In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

17 Chapter 1 Linguistic Form: The Critique of Reason Becomes the Critique of Culture Critical Idealism Cassirer’s sentence, “The critique of reason becomes the critique of culture ” (PSF 1:80), more than any other, captures the sense and aim of his philosophy. It is a motto. Cassirer regards the expansion of the Kantian concern with the critique of reason to the critique of culture as a natural and necessary step in the fruition of philosophical idealism. He says: “As long as philosophical thought limits itself to analysis of pure cognition, the naïve-realistic view of the world cannot be wholly discredited” (PSF 1:80). The transcendental method of asking how our knowledge of the object is possible and thereby discovering the principles of how we construct the object must be applied throughout all spheres of experience. Each sphere of experience comes about through an original act of the human spirit. The purpose of philosophy is to delineate these areas as having their own formations of space, time, number, cause, and so forth. In its delineation philosophy acts as a modifying force within culture because of its concern with culture as a whole. It shows the validity of each sphere as relative to the validity of the others. Taken on its own terms individually, each sphere seeks “to imprint its own characteristic stamp on the whole realm of being and the whole life of the spirit. From this striving toward the absolute inherent in each special sphere arise the conflicts of culture and the antinomies within the concept of culture” (PSF 1:81). Cassirer’s attachment to critique does not allow him to adopt Hegel’s “speculative sentence” (spekulativer Satz), in which the subject-term passes into the predicate-term and its meaning is so modified by its connection with the predicate that it emerges as a newly formed subject (PS 61–63). To accept this view of philosophical statement Cassirer would 18 chapter  need to accept Hegel’s principle of Aufhebung, in which each stage of consciousness is canceled yet preserved in a succeeding stage, until all the stages culminate in the synthesis of the stage of Absolute Knowing of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Cassirer says that Hegel’s phenomenology of these stages has one purpose—to prepare the ground for logic. He says that as rich and diverse as these stages of consciousness are in their content, “their structure is subordinated to a single and, in a certain sense, uniform law—the law of dialectical method, which represents the unchanging rhythm of the concept’s autonomous movement. All cultural forms culminate in absolute knowledge; it is here that the spirit gains the pure element of its existence, the concept [Begriff ]” (PSF 1:83). Cassirer understands Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit itself to be aufgehoben in Hegel’s Science of Logic. He says: “Of all cultural forms, only that of logic, the concept, cognition [Erkenntnis], seems to enjoy a true and authentic autonomy” (PSF 1:83). Hegel’s speculative logic is thought in discourse with itself, a self-development of the Begriff that finally arrives at the Absolute Idea. Cassirer finds this process to be the ultimate form of reductionism. He concludes: “With all Hegel’s endeavor to apprehend the specific differentiations of the spirit, he ultimately refers and reduces its whole content and capacity to a single dimension—and its profoundest content and true meaning are apprehended only in relation to this dimension” (PSF 1:84).1 Cassirer points out that this reduction of all cultural forms to the one form of logic appears to be inherent in the concept of philosophy itself and to be especially inherent in philosophical idealism. Philosophy that is based in the idea comes naturally to logic as the means through which ideas are rationally structured. The alternative to seeking the totality of cultural forms in the universal terms of logic is to seek their totality in historical terms. Apprehending cultural forms historically would preserve their particularity but would do so at the sacrifice of any sense of their logical unity. Cassirer claims: “An escape from this methodological dilemma is possible only if we can discover a factor which recurs in each basic cultural form but in no two of them takes exactly the same shape” (PSF 1:84). This factor that recurs in each cultural form is the symbol, the major features of which were noted in the introduction. In accord with what was said earlier regarding the function-concept as...

Share