Ernst Cassirer

German philosopher and scholar

• Born: July 28, 1874
• Birthplace: Breslau, Silesia, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland)
• Died: April 13, 1945
• Place of death: New York, New York

Cassirer created an innovative and modified form of Kantian philosophy. He published a number of works on the history of philosophy that demonstrated the relevance of philosophy to scientific and humanistic knowledge.

Early Life

Ernst Cassirer (ehrnst kah-SEER-ehr) was born into a large middle-class Jewish family. His extended family was engaged in both publishing and commercial enterprises, with the result that Cassirer enjoyed financial independence throughout his life. He entered the German university system in 1892 and, over the next seven years, attended universities in Berlin, Leipzig, Heidelberg, and Marburg. At first, Cassirer lacked a clear direction for his intellectual pursuits; he sampled a number of subjects. In 1894, however, he took a course from Georg Simmel that set the direction for his future career. Simmel taught that conflicts between the individual and society are inevitable and unavoidable: Tension results from the conflict between the individual’s desire for freedom and society’s need to limit the individual through institutions, laws, and other encumbrances. Cassirer retained and refined these lessons throughout much of his productive life. While studying with Simmel, Cassirer found that his teacher admired the philosophical works of Hermann Cohen. Because of his high regard for Simmel, Cassirer went to the University of Marburg in 1896 to study under Cohen.

The philosophy department at Marburg was strongly influenced by the thought of Immanuel Kant. Indeed, neo-Kantian philosophy prevailed in many institutions of higher learning in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although Cohen focused much of his philosophical work on the objects of natural science, he believed that it is thought that provides the natural world with a coherent reality. Influenced by his teacher, Cassirer wrote a dissertation on René Descartes and his critique of mathematics and natural science. Completed in 1899, this early work of Cassirer revealed two key assumptions that were to inform his mature philosophy: first, that historical studies of philosophical problems provided insight into the problems of knowledge; and second, that reality is not static but must be reconstructed to be understood.

Life’s Work

Cassirer returned from Marburg with his doctoral degree in hand and began a prolific half century during which he would produce 125 published works. Unencumbered by financial necessity, Cassirer pursued his studies of Descartes, science, and the problems of knowledge. In 1902, he married; he and his wife, Toni, eventually had three children. In 1903, the Cassirers moved to Berlin; as a result of anti-Semitism, however, Cassirer did not gain a teaching position until 1906, when he became an instructor at the University of Berlin. In the next twelve years, in fact, no European university offered him a professorship, despite his already significant achievements. It is ironic that during this time his contribution to philosophy was recognized by Harvard University, which offered him a two-year visiting professorship.

Cassirer’s first major philosophical work was Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (1910; Substance and Function , 1923). In this work, he analyzed the development of concepts of chemistry in terms of the rational approach of science. Given a world of material substances, he argued, it is possible through logical thought to discover the theoretical framework that controls physical entities. In 1914, as Cassirer prepared himself for a study of Kant, he was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. Although the war captured the imagination of a number of German Jews, Cassirer did not respond to this great surge of German nationalism. Rejected from military service for medical reasons, he was drafted to teach in a high school for the duration of the war. Thus, as it turned out, he was able to continue his study of Kant’s philosophy. Kants Lebun und Lehre (1918; Kant’s Life and Thought , 1981) marked a major turn in Cassirer’s intellectual development. In his reinterpretation of Kant, Cassirer moved away from earlier concerns with science and the logical formulation of knowledge toward a larger vision of the humanities.

After the war, the Weimar Republic of Germany established several new universities. One of these, the University of Hamburg, offered Cassirer a professorship. Eventually, anti-Semitism reached Hamburg as well, but for a time Cassirer found a refuge there. In addition, Hamburg became the location of the Warburg Library. Aby Warburg, from a rich banking family, wanted to create a library containing a history of human civilization a library that would reveal the secrets of the human spirit. Cassirer’s interests had also moved in this direction during the war years. The first publications of the Warburg Library were two of Cassirer’s essays on myths and symbolic forms. During these early years at Hamburg, Cassirer continued his work in the philosophy of science with an essay on Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and began his most significant work in the philosophy of symbolic forms.

In 1923, Cassirer published the first of three volumes of Die Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms ); the second and third volumes followed in 1925 and 1929, with the English translations of all three volumes appearing in 1955. This work was Cassirer’s most significant contribution to philosophy and the humanities. Cassirer believed that consciousness imposes signs and symbols on the world and that as a result of these symbols the world has meaning. There are scientific symbols that bring about the objective world, mythic symbols that bring about myths and religion, and finally the symbols of language which at first one is not inclined to perceive as symbols, since it is language that constitutes the commonsense world as one experiences it. For Cassirer, all human thought is symbolic.

To justify this philosophy of symbolic forms, Cassirer examined a vast amount of material taken from philosophy, history, science, languages, anthropology, and the humanities. The result was a work of remarkable erudition. Cassirer remains the only major philosopher of the twentieth century to place myth at the center of his philosophy.

