...I am tempted to study how he made sense of the revolutions in thought effected by personalities (and for Cassirer the focus is on personalities) such as Galileo, Descartes, Luther, the important figures of the Italian Renaissance to see if light could be thrown by his methods on Marx. Yet socio economic determinants or causes hardly ever appear in Cassirer's explanation of the transformations in thought. I have been meaning to make a study of Cassirer on myth (arising out of my interest in racial mythology) for some time, but have just not got to it.... Rakesh Bhandari
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I can't come up with a quick reference for either the position of consciousness or causality. But here is what Cassirer wrote, from Substance and Function (Dover, 309p), about 1922-3 just before starting on The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. The background is that physics and mathematics in the 20s were implicitly questioning the most common sense ideas about the mind, casuality and the reality of objects:
``The problem of the subjectivity and objectivity of relational concepts. The analysis of knowledge ends in certain fundamental relations, on which rests the content of all experience. Thought cannot go further than to these universal relations; for only within them are thought and its object possible. And yet with this answer it may seem as if we have moved in a circle. The end of the enquiry leads us back to the same point at which we began. The problem seems shifted, but not solved; for the opposition of the subjective and objective still persists as sharply as ever. The pure relations also fall under the same question, that was previously directed upon sensations and presentations. Are pure relations an element of being, or are they mere constructions of thought? Is the nature of things revealed in them, or are they only the universal forms of expression of our consciousness, and thus valid only for consciousness and the sphere of its contents? ....
....But to state the problem in this way shows that it has been overcome in principle as the result of the preceding enquiry. At any rate, `common' ground for resolving the opposition of thought and being exists. Yet this common ground is not to be sought in an absolute ground of all things in general, but merely in the universal functions of rational and empirical knowledge. These functions themselves form a fixed system of conditions; and only relative to this system do assertions concerning the object, as well as concerning ego or subject, gain an intelligible meaning. There is no objectivity outside of the frame of number and magnitude, permanence and change, casuality and interaction: all these determinations are only the ultimate invariants of experience itself, and thus of all reality, that can be established in it and by it. The same point of view directly includes consciousness itself. Without a temporal sequence and order of contents, without the possibility of combining them into certain unities and of separating them again into certain pluralities, finally without the possibility of distinguishing relatively constant conditions from relatively changing ones, the conception of the ego has no meaning or application....''
I think of this as the high point of his neo-kantian phase, while he is still embedded in a philosophy of science. The above is both an exposition of how mathematics and physical science construct their position, and the way Cassirer views that position--if that makes any sense.
His next work (I think) was a short sketch, Myth and Language, and it is in that work that the almost seamless unity of consciousness and language, both as construction of mind and its expression, begins to blur all these nice edges. This is where I think he first comes up with the idea that there is a mythic form of thinking and consciousness that lays at the foundation of thought and culture and is never completely subsumed: not subsumed or transcended even in its most technically sophisticated expression as the language of abstract relations in science and mathematics. And I think it was through investigating math and science notions of abstract relations, that he was lead to unearth so to speak some basis for these in a primordial construct of language and thought.
But this idea of using Cassirer to look at Marx, might not work. As much as I like Cassirer, he has his limitations, and the grit and dirt of real industrial life is one place I am not sure he ever visited---even in his nightmares. This is were Marx's really shines, right down there on the shop floor, in the grubby thick fingers of some stupid, tightwad foreman counting out tallies for piece work and pay stubs. I can almost taste the iron oxides and toxic fumes of Kapital, when I read him---in fact that why I read him. It's Marx, the alienated and exiled philosophy student who is formed by the socio-economic determinants of the working class, capital, and the state, not the successful, well cultured, and high bourgeois Cassirer.
On the other hand, it seems to me that Cassirer's work could be easily adapted to analyze race, since he already provided some basis for it in the Myth of State.
Chuck Grimes