Tnr Looic or +nr Ctr+tn\r Scirxcrs

FIVE STUDIES
Ernst Cassirer
Translated and with an Introduction by S. G. Lofts
Foreword by Donald Phillip Verene
Yale University Press/New Haven and London
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Cassirer, Ernst, :8:q.
[Logik der Kulturwissenschaften. English]
The logic of the cultural sciences : ve studies / Ernst Cassirer ; translated with an
introduction by S. G. Lofts ; foreword by Donald Phillip Verene.
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:o q 8 6 . :
Cox+rx+s
Fonrvonn Donald Phillip Verene vii
Tn\xsr\+ons Ackxovrrnoxrx+s xi
Tn\xsr\+ons Ix+nontc+iox
The Historical and Systematic Context
of The Logic of the Cultural Sciences xiii
S+tnv :.
The Object of the Science of Culture :
S+tnv ..
The Perception of Things and the Perception of Expression
S+tnv .
Concepts of Nature and Concepts of Culture 6
S+tnv .
The Problem of Form and the Problem of Cause 8
S+tnv .
The Tragedy of Culture :o
Ixnrx :.q
Fonrvonn
Donald Phillip Verene
If we look back over the major thinkers in philosophy of the twentieth
century, Ernst Cassirer is the gure most associated with the philosophy
of culture. Philosophy of culture is one of the youngest elds of philoso-
phy, and the work of Cassirer, more than that of anyone else, has given it
shape.
Culture is the problem of the twentieth century. Never before has
there been such an awareness of the range and variety of cultures. This
awareness of the variations on the human condition has been made vivid
to the point of being overwhelming. Offsetting this plural sense of culture
in which all cultures are different is Cassirers sense of the constancy of
human culture itself. Cassirer has held to a singular sense of culture, with
multiple basic or symbolic forms that underlie the diversity of cultures.
In explaining the intent of his major work, the Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms, published in the :q.os, Cassirer said that in it the critique of rea-
son becomes the critique of culture. He sought to expand the Kantian
project of a presentation of the principles of human knowledge based on
an analysis of science, ethical judgment, and aesthetic and organic forms
to the areas of myth, religion, language, art, and history. In so doing he
expanded the problem of knowledge from its traditional connections
with forms of cognition and theoretical thought to areas of human expe-
rience that depend primarily upon imagination and memory, areas that
are the subject matter for study in the various elds of the humanities.
To accomplish this conception of knowledge Cassirer sought a com-
mon denominator of these areas and found it in the phenomenon of the
vii
symbol. On Cassirers view, one area of human experience is not more
symbolic than another. All human experience depends upon the distinc-
tively human capacity to form the world through the medium of myths
and aesthetic images, the words of natural languages, and systems of for-
mal notations and numbers such as are found in mathematics and sci-
ence. In his late work An Essay on Man (:q), in which he summarized and
reformulated his philosophy of symbolic forms for his American audi-
ence, Cassirer recast the Aristotelian denition of man as animal rationale
into man as animal symbolicum. Cassirer regarded all areas of culture as ex-
pressions of the human power to form the ongoing immediacy of life in
various ways by means of symbols. Each area of culture, whether it is
myth, language, or science, has its own inner form. Each has its own
tonality in an overall harmony of forms that make up human culture as
a whole.
The task of the philosophy of culture, for Cassirer, is to understand
and articulate a sense of the whole while preserving the integrity of each
symbolic form. Cassirer understood this unity as functional so that all ar-
eas of culture, all symbolic forms, stand in a dynamic relation to each
other. Cassirer approaches each area of culture in the manner of Kant-
ian critique, analyzing the form of each in terms of space, time, number,
causality, object, and so on. But his concern for culture as a whole owes
much to Hegel. He explicitly endorses Hegels dictum that the True is
the whole, and he states that the phenomenology of knowledge he pre-
sents in the third volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is to be under-
stood in terms of Hegels sense of phenomenology rather than more
modern senses. Cassirer understands the dynamics of culture as dialecti-
cal, but he does not wish all of the internal oppositions of cultural life and
thought to culminate in the one form of logic as he nds in Hegel.
Cassirers scholarship is so vast and encyclopedic that, in addition to
the inuence of Kant and Hegel, his philosophy incorporates elements
from the work of most modern European thinkers, including Goethe,
Herder, Vico, Leibniz, Schelling, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. It is said
that every great thinker is a complete university, and in Cassirers case this
is easily seen. Little escapes his gaze, and he can elicit just the right
amount of value in anothers thought. He concentrates always on the
great achievement that human culture is and on the sense in which its
greatest interpreters carry in their thought its greatest ideals.
viii FOREWORD
In founding his philosophy of culture, Cassirer relies upon the com-
prehension of the various areas of cultural life in the elds that study
themmythology, history of religion, linguistics, aesthetics, literary crit-
icism, art history, history and historiography, anthropology, and so on
the Kulturwissenschaften (literally: cultural sciences), as these elds can be
called in German. In the work which follows, whose German title is Zur
Logik der Kulturwissenschaften, Cassirer turns his attention from the subjects
that these elds study to the form or logic of the elds themselves. In his
early work on Substance and Function (:q:o), Cassirer had presented a the-
ory of concept formation in the natural sciences which he carried
through into his later works. In the present work, Cassirer turns to a the-
ory of concept formation for the cultural sciences. The contrast and re-
lation between these two types of concept formation is specically the
subject matter of the third and pivotal study of this work. Cassirers phi-
losophy of culture comes full circle from extending the problem of
knowledge to those areas of thought that are distinctively human, in
which the human self specically confronts its own nature, to a philo-
sophical reection on those elds on which the philosophy of culture
must rely to construct its account.
S. G. Lofts offers a valuable translation of this most rewarding and
crucial work of Cassirer, replacing the earlier translation of Clarence
Smith Howe, which has been out of print for some years. English-speak-
ing readers of Cassirer and those generally interested in the study of cul-
ture are in his debt, and that of Yale University Press, for making avail-
able this important work in this new translation.
FOREWORD ix
Tn\xsr\+on s Ackxovrrnoxrx+s
The following translation has been made from the original edition: Zur
Logik der Kulturwissenschaften: Fnf Studien in Gteborgs Hgskolas rsskrift 8
(:q.), pp. ::q. The German pagination provided marginally refers,
however, to the more accessible edition published by Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt. The translation of the title follows Cas-
sirers own translation in a bibliography of his works compiled by him
shortly before his death. Cassirers precise translation was Logic to Cul-
tural Sciences, Five Essays (cf. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Li-
brary at Yale University, Gen Mss , Box :, folder .). I wish to thank
John M. Krois for drawing this to my attention. The difcult task of
translating has been made easier by the generous help of Professor
Philipp W. Rosemann, of the University of Dallas, who has kindly read
the entire manuscript and made numerous comments concerning both
the letter and the spirit of Cassirers text. Professor Rosemann has also
provided me with the translations for the Greek and Latin. I thank him
for his work and valuable help. I would also like to thank the Alexander
von Humboldt Foundation for providing the means to complete this
translation.
xi
Tn\xsr\+on s Ix+nontc+i ox
The Historical and Systematic Context of
The Logic of the Cultural Sciences
Because of his Jewish heritage, Ernst Cassirer was forced in :q to resign
from his functions at the University of Hamburg, where he had served as
rector only two years before, and take up a life of exile. He taught at All
Souls College at Oxford for two years before moving in :q to Sweden.
