
Cassirer was a defender of the notion that reason's self-realization leads to liberation and human and civil rights. Mazlish (2000) argues that in Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (The Philosophy of the Enlightenment) (1932) Cassirer approached his subject as an idealist, interested only in the analysis of ideas and their influence, without regard to the intellectual, political, or social context in which they were produced. Nevertheless, his interest in the use of symbols and the possibility of new techniques for the transmission of ideas links him to contemporary cultural studies.
Heidegger
When Cassirer left Germany in 1933, he left his antagonist Martin Heidegger to dominate postwar Continental philosophy.
Works
In 1921 Cassirer, stimulated by Einstein's general theory of relativity, addressed the subject of scientific epistemology. Cassirer found that Einstein's theory gave overwhelming support to his neo-Kantian conception of knowledge which rejected the fixed and embraced the evolutionary development of ideational structures. Moritz Schlick responded (foreshadowing logical empiricism) with a review of Cassirer's book in which he argued that the general theory of relativity in fact refutes Kantian thought in all its permutations. But Cassirer soon extended his thoughts on Einstein's theory to a more general relativity of "symbolic form": aesthetic, ethical, religious, and scientific. He spent the rest of his career elaborating his ideas regarding symbolic forms.
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
- “That self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophical inquiry appears to be generally acknowledged” --Essay on Man
Cassirer was both a genuine philosopher and an historian of philosophy. His major work, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (3 vols., 1923–1929) is considered a benchmark for a philosophy of culture. Man, says Cassirer later in his more popular Essay on Man (1944), is a "symbolic animal". Whereas animals perceive their world by instincts and direct sensory perception, man has created his own universe of symbolic meaning that structures and shapes his perception of reality - and only thus, for instance, can conceive of utopias and therefore progress in the form of shared human culture. In this, Cassirer owes much to Kant's transcendental idealism. For Cassirer, the human world is created through symbolic forms of thought which are linguistic, scholarly, scientific, and artistic, sharing and extending through communication, individual understanding, discovery and expression.
The Myth of the State
Cassirer's last work, The Myth of the State (1946), was published posthumously; at one level it is an attempt to understand the intellectual origins of Nazi Germany. Cassirer sees Nazi Germany as a society in which the dangerous power of myth is not checked or subdued by superior forces. The book discusses the opposition of logos and mythos in Greek thought, Plato's Republic, the medieval theory of the state, Machiavelli, Thomas Carlyle's writings on hero worship, the racial theories of Arthur de Gobineau, and Hegel. Cassirer claimed that in 20th century politics there was a return, with the passive acquiescence of Martin Heidegger, to the irrationality of myth, and in particular to a belief that there is such a thing as destiny. Of this passive acquiescence, Cassirer says that in departing from Husserl's belief in an objective, logical basis for philosophy, Heidegger attenuated the ability of philosophy to oppose the resurgence of myth in German politics of the 1930s.
Partial bibliography
- Substance and Function (1910), English translation 1923 (at archive.org)
- Kant's Life and Thought (1918), English translation 1981
- Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29), English translation 1953–1957
- Language and Myth (1925), English translation (1946) by Susanne K. Langer
- Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), English translation 1951
- The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942), English translation 2000 by S.G. Lofts (previously translated in 1961 as The Logic of the Humanities)
- Essay on Man (written and published in English) (1944)
- The Myth of the State (written and published in English) (posthumous) (1946)
- The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel (1950) online edition
- Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935-1945 ed. by Donald Phillip Verene (1981)
See also
