An Essay on ManAn Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture

by ErnstCassirer

Yale University Press, 1944

Ernst Cassirer (1874--1945) was a Jewish German intellectual historian andphilosopher, the originator of the ``philosophy of symbolic forms.''  After adistinguished teaching career in Germany, he fled the Nazis, first to Oxford,then Goteborg, then finally Yale, which gives an annual series of lectures inphilosophy in his honor; he died as a visiting professor at Columbia.  Havingread and admired his historical works, particularly The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Iwas curious about his own doctrines.  The summary of them included in hissemi-historical book The Myth of theState left me quite confused: reading it gave me no sense of what asymbolic form was, except that it had something to do with what Kant calledforms of apperception (no surprise: Cassirer was a neo-Kantian).  Similarly, onthat basis I couldn't have told you what Cassirer thought a myth was, though ithad something to do with emotions whose ``motor-expressions'' were rituals.

Now, I don't think I'm a stupid man, or a bad reader.  In the lineof professional duty I've read a great deal on subjects which are fairly trickyconceptually, like mathematical logic and quantum field theory and learningtheory, and it at least felt like I understood them.  And I'm notnormally blocked by dense prose, either.  Nonetheless, what I got from thosepassages was a diffused feeling of frustrated incomprehension: therewas something there, and I just wasn't getting it.  (I may add that,pursuing my hobby of psychoceramics, I've read agreat deal of dense prose where there really isn't anything to begrasped, and the difference is palpable.)  Such befuddlement is, of course, thereason why introductory books are written, so I started looking around for anintroduction to Cassirer.  Lo: the man wrote one himself, An Essay onMan. The preface tells us it was intended for those who hadn't Germanenough to tackle the three volumes of his The Philosophy of SymbolicForms, supposedly even for those who aren't scholars.  Having read it,matters are a bit clearer, but not much.

The start is good.  There is, Cassirer declares, a ``crisis in man'sknowledge of himself.''  I dare say it takes a philosopher, perhaps even aGerman philosopher, to deem the absence of an adequate and generallyaccepted philosophical anthropology a ``crisis,'' but this dramatization isharmless, and Cassirer has a real point.

No former age was ever in such a favorable position withregard to the sources of our knowledge of human nature.  Psychology, ethnology,anthropology, and history have amassed an astonishingly rich and constantlyincreasing body of facts.  Our technical instruments for observation andexperimentation have been immensely improved, and our analyses have becomesharper and more penetrating.  We appear, nevertheless, not yet to have found amethod for the mastery and organization of this material....  Unless we succeedin finding a clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can have noreal insight into the general character of human culture; we shall remain lostin a mass of disconnected and disintegrated data which seem to lack allconceptual unity. [End of ch. 1]

Slightly more Englishly: it'd help if we had a big picture about whatpeople are like, and why they are that way.  What Cassirer set out to do was tomaster the actual facts of the relevant particular sciences (in which, verysoundly, he included biology, logic, mathematics and physics, in addition tothose in the quotation above), and to produce a synthesis, a body of generaldoctrine about human beings and human culture in light of which the discoveriesof the sciences, and the existence of the sciences, would make sense.It was an ambitious and worthwhile undertaking, though Cassirer was engaginglymodest about it: note that his subtitle says a philosophy of culture,not the. There is also a pleasing whiff of the Enlightenment about theproject (and, of course, the title).

``Symbolic form'' is still maddeningly vague, but my impression is that itis almost, but not quite, a ``universe of discourse'' in the sense of logic.Tentatively, I'd suggest it be defined as ``a subject matter plus patterns ofemploying symbols to deal with it.''  I can sort of see how this might berelated to a form of apperception, but the details aren't so much left vague inthe Essay as non-existent.  The canonical symbolic forms Cassirerdiscusses are: myth, language, art, religion, history and science.  I thinkCassirer would have said that people sometimes have ``mythic''perceptions, and artistic (``aesthetic'') ones, but probably not scientific orhistorical ones.  Mythic or magical perceptions would be ones colored by avaguely-described vague feeling that everything is alive, interconnected andsignificant.  (I have severe doubts about that: the people who came up with themyth of Armageddon don't seem to have thought of themselves as fused with theAdversary in an all-encompassing web of life.)  The material on aesthetics wasvery interesting, but mostly because Cassirer was very good at explaining whatothers had thought about the puzzles, and what the problems with their ideaswere, his positive ideas being quite impenetrable to me.  ``Religion'' hereblurs into ethics, which may or may not be adequate; in any case it's a veryinterior sort of religion.  (Perhaps cultic activities were to fallunder ``myth''.)  Even when he talks about history he's mostly talking aboutthe historian's ``bringing the past to life,'' illustrated by our understandingthe motives of particular persons.  Human beings as social animals donot interest him --- though presumably the means we use to order our lives incommon qualify as symbolic forms within the meaning of the act.  The chapter onscience is mostly devoted to the idea that science is a means of bringingconceptual order to our experience of the physical world, and to illustrationsfrom the development of mathematics and its applications.  (At one pointCassirer says that material objects are composed of our sense impressions; butI think he meant that our representations of material objects are constructionsor inferences from sense impressions.)

``Symbol,'' naturally a key and much-employed term, is never clearly definedor described.  Symbols are to be distinguished from mere ``signs,'' but Icouldn't tell you how.  Animals are allowed signs, but symbols are reserved forus forked radishes.  I think the idea is that a given symbol has many possiblemeanings, while a given sign has only one.  Unfortunately, the example Cassirergives in this connection (ch. 3) is that multiple phrases can have the samereference, which is not only irrelevant to how many senses a symbol can have(in different contexts), but is even true of conditioned stimuli, which hetakes to be prototypical signs.  Cassirer ignores the problem of how togradually evolve symbolic capacity in merely signing animals (if the chasmis that profound).  To be fair, at the time macromutations were stillbeing defended by Goldschmidt, so he had a biological authority for big suddenjumps.  Likewise, he has some very odd-seeming comments about language, thebrain, the effects of brain-lesions, etc., which seem to derive from the German school of holistic neuropsychology, nowquite discredited.  But clearly his impulse to respect what the brain-fanciersand the animal-trainers had discovered was eminently sound.  (I can't help butwonder whether Dennett will looksimilarly antiquated in fifty years.)  I am uncomfortable with his statementsabout how symbols exist in a parallel world to the merely physical universe:the real problem, I should think, is to explain how physical objects and eventscan come to be symbolic --- how semantics emerges from physics (taking bothvery generally).

I learned a good deal from reading An Essay on Man, and if I'dread it three years ago I'd have learned a hell of a lot.  (Since then mysubjects have over-lapped with Cassirer's more than I'd suspected.)  Cassirer'serudition was profound, and he is always exceptional at explaining what otherpeople thought, and both acute and generous about their merits and defects.The problem is, I learnt very little about Cassirer's ideas, and Istill don't know whether this is because he's bad at self-exposition, orwhether I'm just too dumb to twig him.

ix + 237 pp. (Yale UP)/294 pp. (Doubleday), no illustrations, bibliographicfootnotes, index of names and subjects (analytical for subjects)
Anthropology and Archaeology /Art /Languages and Linguistics /Mind, Consciousness, etc. /Philosophy /Philosophy of Science /Religion
Currently in print as a trade paperback (1962), ISBN 0-300-00034-0, US$16;out of print as a pocket-sized paperback (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954);out of print as a hardback.  LoC B3216.C33 E84 November 1999

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