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89 Chapter 6 Animal Symbolicum Self-Knowledge: The Individual Writ Large When Cassirer began teaching at Yale University in 1941, his friends and colleagues suggested that he publish a translation of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. His response was to write a new book that would both summarize his earlier and larger work and put its conclusions in a new light. The essence of this new light was explicitly to cast the philosophy of symbolic forms as a philosophy of self-knowledge. He begins An Essay on Man (1944) with the claim that self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophy. He says: “In all the conflicts between the different philosophical schools this objective remained invariable and unshaken: it proved to be the Archimedean point, the fixed immovable center, of all thought” (EM 1). This is a noble claim, a way to read all philosophy that has gone before as having the single concern of self-knowledge. Much, if not nearly all philosophy, from the late twentieth century on, has given up any attempt to pursue self-knowledge. Yet Cassirer’s book has remained in print and is one of the most widely read works in modern philosophy. Cassirer takes his title from Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733): “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, / The proper study of mankind is man” (Epistle 2, line 1). Taking the title from Pope reflects Cassirer’s commitment to the importance of the Enlightenment for a phenomenology of the philosophic spirit. In The Philosophy of the Enlightenment , Cassirer writes: “Time and again thought returns to its point of departure from its various journeys of exploration intended to broaden the horizon of objective reality. Pope gave brief and pregnant expression to this deep-seated feeling of the age in the line: ‘The proper study of mankind is man.’”1 Casting his work as an essay reflects a form 90 chapter  that since Montaigne has been the proper and natural form for the self to consider its own nature; it also fits with Cassirer’s aversion to calling the philosophy of symbolic forms a system. It emphasizes Cassirer’s conception of his philosophy as Socratic, since Socrates, as Cicero says, “was the first to call philosophy down from the heavens and set her in the cities of men and bring her also into their homes and compel her to ask questions about life and morality and things good and evil.”2 There is immediately a normative dimension to Cassirer’s work, since the question of what man is has implications for how we are to regard our selves, our society, and our history. Cassirer’s subtitle, “An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture,” stresses that the sense in which he views what the work contains remains open. It is an introduction to a not to the philosophy of human culture. Attaching human to culture brings attention to the fact that our humanity is tied to our making of culture. Cassirer says: “It is my serious wish not to impose a ready-made theory, expressed in a dogmatic style, upon the minds of my readers. I have been anxious to place them in a position to judge for themselves” (EM viii). The fragmentation in modern culture is a threat to our ethical life and to our ability to ascertain what the human is. Never before have we been in such a favorable position to have access to sources for the development of a knowledge of human nature, yet never before have we found ourselves at such a loss to find a common reference point from which to grasp the nature of the human world. Cassirer calls this “the crisis of man’s knowledge of himself.” He maintains that in past ages, beginning with Greek philosophy, the question of what man is could be raised and investigated in terms of a common context. He claims: “Metaphysics, theology, mathematics, and biology successively assumed the guidance for thought on the problem of man and determined the line of investigation ” (EM 21). Cassirer claims that in modern thought there is no agreement on a general standpoint from which the nature of man can be investigated. “Nietzsche proclaims the will to power, Freud signalizes the sexual instinct , Marx enthrones the economic instinct. Each theory becomes a Procrustean bed on which the empirical facts are stretched to fit a preconceived pattern” (EM 21). He points out that if we turn to the fields that study man we also...

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