Ernst Cassirer Essay Research Paper Ernst Cassirer

Ernst Cassirer Essay, Research Paper

Ernst Cassirer ( 1874 & # 8211 ; 1945 ) was a Judaic German rational historiographer and philosopher, the conceiver of the & # 8220 ; doctrine of symbolic forms. & # 8221 ; After a distinguished instruction calling in Germany, he fled the Nazis, foremost to Oxford, so Goteborg, so eventually Yale, which gives an one-year series of talks in doctrine in his award ; he died as a visiting professor at Columbia. Having read and admired his historical plants, peculiarly The Doctrine of the Enlightenment, I was funny about his ain philosophies. The sum-up of them included in his semi-historical book The Myth of the State left me rather confused: reading it gave me no sense of what a symbolic signifier was, except that it had something to make with what Kant called signifiers of apperception ( no surprise: Cassirer was a neo-Kantian ) . Similarly, on that footing I couldn & # 8217 ; Ts have told you what Cassirer thought a myth was, though it had something to make with emotions whose & # 8220 ; motor-expressions & # 8221 ; were rites.

Now, I don & # 8217 ; t think I & # 8217 ; m a stupid adult male, or a bad reader. In the line of professional responsibility I & # 8217 ; ve read a great trade on topics which are reasonably slippery conceptually, like mathematical logic and quantum field theory and larning theory, and it at least felt like I understood them. And I & # 8217 ; m non usually blocked by dense prose, either. However, what I got from those transitions was a diffused feeling of defeated incomprehension: there was something at that place, and I merely wasn & # 8217 ; t acquiring it. ( I may add that, prosecuting my avocation of psychoceramics, I & # 8217 ; ve read a great trade of dense prose where there truly isn & # 8217 ; t anything to be grasped, and the difference is tangible. ) Such bewilderment is, of class, the ground why introductory books are written, so I started looking about for an debut to Cassirer. Lo: the adult male wrote one himself, An Essay on Man. The foreword tells us it was intended for those who hadn & # 8217 ; t German sufficiency to undertake the three volumes of his The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, purportedly even for those who aren & # 8217 ; t bookmans. Having read it, affairs are a spot clearer, but non much.

The start is good. There is, Cassirer declares, a & # 8220 ; crisis in adult male & # 8217 ; s cognition of himself. & # 8221 ; I dare state it takes a philosopher, possibly even a German philosopher, to hold the absence of an adequate and by and large accepted philosophical anthropology a & # 8220 ; crisis, & # 8221 ; but this dramatisation is harmless, and Cassirer has a existent point.

No former age was of all time in such a favourable place with respect to the beginnings of our cognition of human nature. Psychology, ethnology, anthropology, and history have amassed an amazingly rich and invariably increasing organic structure of facts. Our proficient instruments for observation and experimentation have been vastly improved, and our analyses have become sharper and more acute. We appear, however, non yet to hold found a method for the command and organisation of this stuff & # 8230 ; . Unless we win in happening a hint of Ariadne to take us out of this labyrinth, we can hold no existent penetration into the general character of human civilization ; we shall stay lost in a mass of staccato and disintegrated informations which seem to miss all conceptual integrity. [ End of ch. 1 ]

Slightly more Englishly: it & # 8217 ; d aid if we had a large image about what people are like, and why they are that manner. What Cassirer set out to make was to get the hang the existent facts of the relevant peculiar scientific disciplines ( in which, really soundly, he included biological science, logic, mathematics and natural philosophies, in add-on to those in the citation above ) , and to bring forth a synthesis, a organic structure of general philosophy about human existences and human civilization in visible radiation of which the finds of the scientific disciplines, and the being of the scientific disciplines, would do sense. It was an ambitious and worthwhile project, though Cassirer was winsomely modest about it: note that his caption says a doctrine of civilization, non the. There is besides a delighting puff of the Enlightenment about the undertaking ( and, of class, the rubric ) .

