Donald Phillip Verene, "Cassirer’s Metaphysics"

From The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Barash. The University of Chicago Press, 2008, 93-103. Professor Verene’s comparison of Cassirer with Whitehead is of special interest to me:

“Cassirer has a functional, dialectical, organic conception of the real. With his background in mathematical science and his insistence on the process of life and Geist he could have produced a speculative metaphysics similar to that of Whitehead. But he did not. Cassirer’s focus is always on man, an emphasis he takes from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. But had he decided to formulate in detail the internal structures and functions of nonhuman realities, his metaphysics would in essence have been the same as that of Whitehead. Cassirer can be rightly described as a process philosopher in metaphysics. . . .

“. . . Cassirer . . . does not engage in speculation after the fashion of Whitehead, namely, projecting an account of the various forms of reality and life that are nonhuman developed from an analysis of the human. Instead he relies on Uexküll’s biology of the organism and stops within its limits. . . .

“Neither the principle of life nor that of action is especially original in Cassirer’s philosophy. It is the notion of work that is original. It lies at the heart of his metaphysics. Work is the element in human affairs that is directly connected to the inner form of the given—the functional bond, as it were, of the particular and the universal. The sphere of work is the ground of what is true and of what is real for Cassirer, and it is what sets his philosophy apart from most of what has occurred in philosophy since.”

I find a similar restriction of philosophical attention on the phenomenon of life in the work of Cassirer’s most gifted student, Susanne K. Langer. It is also not hard to see in a philosophy of human work a philosophy of creativity, from which the impetus to extrapolate to a theory of divine creativity, as in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, is either to be resisted or surrendered to.

Anthony Flood

August 22, 2009

Cassirer’s Metaphysics

In the first article on Cassirer’s philosophy to appear in an American journal, Iredell Jenkins compares Cassirer’s critical idealism to logical positivism.¹ Jenkins claims that both methods avoid the question of whether there is a reality independent of the knower. This question, in various forms, has haunted Cassirer’s conception of symbolic forms throughout its career. In his last years, while teaching a seminar Philosophy of Language and the Principles of Symbolism at Yale University, Cassirer concluded his seminar with a remark on the independent status of the object of knowledge; he noted that he had the impression that many of the participants had apparently thought that he had been defending a position of subjective idealism throughout the seminar. Cassirer then proceeded to clarify this point: “I think that the problems with which we were concerned here scarcely need these epistemological subtleties. They are to a very large degree independent of any metaphysical theory about the absolute nature of things. The metaphysical realist and the metaphysical idealist may answer them in the same way. For the fact of human culture is, after all, an empirical fact that has to be investigated according to empirical methods and principles. And all of us, I think, are empirical realists, whatever metaphysical or epistemological theory we may assume.” Cassirer concluded: “The ego, the individual mind, cannot create reality. Man is surrounded by a reality that he did not make, that he has to accept as an ultimate fact.”²

Cassirer is firm in his contention that man’s making of his various worlds of symbolic forms presumes a reality, which is not made by man and which is present as an ultimate fact. Yet Cassirer at most points in his work prefers to deal with what we can accept insofar as we are “empirical realists” and avoids discussing how that which man produces as animal symbolicum relates to that which man in principle does not and cannot produce, namely, that part of his milieu that is simply given. Cassirer could have said of himself what the phenomenology scholar Herbert Spiegelberg once said of himself, namely, that he was “metaphysics-shy.” Notwith-standing doubts that any student of Cassirer may have regarding his interest in metaphysics, the text of a fourth volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, entitled The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms—which has recently been published from his Nachlass—must be considered.³

