Ernst Cassirer: Scientific Knowledge and the Concept of Man by Seymour W. Itzkoff (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 679 Ernst Cassirer: Scientific Knowledge and the Concept of Man. By Seymour W. Itzkoff. University of Notre Dame Press, 1971. Pp. fl86. $9.95. In general it seems fair to say that in philosophy there are books which have something to say in their own right, and there are books written about those books. As H. L. Mencken well knew in regard to literature, simply because a book falls into the latter category does not mean that it cannot be original of itself, and in fact the best such books are. On the other hand this need not, and too often is not, so, as this work concerned with Cassirer goes some to show. According to the author, his chief purpose is to cull, or to use his own word, delineate from Cassirer's writings "the historical and systematic sources for his intellectual position." (p. ix) Although he suggests that this purpose is an exegetical one, leading us to believe that he will in some measure be involved with comparing various texts of Cassirer's with an eye to illuminating their meaning for us and genuinely delineating their developmental significance, this is, unfortunately, not quite what happens. The alternate possibility, namely, that this will be an investigation of those historical and systematic sources likewise turns out not to be the case. In place of either of these two methods of proceeding, proof-texting or historical analysis, the author opts for something he considers more faithful to Cassirer's own method: he simply assembles, albeit not too obviously so, everything Cassirer said about the given range of topics. Thus, the first chapter gives us everything Cassirer said about the history of preKantian philosophy, the second everything about Kant, the third everything about Newton, and so on. Oddly enough, the only clue we get to the fact that this is what is going on is in the footnotes. Whereas this would not oppose too great a problem in most instances, the editorial decision to have the footnotes conveniently less accessible at the back of the book makes it look almost as if we are not supposed to find this out. The appearance of an interpretation of pre-Kantian thought as it presaged Cassirer thus turns out to be the reality of a harmony of Cassirer's writings on the subject, and Mr. Itzkoff, looking like an author, turns out to be a compiler. There is, however, another purpose to the book which the author would have us consider. Over and above its alleged exegetical concerns it is supposed to have some creative and original intent as well, and thus the second part of the book is meant " to examine the implications of this critico-idealistic philosophy for a theory of man and discursive knowledge." (p. ix) It is true that some attempt is indeed made to do this, particularly in chapter 8, on an evolutionary interpretation of man's status as a symbolic animal, although the importance of the results is not altogether without question. For the most part, however, the discussion is confined to thumbnail sketches of the work and intellectual positions of a wide 680 BOOK REVIEWS variety of philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists, undertaken with a view to showing how they fit into the critico-idealistic scheme of how the history of man works, how man as a symbolic animal tends ever more towards symbolism as his primary activity. This is sometimes interesting because of the odd slant it gives on such matters, but too often it degenerates into the sort of broad-stroke cultural history where no conceivable data could disconfirm the principal hypothesis, where maverick figures somethow get reinterpreted as fulfilling the expectations of the scheme in spite of themselves. Carnap, whom ltzkoff identifies somewhat too closely for comfort with the Wiener Kreig, thus winds up pretty much as an example of how not to do philosophy. Wittgenstein, also identified as a logical positivist, suffers a similar fate but seems to have at least managed to go down fighting, as the author's bewilderment with the Philosophical lnvestigatioM seems to attest. When some breakthrough is made, i.e., when some constructive hypothesis of the author's...