He held a position at the University of Gteborg until :q:, at which time
he left Europe to teach at Yale University. Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften:
Fnf Studien was written in the spring of :qo, just as all of Europe was en-
tering into war. Toni Cassirers remarkable account in Mein Leben mit Ernst
Cassirer of this period in her husbands life not only sets the historical stage
for this treatise and explains the existential context of its writing but also
provides us with a valuable clue to the important systematic role that it
plays in the overall work of Cassirer:
A few days after Ernst nished his lectures we left Gteborg, where
we had to leave behind the children and Peter, and put ourselves up
in a wonderfully situated old manor whose accommodations had
been converted for guests. It was near a small town, Alingss, by a
large lake about an hour from Gteborg.
Suddenly transported from the oppressive atmosphere of the
city to the wonderful Swedish landscape, we breathed a sigh of re-
lief. The lake in front of our house was still frozen when we arrived,
and we experienced in the next few days and weeks the opening of
Swedish springa process, the beauty of which hardly has its
equal. We learned then that in no situation is it possible to escape
xiii
the impression of the awakening of nature. Although we encoun-
tered wire enclosures and patrols, although the air hummed with
the noise of planes and each wagon that we met carried eld equip-
ment, although we listened anxiously to each broadcast, always
prepared to hear it suddenly announced that the Germans had en-
tered Sweden, we enjoyed the nature surrounding us more in-
tensely than ever before.
In these weeks everything that could happen politically hap-
pened, except that which was expected. Holland, Belgium were
overrun, France had been conquered, and only Sweden escaped.
We no longer wondered at the shortsightedness of anyone; but to
the horrible idea of the subjugation of the Western countries was
added for us the thought that all the German fugitives, who had
been victims of political or religious persecution, had now come
under Hitlers power. In this situation, Ernst suddenly decided to
undertake a new work. In the morning he took a walk with me and
told me about what he was working on, and that this new work ac-
tually signied the fourth volume of the symbolic forms.
1
The improvement of his physical state had lled him, in just
such an incomparably dreadful moment in world history, with a
new desire for life and work. I worried now mostly about my
brother Walter and his young wife, who lived in Toulon, which as a
naval port appeared to be in special danger. . . . After the invasion
of Paris, Walter, who was always optimistic and positive, suddenly
lost all vigor. Seriously ill with diabetes for many years and kept
alive only through insulin, he had mastered his life wonderfully as a
result of his happy character. Now he used the disease to escape the
disaster. He was no longer prepared to witness the collapse of
France and to see German soldiers turn up in Toulon. He refused
to inject the necessary dose of insulin, and died two weeks later. . . .
One week after our return to Gteborg, thus six weeks after our
departure for Alingss, Ernst had given the nished manuscript of
the new book, which received the title The Logic of the Cultural Sciences,
xiv TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
:. In dieser Situation beschlo Ernst pltzlich, sich an eine neue Arbeit zu
machen. Vormittags ging er mit mir spazieren und erzhlte mir von dem, was er
arbeitete, und da diese neue Arbeit eigentlich den vierten Band der symbolischen
Formen bedeutete. (My italics in translation.)
to a typist, and a few days later he began to write the fourth volume
of the Problem of Knowledge, which he nished in November of the
same year. This unusual pace was the rst indication of the urgency
that showed itself in his otherwise very quiet mode of working. He
had always been a very fast worker without wanting to be or inten-
tionally forcing it. However, the pace that he maintained from the
time of the invasion of Norway up to his death had a completely
new driving force. The effort to be nished had become all determining.
2
The contrast between the splendor of spring and the awakening of na-
ture on the one hand, and the death and destruction of war on the other,
between the renewed desire for life and work on Cassirers part and the
lost hope and tragic death of his brother-in-law, forms quite a remarkable
background for The Logic of the Cultural Sciences. It was in this situation,
in this dreadful moment in world history, that The Logic of the Cultural
Sciences was written, and it is in this light that it should be read. Some years
later, in Myth of the State, Cassirer criticized those trends in philosophy, ex-
emplied most notably by Spenglers work The Decline of the West and by
Heideggers concept of thrownness (Geworfenheit), which admittedly had
not directly brought about the political ideas and events of Nazi Ger-
many and the war but which nevertheless had enfeebled and slowly un-
dermined the forces that could have resisted the modern political myths.
A philosophy of history that consists in somber predictions of the decline
and the inevitable destruction of our civilization and a theory that sees in
the Geworfenheit of man one of his principal characters have given up all
hopes of an active share in the construction and reconstruction of mans
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION xv
.. Ernst hatte eine Woche nach unserer Rckkunft nach Gteborg, also sechs
Wochen nach dem Tage unserer Abreise nach Alingss, das fertige Manuskript des
neuen Buches, das den Titel Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften erhielt, zum
Abschreiben gegeben und begann wenige Tage spter mit der Niederschrift des
vierten Bandes des Erkenntnisproblems, die er im November desselben Jahres
beendete. Dieses ungewhnliche Tempo war das erste Anzeichen von Eile, das sich
in seiner sonst so ruhigen Arbeitsweise zeigte. Er war von jeher, ohne es zu wollen
oder absichtlich zu forcieren, ein sehr schneller Arbeiter gewesen. Das Tempo
aber, das er von der Zeit der Besetzung Norwegens bis zu seinem Tode bewahrte,
hatte eine ganz neue Triebkraft. Das Bestreben, fertig zu werden, war aus-
schlaggebend geworden. Toni Cassirer, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (Hildesheim:
Gerstenberg-Verlag, :q8:), pp. .6q.: (my translation).
cultural life. Such philosophy renounces its own fundamental theoretical
and ethical ideals.
3
Throughout the spring and summer of :qo Cas-
sirer experienced the consequences of this attitude of fatalism in the
most intense and personal terms, both in the military successes of Nazi
Germany and in the resignation of his brother-in-law to the fall of Eu-
rope. The Logic of the Cultural Sciences can be read as Cassirers response to
this attitude. For this treatise, and especially its nal part, entitled The
Tragedy of Culture, provides us with a philosophy of history and cul-
tural events in which there is no nal decline, no destiny other than the
one we ourselves create through our proper activity. Both The Logic of the
Cultural Sciences and the fourth volume of the Problem of Knowledge (Philoso-
phy, Science, and History Since Hegel)which Cassirer wrote back-to-back in
a period of ve months of intensive workare concerned with over-
coming the crisis in mans knowledge that Cassirer diagnoses as being
due to the growing fragmentation in philosophy and science since the
death of Hegel.
4
The fourth volume of the Problem of Knowledge seeks to
overcome the separatist tendencies that are the distinguishing mark
and to a certain extent, the stigma of the theory of knowledge during the
past century through an essentially historical approach to the problem.
5
By contrast, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences provides us with a systematic
approach to the crisis in knowledge. One of its principal tasks is to es-
tablish the logical and methodological difference between the sciences of
nature and the sciences of culture, while at the same time determining
their respective places in the general and unied logic of research of
science as a whole.
6
xvi TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, :q6),
p. .q.
. The original German title of the fourth volume actually translates as The
Problem of Knowledge in the Philosophy and Science of Recent Times: From Hegels Death up to
the Present (Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der
neueren Zeit: Von Hegels Tod bis zur Gegenwart).
. Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge, vol. , Philosophy, Science, and History
Since Hegel, trans. William H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel (New Haven: Yale
University Press, :qo), p. :8.
6. To translate Kulturwissenschaften as humanities instead of using the some-
what unusual English term, sciences of culture, would thus have meant to ob-
scure Cassirers aim of searching for the unity behind the sciences of culture and
of nature.
That this internal crisis is not merely a grave theoretical problem
but an imminent threat to the whole extent of our ethical and cultural life
admits of no doubt for Cassirer.
7
This is why, in the words of Toni Cas-
sirer, the effort to be nished had become all determining for her
husband from :qo onward. For it was in the rise of the myth of Nazism
and the historical events of the spring of :qo that Cassirer saw the con-
crete effects of the fragmentation of the theoretical realm, of the failure
of philosophy to provide an intellectual center around which to organize
our critical forces, either theoretical or ethical.
8
Of all the sad experi-
ences of these last twelve years, Cassirer writes in Myth of the State, the
most dreadful was to have seen his colleagues, men of education and
intelligence, honest and upright men . . . suddenly give up the highest hu-
man privilege. They [had] ceased to be free and personal agents.
9
The
force of critical reason, weakened by the cultural pessimism of the
times, had failed to fulll its theoretical and ethical duty in the moment
that it had been most urgently needed. Already in his inaugural address at
the University of Gteborg in :q Cassirer spoke of the problem of
the unity of knowledge and of the failure of philosophy to achieve
its ethical vocation: in the hour of peril Cassirer said, quoting
Schweitzer, the watchman slept, who should have kept watch over us.
So it happened that we did not struggle for our culture.
10
Cassirer
maintains that the whole of theoretical philosophy, including himself, has
its share in this failure:
I do not exclude myself and I do not absolve myself. While endeav-
oring on behalf of the scholastic conception of philosophy . . . we
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION xvii
. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture
(New Haven: Yale University Press, :qo), pp. .: ff.
8. As Fabien Capeillres has shown, Cassirer, in writing The Myth of the State
seems to have had in mind Alfred Rosenbergs declaration of the necessity to cre-
ate a new myth of the state. Rosenberg is the author of Der Mythus des 20.
Jahrhunderts, which is considered to contain the ofcial philosophy of Nazism. Cf.
Capeillres, Cassirer penseur politique: The Myth of the State contre Der Mythus des
20. Jahrhunderts, in Cahiers de philosophie politique et juridique .6 (:qq): :.o.
q. Cassirer, Myth of the State, p. .86.
:o. Ernst Cassirer, The Concept of Philosophy as a Philosophical Problem,
in Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, , ed. Don-
ald Phillip Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, :qq), p. 6o.
have all too frequently lost sight of the true connection of philoso-
phy with the world. But today we can no longer keep our eyes
closed to the menacing danger. Today the urgency of the time
warns us more strongly and more imperatively than ever that there
is once again a question for philosophy which involves its ultimate
and highest decisions. Is there really something like an objective
theoretical truth, and is there something like that which earlier
generations have understood as the ideal of morality, of humanity?
. . . In a time in which such questions can be raised, philosophy can-
not stand aside, mute and idle. If ever, now is the time for it again
to reect on itself, on that which it is and what it has been, on its
systematic, fundamental purpose, and on its spiritual-historical
past.
11
We must reject, on the one hand, that cultural pessimism which be-
lieves that the hour of destiny for our culture has struck: to this pes-
simism and fatalism we do not wish to resign ourselves. On the other
hand, we can give ourselves over today less than ever before to that opti-
mism which Hegels famous words express: what is rational is real; what
is real is rational.
12
The reader will recognize here both the passage
from The Myth of the State cited above and the opening paragraph from the
fth study of the present volume. The Logic of the Cultural Sciences was, as I
have said, Cassirers response to the crisis of his time. This also explains
why Cassirer employs the term Kulturwissenschaften in the title rather than
the term Geisteswissenschaften, which he generally employsand which, in
fact, better depicts the project of the critique of culture. For in so doing
Cassirer was explicitly associating himself, not with such neo-Kantians as
Windelband and Rickert, as we might rst think,
13
but rather with the
Warburg Library for the Science of Culture (Kulturwissenschaften) and with the
xviii TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
::. Ibid., pp. 6o6:. It is clear that from :q on Cassirer was rethinking his
whole philosophical enterprise from a more profound and more concrete perspec-
tive. The Logic of the Cultural Sciences is, in a certain sense, only the tip of the iceberg,
a brief rsum of a much more vast project which, with the outbreak of the war,
could no longer wait.
:.. Ibid., pp. 6:6..
:. Cassirer in fact critiques Windelband and Rickerts concepts of Kulturwissen-
schaften in the second study of The Logic of the Cultural Sciences.
ideal of universal humanity, a universal humanitas, which was the spirit
of that institution.
14
In her account Toni Cassirer also suggests how Cassirer himself seems
to have understood the place of The Logic of the Cultural Sciences in his
oeuvre. On one of their daily morning walks, Cassirer mentioned that
the new work on which he was working actually signied the fourth
volume of the symbolic forms. She then informs us that one week after
returning to Gteborg, Cassirer gave the nished manuscript of the new
book, which received the title The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, to a typist.
By the new book Toni Cassirer is almost certainly referring back to the
new work that Cassirer had suddenly decided to undertake upon
their arrival at Alingss only six weeks earlier. The Logic of the Cultural Sci-
ences, therefore, in some way represented or signied (bedeutete) for Cas-
sirer the fourth volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Whether Toni
Cassirers account is accurate or not we will never know. It does seem
rather clear, however, that the two works are certainly connected. This
connection can been seen if we turn for a moment to consider the project
of the philosophy of symbolic forms as it was originally presented in the
preface of the rst volume in :q. and as it came to be realized in the
three volumes.
After completing his analysis of the structure of the mathematical sci-
ences of nature in Substance and Function, Cassirer turned his attention to
the sciences of spirit (Geisteswissenschaften) only to discover that tradi-
tional epistemology was wholly inadequate for this task. Only after a
morphology of spirit that accounted for the various fundamental
forms of mans understanding of the world could a proper method-
ological approach to the individual cultural sciences be established. This
morphology of spirit was undertaken in the philosophy of symbolic
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION xix
:. Edgar Wind, Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliographie zum Nachleben der Antike, vol. :,
Die Erscheinungen des Jahres 1931 (London: Cassell, :q), p. xvi. In this introduction
Wind describes the spirit and structure of the Warburg Library. Reading this intro-
duction one almost has the impression that it was written by Cassirer himself. This
is due, no doubt, to the fact that Wind was a student of Cassirers and to the close
afliation between the philosophy of Cassirer and the spirit of the Warburg
Library. (I thank Professor John M. Krois for drawing my attention to this link
between the title of Cassirers text and the project of the Warburg Institute.)
forms. The rst volume of this project dealt with language, the second
with myth and religion, and the third provided a morphology of scientic
thought.
15
However, when we examine this third volume, we discover to
our surprise that Cassirer treats only the structure of the mathematical
sciences of nature; there is no mention of the sciences of culture. It is only
in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences that Cassirer nally returns to the project
of establishing the logical foundations and structure of the sciences of
culture in contradistinction to the sciences of nature.
As we know, the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms was
published in :q.q without the nal section that Cassirer had planned for it.
