Post by Admin on Mar 28, 2021 16:12:25 GMT
The Symbolic Animal
Adam Kirsch
The philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s most timely insight is that even in a scientific age, people are prone to magical, mystical thinking.
April 8, 2021 issue
www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/04/08/ernst-cassirer-symbolic-animal/
The appearance of a new English translation of Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms marks the culmination of an unlikely intellectual revival. Cassirer’s three-volume magnum opus, first published in Germany between 1923 and 1929, was translated into English by Ralph Manheim in the 1950s, when its author’s reputation was in decline. For a long time thereafter, it didn’t seem the book would ever need retranslating. Interwar German thought exercised an enormous influence in the late-twentieth-century US, from Martin Heidegger’s existentialism to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School to the Marxist mysticism of Walter Benjamin. But the apocalyptic radicalism that made these thinkers so fascinating—the product of a period that felt like, and in a sense really was, the end of the world—is absent in Cassirer.
Instead, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms focuses unfashionably on the power and progress of the human mind. Drawing on an exceptionally wide range of sources—in linguistics, anthropology, religion, psychology, math, and physics, as well as philosophy—Cassirer argues that the classic Aristotelian definition of the human being as a rational animal is wrong, or at least incomplete. Instead we should think of ourselves as “symbolic animals,” since ratiocination is only one expression of the human instinct to think in symbols.
Art, myth, and language are also forms of thinking, Cassirer insists, just as much as philosophy and science. “Each of them creates its own symbolic configurations, which if not of the same kind…are, nevertheless, equal as to their spiritual origin,” he writes in the introduction to the first volume. “None of these configurations can simply be reduced to, or derived from, the others; rather, each of them…constitutes its own aspect of the ‘actual.’”
The three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms focus on language, myth, and science respectively, offering fascinating, if necessarily fragmentary and speculative, accounts of how each develops in the direction of increasing freedom and universality. This essentially affirmative view was “out of tune with its time,” as Peter E. Gordon writes in his preface to the new edition. Yet Cassirer knew the darkness of the time as well as anyone. Born in 1874, he became a leading figure in German philosophy before World War I, though his Jewishness kept him from being appointed to a professorial chair until 1919. But his academic career was cut short in 1933, when the Nazis, as one of their first acts, prohibited Jews from teaching in universities.
Cassirer and his wife quickly fled the country, and he spent the next dozen years as an émigré, moving from post to post in England, Sweden, and finally the US. He was teaching at Columbia when he died of a heart attack on the street near 116th and Broadway in April 1945, one day after FDR. Cassirer was laid to rest in a Jewish cemetery in Paramus, New Jersey—a destination the German mandarin could never have imagined.
Adam Kirsch
The philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s most timely insight is that even in a scientific age, people are prone to magical, mystical thinking.
April 8, 2021 issue
www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/04/08/ernst-cassirer-symbolic-animal/
The appearance of a new English translation of Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms marks the culmination of an unlikely intellectual revival. Cassirer’s three-volume magnum opus, first published in Germany between 1923 and 1929, was translated into English by Ralph Manheim in the 1950s, when its author’s reputation was in decline. For a long time thereafter, it didn’t seem the book would ever need retranslating. Interwar German thought exercised an enormous influence in the late-twentieth-century US, from Martin Heidegger’s existentialism to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School to the Marxist mysticism of Walter Benjamin. But the apocalyptic radicalism that made these thinkers so fascinating—the product of a period that felt like, and in a sense really was, the end of the world—is absent in Cassirer.
Instead, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms focuses unfashionably on the power and progress of the human mind. Drawing on an exceptionally wide range of sources—in linguistics, anthropology, religion, psychology, math, and physics, as well as philosophy—Cassirer argues that the classic Aristotelian definition of the human being as a rational animal is wrong, or at least incomplete. Instead we should think of ourselves as “symbolic animals,” since ratiocination is only one expression of the human instinct to think in symbols.
Art, myth, and language are also forms of thinking, Cassirer insists, just as much as philosophy and science. “Each of them creates its own symbolic configurations, which if not of the same kind…are, nevertheless, equal as to their spiritual origin,” he writes in the introduction to the first volume. “None of these configurations can simply be reduced to, or derived from, the others; rather, each of them…constitutes its own aspect of the ‘actual.’”
The three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms focus on language, myth, and science respectively, offering fascinating, if necessarily fragmentary and speculative, accounts of how each develops in the direction of increasing freedom and universality. This essentially affirmative view was “out of tune with its time,” as Peter E. Gordon writes in his preface to the new edition. Yet Cassirer knew the darkness of the time as well as anyone. Born in 1874, he became a leading figure in German philosophy before World War I, though his Jewishness kept him from being appointed to a professorial chair until 1919. But his academic career was cut short in 1933, when the Nazis, as one of their first acts, prohibited Jews from teaching in universities.
Cassirer and his wife quickly fled the country, and he spent the next dozen years as an émigré, moving from post to post in England, Sweden, and finally the US. He was teaching at Columbia when he died of a heart attack on the street near 116th and Broadway in April 1945, one day after FDR. Cassirer was laid to rest in a Jewish cemetery in Paramus, New Jersey—a destination the German mandarin could never have imagined.