Ernst Cassirer

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The German philosopher and intellectual historian Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) was the most distinguished member of the Neo-Kantian school of philosophy.

Ernst Cassirer was born in Breslau, Silesia, on July 28, 1874, the son of a wealthy and cultured Jewish tradesman. He was educated at the universities of Berlin, Leipzig, and Heidelberg. His varied interests finally focused on philosophy after hearing Georg Simmel's lectures on Kant. This led him to Marburg, where Hermann Cohen, the leading Neo-Kantian of the period, lectured. Cassirer set himself to master both Kant's voluminous writings and Cohen's interpretations; though he went well beyond both, they formed the essential foundation for his subsequent work.

In spite of early and brilliant publications Cassier was blocked by anti-Semitic prejudice from a professorship in Germany. By the time he was 30, he had finished the first two volumes of a monumental work tracing the history of epistemology. This won him wide recognition and finally acceptance at the University of Berlin, but only as a lecturer.

In 1910 Cassirer published his first systematic work, Substance and Function, a profound essay on the nature of concepts and generalization. Still he was passed over for professorial appointments. In 1914 Harvard University invited him, but the outbreak of World War I prevented his acceptance. When the war ended, however, the new University of Hamburg offered him a professorship. He taught there from 1919 to 1930 and served as rector from 1930 to 1933. At Hamburg the superb Warburg Library enabled him to begin his magnum opus, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923-1929). Warburg had gathered a unique treasure of books on primitive cultures and studies of imagery, magic, folklore, and mythology. With these source materials Cassirer began to fashion a systematic comparison of the fundamentally different kinds of "symbolic forms" through which men interpret their experience. Although a continuation of Kant's analysis of human powers of synthesis, Cassirer's work took into account types of thinking which Kant had ignored as irrational. Cassirer thus subjected mythical thinking to detailed analysis and undertook to revise the Kantian accounts of scientific, moral, and esthetic thinking. The principles and methods used to structure these different areas of experience, Cassirer argued, must be seen as flexible and developing.

With the electoral triumph of the Nazi party in 1933, Cassirer immediately resigned his position in disgust and went to Oxford University. After 3 months of intensive study he learned to speak English. He lectured at Oxford until 1935, when the University of Göteborg in Sweden offered him a personal chair. Becoming a Swedish citizen, he once again learned a new language and later wrote a book on Swedish philosophy.

In the summer of 1941 Cassirer came to the United States as a guest professor at Yale University. In these years of exile he wrote continuously - books on physics, on political philosophy, on the history of ideas, and finally An Essay on Man (1944), a systematic study written in English. At the time of his death Cassirer was a visitor at Columbia University and was preoccupied with plans for further applications of his central discovery: the functions played by symbolic forms. He left a rich legacy which has not yet been fully assimilated and exploited.

Further Reading

An inquiry into Cassirer's work should begin with Paul Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (1949). It contains biographical essays, descriptive and critical essays on his philosophy, and an exhaustive bibliography of his works. Carl H. Hamburg, Symbol and Reality (1956), is a study of Cassirer's central conception.

Additional Sources

Itzkoff, Seymour W., Ernst Cassirer: philosopher of culture, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977.

Lipton, David R., Ernst Cassirer: the dilemma of a liberal intellectual in Germany, 1914-1933, Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1978.

Cassirer, Ernst (1874-1945) German neo-Kantian, who resigned as Rector of Hamburg University in 1933, and subsequently taught at various universities in England and the United States. His main ambition was to develop Kant's work into a general theory of culture. This involved a general theory of symbolization, and Cassirer, although influential in his time in many areas, is best remembered for his work on varieties of ‘symbolic forms’, presented in his major work Die Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1923-9, trs. as The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 1953-7).

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Ernst Cassirer

Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy
Ernst Cassirer
Full name	Ernst Cassirer
Born	July 28, 1874 Breslau, Germany
Died	April 13, 1945
School/tradition	Neo-Kantianism

Ernst Cassirer (July 28, 1874 – April 13, 1945) was one of the major figures in the development of philosophical idealism in the first half of the twentieth century, a German Jewish philosopher. Coming out of the Marburg tradition of neo-Kantianism, he developed a philosophy of culture as a theory of symbols founded in a phenomenology of knowledge. His son, Heinz Cassirer, was also a Kantian scholar.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Works 2.1 Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 2.2 The Myth of the State 3 Partial bibliography 4 See also 5 External links

Biography

Cassirer was born in Breslau (Wrocław), Silesia, into a Jewish family. He studied literature and philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a Jew, his academic career was anomalously facilitated. After long years as Privatdozent at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin (Cassirer turned down the offer of a visiting professorship at Harvard which he and his wife considered obscure and remote), he was elected to a chair of philosophy at the newly-founded University of Hamburg in 1919, where he lectured until 1933, and supervised the doctoral thesis of Leo Strauss. Cassirer was forced to leave Germany because the Nazis came to power.

After leaving Germany he found first refuge as a lecturer in Oxford 1933–1935; he was then professor at Gothenburg University 1935–1941. When Cassirer - who considered Sweden too unsafe by then - tried to go to the United States and specifically to Harvard, the university turned him down because he had turned Harvard down thirty years earlier. Thus, he first had to work as a visiting professor at Yale University, New Haven 1941–1943, and only then moving to Columbia University in New York, where he lectured from 1943 until his death in 1945. As he had been naturalized in Sweden, he died on the Columbia campus a Swedish citizen of German-Jewish descent.

Works

Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

Cassirer was both a genuine philosopher and an historian of philosophy. His major work, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (3 vols., 1923–1929) is considered a benchmark for a philosophy of culture. Man, says Cassirer later in his more popular Essay on Man (1944), is a "symbolic animal". Whereas animals perceive their world by instincts and direct sensory perception, man has created his own universe of symbolic meaning that structures and shapes his perception of reality - and only thus, for instance, can conceive of utopias and therefore progress in the form of shared human culture. In this, Cassirer owes much to Kant's transcendental idealism, which claimed that the actual world cannot be known, but that the human view on reality is shaped by our means of perceiving it. For Cassirer, the human world is created through symbolic forms of thought which are linguistic, scholarly, scientific, and artistic, sharing and extending through communication, individual understanding, discovery and expression.

The Myth of the State

Cassirer's last major work was The Myth of the State. The book was published posthumously in 1946 after Cassirer's sudden death. Cassirer argues that the idea of a totalitarian state evolved from ideas advanced by Plato, Dante, Machiavelli, Gobineau, Carlyle and Hegel. He concludes that the Fascist regimes of the 20th century were symbolised by a myth of destiny and the promotion of irrationality.

Academic Genealogy
Notable teachers	Notable students
Hermann Cohen Paul Natorp	Hans Reichenbach Leo Strauss Susanne K. Langer Nimio de Anquín

Partial bibliography

• Substance and Function (1910), English translation 1923
• Kant's Life and Thought (1918), English translation 1981
• Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29), English translation 1953–1957
• Language and Myth (1925), English translation (1946) by Susanne K. Langer
• Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), English translation 1951
• The Logic of the Humanities (1942), English translation 1961
• An Essay on Man (written and published in English) (1944)
• The Myth of the State (written and published in English) (posthumous) (1946)

See also

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Aby Warburg

External links

• "Ernst Cassirer" article by Michael Friedman in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• History of the Cassirer family
• Centre for Intercultural Studies
• Information Philosopher on Ernst Cassirer on Free Will

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