In this work Cassirer treats the question of a metaphysics of symbolic forms in terms of the distinction between Geist and Leben—spirit and life—as well as in terms of what he calls Basisphänomene, or basis phenomena; these comprise the “I,” action and willing, and work (Werk) or human production—a threefold distinction that he takes from Goethe’s Maxims.⁴ In a fragment appended to this fourth volume Cassirer makes clear his view that philosophy is not a symbolic form, and thus he rules out the possibility that metaphysics can be explained or explained away as a type of symbolism or language use. Cassirer’s position here sets his thinking apart from the approach to metaphysics of his colleague at Yale, Wilbur Urban,⁵ or from the analytic view of Morris Lazerowitz.⁶

I wish to consider two questions: First, does Cassirer have a metaphysics in the sense of having a doctrine of being? Second, what does he mean by “the metaphysics of symbolic forms”? The contributors to the Library of Living Philosophers volume on Cassirer offer a range of opinions concerning these two questions. Although they had no knowledge of the fourth volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, they did have access to the translated essay that appears at the end of the Library of Living Philosophers volume, in which Cassirer develops the distinction between Geist and Leben that is central to his fourth volume⁷

William Curtis Swabey explains: “As Cassirer uses the word, metaphysics is merely a name for certain bad habits of thought inherited from a crude and unenlightened past.”⁸ For Cassirer, Swabey notes, these habits are corrected by critical philosophy. Felix Kaufmann has claimed that Cassirer “rejects all varieties of transempirical metaphysics; philosophy is, to him, as it was to Kant, analysis of experience.” According to Robert S. Hartmann, “Cassirer’s philosophy is neither metaphysics nor psychology: it is neither concerned with pure beingnor with pure Consciousness, but ith the context and interaction of both.¹⁰ Hartmann cites Cassirer’s view that, in Leibniz’s philosophy, analysis of the real leads to analysis of ideas and this leads to the analysis of signs. Thus the symbol becomes the center of the intellectual world. For Cassirer then, the principles of metaphysics and those of cognition run together in Leibniz’s thought. Hartmann maintains that “this very same characteristic can be given of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms; only that the form’s metaphysical ingredients, by definition, are—as metaphysical—unknowable. His philosophy is thus, in a way frustrating; one would like to say, it is so by definition. The quest for a metaphysics ‘behind’ the symbolic form is invalid.”¹¹

Cassirer frustrates the metaphysically inclined reader because he himself was frustrated. He is caught between the Kantian critical philosophy, which served as the basis for his philosophy, and the Hegelian speculative philosophy—concerning the truth of the whole—which is the direction in which he would like to take his philosophy.¹² From the Kantian perspective he can do little more in regard to metaphysics than to make pronouncements in modern terms concerning the thing-in-itself, such as his assertion before his Yale seminar that, surrounding human productions, there is a world that man did not make and that must be accepted as an ultimate fact.

From a Hegelian perspective he endorses the speculative doctrine that the true is the whole, but he does not go as far as embracing the principle of the Absolute: he will not go so far as to endorse the complete dialectical totalization of the contents and forms of consciousness and thought. He criticizes Hegel for giving no account of the primary form of spirit in myth and of myth’s basis in the primary phenomenon of life.¹³ Hegel provides a complete speculum mentis but does not ground this in an apprehension of a truly first phenomenon. Without such an original grounding, the principle of the absolute invokes the dogmatism that Hegel had sought to avoid. Only the apprehension of an original unity can guarantee a final synthesis.

What, then, does Cassirer’s system consist of? What is this metaphysics of symbolic forms that will allow him to pass between the Scylla and Charybdis of Kant and Hegel and complete his intellectual odyssey, his passage through the details of the various symbolic forms? Metaphysics is ordinarily a study of being in general, as well as of the fundamental types of being and reality. It takes its questions from the ontological claims already present in thought and language.

Cassirer does not engage in a theory of being or in metaphysics in the traditional sense, that is, in the way that it is pursued by rationalism or empiricism. He claims that all earlier theories of metaphysics were faulty inasmuch as they took some aspect of reality and declared it to be ultimate, and as a result became one-sided. All past systems of metaphysics, then, offer us only partial truths. In explicating any area of culture as a symbolic form, Cassirer on the other hand speaks of discovering its “inner form.” His pursuit of a metaphysics of symbolic forms requires him to discover the “inner form” of being—that one feature of being that encompasses all of the functions of the symbol discovered by Cassirer in his scholarly research on the different and distinct fields of human knowledge and culture.

