the symbolic construction of reality the symbolic construction of reality Th e Legacy of Ernst Cassirer edited by jeffrey andrew barash the university of chicago press • Chicago and London jeffrey andrew barash is the Professeur des Universités in the Depart- ment of Philosophy at the Université de Picardie in Amiens, France, and the author of several books, including Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning. Th e University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 Th e University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2008 by Th e University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2008 Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-03686-1 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-03686-3 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Th e symbolic construction of reality : the legacy of Ernst Cassirer / edited by Jeff rey Andrew Barash. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-03686-1 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-03686-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Cassirer, Ernst, 1874–1945—Congresses. I. Barash, Jeff rey Andrew. b3216.c34s95 2008 193—dc22 2008024437 ∞ Th e paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992. contents acknowledgments vii introduction ix Part One foundations: articulations of the symbol . Symbol and History Ernst Cassirer’s Critique of the Philosophy of History 3 enno rudolph . Ernst Cassirer on Nicholas of Cusa Between Conjectural Knowledge and Religious Pluralism 17 yossef schwartz . History and Philosophy in Ernst Cassirer’s System of Symbolic Forms 40 fabien capeillères . Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms A Foundational Reading 73 gabriel motzkin Part Two themes: symbolic forms and philosophy . Cassirer’s Metaphysics 93 donald phillip verene . Th e Limits of Order Cassirer and Heidegger on Finitude and Infi nity 104 michael roubach . Ernst Cassirer’s Th eory of Myth On the Ethico-Political Dimension of His Debate with Martin Heidegger 114 jeffrey andrew barash Part Th ree ramifications: symbol, history, politics . Th e Myth of the State Revisited Ernst Cassirer and Modern Political Th eory 135 joseph mali . Cassirer’s Enlightenment and Its Recent Critics Is Reason Out of Season? 163 fania oz-salzberger . Practicing “Intertextuality” Ernst Cassirer and Hermann Cohen on Myth and Monotheism 174 almut shulamit bruckstein . Th e Hero of Enlightenment 189 gideon freudenthal list of contributors 215 index 219 acknowledgments Th e articles published in this volume were presented in preliminary form at the conference “Ernst Cassirer: Symbol, Science, and Culture” held in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in May 1998. I wish to extend my heartfelt thanks to the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History of Th e Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas of Tel Aviv University and to the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute for having sponsored this conference. Special thanks to the organizers of the confer- ence, Professors Gideon Freudenthal, Joseph Mali, and Gabriel Motzkin and to Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr, who served as director of the Rosen- zweig Center during the period of preparation of this volume. I also wish to thank Dr. Anya Mali, whose literary talents and editorial suggestions contributed to the coherence and clarity of the articles included in this work. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Dr. Corinna Kaiser of the Rosenzweig Center for her editorial suggestions and for her help in preparing the manuscript for publication. I completed work on this volume during a semester in residence in the Philosophy Department of the University of Hamburg, which has recently created an Ernst-Cassirer Visiting Professorship in honor of the Hamburg philosopher. I extend my gratitude to my colleagues at the Uni- versity of Hamburg and particularly to Professors Dorothea Frede and Birgit Recki for their encouragement during the months when this book was brought to completion. Jeff rey Andrew Barash introduction Th e eleven essays included in this volume examine the legacy of Ernst Cas- sirer’s thought and reassess its signifi cance for our contemporary world. In focusing on diff erent aspects of Cassirer’s wide-ranging work, in fi elds such as philosophy and history, cultural studies, ethics and politics, these essays seek less to impose unity and order on writings elaborated over the course of fi ve decades, than to explore and interpret diff erent facets of his work in its diversity. Presented sixty years after Cassirer’s death in 1945, this volume does not intend to serve as an apology for his orientation; the studies that comprise it refl ect a willingness to consider the criticism his work has generated, both among contemporaries and members of later generations. In keeping with this attempt to present a balanced approach to Cassirer’s writings, the following introductory essay will consider the contribution made by his theory of symbolic forms in light of important criticism