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61 Chapter 4 Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: Spirit, Life, and Werk The Dialectic of Spirit and Life In concluding his preface to the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer informed the reader that he had intended to include a final chapter, in which he would critically place his conception of a philosophy of symbolic forms in relation to contemporary philosophy. Not to make a long book longer by adding to it a discussion that considers problems that go beyond its specific analyses, Cassirer announced his decision to present the issues of such a chapter as a separate, future work, under the title: “‘Life’ and ‘Spirit’: Toward a Critique of Contemporary Philosophy” (PSF 3:xvi). Cassirer’s preface is dated July 1929. The promised critique appeared to be an essay of twenty pages with nearly the same title that Cassirer published the following year in Die Neue Rundschau: “‘Spirit’ and ‘Life’ in Contemporary Philosophy.”1 This essay is directed primarily to criticism of Max Scheler’s philosophical anthropology. It appeared to be much less than the study Cassirer seemed to be proposing in his preface—and indeed, it was. Found among Cassirer’s Nachlass were parts of a fourth volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, involving the nature of spirit (Geist) and life (Leben) and discussions and criticisms of, among others, Scheler, Simmel, Heidegger, and Bergson, and analysis of Lebensphilosophie—what Cassirer associates with post-idealist philosophy generally, from Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard , and Nietzsche to Heidegger (see PSF 4:xi). This manuscript, unpublished during Cassirer’s lifetime, was drafted in 1928 (recall that the text of PSF 3 was completed in 1927). In this projected and partially completed fourth volume Cassirer sought not only to place his philosophy in the spectrum of contemporary philosophy and to show its differences with the development of 62 chapter  Lebensphilosophie; he also attempted to face the issue of the sense in which his philosophy has a metaphysical ground and is not simply a theory of knowledge connected to a theory of culture. To accomplish this task he centers his account in an interpretation of Geist as a transformation of life. The reader of the first three volumes of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is not so concerned with how Cassirer’s philosophy stands over and against other philosophical positions as with what sense of reality is required for his symbolic forms to function. The question of the metaphysical ground for Cassirer’s symbolic forms has haunted his philosophy from its first critical assessments to his students in his seminars at Yale.2 In his remarks for the final sessions of his seminar on the Philosophy of Language and the Principles of Symbolism at Yale in spring 1942, Cassirer takes a stand on the question of the ground of his philosophical idealism. He says: “In our former discussions I often had the impression that some of you were thinking that what I defend here is a system of subjective idealism in which the ego, the subjective mind, the thinking self is considered as the center and as the creator of the world, as the sole or ultimate reality” (SMC 194). Cassirer claims that the problems of symbolism and knowledge, treated from the position of the philosophy of symbolic forms, “are to a very large degree independent of any metaphysical theory about the absolute nature of things” (SMC 195). Whether we are metaphysical realists or idealists, he claims, makes no difference in answering questions about human culture, if we investigate it by empirical methods applied to empirical facts. Cassirer concludes: “The ego, the individual mind, cannot create reality. Man is surrounded by a reality that he did not make, that he has to accept as an ultimate fact” (SMC 195). Cassirer sounds almost like C. S. Peirce in this passage, except his emphasis is on culture, not so directly on the world of hard facts. Cassirer takes a similar approach in his 1936 lecture at the Warburg Institute, “Critical Idealism as a Philosophy of Culture,” which he begins by quoting Byron’s stanza in Don Juan criticizing Berkeley, the first lines of which are: “When Bishop Berkeley said ‘there was no matter,’ / And proved it—’t was no matter what he said.” Cassirer said that these witty lines express a common opinion concerning the problem of philosophical idealism, and that “Idealism seems to remain a merely speculative view—an airy system” (SMC 65). He emphasizes that culture is a...

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