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Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945)

Cassirer argued that the human mind does not encounter reality directly; it constitutes its world through symbolic forms. Language, myth, religion, art, science — each is a distinct form of symbolic activity, a distinct way of organising experience into a meaningful world. No form is reducible to another; each has its own internal logic, its own mode of objectification, its own criteria of truth or rightness. The project extends Kant: where Kant asked how the categories of the understanding make experience possible, Cassirer asked how different symbolic forms make different kinds of experience possible. The result is a structural pluralism of symbolic worlds — many forms, each constitutive, none sovereign — that Cassirer developed across three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29) and condensed in An Essay on Man (1944), where he defined the human being as the animal symbolicum: the animal that creates symbols.

Life

Born 28 July 1874 in Breslau, German Empire (now Wrocław, Poland), into a prosperous Jewish family. Studied at the universities of Berlin, Leipzig, Heidelberg, and Marburg. At Marburg he worked under Hermann Cohen, the founder of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism — the tradition that read Kant not as setting limits to knowledge but as revealing the constitutive role of thought in the formation of experience. PhD at Marburg (1899).

Privatdozent at the University of Berlin (1906–19), where he produced the major study Substance and Function (1910) and the three-volume The Problem of Knowledge (1906–20), tracing the history of epistemology from the Renaissance through Kant. Appointed professor of philosophy at the newly founded University of Hamburg (1919), where he spent his most productive years. Elected rector of the University of Hamburg in 1929 — the first Jewish rector of a German university. The same year, he participated in the Davos disputation with Heidegger.

Emigrated from Germany in 1933, immediately after the Nazi seizure of power. Visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford (1933–35). Professor at the University of Göteborg, Sweden (1935–41), where he wrote The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942) in Swedish. Moved to the United States: Yale University (1941–44), then Columbia University (1944–45). Wrote An Essay on Man (1944) and The Myth of the State (1946, posthumous) in English. Died 13 April 1945 in New York, a month before the end of the war in Europe.

The philosophy of symbolic forms

The three volumes of Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1923–29) are Cassirer’s central work. The project begins from a dissatisfaction with Kant’s transcendental framework: Kant’s categories explain how scientific experience is constituted, but they do not explain language, myth, art, or religion — domains that are constitutive of human experience in ways that Kant’s framework leaves unaddressed. Cassirer’s extension: the categories are not fixed; there are multiple systems of symbolic formation, each constituting its own domain of experience.

Volume I: Language (1923). Language is not a transparent medium for transmitting pre-formed thoughts; it is a formative activity that constitutes the world it describes. The structure of a language — its categories of number, tense, spatial orientation, classification — shapes the experience of its speakers. Different languages carve the world differently, not as a defect but as a consequence of the formative character of symbolic activity. Cassirer traces the development of language from expressive and mimetic functions (the cry, the gesture) through analogical and relational functions to the fully symbolic — where the sign is distinguished from what it signifies and can function freely.

Volume II: Mythical Thought (1925). Myth is not primitive science — not a failed attempt at explanation later corrected by rational inquiry. It is a distinct symbolic form with its own mode of constituting experience. In mythical consciousness, the symbol and what it symbolises are not yet distinguished: the name is the thing, the image is the god, the ritual does not represent the event but is the event. The sacred and the profane are the fundamental categories, replacing the logical categories of identity and difference. Cassirer documents the internal logic of mythical thought — its treatment of space, time, number, and causation — as a coherent symbolic system, not as confusion.

Volume III: The Phenomenology of Knowledge (1929). Science constitutes its world through abstraction, law, and mathematical form. The history of science, which Cassirer had studied in Substance and Function, shows a progression from substance-concepts (things with fixed properties) to function-concepts (relations, laws, mathematical structures). Modern physics does not describe substances; it describes relational structures. This volume locates science as one symbolic form among others — the most abstract, but not for that reason the most fundamental.

The three volumes together establish a non-hierarchical plurality: language, myth, and science are each constitutive, each with its own internal logic, none reducible to another. Cassirer’s framework is explicitly pluralist — “the many symbolic forms cannot be derived from one root, nor reduced to one form” — but the pluralism is structural, not relativist: each form is answerable to its own criteria of coherence, and the philosopher’s task is to understand the logic of each, not to rank them.

The Davos debate

In March 1929, Cassirer and Heidegger met at the Davos Hochschulkurse — a series of university lectures in the Swiss Alps. The debate between them has been read as a confrontation between two visions of philosophy and, by extension, of European culture.

Cassirer defended the Enlightenment inheritance: reason, culture, and the creative capacity of symbolic forms as the grounds of human freedom. Philosophy’s task is to understand how the human mind constitutes meaningful worlds through its symbolic activity. Heidegger argued that Cassirer’s framework — the transcendental constitution of experience through symbolic forms — remains within the Kantian subject-object structure and cannot reach the question of Being. Finitude, anxiety, and the nothing are more fundamental than cultural production; philosophy must pass through these to ask its proper question.

The debate was not conclusive — Cassirer and Heidegger were asking different questions. But the historical context gives it a retrospective weight: four years later, Heidegger briefly aligned himself with the Nazi regime as rector of Freiburg, while Cassirer — Jewish and committed to the humanistic Enlightenment — was forced into exile. Whether the Davos debate was a philosophical confrontation with political implications, or a political confrontation in philosophical form, has been debated since. Peter Gordon’s Continental Divide (2010) gives the fullest historical account.

Where Cassirer stops

Cassirer’s project translated unevenly into postwar philosophy. In the Anglophone world, Goodman’s Languages of Art (1968) and Ways of Worldmaking (1978) took up the structural pluralism of symbol systems but stripped the neo-Kantian inheritance — Goodman’s irrealism has no transcendental subject, no constitutive forms, no developmental trajectory. What was lost in the translation is contested: Goodman gained analytical precision (syntactic density, semantic repleteness, exemplification) but lost the historical depth and the claim that symbolic forms are conditions of experience, not just descriptions of it. On the continental side, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism developed accounts of mythical and linguistic systems with surface family-resemblance to Cassirer’s symbolic forms but with substantively different commitments — Lévi-Strauss’s structures are unconscious and universal, Cassirer’s are culturally constituted and historically variable. The relationship between the two projects is only partly worked out. The Cassirer revival of the 1990s–2000s (Krois, Paetzold, Lofts) attempted to recover what both the Anglophone and structuralist lineages had dropped.

The neo-Kantian framework is both the source of Cassirer’s power and the constraint his successors have tried to escape. The symbolic forms are constitutive — they make experience possible — which places the framework within the transcendental tradition: the forms are conditions of experience, not features of reality in itself. Heidegger’s Davos objection — that Cassirer cannot reach the question of Being because his framework presupposes the subject-object structure — has been influential. John Michael Krois and others in the Cassirer revival of the 1990s–2000s argued that the symbolic-forms programme can be freed from the transcendental framework by grounding it in embodied expression and gesture rather than in Kantian constitution. Whether this revision preserves what was distinctive about Cassirer’s project or transforms it into something else is an open question.

The treatment of myth has drawn the sharpest criticism. Cassirer presents the three volumes as a developmental sequence — from expressive (myth) through representational (language) to purely significative (science) symbolic functions. The sequence is not normative in principle — myth is a genuine symbolic form, not a deficiency — but the developmental framing invites the reading that myth is a primitive stage superseded by science. This tension between structural pluralism (all forms are equal) and developmental teleology (science is the most advanced) runs through the work and has not been resolved in Cassirer’s favour.

Key works

See also: Symbolic forms · Langer · Goodman · Kant · Heidegger