it has elicited. cassirer’s theory of the symbol Th e title of this collection of essays indicates a primary concern of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy, namely the role for human understanding of the symbol in the constitution of reality. Cassirer’s characterization of the symbol as “symbolic form,” however, employs this term in a way which is neither usual nor universally accepted. Encompassing the primary sym- bolic form of language, as well as other cultural articulations such as art, myth, religion, and science, Cassirer’s unusually broad defi nition of the symbol sharply contrasts with a narrower traditional usage in philosophy, where the symbol is said to mean something other than what it directly x introduction represents, something that cannot directly correspond to its sensuous im- age. In view of the reception of Cassirer’s philosophy, it is clear that this broad connotation he conferred on the symbol is surrounded by a certain paradox. Cassirer’s philosophy, indeed, has generally been associated with Kantian idealism and with the neo-Kantian movement, with which he admittedly shared certain affi nities. Th ere are, however, key diff erences, and Cassirer’s broad defi nition of the symbol manifests the dissonance between his thought and Kant’s philosophy, as well as its distinctiveness in relation to more typical expressions of the neo-Kantian orientation. Indeed, one must ask whether the marked tendency to refer to Cassirer as just “another of those neo-Kantians,” has not paradoxically obscured what is most original in his thinking. Th is originality, as I will argue, comes to light above all in the unusual character of Cassirer’s interpreta- tion of the symbol as symbolic form. Born in 1874 in Breslau, which at the time was part of Germany, Cas- sirer completed his doctoral dissertation in Marburg under the direction of Hermann Cohen, one of the leading fi gures in the German neo-Kantian movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cassirer’s work manifests the inspiration of the neo-Kantian perspective, which constituted a main orientation of German intellectual life in the period extending roughly from the second half of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of the First World War. Th is orientation corresponded to a new philosophical direction, which strongly appealed to Cassirer, namely, the revival of the critical attitude espoused by Kant following the mid- nineteenth-century decline of German speculative idealism, and the con- comitant rise of philosophical interest in the empirically oriented natural and human sciences. Cassirer, however, belonged to a later generation of philosophers sympathetic to the neo-Kantian perspective whose major work was elaborated in the years following the First World War, during a period when neo-Kantianism came increasingly under attack in the Ger- man universities. In the years following the Great War the orientations of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger or Karl Jaspers were particularly representative of a new climate in German academia, associated with the call to recast the theoretical and scientifi c preoccupations typical of neo- Kantianism in terms of a philosophy of existence. In this climate, the fact that Cassirer had been pinned with the neo-Kantian label helps account for the controversy which has surrounded the reception of his thought and which has all too often led to neglect of his ideas on their own merits. introduction xi Th is neglect was, of course, abetted by Martin Heidegger’s polemical attitude toward Cassirer in the 1920s, expressed in Heidegger’s course lec- tures, in a critical 1925 review of Mythical Th ought (the second volume of Cassirer’s major work, Th e Philosophy of Symbolic Forms), in his book Sein und Zeit, and in the celebrated Davos conference of 1929, which brought Cassirer and Heidegger face to face in a debate on the theme of Kan- tianism and Philosophy. In these utterances Heidegger insisted that the neo-Kantian roots of Cassirer’s thought accounted for what—in his view—was Cassirer’s inadequate approach to the fundamental themes of human existence. Heidegger’s lack of appreciation for the originality of Cassirer’s work is perhaps not surprising if one remembers that the concept of the symbol— so central to Cassirer’s philosophy—was of little interest to Heidegger. In Heidegger’s major work of the period, Sein und Zeit (1927), he deals with the signifi cance of “sign” (Zeichen) and “reference” (Verweisung), but symbols and symbolic interaction are hardly prominent themes in this or in his other works. Most important, Heidegger’s book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), which fueled his debate with Cassirer at Davos, focused on Kant’s interpretation of the transcendental schema- tism by which the pure imagination lends structure to sensuous intu- ition, while Heidegger accorded little attention to that other means of conferring meaning on sensuous intuition—namely, comprehension by analogy—on the basis of which Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, had defi ned the symbol.