The inner form of being is tied to the problem of the nature of the given. To discover what this “given” is, and how the given is itself given, is the key to a metaphysics of symbolic forms. This, at least, is my thesis. The question then, is what is Cassirer’s doctrine of the given and how does it develop in his work?

Cassirer says that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason begins with “experience” that is “taken to be something immediately ‘given’ [Gegebenheit], yet this analysis is never directed toward this given as such.”¹⁴ Instead the analysis is directed toward the pure concept of experience as presented in the sciences of nature. The beginning point of “experience” is simply presumed or given, and thought is never truly brought to bear on it. The actual nature of the given, what in fact simply is, is only indirectly confronted by critical idealism in its notion of the numenon and in its metaphysics of the regulative.

Hegel begins with the question of the nature of experience captured in his description of his Phenomenology as the “science of the experience of consciousness.” Experience, for Hegel, is the move-ment of consciousness between its apprehension of the object as it is in itself and as it is as an object for consciousness. This dialectical movement of consciousness in relation to itself necessitates—and indeed is what it means to have—experience. The ways in which this movement occurs are described by Hegel through the stages of the Phenomenology. In Hegel’s account consciousness simply begins to have experience before one’s eyes, as it were, as “sense-certainty.” But Hegel does not pause long enough in his exposition to reveal the inner form of Being itself. Nor does he do this at the beginning of the Science of Logic, which presupposes the beginning point of the Phenomenology for the dynamic of its internal movement.

Cassirer begins his philosophical endeavor by replacing substance with function in Substance and Function. He finds in the logic of the mathematical concept of function the necessary advance over the abstract universality of classical substance-based logic. As he explains, “modern expositions of logic have attempted to take account of their circumstance by opposing—in accordance with a well-known distinction of Hegel’s—the abstract universality of the concept to the concrete universality of the mathematical formula.”¹⁵ The functional concept provides us with a formally determinate representation of the inseparability of universal and particular, which Hegel attempted to portray dialectically in his conception of the “in-and-for-itself.” In the functional concept the principle that determines the order of a series of variables is never in itself reducible to the series but is a universal element distinct from the individual variables; the variables in turn are without significance apart from that of the universal principle of their order. The variables are meaningful particulars only to the extent that they are something for the universal—which is the principle that establishes their position in the series.

In the first chapter of Substance and Function, Cassirer states something that has been overlooked, yet is obvious once stated. Like so many major discoveries, it is a matter of recognizing the significance of something that is already there. Cassirer realizes that the concept of the mathematical function shows with complete clarity what philosophy has long been seeking—the inseparability of the universal and the particular achieved through their mutual determinations. Cassirer found this on the highest level of intellectual thinking. This is what Kant had been looking for in the schematism—the connection between the uni-versality of the concept and the specificity of intuition. To grasp this Kant posits a third thing, the schema, which is more concrete than either but which Kant also calls an art concealed in the depths of the human soul.

The mathematical function contains the secret of the inner form of the given and the secret of a new approach to being. This is the secret means by which Cassirer proposes to pass between the Scylla of Kant, with the many heads of critical philosophy, and the Charybdis of Hegel with the whirlpool of the dialectic.

From mathematical logic Cassirer moves to cultural semiotics and finds this bond of universal and particular within the phenomenon of the symbol. The symbol is at once something physical, a breath of wind or a mark on paper, and something spiritual, a meaning. The symbol is also something specific, yet it conveys a universal meaning. The symbol is also something specific, yet it conveys a universal meaning. The symbol is further the universal medium of all cultural activity, and yet any symbol is specific to the particular cultural activity within which it has its own meaning. The symbol is thus an analogue to the mathematical concept of function. The term “symbolic form” is Cassirer’s own, but to highlight this as the leading idea of a total philosophy he connects it to the doctrine of “symbolic preg-nance” (symbolische Prägnanz), a term that he takes from Gestalt psychology.

