http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cassirer/
4. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
At Hamburg Cassirer found a tremendous resource for the next stage in his philosophical development, the Library of the Cultural Sciences founded by Aby Warburg. Warburg was an eminent art historian with a particular interest in ancient cult, ritual, myth, and magic as sources of archetypal forms of emotional expression later manifested in Renaissance art, and the Library therefore contained abundant materials both on artistic and cultural history and on ancient myth and ritual. Cassirer's earliest works on the philosophy of symbolic forms appeared as studies and lectures of the Warburg Library in the years 1922-1925, and the three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms itself appeared, as noted above, in 1923, 1925, and 1929 respectively. Just as the genetic conception of knowledge is primarily oriented towards the `fact of science' and, accordingly, takes the historical development of scientific knowledge as its ultimate given datum, the philosophy of symbolic forms is oriented towards the much more general `fact of culture' and thus takes the history of human culture as a whole as its ultimate given datum. The conception of human beings as most fundamentally `symbolic animals,' interposing systems of signs or systems of expression between themselves and the world, then becomes the guiding philosophical motif for elucidating the corresponding conditions of possibility for the `fact of culture' in all of its richness and diversity.
Characteristic of the philosophy of symbolic forms is a concern for the more `primitive' forms of world-presentation underlying the `higher' and more sophisticated cultural forms, a concern for the ordinary perceptual awareness of the world expressed primarily in natural language, and, above all, for the mythical view of the world lying at the most primitive level of all. For Cassirer, these more primitive manifestations of `symbolic meaning' now have an independent status and foundational role that is quite incompatible with both Marburg neo-Kantianism and Kant's original philosophical conception. In particular, they lie at a deeper, autonomous level of spiritual life which then gives rise to the more sophisticated forms by a dialectical developmental process. From mythical thought, religion and art develop; from natural language, theoretical science develops. It is precisely here that Cassirer appeals to `romantic' philosophical tendencies lying outside the Kantian and neo-Kantian tradition, deploys an historical dialectic self-consciously derived from Hegel, and comes to terms with the contemporary Lebensphilosophie of Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson, Max Scheler, and Georg Simmel, as well as with the closely related philosophy of Martin Heidegger.
The most basic and primitive type of symbolic meaning is expressive meaning, the product of what Cassirer calls the expressive function (Ausdrucksfunktion) of thought, which is concerned with the experience of events in the world around us as charged with affective and emotional significance, as desirable or hateful, comforting or threatening. It is this type of meaning that underlies mythical consciousness, for Cassirer, and which explains its most distinctive feature, namely, its total disregard for the distinction between appearance and reality. Since the mythical world does not consist of stable and enduring substances that manifest themselves from various points of view and on various occasions, but rather in a fleeting complex of events bound together by their affective and emotional `physiognomic' characters, it also exemplifies its own particular type of causality whereby each part literally contains the whole of which it is a part and can thereby exert all the causal efficacy of the whole. Similarly, there is no essential difference in efficacy between the living and the dead, between waking experiences and dreams, between the name of an object and the object itself, and so on. The fundamental Kantian `categories' of space, time, substance (or object), and causality thereby take on a distinctive configuration representing the formal a priori structure, as it were, of mythical thought.
What Cassirer calls representative symbolic meaning, a product of the representative function (Darstellungsfunktion) of thought, then has the task of precipitating out of the original mythical flux of `physiognomic' characters a world of stable and enduring substances, distinguishable and reidentifiable as such. Working together with the fundamentally pragmatic orientation towards the world exhibited in the technical and instrumental use of tools and artifacts, it is in natural language, according to Cassirer, that the representative function of thought is then most clearly visible. For it is primarily through the medium of natural language that we construct the `intuitive world' of ordinary sense perception on the basis of what Cassirer calls intuitive space and intuitive time. The demonstrative particles (later articles) and tenses of natural language specify the locations of perceived objects in relation to the changing spatio-temporal position of the speaker (relative to a `here-and-now'), and a unified spatio-temporal order thus arises in which each designated object has a determinate relation to the speaker, his/her point of view, and his/her potential range of pragmatic activities. We are now able to distinguish the enduring thing-substance, on the one side, from its variable manifestations from different points of view and on different occasions, on the other, and we thereby arrive at a new fundamental distinction between appearance and reality. This distinction is then expressed in its most developed form, for Cassirer, in the linguistic notion of propositional truth and thus in the propositional copula. Here the Kantian `categories' of space, time, substance, and causality take on a distinctively intuitive or `presentational' configuration.
