Ernst Cassirer: Philosopher and Intellectual Historian

CASSIRER, Ernst 1874-1945 German philosopher and intellectual historian Ernst Cassirer, perhaps the most persistently underrated of modern German philosophers, was the pre-eminent representative of neo-Kantian and German idealist philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as one of the century’s greatest intellectual historians. He is best known for his monumental works on the rise of modern philosophy and science, on the philosophical foundations of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and for his philosophy of the ‘symbolic forms’ of human culture. Cassirer’s work is unique in twentieth century philosophy for the way in which it spans widely divergent fields of intellectual inquiry, transcending the petrified divisions of academic specialisation and providing a synoptic vision of the myriad objective manifestations of human culture by means of a comprehensive theory of symbolic formations. Writing in an era in which many philosophers were above all concerned to safeguard the autonomy of their discipline from the encroachments of the special sciences, Cassirer’s work demonstrates how it is possible to retain a unique, even privileged role for philosophical inquiry while avoiding the pitfalls of narrow specialisation and reactionary obscurantism. Perhaps in part because of his tendency to express his own most original insights in and through the words of others—this being indicative as much of his philosophical worldview as of his fundamentally modest and self-effacing personality—Cassirer’s writings have so far been granted neither the canonical status nor the exegetical attention bestowed upon that of his two most illustrious German philosophical contemporaries, *Husserl and *Heidegger. Nevertheless, his influence on a wide variety of intellectual fields, ranging from the history and philosophy of science and epistemology to aesthetics, philosophical and cultural anthropology, semiotics, structural linguistics and psychoanalysis, is remarkable, and the beginning of the twenty-first century is witnessing a considerable revival of interest in virtually every aspect of his encyclopaedic oeuvre. Cassirer was born in Breslau, Germany (today Wroclow, Poland) into a large and affluent Jewish family that was to gain prominence in the arts and academic community of Berlin in the early decades of the twentieth century. As a student he attended numerous universities, studying jurisprudence at Berlin and Leipzig, and German philosophy and literature at Heidelberg, Munich, and again at Berlin. It was while attending Georg *Simmel’s lecture course on Kant at Berlin in 1894 that Cassirer first heard of Hermann Cohen, leader of the so-called ‘Marburg School’ of neo-Kantianism (which also prominently included Paul Natorp), and he soon resolved to go to Marburg to study under Cohen. Having devoted himself to intensive studies of Cohen’s notoriously abstruse writings on Kant, as well as to studies in the foundations of mathematics and the natural sciences necessary for a proper appreciation of those writings, Cassirer arrived in Marburg in 1896, quickly establishing himself as Cohen’s most gifted disciple and privileged interlocutor. ‘I felt at once’, Cohen later recalled, ‘that this man had nothing to learn from me’. After Cohen’s death in 1918 and Natorp’s in 1924, Cassirer came to be regarded as the leading proponent of Marburg neo-Kantianism, with which his work is still quite properly identified today. Notwithstanding the extent to which his later works can be seen to depart from the positions of Cohen and Natorp, he maintained his fidelity to the Marburg School, which had always understood itself to be united by methodological rather than doctrinal ties. While Kant, Cohen and Natorp are doubtless his most crucial and abiding influences, characteristic of his thought in general is the way in which it weaves together elements drawn from an astonishingly rich variety of both classical and contemporary sources, including the work of philosophers, linguists, mathematicians, physicists, poets, and aestheticians, in order to produce a highly original and unified philosophical outlook. Other important influences thus include the likes of Leibniz, Vico, Goethe, Schiller, *Helmholtz, Humboldt, Hertz, Husserl, and Schweitzer. His work in turn exercised a significant influence upon the likes of Mikhail *Bakhtin, Hans Blumenberg, Rudolf *Carnap, Michel *Foucault, Peter Gay, Nelson Goodman, Alexandre Koyré, Suzanne Langer, Maurice *Merleau-Ponty, and Erwin Panofsky. Neo-Kantianism is little studied today, having been eclipsed in the 1920s and 30s by Lebensphilosophie, phenomenology, and logical empiricism. However, this movement, and the Marburg School in particular, exercised an enormous, even predominant influence upon German academic philosophy from around the 1870s up until the early years of the Weimar Republic. Famous above all for its concentration upon the epistemology (Erkenntniskritik) of the mathematical natural sciences—a reputation which meant that it was