The symbol as the medium of forms found at the level of human knowledge and culture has no grounding in human experience as such. The basis of the symbol must be found in the object of consciousness. The symbol’s internal dialectic of universal and particular can be grasped in the phenomenon of symbolic pregnance. Cassirer defines symbolic pregnance as: “the way in which a perception as a sensory experience contains at the same time a certain nonintuitive meaning which it immediately and concretely represents.”¹⁶

Cassirer’s analysis of symbolic pregnance takes the symbol back to the level of the “life-world,” to use Husserl’s terms. In Cassirer’s sense of the life-world we can find the roots of all the forms of human culture. In Husserl’s life-world we find only the basis of science and cognition. Cassirer claims that in Husserl’s phenomenology the hyletic stratum is still separated from the noetic.¹⁷ In it we have a dirempted given rather than the mutual necessity of the particular and universal in the formal concept of function.

In contrasting nature-concepts and culture-concepts, Cassirer regards the latter as containing a separation of universal from particular that is not present in the former. Nature-concepts in principle unite the universal and the particular in the manner of the pure mathematical function, the difference being that the nature-concept never perfectly encompasses the actual elements as they appear in nature. Culture-concepts achieve only an approx-imate integration of the particular into the universal. Thus in Burckhardt’s concept of “Renaissance man” the specific figures it comprises, namely, Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and others, only point in the direction of its ideal. The concept “Renaissance man” allows us to make sense of the particular figures of the Renaissance in terms of which one comes closest to the universal set of characteristics the concept enunciates, but does not offer us a fully determinate order of figures in which each figure finds its necessary place in the way that any specific material finds its place in, for example, a table of specific gravities.¹⁸

Cassirer penetrates the inner form of the given, first from the standpoint of the know of the object. He then approaches the problem from the standpoint of the reality of the object, which necessitates the concept of a metaphysics of symbolic forms. Cassirer moves between these two standpoints from the outset, but, as already noted, his concern with the reality of the object is always muted. Cassirer, however, is clear on how he regards the reality of the object. He says: “We begin not with the primordial fact of so-called Being, but with that of ‘Life.’”¹⁹ To his students in the seminar at Yale, Cassirer explained that “the fundamental reality, the Urphänomen . . . the ultimate phenomenon may, indeed, be designated by the term ‘life.’ This phenomenon is accessible to everyone; but it is ‘incomprehensible’ in the sense that it admits of no definition, no abstract theoretical explanation . . . . Life, reality, being, existence are nothing but different terms referring to one and the same fundamental fact. These terms do not describe a fixed, rigid, substantial thing. They are to be understood as names of a process.”²⁰

Cassirer substitutes Life understood as process, for Being understood as substance. His objection to substance is that it has no inner form, no relation to itself. To use Alfred North Whitehead’s term, sub-stance is “vacuous actuality.” Epistemologically, Kant’s schema is what captures Cassirer’s imagination, but what stimulates him metaphysically is Leibniz’s monad, or the sense of the monad as having internal relations to itself, what Whitehead develops into the idea of an “actual entity.” Cassirer speaks of this in terms of function. Just as he replaces substance-concepts with function-concepts in his system of theoretical knowledge, so too he replaces the substantial conception of Being with process, which he understands as a dialectic of Life and Geist in metaphysics.

Life is an Urphänomen, but the key feature of life is its constant transformation into Geist. This trans-formation into Geist is the continual process of life taking on form, a process that moves from the immediate to the mediate. Cassirer regards Plato’s eidos as the origin of his doctrine of form, but considers eidos in Plato as tied to a doctrine of substantial being, which is only freed when the traditional concept of being is recognized as in fact life. The relationship of life and Geist is not one-way. It is bidirectional because Geist is continually in the process of reemerging from life. Life and Geist are held together as two necessary moments of a dialectic that is parallel to Hegel’s in-itself and for-iteself. Life and Geist are in a continual dialectic and life is not aufgehoben—literally, taken up—in Geist, as with Hegel.