The volume as it appears today had already been completed by :q.. Cas-
sirer continued to work on the nal section until :q.q, at which time he -
nally decided to publish the volume without the concluding chapter so as
to avoid making the present volume even longer than it is, and to avoid
weighting it with discussions which, in the last analysis, lie outside the ter-
ritory prescribed by its specic problem.
16
This missing section was not,
however, to deal with the problem of the sciences of culture. Rather it was
to dene and justify the basic attitude of the philosophy of symbolic
forms toward present-day philosophy as a whole. By present-day philos-
ophy Cassirer is referring to life philosophy (Lebensphilosphie) and in
particular to such philosophers as Bergson, Simmel, Dilthey, Schopen-
hauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. When we examine the problem of life
philosophy as it is presented by Cassirer at the end of the introduction to
the third volume, we discover that it is, in fact, the same problematic that is
addressed in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, though from a more systematic
perspective. Bergson advocates an immediate intuitive knowledge of the
real beyond all symbolic expression, a pure vision without symbols. He
critiques all symbolic formation as a process of mediation and reica-
tion which causes life to dry up and die.
17
Now the problem of the me-
xx TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
:. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. :, Language, trans. Ralph
Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, :q), p. 6q. Cassirer abandons the
use of the term morphology in the three volumes of the The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms. The principle of morphology reappears in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (cf.
also Structuralism in Modern Linguistics, Word : (:q6): q:.o).
:6. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. , Phenomenology of Knowl-
edge, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, :q), p. xvi.
:. Ibid., p. .
diation of the symbol and the loss of any immediate contact with the real
is a recurring theme throughout The Logic of the Cultural Sciences. In both the
introduction to the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and in The Logic of the Cul-
tural Sciences, Cassirer maintains that the expression of the I in the objective
forms of spirit constitutes a genuine act of discovery and determining of
the I, and not a simple act of alienation. In both, the general philosophical
point remains the same: the return to pure vision through the negation
of symbols desired by life philosophy ends by destroying the preconditions
for vision as such.
18
Only by externalizing itself in its work and
through the symbolic forms can spirit manifest itself; only in the mirror of
its work can spirit discover itself.
When we turn to consider even schematically the fragments and notes
for the fourth volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, it becomes even
more apparent that The Logic of the Cultural Sciences is closely tied to this
planned fourth volume, as Toni Cassirers account suggests. In chapter :
we nd that Cassirers protagonist is Georg Simmel.
19
The problems
raised and the answers given there are identical to those found in Cas-
sirers discussion of Simmel in the last part of The Logic of the Cultural Sci-
ences. In both, the problem is how we are to reconcile the immediacy of
life with the mediacy of thought. If we compare the structure of what
Cassirer says about philosophical anthropology in the second chapter
with what he says on the same topic at the beginning of the second part of
the rst study of The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, we discover the same ar-
guments and the same examples employed. The problem is that man has
come to be dened in naturalistic terms by the Darwinian theory of evo-
lution. In both texts, Cassirer turns to the vitalism of J. von Uexkll in or-
der to distinguish the specic difference between nature and spirit, be-
tween organic forms and symbolic forms. In the text on the basic
phenomena, Cassirer distinguishes, following Goethe, among the I,
the you, and the it.
20
These three fundamental elements are also
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION xxi
:8. Ibid., p. q.
:q. It should perhaps be mentioned here that Cassirer was a student of Georg
Simmels in Berlin. Simmel, in fact, introduced Cassirer to the work of Kant and
of Cohen.
.o. Cassirer, Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, p. :. (Nachgelassene Manuskripte und
Texte, vol. :, Zur Metaphysik der symbolischen Formen, ed. John Michael Krois [Ham-
burg: Felix-Meiner-Verlag, :qq], p. :).
found in Cassirers phenomenology of the structure of perception in The
Logic of the Cultural Sciences. In both, the I perceives the resistance (Wider-
stand) of the outside world, and it is in the consciousness of this resistance
that consciousness of the alterity of the object as something standing
over against (Gegen-Stand) the I arises. Now this Gegen-Stand, this alterity,
can be understood either as a you or as an it.
21
But there is no imme-
diate knowledge of the you. We recognize others, and others recognize
us, not through what we live or are, but through the objectivization,
through the work that we create.
22
The work is experienced by the I as
a restraint of its unformed stream of consciousness, indeed as a factor
of alienation.
23
Finally, the movement from nature to culture repre-
sents a movement of liberation through symbolic activity. All these
themes are, as we shall see, central throughout The Logic of the Cultural Sci-
ences.
The Object of the Science of Culture
The Logic of the Cultural Sciences begins by way of a seemingly objective and
impartial account of the history of the problem of objectivity in Western
thought. Upon closer scrutiny, however, we discover that it introduces
many of the central themes and problems that will recur again and again
in the pages that follow, and that it presupposes the theoretical and sys-
tematic position developed in the next four studies. Here, as elsewhere,
Cassirer shows us that there is no fact without theory. The principal ob-
jective of the rst part of Study : is to situate the philosophy of symbolic
forms in the Western intellectual tradition as a re-establishment (in the
Husserlian sense of Nachstiftung) of the Greek idea of knowledge (which
constitutes its essence), while at the same time determining its specic dif-
ference from that tradition. The philosophy of history that underlies this
history of philosophy becomes explicit only in the course of our reading
and especially in the nal study. There Cassirer establishes the dialectical
relation between the forces of conservation, which constitute a tradition,
and the forces of renewal, which continue to give that tradition new life
through its active transformation.
xxii TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
.:. Ibid., p. :o in the English and p. : in the German.
... Ibid., p. :o in the English and p. :. in the German.
.. Ibid., p. :: in the English and p. :6 in the German.
All philosophy begins from astonishment, from the awareness of
lawful order, from the intuition of the logos (lov v go~) that orders the cosmos
(kov smo~), be it the cosmos of nature or the cosmos of man. However, the
philosophical attitude is established in its own right only in the moment
that it not only questions reality but turns toward establishing a method
by means of which it can answer these questions. This step occurs for
the rst time in Greek philosophyand herein lies its meaning as the
great spiritual turning point in history. Thought no longer contents itself
with a multitude of individual mythical explanations, it seeks the idea
of an overriding unity of being to which an identical unity of causes
necessarily corresponds. This unity is accessible only to pure thought
that goes beyond the limitations of our concrete perception of reality.
Such is the new task and new direction that characterize and deter-
mine the whole of Western thought.
In contrast to Greek intellectualism stands the Christian religion of
salvation and revelation. Both seek to establish the logos or the truth
of the world. However, the worldview of religion places this logos beyond
the reach of rational philosophical thought, beyond the nitude of the
historical world of man. For Greek philosophy, logos is wholly immanent
within being, and in fact the two form a homogeneous whole. The dual-
ism of the Christian worldview brings this identity to an end. The con-
ict between the two worldviews can never be reconciled. They are dif-
ferent symbolic forms, and as such each possesses its own mode of seeing
the world and its own mode of understanding and objectivity. Between
revelation and reason there can be no harmony of coexistence. Each
strives to subject the other to its own criteria of objectivity: philosophy
places religion within the limits of reason, while religion places reason
within the limits of revelation.
The mathematical science of nature marks a reestablishment of the an-
cient ideal of knowledge. However, this ideal has assumed a new form
and a new meaning. The new science is able to determine the unity be-
tween the intelligible and the sensuous that had eluded the Greeks.