to fare badly in the anti-scientific climate of the Weimar years—the Marburg School’s influence stretched across fields as diverse as social pedagogy, jurisprudence, ancient history, sociology, critical theory, theology, and the formation of the ideology of German social democracy. Declaring their fidelity to the method rather than to the content of Kant’s critical philosophy, the Marburgers sought to revise his transcendental method of uncovering the a priori conditions of the possibility of empirical knowledge in response to the radical transformations in the foundations of the sciences taking place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Cohen and Natorp developed a powerful ‘genetic’ and ‘relativized’ theory of the synthetic a priori foundations of scientific cognition according to which the object of knowledge is actively generated within the ongoing historical process of empirical theory-formation, it was left largely to Cassirer to extend and refine this distinctive ‘logical idealist’ approach in response to developments in the foundations of logic, mathematics and physics—including *Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, and later, quantum mechanics. Importantly, Cassirer drew upon recent advances in the development of mathematics and mathematical logic in order to revise Kant’s functionalist (as opposed to abstractionist and substantialist) theory of concept-formation in such a way as to pose a fundamental challenge to both realist and empiricist theories of the foundations of the natural sciences. It was Cassirer, too, who most diligently and systematically developed the interpretation of the history of philosophy and science sketched out in Cohen’s writings, a task which he masterfully executed both in his earliest texts on Descartes and Leibniz, and in his monumental four-volume work Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit (‘The Problem of Knowledge in Philosophy and Science in the Modern Age’), the first two volumes of which were published in 1906 and 1907. This work in particular, the first to develop a detailed reading of the scientific revolution in terms of the so-called ‘mathematization of nature’, was to exercise a profound influence upon the seminal intellectual historians of the twentieth century (e.g., Burtt, Koyré, and Dijksterhuis), thus helping to found that discipline as we know it today. While the Marburger’s critical idealist approach to the philosophy of science was long held to have been superseded by the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle, recent developments in the field have led to a significant re-evaluation of this opinion and a rekindling of substantive interest in Cassirer’s early texts, his Substance and Function (Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff, 1910 trans. 1923) and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie, 1921 trans. 1923) in particular. Between 1906 and 1919 Cassirer lectured as Privatdozent at the University of Berlin. Despite his growing international reputation, the pervasive anti-Semitism of Wilhemine Germany meant that he was unable to secure a professorship until the more liberal years of the Weimar Republic. After the First World War he assumed the chair of philosophy at the newly established University of Hamburg, where he was ultimately elected Rector in 1929 (the first Jew to hold this post at a German university). During his years in Hamburg Cassirer was well served by the famous Library of the Cultural Sciences founded by Aby Warburg, which provided much of the empirical material for his hugely ambitious three-volume work The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 1923-29, trans. 1955-57). Jürgen *Habermas has called Cassirer ‘the last twentieth-century individual possessed of a universal culture’, pointing to his ‘expertise in logic and mathematics, the natural and human sciences, and the history of literature, art and religion’, and nowhere is this prodigious erudition more in evidence that in these magisterial tomes of the 1920s. Developing the theory of the functional nature of concept formation first systematically developed in his Substance and Function, Cassirer draws upon a breathtaking range of material taken from virtually every academic discipline in order to extend the Kantian ‘critique of reason’ to a more comprehensive ‘critique of culture’. In other words, he sets about investigating the conditions of the possibility and the principles of the formation not only of the exact and natural sciences, ethics, and aesthetics (the subject-matter of Kant’s three major works), but also of cultural domains such as language, mythology, religion, art, and technology. According to Cassirer, what all these relatively autonomous domains of culture have in common is that they each comprise unique ways of symbolically constituting a world of objective, meaningful reality, according to their own specific laws and principles of unity. The task of philosophy is not to align itself with any one of these cultural fields in particular, nor to show how one can be reduced to