The relationship of life and Geist is in Cassirer’s view a functional one: life is to Geist as the individual variables are to the principle of the order of their series. Cassirer’s imagination never abandons the sense of the bond of particular and universal that is present in the concept of the mathematical function. Life and Geist as metaphysical terms mark a metamorphosis of this original sense of functions inner form.

Cassirer has a functional, dialectical, organic con-ception of the real. With his background in mathematical science and his insistence on the process of life and Geist he could have produced a speculative metaphysics similar to that of Whitehead. But he did not. Cassirer’s focus is always on man, an emphasis he takes from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. But had he decided to formulate in detail the internal structures and functions of nonhuman realities, his metaphysics would in essence have been the same as that of Whitehead. Cassirer can be rightly described as a process philosopher in metaphysics. He is not a life philosopher, wishing to return the workings of Geist to the cosmic vitality of life, nor is he a Geist philosopher, regarding Geist as an alienation from life. Rather, he sees Geist as the fulfillment of life, which for its own vitality must always maintain its dialectic with life.

When Cassirer turns to these questions in detail he does not attempt a speculative reworking of Plato’s Timaeus, as does Whitehead. Cassirer turns to the biology of the organism of Jacob von Uexküll To Uexküll’s view that every organism has its own environment or Umwelt organized around two poles of an effector system and a reactor system, Cassirer adds that in the world of man there is a third system, a symbol system. Reacting, effecting, and symbol-izing are the three basic functions of the human organism, according to Cassirer.²¹

In his essay “Basis Phenomena,” Cassirer distinguishes three phenomena that are underived and have no ground outside themselves. These are life, which is understood as a process and which Cassirer associates with the phenomenon of the “I” as the locus of life; action or the resistance and opposition we experience in the world in our attempts to effect the other by willing; and the sphere of “work” (Werk) in which something objective is produced. Cassirer, as mentioned above, claims to derive these three basis phenomena from Goethe’s conception of life as an Urphänomen. But in addition to Goethe there appears to lie behind them the conception of the human organism that he derives from Uexküll. The “I” has a parallel in Uexküll’s reactor system. It is a taking up of the movement of life itself. The phenomenon of action is parallel to that of the effector system in which the self attempts to act in relatin to the world and to other selves. Finally, the sphere of work is parallel to the symbol system in which something objective is produced—a Werk.

Cassirer is in the end a Socratic. As he asserts in the first sentence of An Essay on Man, self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophy. He is a Socratic because he believes in the basis phenomenon of “work” and he understands “work” to be not merely the product of “willing” or “action”—which would be to reduce “work” to the political or historical effects of its production—but something more. Cassirer claims that “there are ‘works’ whose content, whose meaning, whose ‘sense’ does not consist exclusively in their bringing about a specific ‘effect,’ in their making some physical or psychical changes in things, or in their inhering in the physical or psychical causal order.”²²

Cassirer says that self-knowledge is a call to the sense of truth that can be achieved in the work: “This call now means know your work and know ‘yourself’ in your work: know what you do so you can do what you know.”²³ To give up on the Socratic project is to fail to recognize the basis phenomenon of work and the fact that the achievement of truth that transcends action and its world of effects, lies in work. Cassirer says: “The recognition of this purely formal value of truth ‘itself in itself’ is what distinguishes the ‘philosopher’ from the ‘Sophist,’ the’ dialectician’ from the ‘rhetorician’ and ‘eristic.’ For the sophist and the rhetorician, ‘truth’ is exhausted by the sphere of action.”²⁴

