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DECLINE OF A TRADITION
AN EssAY ON MAN.
By Ernst Cassirer. Yale University Press.
$3.
E
RNST CASSIRER is one of the foremost living thinkers and ex–
patriates. Formerly a professor at Hamburg and Berlin, he has
recently taught at Oxford and Gothenburg and in 1940 he was invited
to Yale. He is now at Columbia. This book, "the first impulse for the
writing of which came from my English and American friends who
repeatedly and urgently asked me to publish an English translation
o(
my
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms/'
is a condensed and somewhat modi·
fied version of that voluminous earlier work. Its comparative brevity
i~
one of its virtues and a mark of austerity. Its thesis is that "spontaneitr
ar.d productivity are the very center of all human activities ... man's
highest power... . In language, in religion, in art, in science man
ran do no more than to build up his own universe-a symbolic universe
that enables him to understand and interpret, to articulate and organize.
to synthesize and universalize his human experience." The substance oJ
the book documents and illustrates this thesis. The key concept is that
of symbol, and Cassirer makes the familiar distinction between sign and
~ymbol
as corresponding to and defining the difference between animal
and human: the meaning of a sign lies in some physical or existential
rel ation whereas a symbol is a purely semantic entity. In this respect the
book recalls Susanne Langer's recent
Philosophy in a New Key,
and em–
nloys the same sort of material from animal psychology and ethnology.
The derivation of Cassirer's thought is, of course, Kantian. But it
is obviously a secularized or left-wing brand of Kantianism.
It
is a uni-·
lateral Kantianism, retaining only Kant's methodological side-or rather
his methodological emphasis, for Cassirer eschews the term
a priori
and
one gathers it is a much less determinate thing for him than for Kant.
Cassirer is Kantian mainly in his anti-empiricism, in his emphasis on
the formative, constructive power of mind, although his inquiry is strong·
ly empirical. His affinity with pragmatism is therefore unmistakable–
the sense, for example, in which thought and language "objectify" ex–
perience is very much the same for him as for Dewey and C.
I.
Lewis
·-and he implicitly supports Peirce's contention that the ancestry of
pragmatism is Kantian.
In a philosophy of this sort the metaphysical problem is avoided
rather than solved. At any rate it is never stated, and in effect denied.
The metaphysical problem is the problem of integrating our knowledge
of scientific method, or of conceptualization in general, with our scien–
tific knowledge of the world. Relativism and positivism are semi-adequate
solutions because they require a radical revision, or inanition, of our
~cientific
concepts, of the concept of reality and its ·subjective equivalent,
belief. Indeed the great tendency and motif, extending even to physical
~cience,
of our intellectual life at the moment is the attempt to find a