or derived from another, but rather to bring to light the functional unity of each according to the principles of their internal coherence, as well as to determine their respective place within the concrete totality of the symbolic forms of culture as a whole. Cassirer’s pioneering work in this field (i.e. that of the ‘philosophy of culture’ broadly understood) is not only a monumental achievement in itself, but is remarkable in that it prefigures many of the key developments in both European and Anglo-American philosophical thought after World War Two. In the spring of 1929 Cassirer participated in a legendary public disputation in Davos, Switzerland, with the then rising star of the German philosophical world, Martin Heidegger. Attended by a dazzling array of Europe’s leading contemporary and future philosophical luminaries, including Leon Brunschvicg, Rudolf Carnap, Jean Cavaillès, and Emmanuel *Levinas, this event is now regarded as representing a decisive ‘parting of the ways’ in twentieth-century thought. Framed in terms of a debate over the proper interpretation of Kant’s critical philosophy, the real crux of this disputation was a clash between two radically opposed visions of human existence and of the task of philosophy. Cassirer, one of the few public defenders of the Weimar Republic, emphasises man’s reason and self-legislative freedom, his ability to transcend the immanence of life and to participate in the infinite and the universal through the manifold forms of human culture, philosophy being understood in terms of a classically Kantian vision of the ‘infinite tasks of reason’. Heidegger, who breathes not a word about reason, instead foregrounds man’s essential and irremediable finitude, his ‘thrownness’ into a world of ‘idle chatter’, philosophy being called upon to rouse man from his inauthenticity and to confront him with the nullity of his existence and the hardness of his fate. Given the prevalent mood of yearning for novelty characteristic of the times, especially amongst the younger generation, it is perhaps unsurprising that it was Heidegger who was popularly taken to have carried the day. Participants wrote of how they felt they had borne witness to the end of one epoch and the beginning of another, with the liberal tradition of classical Enlightenment humanism represented by Cassirer giving way to a revolutionary new era heralded by Heidegger’s darkly compelling rhetoric. When, only four years later, Heidegger became one of the first rectors of a German university to publicly and enthusiastically proclaim his allegiance to *Hitler and National Socialism, that rhetoric quickly took on a cast less intriguingly foreboding than sheerly repellent, and Levinas was far from being the only one to reproach himself in later years for having preferred Heidegger at Davos. While the starkly contrasting philosophical and spiritual Weltanschauungen represented at Davos by Cassirer and Heidegger remain today as entrenched as ever, and the debate thereby initiated over the nature and function of reason unabated, the initial fervour in favour of Heidegger’s putative radicalism has long since yielded to a more nuanced philosophical appraisal, and it is arguably Cassirer rather than Heidegger whose thought continues to reveal a quite surprising philosophical contemporaneity. Leaving Germany soon after Hitler’s assumption of the chancellorship in 1933, Cassirer spent the remainder of his life in exile. He taught at All Souls College, Oxford between 1933 and 1935, and subsequently accepted a professorship at the University of Göteborg, Sweden. He taught at Yale University between 1941 and 1944, and finally at Columbia from 1944 to 1945, when he died of a heart attack. During these years Cassirer wrote numerous highly original and influential works, including The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, 1932 trans. 1951), Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics (Determinismus und Indeterminismus in der modernen Physik, 1936 trans. 1956), The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften, 1942 trans. 2000), An Essay on Man (1944), and The Myth of the State (1946). Damian Veal Other major works and collections of papers translated into English include Kant’s Life and Thought (Kants Leben und Lehre, 1918 trans. 1981), Language and Myth (Sprache und Mythos, 1925 trans. 1946), The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance, 1927 trans. 1963), The Platonic Renaissance in England (Die Platonische Renaissance in England, 1932 trans. 1953), The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science and History Since Hegel (1950, the fourth and final volume of Das Erkenntnisproblem, translated from the German manuscript of 1940), and Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935–1945 (1979). See: P.A. Schilpp ed., The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (1958); J.M. Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (1987); S.G. Lofts Ernst Cassirer: A 'Repetition' of Modernity (2000); Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (2000). PAGE 1