Matter as such proves to be permeated with the harmony of number
and to be ruled by the lawfulness of geometry. . . . The world is one, as
surely as the knowledge of the world, the mathematics of the world is and can
only be one. Everything is subjected to the power of mathematical
thought: everything, expect perhaps history, as Vico, whom Cassirer
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION xxiii
views as the rst thinker to question this pan-mathematical worldview, in-
sists. The originality of Vicos Scienza nuova lies not in the answers that it
provides but in the question that it poses and the new direction of re-
search that it opens up. Here for the rst time logic dares to break
through the circle of objective knowledge, the circle of mathematics and
the science of nature to constitute (konstituieren) itself instead as the logic
of the science of culture, as the logic of language, poetry, and history. It
is Herder, however, whom Cassirer credits with having developed the full
implications of Vicos position. Herder criticizes the tyranny of reason
which must enslave and suppress all of mans other mental and spiritual
forces in order to ensure the victory of reason. It is necessary, as
Cassirer himself will show, to understand all the different spiritual forces
as a whole and in their unity. What is more, this unity of spirit is to be
sought not in some substantial thing underlying the different activities of
spirit, nor in some metareality that exists beyond them, but rather in a
functional unity that must be determined through a phenomenology of
spirit.
What we learn from Vico and Herder is that the physical cosmos, the
universe of the science of nature, constitutes only a special case and par-
adigm for a much more general way of posing problems. It is this way of
posing problems that now gradually supplants that ideal of the pan-
mathematic, the mathesis universalis, which had dominated philosophical
thought since Descartes. The science of nature and the science of cul-
ture are but two expressions of one and the same symbolic activity, that of
science as such. Vico and Herders thought constitutes yet another
reestablishment of the Greek ideal of knowledge by giving it a new form.
Cassirer now takes a step further that leads him to the philosophy of
symbolic forms. This step involves a generalization of the problem of
objectivity.
24
The rule of . . . a structural law: this is the most general
expression of what we denote, in the largest sense of the term, by objec-
tivity. In order to render this fully clear for us, we need only refer to the
essential meaning of the concept of cosmos, which ancient thought had al-
ready established. Science is now seen as forming only one mode of law-
ful ordering, so that scientic reality comes to represent only one dimen-
xxiv TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
.. Concerning the generalization of the problem of objectivity see Cassirer,
Language, pp. 6 ff.
sion of objectivity. For this reason, science is unable to treat the general
problem of objectivity as such. For this problem belongs, if we take it in
its full generality, to a sphere that cannot itself be grasped and exhausted
by science even taken as a whole. Science is only one member and one
factor in the system of symbolic forms. The philosophy of symbolic
forms seeks to establish the systematic unity of the various ways and
directions of our knowledge of the world, and in this way it, too, marks
a reestablishment of the Greek ideal of knowledge. Alongside the logical
mode of structuring there are not only other ways of structuring the
world that are determined by other laws of formation, but these other
modes of formation prove to be prelogical. That is to say, they are pre-
supposed by the conceptual and theoretical activity of science. The
world of language and the world of art offer us direct proof for this pre-
logical structuring [vorlogische Strukturierung], for this stamped form that
precedes and underlies the work of concepts. It is not by accident that
Cassirer returns throughout The Logic of the Cultural Sciences to the exam-
ples of language and art. For Cassirer, it is above all through the forces of
language and art that perception is rst constituted as the objective per-
ception of the world.
25
Having determined that the science of nature and the science of cul-
ture are two expressions of a more general theoretical attitudethat is,
scienceCassirer must now establish the specic difference between the
objects of the two sciences, between nature and culture. In the second
half of the rst study Cassirer thus addresses the question: what is
man? The reader will no doubt recognize Cassirers denition of man as
an animal symbolicumin the pages that follow.
26
Cassirer combats the natu-
ralistic reduction of man to nature defended by the Darwin theory of
evolution, with the aid of Uexklls theory of living organisms. It is only
in Study that we will understand the full signicance of Cassirers ap-
proach here. For the morphology of vitalism marks the return and
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION xxv
.. Cassirer, Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, pp. 8 ff.: The true foundation, the
legitimation, of this union [between language and art] is found only if we under-
stand both language and art as basic ways of objectication, of raising conscious-
ness to the level of seeing objects. This raising is in the end possible only when dis-
cursive thinking in language and the intuitive activity of artistic seeing and
creating interact so as together to weave the cloak of reality.
.6. Cassirer, Essay on Man, p. .6.
reestablishment of the Aristotelian concept of form in the sciences of na-
ture, and thus helps determine the basis for the science of culture, which
cannot function without the concept of form. When reading Cassirers
descriptions of Uexklls conception of organic forms, one cannot
help but think of Cassirers conception of the symbolic forms: Ac-
cording to [Uexkll], precisely the study of anatomy is capable of fur-
nishing strict proof that every organism presents a self-enclosed world in
which everything weaves itself into the whole. The organism is no ag-
gregate of parts but a system of functions that are mutually dependent on
each other. In the blueprint [Bauplan or structural plan] of every animal
we are able to read off immediately the nature of this interconnection.
The differentia specica between organic forms and symbolic forms
is not found in any physical difference between the two, but rather in a
characteristic change of function. Spirit is able to achieve a new free-
dom that is closed to nature and the animal world. It achieves this new
freedom not by removing itself from the determination of the natural or-
derspirit for Cassirer is always embodied spiritbut rather by becom-
ing aware of these determinations:
This becoming conscious is the beginning and end, the alpha and
omega, of the freedom that is granted to man; to know and to ac-
knowledge necessity is the genuine process of liberation that
spirit, in opposition to nature, has to accomplish.
The individual symbolic formsmyth, language, art, and
knowledgeconstitute the indispensable precondition for this
process. They are the specic media that man has created in order
to separate himself from the world through them, and in this very
separation bind himself all the closer to it. This trait of mediation
characterizes all human knowledge, as well as being distinctive and
typical of all human action.
Once again our attention is drawn to the simultaneous processes of sep-
aration and reunication that characterize all spiritual and symbolic
activity. Anticipating behaviorism, which sees in the activity of language,
art, and so on nothing that essentially differs from the ritual actions of an-
imals, Cassirer further characterizes the difference between animal re-
actions and human actions in terms of their temporal orientation. All
animal reactions to the world are always oriented toward the concrete
xxvi TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
present and are preorchestrated by the blueprint of the species. What
we term animal instincts are nothing other than such xed chains of ac-
tion, whose individual links engage each other in ways predetermined by
the nature of the animal. What distinguishes all human actions is their
orientation toward the future.
27
Cassirer illustrates this new temporal
orientation by way of the tool: The intent that the tool serves contains
within itself a certain foresight. The impulse does not originate only from
the spur of the present, but belongs also to the future, which must in some
way be anticipated in order to become effective in this manner. This
idea of the future characterizes all human action. We must place some-
thing not yet existing before ourselves in images, in order, then, to pro-
ceed from this possibility to the reality, from potency to act.
The philosophy of symbolic forms must determine and organize the
various cardinal directions of the symbolic function as it unfolds in
human culture. And in fact it is the totality of these structures that iden-
ties and distinguishes the specically human world.