Cassirer was appointed rector of the University of Hamburg in 1929, but, with the rise of National Socialism in Germany, he was able to serve in this position for one year only. In the following two years, Cassirer worked on Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (1932; The Philosophy of the Enlightenment , 1951), a study of law, state, and society during the Enlightenment. In this book, he contends that the heights of human achievement have been reached through rationality and reason. In 1933, he resigned his position at the university. In his letter of resignation he stated that a Jew could no longer be a part of the German educational system.

Cassirer taught at the University of Oxford for two years and in 1935 went to the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. In 1941, he emigrated to the United States, where he was a visiting professor at Yale University for three years before a final year at Columbia University in New York. After leaving Germany, Cassirer lost much of the liberal optimism that colored his historical and philosophical works. He began to have serious doubts about the ability of human culture to prevail against the irrational and violent elements that are also part of the human heritage. He shifted his concern from cultural symbols toward the individual human being, and his last publications, An Essay on Man (1944) and The Myth of the State (1946), reflect that change in orientation. Cassirer died in New York City in April, 1945.

Significance

Cassirer listened to the voices of rationality and science, yet he also understood the crisis that beset liberal institutions in the twentieth century. He understood that the rise of intolerance, lawlessness, and violence threatened to sweep aside those key elements of civilization that give meaning to individual existence. Cassirer clarified his position in one of the most interesting philosophical debates of the twentieth century. In 1929, Cassirer had recently published the third volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Two years earlier, Martin Heidegger had published Sein und Zeit (1927; Being and Time, 1962), which was already acclaimed as one of the more important works of the century. The two philosophers met on March 17, 1929, in Switzerland, to debate their respective views on reason and existence. Heidegger argued that reason must play a secondary role to existence because it is a part of the imagination. Cassirer replied that reason is independent of sensibilities and imagination, and that consequently philosophy has the power to liberate humanity from the finality of existence and provide room for individual freedom.

The debate in Switzerland was no ordinary disagreement between two philosophers, each pursuing his own intellectual path within the sheltered world of academia. In 1933, Cassirer fled Germany, and he was to spend the remainder of his life as an expatriate in various countries. During that same year, Heidegger became the rector of Freiburg University, where he gave a speech praising the Nazi regime. For Cassirer, the philosophical task does not exist in isolation but is nourished by the human spirit and the entire history of humanity.

Bibliography

Copelston, Frederick Charles. A History of Philosophy. Vol. 7, part 2. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965. Copelston wrote a multivolume history of philosophy covering the ancient Greeks to the present. This volume deals with twentieth century European philosophers and serves well both as a background work to this period and for information on Cassirer.

Ferretti, Silvia. Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History. Translated by Richard Pierce. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989. First published in Italy in 1984, this study compares and contrasts the approaches to cultural history taken by Cassirer and the art historians Erwin Panofsky and Aby Warburg.

Gay, Peter. “The Social History of Ideas: Ernst Cassirer and After.” In The Critical Spirit, edited by K. H. Wolff and B. Moore, Jr. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967. Gay is a sympathetic interpreter of Cassirer’s philosophy; this essay serves to illustrate how Cassirer used the historical past and cultural patterns to outline his philosophy.

Hamlin, Cyrus, and John Michael Krois, eds. Symbolic Forms and Cultural Studies: Ernst Cassirer’s Theory of Culture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. Cassirer conceived of culture as the complex of modes through which humans seek meaning and existence. This collection of essays examines Cassirer’s ideas about culture.

Hansson, Jonas, and Svante Nordin. Ernst Cassirer: The Swedish Years. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Describes Cassirer’s life and work from 1935 until 1941, when he was a professor in Göteborg, Sweden.

Itzkoff, Seymour W. Ernst Cassirer: Scientific Knowledge and the Concept of Man. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971. All too often Cassirer’s philosophy is associated exclusively with art, language, and the humanities. Cassirer believed that science is one of the three major forms of human expression. This book shows why Cassirer placed such emphasis on scientific knowledge.

Krois, John Michael. Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987. A comprehensive study of Cassirer’s thought, covering the entire range of his work. Krois argues that the common view of Cassirer, as preoccupied with epistemological questions, is far too narrow; he emphasizes the importance of myth in Cassirer’s philosophy.

Lipton, David R. Ernst Cassirer: The Dilemma of a Liberal Intellectual in Germany, 1914-1933. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1978. Lipton portrays Cassirer’s life in terms of the growth and formation of his philosophy and against the background of rising anti-Semitism and political and social repression in Germany.

Schilpp, Paul A., ed. The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer. Evanston, Ill.: Open Court, 1949. This massive volume (just under one thousand pages) in the Library of Living Philosophers series includes Cassirer’s own account of his life’s work, followed by critical responses from scholars and fellow philosophers. An indispensable resource.

Schultz, William. Cassirer and Langer on Myth: An Introduction. New York: Garland, 2000. A detailed overview of Cassirer’s and philosopher Susanne K. Langer’s ideas about myth as symbolic form.