The distinction between appearance and reality, as expressed in the propositional copula, then leads dialectically to a new task of thought, the task of theoretical science, of systematic inquiry into the realm of truths. Here we encounter the third and final function of symbolic meaning, the significative function (Bedeutungsfunktion), which is exhibited most clearly, according to Cassirer, in the `pure category of relation.' For it is precisely here, in the scientific view of the world, that the pure relational concepts characteristic of modern mathematics, logic, and mathematical physics are finally freed from the bounds of sensible intuition. For example, mathematical space and time arise from intuitive space and time when we abstract from all demonstrative relation to a `here-and-now' and consider instead the single system of relations in which all possible `here-and-now'-points are embedded; the mathematical system of the natural numbers arises when we abstract from all concrete applications of counting and consider instead the single potentially infinite progression wherein all possible applications of counting are comprehended; and so on. The eventual result is the world of modern mathematical physics described in Cassirer's earlier scientific works, a pure system of formal relations where, in particular, the intuitive concept of substantial thing has finally been replaced by the relational-functional concept of universal law. So it is here, and only here, that the generalized and purified form of (neo-)Kantianism distinctive of the Marburg School gives an accurate characterization of human thought. This characterization is now seen as a one-sided abstraction from a much more comprehensive dialectical process which can no longer be adequately understood without paying equal attention to its more concrete and intuitive symbolic manifestations; and it is in precisely this way, in the end, that the Marburg `fact of science' is now firmly embedded within the much more general `fact of culture' as a whole. (The final volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, The Phenomenology of Knowledge [1929b], articulates this embedding most explicitly, where the significative function of symbolic meaning is depicted as dialectically evolving, in just the sense of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, from the expressive and representative functions.)
5. Cassirer and Twentieth-Century Philosophy
As noted above, in the same year (1929) that the final volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms appeared, Cassirer took part in an historically significant encounter with Martin Heidegger in Davos where, in particular, Cassirer challenged Heidegger's radical `finitism' by reference to the presumed necessary (and eternal) universal validity found in both the mathematical sciences and human moral or practical experience. Heidegger had already distanced his own `existential analytic of Dasein' from Cassirer's analysis of mythical thought in Being and Time (see [Heidegger 1927, §§ 10, 11]), and he had then published a respectful but critical review of Cassirer's volume on mythical thought [Heidegger 1928]. Cassirer, for his part, added five footnotes on Being and Time before publication of his final volume in 1929, and he then published a similarly respectful but critical review of [Heidegger 1929] alluding to the Davos disputation at the end [Cassirer 1931]. Unlike in his remarks at the Davos disputation itself, Cassirer here places his primary emphasis on the practical and aesthetic dimensions of Kant's thought, as expressed in the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgement. His main point is that, whereas the transcendental analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason may indeed be written from the point of view of human temporality or finitude, the rest of the Kantian system embeds this particular theory of human cognition within a much wider conception of `the intelligible substrate of humanity.' Cassirer's remarks here thus mirror his own attempt to embed the Marburg genetic conception of mathematical-scientific knowledge within a much wider theory of the development of human culture as a whole, and thereby reflect, as indicated at the beginning, his distinctive mediating role between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften, and thus between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions.
The Logic of the Cultural Sciences [Cassirer 1942] presents Cassirer's most developed and systematic articulation of how it is possible to achieve objective and universal validity in both the domain of the natural and mathematical sciences and the domain of practical, cultural, moral, and aesthetic phenomenon. Cassirer argues, in the first place, that an ungrounded prejudice privileging `thing perception [Dingwahrnehmen]', based on the representative function (Darstellungsfunktion) of thought, over `expressive perception [Ausdruckswahrnehmen]' is a primary motivation for the widespread idea that the natural sciences have a more secure evidential base than do the cultural sciences (and it is here, in particular, that he presents his criticism of Rudolf Carnap's `physicalism' alluded to above). In reality, however, neither form of perception can be reduced to the other, both are what Cassirer calls `primary phenomena [Urphänomene].' Thus, whereas the natural sciences take their evidential base from the sphere of thing perception, the cultural sciences take theirs from the sphere of expressive perception, and, more specifically, from the fundamental experience of other human beings as fellow selves sharing a common intersubjective world of `cultural meanings.' In the second place, moreover, whereas intersubjective or objective validity in the natural sciences rests ultimately on universal laws of nature ranging over all (physical) places and times, an analogous type of intersubjective or objective validity arises in the cultural sciences quite independent of such universal laws. In particular, although every `cultural object' (a text, a work of art, a monument, and so on) has its own individual place in (historical) time and (geographical-cultural) space, it nevertheless has a trans-historical and trans-local cultural meaning that emerges precisely as it is continually and successively interpreted and reinterpreted at other such times and places. The truly universal cultural meaning of such an object only emerges asymptotically, as it were, as the never to be fully completed limit of such a sequence. In the end, it is only such a never to be fully completed process of historical-philosophical interpretation of symbolic meanings that confers objectivity on both the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften, and thereby reunites the two distinct sides of Kant's original synthesis.