Biography of Ernst Cassirer

Biography of Ernst Cassirer

Ernst Cassirer (1874--1945) was a Jewish German intellectual historian and philosopher, the originator of the ``philosophy of symbolic forms.'' After a distinguished teaching career in Germany, he fled the Nazis, first to Oxford, then Goteborg, then finally Yale, which gives an annual series of lectures in philosophy in his honor; he died as a visiting professor at Columbia. Having read and admired his historical works, particularly The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, I was curious about his own doctrines. The summary of them included in his semi-historical book The Myth of the State left me quite confused: reading it gave me no sense of what a symbolic form was, except that it had something to do with what Kant called forms of apperception (no surprise: Cassirer was a neo-Kantian). Similarly, on that basis I couldn't have told you what Cassirer thought a myth was, though it had something to do with emotions whose ``motor-expressions'' were rituals.

Now, I don't think I'm a stupid man, or a bad reader. In the line of professional duty I've read a great deal on subjects which are fairly tricky conceptually, like mathematical logic and quantum field theory and learning theory, and it at least felt like I understood them. And I'm not normally blocked by dense prose, either. Nonetheless, what I got from those passages was a diffused feeling of frustrated incomprehension: there was something there, and I just wasn't getting it. (I may add that, pursuing my hobby of psychoceramics, I've read a great deal of dense prose where there really isn't anything to be grasped, and the difference is palpable.) Such befuddlement is, of course, the reason why introductory books are written, so I started looking arou...

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...s more than I'd suspected.) Cassirer's erudition was profound, and he is always exceptional at explaining what other people thought, and both acute and generous about their merits and defects. The problem is, I learnt very little about Cassirer's ideas, and I still don't know whether this is because he's bad at self-exposition, or whether I'm just too dumb to twig him.

Bibliography:

ix + 237 pp. (Yale UP)/294 pp. (Doubleday), no illustrations, bibliographic footnotes, index of names and subjects (analytical for subjects)

Anthropology and Archaeology / Art / Languages and Linguistics / Mind, Consciousness, etc. / Philosophy / Philosophy of Science / Religion

Currently in print as a trade paperback (1962), ISBN 0-300-00034-0, US$16; out of print as a pocket-sized paperback (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954); out of print as a hardback. LoC B3216.C33 E8