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This chapter presents the object of philosophy according to Cassirer—the dialectic of life and spirit. The object of philosophy in another sense is itself. Philosophy asks itself what it is, does, and hopes to achieve. A remarkable portion of the early texts of the fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is concerned with what philosophy is and how it functions. Understanding what philosophy is, for Cassirer, is an essential part of the activity of philosophy. The activity of philosophy can be understood through its various components: its presuppositions, starting point, method, goal, and impulse. These components are integrally related; strict divisions between them are artificial. The most revealing and new claim Cassirer makes about philosophy in these early texts, however, is that philosophy is not a symbolic form.

The presentation of Cassirer’s system of symbolic formation, in this chapter, is different from most other presentations, in that the chapter first lays out his system straightforwardly, without discussing the critiques at each juncture. The presentation focuses on the central concept of Cassirer’s philosophy, the symbol and the symbolic, and adumbrates the meaning of this phenomenon following rather unorthodox avenues. The presentation of the different symbolic forms is exhaustive enough to get a grasp of Cassirer’s philosophical system and its meaning as a transcendental critique of culture. This systematic sketch clarifies Cassirer’s symbolic idealism, the overall thesis that the world is mediated through symbolic forms.

This chapter discusses how Ernst Cassirer traced the powers of symbolic form within the mythic origin of thinking. Nowhere in his studies does Cassirer label the archetypes of mythical thinking with Western concepts, however they mesmerized him in a way that calls him to see the human subject immersed in the world of myth. Based on an analysis of Cassirer's Myth of the State, this chapter concludes that myth carries a staying power throughout people's lives and within symbolic forms.

This chapter discusses the specialist producers of symbolic forms and their social role form the perspective of the debate about intellectuals. It argues that the operation and control by specialists of the systems of social communication, and thus the social distance and distinction between those who produce symbolic forms and those who consume or appropriate them, are an inevitable corollary of the general process of specialization that characterizes modernity. It is for this reason that post-Enlightenment social theory has been continually concerned with the problem of to think about and evaluate the social role of these ‘intellectuals’.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the philosophy of symbolic forms devised by Ernst Cassirer. Much of Cassirer's work has been neglected in the philosophical realm. His An Essay on Man, for example, has been reduced to a facile, optimistic humanism in which some kind of comprehensive elaboration of the many diverse symbolic forms belonging to humanity could have been developed. This book traces the major questions and ideas integral to understanding Cassirer's work and their relevance in contemporary critical and affirmative political philosophy.

This chapter traces the trajectory of Ernst Cassirer's intellectual thought and his unique relationship to thinkers in the tradition of German Idealism. It examines how Cassirer reworked the schema and idea of synthetic judgment in the work of Immanuel Kant to enable the formulation of a sophisticated philosophy of symbolic forms that is both ideational and regulative. This chapter also evaluates how language in symbolic form operates in Cassirer's philosophy through universal applicability and vivification.

This chapter examines philosophers' view on the issue concerning symbolic forms and the unfinished project of modernity. Herbert Marcuse has developed a critique that takes note of the ways in which life in the advanced industrial world has been symbolically flattened into a one-dimensional logic that keeps a totalitarian system of administration in place such that the spheres of economy, politics, and society fuel a larger system of warfare. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer proffered a careful analysis of how enlightenment has been bled of its progressive aspirations and rendered into a myth perpetuating global deception and dominion.

This book is a survey of the papers that led to the publication of a volume of twelve of Cassirer's essays and lectures from the last decade of his life, Symbol, Myth, and Culture. These were pieces in which Cassirer summarized and introduced to new audiences, in Sweden and principally in the United States, his conception of culture and symbolic form. Most prominent among the papers remained two manuscripts marked as an unpublished text of a fourth volume to his three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, published in the 1920s and translated into English in the 1950s. The first of these three volumes concerns language, the second, mythical thought, and the third is a phenomenology of knowledge, showing the genesis of scientific thought from pretheoretical expressive and representational functions of consciousness.

The fourth chapter shows how Ernst Cassirer fulfilled Warburg’s vision for Hamburg as a city of serious scholarship and validated the scholarly utility of his library, the latter of which would bring Warburg out of his wartime depression. This chapter traces Cassirer’s intellectual origins in Marburg neo-Kantianism under the tutelage of Hermann Cohen to his transformation to become the author of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, a multivolume work that found its intellectual home in the Warburg library. Through an examination of Cassirer’s interwar works, this chapter argues how the relationship between Warburg and Cassirer could be an antidote to Warburg’s mental struggle, and that Cassirer’s work reflected their shared scholarly enterprise. Though Cassirer expanded Kant’s critical philosophical lens to include other symbolic forms, and Warburg struggled to make logical sense of irrationality, both balanced what was lost and gained in the transition between reason and myth.

This chapter examines how colonial legacy was parasitically infected with a white consciousness that established itself though a symbolic form of anti-black racism. It discusses the work of Steve Biko to relate the ways in which white consciousness has fashioned a system of apartheid in South Africa and forestalled the creation of a black consciousness. It explores the work of Paget Henry and extends the notion of revolution beyond the acquisition of state power and toward a reconstituted humanity in a triple sense.

This chapter, which examines the treatment of philosophy and history in Ernst Cassirer's theory of symbolic forms, analyzes the nature of history as a symbolic form, how history became a rigorous knowledge, and the essential methodological and historical steps of the phenomenology of historical knowledge sketched by Cassirer. It also evaluates the function of history in the final synthesis of the Cassirerian system, his philosophical anthropology.

This chapter, which analyzes the foundational philosophy of Ernst Cassirer's The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, reveals that Cassirer's account of the origin of language is incoherent on his own terms. It suggests that the model used by Cassirer in explaining the relation between nature and culture is one of the few philosophically interesting designs that have been advanced for resolving this issue.

This chapter examines Ernst Cassirer's theses concerning the victory of Fascism in Germany proposed in his book The Myth of the State. It aims to resolve the incompatibility of the pluralism of symbolic forms and Cassirer's commitment to the ideal of Enlightenment that rules out genuine relativism, and to explain why Cassirer did not write on ethics and did not even include ethics among the different symbolic forms. The chapter suggests that the kernel of Cassirer's philosophy is the notion of a fully developed “free and autonomous personality” or “hero of Enlightenment.”

This chapter, which focuses on the metaphysics of Ernst Cassirer, analyzes whether Cassirer has a metaphysics in the sense of having a doctrine of being, and examines the meaning of his “metaphysics of symbolic forms.” It suggests that Cassirer did not engage in a theory of being or in metaphysics in the traditional sense, and that he believed that all earlier theories of metaphysics were faulty inasmuch as they took some aspect of reality and declared it to be ultimate, and as a result became one-sided.

Whether there has been a transition to something new in what it is possible to think remains to be seen. In the absence of such a transition, we are unlikely to see significant changes in the conditions of rule. If indeed capitalism is a spent force, then economic decline will accelerate and material inequality will increase. Short of a complete collapse, established conditions of rule will be reinforced—the mighty frame ever mightier, the international society of modern state-nations shows no signs of fading away. As migration dilutes blood ties and multiplies languages in daily use, nations depend all the more on territory for their social coherence and emotional appeal. That sovereignty is more difficult to locate spatially only illustrates the effects of modernist functional differentiation, which does not displace space or overlay it so much as penetrate the immediacy of place, every place, stealthily, by making itself indispensable.