The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer

Preface

Preface Ernst Cassirer is commonly classified as a neo-Kantian. There is considerable truth to this conception of his philosophy. In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, German philosophy was dominated by various schools of neo-Kantianism associated with major German universities. Cassirer was the principal disciple of Hermann Cohen, who, along with Paul Natorp, was one of the two leading figures of the Marburg school. Cassirer’s doctoral dissertation, written under Cohen’s direction, “Descartes’ Critique of Mathematical and Natural Scientific Knowledge” (1899), became the introduction of Cassirer’s first book, Leibniz’ System (1902). Cassirer regarded Leibniz as “the last European thinker to master the whole of knowledge.” Leibniz, in Cassirer’s view, “gave the clearest and keenest systematic expression to the fundamental problem of the relationship between world and individual.” Cassirer’s study of Leibniz prepared the way for the first two volumes of the Problem of Knowledge (1906–07), which traced the interconnections between the rise of modern science and the development of modern philosophy from the Renaissance philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa to its culmination in Kant’s critical idealism. This historical account of the problem of knowledge demonstrated Cohen’s claim of the agreement of his epistemology with the development of modern philosophy and scientific thought. The Marburg school, founded by Cohen about 1870, was framed by Otto Liebmann’s motto, “Back to Kant,” in Liebmann’s Kant and the Epigones (1865). In the first issue of the journal they founded, Philosophische Arbeiten, Cohen and Natorp wrote: “Whoever is bound to us stands with us on the foundation of the transcendental method.” The commitment to this method means that philosophy “is bound to the fact of science, as this elaborates itself. Philosophy, therefore, to us is the theory of the principles of science, and therewith of all culture” (1906). In contrast to the dedication of the Marburg school to scientific epistemology as revealing the basis of all culture was the Baden or Southwest German school of neo-Kantianism led by Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, which attempted to formulate the principles of historixi xii preface cal and cultural experience on a Kantian basis. Central to this opposition was Rickert’s distinction between two objects of knowledge: the objects of science, grounded in the senses, and the objects of experience that we can know not by the senses but by understanding (Verstehen). These are cultural objects as found in history, art, and morality. Given Cassirer’s later philosophy of culture, one might expect his position to have been derived through contact with this school, but it was not. Instead it arose by progressive transformations of the approach of the Marburg school. Even brief attention to the volumes of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms of the 1920s and his later summary and extension of this philosophy in An Essay on Man (1944) and The Myth of the State (published posthumously in 1946) makes it clear that Cassirer’s thought did not simply remain within the confines of the Marburg school. The questions then arise: How did Cassirer reach the original philosophical position for which he is famous? What are the fundamentals of this philosophy? To answer these questions I wish to approach Cassirer’s philosophy in Cassirer’s own terms. Cassirer was a master of the genetic method—that the primary way to understand any human production is to grasp how it came to be what it is. This approach is not merely to relate its history but to obtain a grasp of its “inner form,” to use a term Cassirer took from Wilhelm von Humboldt for his approach to the uniqueness of each symbolic form. This genetic approach to understanding Cassirer’s philosophy does not replace the assessment of its philosophical truth. The questions of the genesis of his position and its truth and viability cannot be separated. Cassirer is one of the greatest of all Kant scholars, the editor of an edition of Kant’s works, and a proficient interpreter of his philosophy. Cassirer’s grasp of Kant’s writings courses throughout all of Cassirer’s own philosophy. But a number of the authors whose essays appear in the Library of Living Philosophers volume on his work, the first full examination of his philosophy, raise questions about the importance of Hegel for understanding Cassirer’s thought. Because Cassirer died during the completion of the volume it contains no “philosopher’s reply,” and thus it is not...