Having dened man as an animal symbolicum, Cassirer introduces one
of the central questions of The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, the question
that lies at the heart of the worldview of life philosophy: does not this
mediation of the symbolic function come at too high a price? Does it
not bring with it a certain self-alienation and self-loss of human exis-
tence? Do the symbolic formations not separate and remove us
from nature and engulf us in a myriad of articial needs? Must we not
rather overcome all symbolic formation and return to nature? Cassirer
acknowledges that a certain alienation and loss of self results from all
symbolic formation, but at the same time he insists that no human
knowledge and no human action can ever nd its way back to [the] un-
questionable existence and unquestionable certainty of the animal
world. The negation of the symbols of language, art, myth, religion, and
science would not bring us closer to reality, nor would it establish any type
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION xxvii
.. Concerning the futurality of the symbolic forms, cf. Cassirer, Phenomenology
of Knowledge, p. :8.: The symbol hastens ahead of reality, as it were, showing it the
way and clearing its path. It does not merely look back upon reality as existing and
having become [that is, as something already nished], but becomes a moment
and motif of its very becoming. It is this form of the symbolic vision that speci-
cally distinguishes the spiritual, the historical will from the mere will to live, mere
vital instinct.
of pure immediate vision of the real, for the different symbolic forms are
the preconditions of all vision as such, and it is only through them that
what we know as reality can be given. Cassirer considers once again the
examples of language and art. In both cases Cassirer aims to show that
neither language nor art copies an already determined and given real-
ity. Rather, it is only through their formative activity that anything that
can rigorously be called the presence of reality comes about. In this
case, the given of objects is transformed into the task of objectivity.
And this task, as it can be shown, does not involve theoretical knowledge
alone; rather, every energy of spirit participates in its own way. Now
language and art can also be assigned their particular objective mean-
ingsnot because they imitate a reality existing in itself but because they
preform it, because they are determined ways and directions of objecti-
cation. Each of the symbolic forms determines the relation between the
subject pole and the object pole according to its specic law of for-
mation. The two poles are not to be thought of as substantially separated
entities, one existing before the other, that the different symbolic forms
must somehow unite. Rather, their separation and subsequent reunica-
tion are brought about in and through one and the same act: the act of
symbolic formation. Here there can be no separation of the symbol
and object.
The Perception of Things and the Perception of Expression
Cassirer begins the second study by stating the thesis that he was later to
work out historically in the fourth volume of the Problem of Knowledge: that
philosophy has failed to establish a unied structure of knowledge, to
provide a single intellectual center from which the different sciences can
be given a unied orientation and direction.
28
The result of this failure,
he says in An Essay on Man, has been a complete anarchy of thought.
29
Here he proclaims: The internal crisis in which science and philosophy
have found themselves for the past hundred years, since the deaths of
Goethe and Hegel, stands out in no other feature as clearly as in the rela-
xxviii TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
.8. Cf. Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge, vol. , Philosophy, Science, and His-
tory Since Hegel, p. ::.
.q. Cassirer, Essay on Man, p. .:. Cf. also Cassirer, Philosophy, Science, and History,
p. ::.
tion existing between the science of nature and the science of culture.
Hegels philosophy was the last great attempt to embrace the whole of
knowledge and to organize it by virtue of one ruling thought. The
Hegelian system failed, however, because it reduced nature to spirit. In it
nature retained none of its alterity. The logic of science proved in the
nal analysis to be only a logic of the science of spirit (Geisteswissen-
schaft).
30
Since then the different sciences have all gone their own ways,
and philosophy has broken up into the two hostile camps of naturalism
and historicism. This polar opposition manifested itself even within
neo-Kantianism, as he later observed in the fourth volume of The Problem
of Knowledge: In the development of neo-Kantianism the theory of Co-
hen and Natorp is sharply opposed to that of Windelband and Rickert: a
dissimilarity that ows of necessity from their general orientation, deter-
mined in the one case by mathematical physics, in the other by history.
31
In order to overcome this crisis it is necessary to determine the specic
logical structure of the concepts at work in both the science of nature and
the science of culture. However, before undertaking this analysis of con-
cepts, Cassirer returns to a deeper level through a phenomenology of
perception in order to ground the different orientations of the science of
nature and the science of culture in the structure of perception itself.
At this level the phenomena we nd before us are basic phenomena that
are showable but not provable.
Within the simple phenomenal state of perception we can distin-
guish between an I-pole and an object-pole. Perception is always the
perception of something standing over against someone who perceives.
Perception is thus always the awareness of something other. Now this al-
terity may be perceived either as an it or as a you: The world that
the I encounters is in the one case a world of things and in the other a
world of persons. . . . In both cases the alterity persists; but in this very al-
terity a characteristic difference reveals itself. The it is quite simply an
other, an aliud; the you is an alter ego. Our perception of other persons is
no more and no less certain or questionable than is our perception of
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION xxix
o. Lebensphilosophie commits the opposite error by dening life as the wholly
other, as the contradictory opposite of Spirit (Spirit and Life in Contempo-
rary Philosophy, trans. R. W. Bretall and P. A. Schilpp, in The Philosophy of Ernst
Cassirer, ed. Paul A. Schilpp [LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, :q8], p. 868).
:. Cassirer, Philosophy, Science, and History, p. ::.
things. Why then, Cassirer asks, does the theoretical attitude time and
again attempt to restrict perception to the perception of things? There
are two reasons for this. The rst concerns the general nature of the crit-
ical attitude itself. The scientic worldview establishes itself in and
through the negation of the mythical worldview, through the overcoming
of all individual subjective perceptions of reality. Science seeks to negate
the individual subjectivity of our perception of the world. It achieves this
by replacing the expressive qualities of perception by universally deter-
minable and objectively measurable qualities. However, if the problem
here were due simply to the nature of the critical scientic attitude, the
possibility of a science of culture would be excluded from the beginning.
Thus the more profound problem is due to a limited conception of scien-
tic objectivity. Since Galileo, the mechanistic and naturalistic model of
science has provided the sole paradigm for all scientic methodology and
inquiry. Such a naturalistic and physicalistic approach to culture ends up
negating the very phenomena it sets out to explain. In the various cultural
activities it sees only the mere physical movement and actions without be-
ing able to understand their meaning and thus without being able to
distinguish, for example, the holy actions of religion from other actions
belonging to the profane world. In the move from nature to culture the
physical takes on a new function: The ideal exists only insofar as it rep-
resents itself sensuously and materially in some manner and embodies it-
self in this representation. Religion, language, art: these are never tangi-
ble for us except in the monuments that they themselves have created.
They are the tokens, memorials, and reminders in which alone we can
grasp a religious, linguistic, or artistic meaning. And it is just in this recip-
rocal determination that we recognize a cultural object.
We recognize in this reciprocal determination Cassirers denition
of symbolic pregnance developed in the third volume of the Philosophy
of Symbolic Forms.
32
Consciousness is the awareness of meaning, but all
meaning, even the ideal meaning of pure signication, is necessarily tied
to a physical presence that renders it present. All physical presence func-
xxx TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
.. Cassirer, Phenomenology of Knowledge, p. .o.: It is with a view to expressing
this mutual determination that we introduce the concept and term symbolic preg-
nance. By symbolic pregnance we mean the way in which a perception as a sen-
sory experience contains at the same time a certain nonintuitive meaning which it
immediately and concretely represents.
tions as a means of representation, just as all representation demands a
physical presence. Cassirer distinguishes a third element that denes all
cultural objects and that is not found in the chapter dealing with symbolic
pregnance in the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: the presence of the sub-
ject who is expressed in and through the creation of the cultural object.
