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During my intro to Cassirer in Edmund Carpender's (anthro, do Wiki) lectures, Carpenter assigned The Eskimo. Skip the bad 60s movie with Anthony Quinn and read the giant novel by Peter Freuchen. The effect is probably similar to Susi Bright. You have to be transported into another world before you are ready to tackle Cassirer.
Anyway getting into Cassirer is a real leap of the mind. Start with some of the essay collections, try Language and Myth, trans. Suzanne Langer, Dover, 1953. There is also Joanna's favorite collection, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaisasnce Philosophy---but this appeals to the highly literary mind. What do you expect from English majors at Cal?
For the scientific or logical postivist types there is the Substance and Function book I listed with the table of contents. For the Nazi-Weimar-Totalitarian interested crew there is The Myth of State.
All these are collections of essays assembled under a general title.
Cassirer's biographical essays are utterly stunning. His essay on Giambasitta Vico is beautiful, as it resonates down the corriders of historical time, like the click of errant footsteps on the marble floors of the Vatican or the Uffizi. Cassirer is magic. Vico appears in his Essay on Man.
Friedman is actually more complicated than Cassirer, because he has to describe Cassirer's ideas (and in some very technical sense Friedman does not quite understand Cassirer...).
Cassirer presents his ideas within these historical settings and biographical essays and you get it much more easily. Going into Cassiser's Vico, you really don't need to know who Vico was or his political position within the flaming wars started by Descartes and Spinoza in what Jonathan Israel called the Radical Enlightenment, where you learn Vico represented a kind of retro-guard action in the periphery... Vico sensed the homogenization of the specifics of time, place, language and culture, and reacted against the free Dutch and French radical assersion of an international culture of learning, science, reason, etc, etc. Instead, Cassirer focuses down on what Vico contributes to our concept of history---which is pretty damned astonishing---as long as you ignore his nemisis, the Enlightenment ideal that there is only an empirical and rational reading, that is to say only one valid reading of history.
So Cassirer in his casual and graceful manner unveils, or transcribes the culturally bound relativistic and the rational absolute through his essay on Vico. Here is a brief summary:
``Cassirer counts history as a symbolic form in his list that includes myth, religion, language, art, and science, but his discussion of history is confined to a chapter in An Essay on Man. A more complete understanding requires attention to a year-long seminar he taught at Yale on "The Philosophy of History" in 1941-1942. The partially unpublished texts of this seminar are the most extended exposition of Cassirer's conception of history as a symbolic form. The key source for Cassirer's philosophy of history is Vico. Cassirer holds that "historical consciousness" is a very late product of human civilization not found before the Greeks and even with the Greeks history is not analyzed as a particular form of thought. Cassirer claims that such analysis did not appear until the eighteenth century in the work of Vico and Herder.'' Revue / Journal Title
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=16811503
(You have to remember that Vico and Herder were reactionaries, and considered themselves enemies of the French Enlightenment.)
In my transcription of Cassirer, I could say that following Carpenter, our concept of western civilization is our most comprehensive mythology of all. Well, history. Within its bounds we are transported to our origins as if a primative people in the American southwest discovered the original desert well from which their ancesters sprang with their gods and their fellow creatures. All wish to return, to be born again in a new re-incarnation, modeled like wet clay in the hands of their gods to be their legendary heros incarnate...
History is our originary myth of identity and we all trace it back to find the ontic source of our being. Heidegger thought he was a pre-Socratic Greek. Strauss thought he was an exiled Jewish scribe in Athens, a mere scribbler of Aristotle. Hegel believed he was the fond of Greek thought in and of itself, almost a reincarnation---just read Hoederlin, Hegel's roomate in seminary school. Nietzsche must have imagined himself the mad oracle of the Agora, a Indio shaman of el mercado...
You have to release your mythological mind to see these things.
There are other ways to get into Cassirer. You can start in a completely unexpected way with Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire, Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde, Harvard Press, 1974.
Ignore the detail of the Spanish and Mexican poets you've never heard of and just read it through, following the sensibility itself. Children of the Mire is one of the most beautiful of all books I've ever read. It flows like mercury on glass. Trust it. Paz was probably the greatest Mexican poet and philosopher of culture ever. He digs deep into the relationship of Mexico, France, Germany and most of all Spain. (Most USers have not idea that Emperor Maxmillian was a German-Austrian who introduced polka, beer, and Protestantism to Mexico---and that's why Mariachi brass sounds and many Mexican beers taste like Bavaria. Nevermind).
What Paz does is introduce the history of ideas into the narrative on poetry and focus on the changing western concept of time. Here is the table of contents (remember this is 1974) to give the idea:
A Tradition against Itself
The Revolt of the Future
Children of the Mire
Analogy and Irony
Translation and Metaphor
The Closing of the Circle
Revolution/Eros/Meta-Irony
The Rattern Reversed
The Twilight of the Avant-Garde
CG