HOMO SYMBOLICUS: ERNST CASSIRER, THE PHILOSOPHER WHO WON ARGUMENT AND LOST CENTURY

In March 1929, at a Swiss mountain resort originally built for people with tuberculosis, two German philosophers argued in public about what a human being is. One of them said that freedom is something we manufacture, slowly and together, out of language and art and law and mathematics. The other said that freedom is something that breaks in on us, rarely, and mostly in the vicinity of death. The first man was courteous, encyclopedic, and right about nearly everything. The second man became the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century and, four years later, delivered an inaugural address celebrating the self-assertion of the German university under its energetic new management. Ernst Cassirer lost. He lost the way careful people usually lose, which is on points, to nobody's particular surprise, over a period of decades. This book is about what he was right about, and about why being right in that way did not help. Cassirer spent his life on one idea with alarming consequences. We never meet the world raw. Experience arrives already shaped, and the shapes are not decorations added afterward but the condition of there being anything to think about at all. Myth is one of them. So are language, art, religion, history, technology, and mathematical science, and none can be reduced to any of the others. He argued that the human animal is defined not by reason but by the gap it inserts between a stimulus and a response, a gap it fills with symbols. He argued in 1910 that our concepts are relations rather than things, quietly demolishing two thousand years of essences in a book that was then absorbed, largely uncredited, by sociology, by art history, and eventually by the engineers who taught machines to sort photographs. And in the last book he wrote, finishing it as the war ended and his own heart ran out, he argued that a modern political myth is neither a relic nor an accident. It is a product. It is manufactured, by technicians, on a schedule, to specification. He believed he was diagnosing a pathology. He had in fact drafted the first operating manual for an industry that now has job titles, quarterly targets, and a conference circuit. Applied to policy announcements, mission statements, cosmological headlines, and the phrase data-driven, the results are not reassuring. They are, however, funny. Keywords: Cassirer, symbolic forms, philosophy of culture, myth, Heidegger, meaning, knowledge.