When, for example, we listen to someone speak, we can focus our atten-
tion upon the purely physical sound of language. This is often how we ex-
perience a language that we do not understand. The sounds articulated
have no linguistic meaning for us, and so we experience only the physical
substratum of language, which nevertheless has a certain aesthetic
melody to it. We are never confronted by an unstructured soundwhich
is a contradiction in terms. As Cassirer writes in Study :, Not only could
the structureless not be thought, it could not be perceived or become ob-
jectively intuited. If we turn our attention now to what is being said by
these sounds, we quickly forget about the physical presence of the sounds
themselves and begin to focus instead on what is being said by means of
them. Here we concentrate upon the meaning that is being objectively
represented. However, beyond both the physical presence of the sounds
and the meaningful content that they represent, we may also turn our at-
tention to the existence of the speaker who speaks through the words that
we hear. Cassirer asserts in Study . that these three dimensionsthe
physical existence, the objectively represented, and the personal expres-
sionare determining and necessary for everything that is a work and
not merely an effect. It is thus not surprising that the physical and nat-
uralistic worldview of the sciences of nature, which reduces the cultural
object to the physical existence of its material support, quickly renders
problematic not only the existence of other subjects but also, as the ex-
ample of William James shows, the existence of self-consciousness itself
(cf. p. 8). What James denies, of course, is only the substantial nature
of the I and the you, and not their purely functional meaning. For Cas-
sirer the I and the you are not substantial things existing in total isolation
from one another, but rather two points in a functional relation: For
both can no longer be described as independent things or essences, as ob-
jects existing in themselves, which are separated, so to speak, by a spatial
gulf across which nevertheless there occurs some kind of effect at a dis-
tance, an actio in distans. Rather, the I and the you exist only insofar as they
are for one another, only insofar as they stand in a functional relation of
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION xxxi
being reciprocally conditioned. And the fact of culture is simply the
clearest expression and the most incontestable proof of this reciprocal
conditioning.
Every reference to the I is made by way of a reference to an alter ego,
which the I is not. The I and the you are binary poles of the same reality,
which is brought about through their mutual activity. Each of the differ-
ent symbolic forms constitutes a different mode of action, a specic kind
of relation between the I and the you that at once differentiates them and
yet binds them together. In the beginning is the act: always, in the use of
language, in artistic formation, in the process of thinking and research a
specic activity expresses itself, and it is only in this activity that the I and
the you at once nd each other, and separate themselves from each other.
They are in and with each other, as they preserve their unity through
speaking, thinking, and all kinds of artistic expression. As a linguistic
subject I come to know the other only in and through a dialogue with the
other, and by recognizing beyond language the presence of that person
who is expressing himself or herself through language. Through this act
of communication we distinguish ourselves from each other, the one by
an act of speaking, the other by an act of listening. Each has its function
in the exchange of words that we call speaking. One of the greatest illu-
sions that the I has cast upon itself is its belief that it exists prior to the act
of speaking, when in fact it comes to be only in the moment that it ac-
tively engages itself in dialogue with another.
We have already seen that the move from the animal world to culture
comes about when human beings no longer react to the presence of a
stimulus according to a predetermined chain of actions but rather act
with the intent to achieve a particular result. Animals possess a certain ca-
pacity to express themselves. However, animal expression remains essen-
tially passive expression, whereas human expression alone is active.
All the symbolic forms are active forms of expression. Behaviorism, as I
have said, sees in the different cultural activities nothing more than a se-
ries of learned responses to given situations that are distinguished from
the animal world only in their complexity. We learn through imitation
and repetition. Speaking is reduced to nothing more than a language
habit. Although Cassirer recognizes that a large part of that which is
spoken in daily life falls under this scathing criticism, he nevertheless in-
xxxii TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
sists that it does not apply to the whole of human speech. Within the
sphere of active expression he thus distinguishes between passive
speech and true speech which is alone truly productive.
Cassirer concludes the study by preparing the way for his confronta-
tion with the life philosophy of Georg Simmel in the fth study, The
Tragedy of Culture. Again and again philosophy and mysticism see
in the symbolic only a barrier. They desire to go beyond the symbols
that separate them from the real, to enter into direct communication with
the world and the other. However, such a yearning for a direct commu-
nication in thought and feeling, which could dispense with all symbolism
and all mediation through the word and image, rests on a self-deception.
Once again Cassirer returns to the theme of separation and reunication
that he now tells us is the double function of everything symbolic.
Every true unity presupposes the separation of that which it brings to-
gether as a unity. Where there is no separation, no difference, there can
be no unity or identity. The different symbolic forms differentiate the I
and the you while at the same time uniting them in a common world of
action. The I exists as I only in the alterity of the you and vice versa.
Through all symbolic activity, the one reaches out to the other, but it is
precisely this act of reaching out that creates the distance between them,
a distance that differentiates them from one another while at the same
time uniting them. Evidently, this distance can never be fully overcome
without at the same time destroying that which it creates. All this applies
to the presence of the I to itself, to the knowledge the I can have of itself.
Self-consciousness is possible only insofar as the subject is split, insofar
as the I becomes something other than itself, that is, its own alter ego. For
only insofar as it has become an object for itself can the I come to know
itself. It must cease to be an individual and become a personin the
basic etymological meaning of the word, which goes back to the mask
and the role of the actor. Here too there remains a certain degree of
alienation, a difference that can never be closed without destroying that
which it creates. The I can never become one with its persona. It knows
itself only in the reections of its works: Every initial enunciation is al-
ready the beginning of a renunciation. It is the destiny and, in a certain
sense, the immanent tragedy of every spiritual form that it can never
overcome this inner tension. With the resolution of the tension the life of
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION xxxiii
spirit would also be extinguished; for the life of spirit consists in this very
act of severing what is, so that it can, in turn, even more securely unite
what has been severed.
Concepts of Nature and Concepts of Culture
Having historically and systematically determined the object of the sci-
ence of culture in the rst study, and having phenomenologically
grounded the different orientations found in the science of nature and
the science of culture in the structure of perception in the second, Cas-
sirer now turns to the task of dening the logical structure of the concepts
employed in the two sciences and indicating how these concepts are ap-
plied to the individual phenomena that are studied by them. Cassirer be-
gins by analyzing two examples taken from the sciences of culture in or-
der to demonstrate concretely how the problem of the science of form or
morphology is brought into play in each. Given the importance of lan-
guage and art in the construction of perception, it is not surprising that
the two sciences from which Cassirer chooses his examples are the sci-
ence of language and the science of art. In his approach to language
Humboldt seeks to establish the structure of the inner form of lan-
guage. Wlfin too is brought from the consideration of the structural
concepts of the science of art to the problem of form and the science of
form. For Humboldt what distinguishes one language from another is
not a mere difference in sounds and signs. Rather, according to him,
each linguistic form expresses its own worldview, a certain fundamental
direction of thinking and representing. Cassirer shows that we discover
the same basic idea in Wlfins investigation of art. Wlfin transfers
the Humboldtian principle from the world of thought and representation
to the world of intuition and seeing. Here too the essential difference be-
tween one style and another is found in the total worldview that it em-
bodies.