& # 8220 ; Symbolic form & # 8221 ; is still maddeningly obscure, but my feeling is that it is about, but non rather, a & # 8220 ; existence of discourse & # 8221 ; in the sense of logic. Tentatively, I & # 8217 ; d propose it be defined as & # 8220 ; a capable affair plus forms of using symbols to cover with it. & # 8221 ; I can screen of see how this might be related to a signifier of apperception, but the inside informations aren & # 8217 ; t so much left vague in the Essay as non-existent. The canonical symbolic signifiers Cassirer Dis

pests are: myth, linguistic communication, art, faith, history and scientific discipline. I think Cassirer would hold said that people sometimes have “mythic” perceptual experiences, and artistic ( “aesthetic” ) 1s, but likely non scientific or historical 1s. Mythic or charming perceptual experiences would be 1s colored by a vaguely-described vague feeling that everything is alive, interrelated and important. ( I have terrible uncertainties about that: the people who came up with the myth of Armageddon don’t seem to hold thought of themselves as fused with the Adversary in an across-the-board web of life. ) The stuff on aesthetics was really interesting, but largely because Cassirer was really good at explicating what others had thought about the mystifiers, and what the jobs with their thoughts were, his positive thoughts being rather impenetrable to me. “Religion” here blurs into moralss, which may or may non be equal ; in any instance it’s a really interior kind of faith. ( Possibly cultic activities were to fall under “myth” . ) Even when he talks about history he’s largely speaking about the historian’s “bringing the yesteryear to life, ” illustrated by our understanding the motivations of peculiar individuals. Human existences as societal animate beings do non involvement him — though presumptively the agency we use to order our lives in common qualify as symbolic signifiers within the significance of the act. The chapter on scientific discipline is largely devoted to the thought that scientific discipline is a agency of conveying conceptual order to our experience of the physical universe, and to illustrations from the development of mathematics and its applications. ( At one point Cassirer says that stuff objects are composed of our sense feelings ; but I think he meant that our representations of stuff objects are buildings or illations from sense feelings. )

& # 8220 ; Symbol, & # 8221 ; of course a cardinal and much-employed term, is ne’er clearly defined or described. Symbols are to be distinguished from mere & # 8220 ; marks, & # 8221 ; but I couldn & # 8217 ; t state you how. Animals are allowed marks, but symbols are reserved for us forked radishes. I think the thought is that a given symbol has many possible significances, while a given mark has merely one. Unfortunately, the illustration Cassirer gives in this connexion ( ch. 3 ) is that multiple phrases can hold the same mention, which is non merely irrelevant to how many senses a symbol can hold ( in different contexts ) , but is even true of learned stimulations, which he takes to be archetypal marks. Cassirer ignores the job of how to bit by bit germinate symbolic capacity in simply subscribing animate beings ( if the chasm is that profound ) . To be just, at the clip macromutations were still being defended by Goldschmidt, so he had a biological authorization for large sudden leap. Likewise, he has some really odd-seeming remarks about linguistic communication, the encephalon, the effects of brain-lesions, etc. , which seem to deduce from the German school of holistic physiological psychology, now rather discredited. But clearly his urge to esteem what the brain-fanciers and the animal-trainers had discovered was eminently sound. ( I can & # 8217 ; t assist but inquire whether Dennett will look likewise antiquated in 50 old ages. ) I am uncomfortable with his statements about how symbols exist in a parallel universe to the simply physical existence: the existent job, I should believe, is to explicate how physical objects and events can come to be symbolic & # 8212 ; how semantics emerges from natural philosophies ( taking both really by and large ) .

I learned a good trade from reading An Essay on Man, and if I & # 8217 ; d read it three old ages ago I & # 8217 ; vitamin Ds have learned a snake pit of a batch. ( Since so my topics have over-lapped with Cassirer & # 8217 ; s more than I & # 8217 ; vitamin D suspected. ) Cassirer & # 8217 ; s eruditeness was profound, and he is ever exceeding at explicating what other people thought, and both acute and generous about their virtues and defects. The job is, I learnt really small about Cassirer & # 8217 ; s thoughts, and I still don & # 8217 ; t cognize whether this is because he & # 8217 ; s bad at self-exposition, or whether I & # 8217 ; m merely excessively dense to twig him.

Bibliography

nine + 237 pp. ( Yale UP ) /294 pp. ( Doubleday ) , no illustrations, bibliographic footers, index of names and topics ( analytical for topics )

Anthropology and Archaeology / Art / Languages and Linguistics / Mind, Consciousness, etc. / Philosophy / Philosophy of Science / Religion

Presently in print as a trade paper-back book ( 1962 ) , ISBN 0-300-00034-0, US $ 16 ; out of print as a minor paper-back book ( Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954 ) ; out of print as a hardcover. LoC B3216.C33 E8