In conclusion; Cassirer does have a metaphysics but it is only partially developed. He goes beyond Kantian critical idealism in his claim that the basis phenomena are embodiments of the real and as such are not regulative ideas. Cassirer is unequivocal on this point. But he stops short of entering into Hegelian speculative philosophy. He holds to a doctrine of reflection and does not provide an explicit account of the totality of experience. In principle, he advocates the view that all the symbolic forms can be understood in a synthetic fashion by philosophy, which means of course that philosophy itself is not an independent symbolic form. But he does not offer a full account in the manner of Hegel’s dialectic, and he certainly does not endorse Hegel’s “speculative sentence.” Instead Cassirer advocates a view of dialectic that does not involve an all-encompassing totality and seeks to avoid the tendency native to philosophy to reduce all forms of expression to a logical order in the manner of Hegel’s logic. Cassirer also does not engage in speculation after the fashion of Whitehead, namely, projecting an account of the various forms of reality and life that are nonhuman developed from an analysis of the human. Instead he relies on Uexküll’s biology of the organism and stops within its limits.

Cassirer’s metaphysics is based on the dialectic between life and Geist. Where his doctrine of basis phenomena is connected to this dialectic it would seem that the ultimate fact of life is formed by Geist by means of the basis phenomenon of action; and ultimately this issues in the sphere of work that is the basis of human culture. Cassirer does not develop a full account of how these basis phenomena inhere in the dialectic of life and Geist, but the two sets of distinctions appear to coalesce to form Cassirer’s doctrine of a metaphysics of function that replaces the metaphysics of substance and being.

Neither the principle of life nor that of action is especially original in Cassirer’s philosophy. It is the notion of work that is original. It lies at the heart of his metaphysics. Work is the element in human affairs that is directly connected to the inner form of the given—the functional bond, as it were, of the particular and the universal. The sphere of work is the ground of what is true and of what is real for Cassirer, and it is what sets his philosophy apart from most of what has occurred in philosophy since.

¹ Iredell Jenkins, “Logical Positivism, Critical Idealism, and the Concept of Man,” Journal of Philosophy 47 (1950): 677-695.

² Ernst Cassirer, “Language and Art II,” in Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935-1945, ed. Donald Phillip Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 195.

³ Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, ed. John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene, trans. by John Michael Krois (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), and idem, Zur Metaphysik der symbolischen Formen, ed. John Michael Krois, vol. 1 of Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, ed. John Michael Krois and Oswald Schwemmer (Hamburg: Meiner, 1995). The first full-length study of this work is Thora Ilin Bayer, Cassirer’s Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: A Philosophical Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

⁵ Wilbur M. Urban, Language and Reality: The Philosophy of Language and the Principles of Symbolism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1939).

⁶ Morris Lazerowitz, Studies in Metaphilosophy (Atlantic Highlands: Humanitics Press, 1964).

⁷ Ernst Cassirer, “‘Spirit’ and ‘Life’ in Contemporary Philosophy,” trans. By Robert Walter Bretall and Paul Arthur Schilpp, in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston: Library of Living Philosophers, 1949), 855-880. This first appeared as “‘Geist’ und ‘Leben’ in der Philosophie der Gegenwart,” Die neue Rundschau I (1930): 244-264.

¹¹ Ibid., 317. See also Leon Rosenstein, “The Metaphysical Problems of Cassirer’s Symbolic Forms,” Man and World 6 (1973): 304-321; and Stephen Erickson, “Cassirer’s Dialectic: A Critical Discussion,” Idealistic Studies 4 (1974): 251-266. For an account of the various types of criticisms of Cassirer’s metaphysics and their relation to the fourth volume, see Bayer, Cassirer’s Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms.

¹³ Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, Mythical Thought, trans. by Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, (955), xv-xvi.

¹⁵ Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, trans, by William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (Chicago: Open Court, (923), 20,

¹⁶ Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, The Phenomenology of Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, (957), 202.

¹⁸ Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Five Studies, trans. by S. G. Lofts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 70-73.

²¹ Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, (944), 23-26.