But what is the logical character of these concepts and how do they
compare with the concepts of the natural sciences? It is important to re-
member that for Cassirer the science of nature and the science of culture
are two expressions of one and the same general critical and theoretical
attitude. As such, both constitute a conceptual understanding of the
world. We understand a science in its logical structure only once we have
xxxiv TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
claried the manner in which it achieves the subsumption of the particular and
the universal. Each science achieves this subsumption according to its own
particular logic, and it is this particular logic that determines its specic
worldview. We cannot simply relegate the investigation of universal prin-
ciples to the sciences of nature, while limiting the sciences of culture to
the investigation of particular facts. Such an interpretation of the func-
tion of the concept would destroy its organic structure. The unity be-
tween the universal and the particular must be thought of not as an ag-
gregate of independent elements but rather as an organic unity,
whereby the universal is immanent in every particular.
33
For Cassirer the division, within the general sphere of conceptual
thought, into the sciences of nature on the one hand and the sciences of
culture on the other, stems, as we have seen, from the two essentially dif-
ferent orientations present within the structure of perception: It is, as it
were, the logical translation of a denite opposition of direction, which
as such does not appear solely in the domain of concepts, but whose roots
descend deep into the soil of perception. Here the concept expresses dis-
cursively what perception contains in the form of a purely intuitive
knowledge. Science thus constitutes itself through a critique of percep-
tion.
Every perception, however simple, already proves to be a process of
formation and selection through concepts that establish a certain degree
of constancy in the ux of contents that ll it. Science is distinguished
here from perceptionin a highly signicant way, to be sureonly by
the fact that it requires a strict determination, whereas perception contents
itself with a mere estimate. The ideal at which all the sciences of nature
aim is to express the universal in the form of a concept of a lawfrom which
the individual instances can be deductively derived. Here the sub-
sumption of the particular under the concept leaves no room for differ-
ence. The particular must meet all the properties designated by the law.
Thus, for example, a determined empirically existing substance, a cer-
tain metal, can be subsumed under the concept gold if, and only if, it ex-
hibits the relevant basic property and consequently all the other proper-
ties that can be derived from it.
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION xxxv
. Ibid., p. 6. For a concise treatment of the structure of the concept by
Cassirer see ibid., part III, chapter :, Toward a Theory of the Concept.
In the case of the sciences of culture, however, the concept can never
subsume the particular under the universal in the same way. The particu-
lar possesses a certain indeterminateness that cannot be overcome.
Burckhardt has provided us with a concept of the Renaissance man,
but no one individual answers to all the properties of this concept. If we
turn to consider the particulars of a culture, we will perceive them to be
not only thoroughly different, but even opposed. What we assert of them
is just this, that, this opposition notwithstanding, and indeed perhaps just
through it, they stand in a certain ideal connection to one another; that
each in its own way cooperates in the construction of what we call the
spirit of the Renaissance or the culture of the Renaissance. The con-
cepts of culture thus represent a unity of direction, a common task,
and not a unity of being. They characterize but do not determine the
particular that they subsume under the universal. The aim of the sciences
of culture is to establish the structure and form of this common task and
activity. Like the science of nature, the science of culture realizes itself
through a critique of perception. We understand one another in speech
without requiring the science of language or grammar; and the natural
artistic feeling does not require art history or stylistics. But this natural
understanding soon reaches its limits. We can no more reach the depths
of culture with the elements of intuition than simple sense perception
can penetrate the depths of space. The science of culture aims at deter-
mining the totality of forms of activity in and through which human ex-
istence realizes itself. These forms are innitely differentiated and yet
they are not deprived of a unied structure. For it is ultimately the same
human being that meets us again and again in a thousand manifestations
and in a thousand masks in the development of culture.
There is, however, a curious difculty inherent in this task. The scien-
tic attitude seeks to remove the object to an ideal distance. However, in
the case of the sciences of culture we are the object of study, and thus it is
considerably more difcult to achieve this ideal distance. Here there
emerges a barrier to knowledge that is difcult to overcome. For the reex-
ive process of the understanding is opposed in its direction to the productive
process; both cannot be accomplished together at one and the same
time. Our only access to this productive process is through the works
that it creates. The science of culture teaches us to interpret symbols in
xxxvi TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
order to decipher their hidden meaningin order to make the life from
which they originally emerged visible again.
The Problem of Form and the Problem of Cause
In Study Cassirer has determined the specic logical structure of the
concepts employed by the sciences of nature on the one hand and those
employed by the sciences of culture on the other. In this way he has es-
tablished their unity within the overall logic of theoretical and concep-
tual research as a whole. The division between the two families of scien-
tic concepts expresses in discursive terms the two fundamental different
orientations that were discovered within the structure of perception in
the second study. In the fourth study Cassirer continues the task of estab-
lishing the systematic unity of science. If the difference between the sci-
ences of nature and the sciences of culture represents a vertical division
within the structure of science taken as a whole, the distinction between
the concepts of form and the concepts of cause represents a horizontal
division: for the concept of form and the concept of cause constitute the
two poles around which our understanding of the world rotates. They are
both indispensable if our thought is to succeed in establishing a xed
world order. The problem of form and the problem of cause are
therefore as important to the sciences of nature as they are to the sciences
of culture. However, as Cassirers historical review reminds us, since the
great turning point in Greek philosophy, form thinking and causal
thinking have not only diverged but have opposed each other as an-
tagonistic oppositions. For a long time the Aristotelian concept of formal
cause seemed to have achieved a reconciliation of the two concepts and to
have established a truly unied system of reality, but only at the price of
absorbing the one into the other. With the advent of the modern math-
ematical sciences the concept of causality was separated from the con-
cept of form and transformed. Now only the mathematical cause is a
causa vera. The mechanical worldview quickly became the dominant
methodological paradigm for all the sciences. Everything that spoke of
form was now viewed as being unscientic. However, with this the
gulf between the science of nature and the science of culture opened
up and became evident. For the latter cannot negate the concept of
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION xxxvii
form without abandoning itself. In the sciences of language, art, and reli-
gion, what we are trying to understand are particular forms that we
must have understood in their pure existence before we can attempt to
reduce them to their causes. The causal model of explanation was pro-
gressively applied to one domain after another. With the development of
the theory of historical materialism culture too nally seemed to have
fallen under the principle of causality.
The challenge to the mechanical worldview did not come from the
domain of the science of culture, which found itself helpless before the
explanatory power of the principles of causality, but rather from a revo-
lution in our mode of thinking within the sphere of the science of na-
ture itself. For at the turn of the century we witness a reestablishment of
the Aristotelian concept of form in all its different elds. Cassirer demon-
strates how in the spheres of physics, biology, and psychology the concept
of wholeness has become the new dominant paradigm in the natural sci-
ences. However, the category of wholeness here no longer includes the
idea of purposiveness that was inherent to the Aristotelian concept of form.
All of this has by no means removed the difference between the sci-
ences of nature and the sciences of culture, but it has eliminated a sepa-
rating barrier that until now has stood between them. . . . Form analyses
and causal analyses now appear as orientations that do not conict with
each other but rather complement each other, and that must interrelate
in all knowledge. Distinguishing among four types of analysis, Cassirer
now turns to establish the general methodological approach of the sci-
ences of culture. The analysis of work forms the true bedrock of the
science of culture. We must rst acquire a broad knowledge of the works
of language, art, history, religion, science, and so on. The process by
which we come to understand their various meanings possesses its own
method of interpretation; an independent and highly difcult and com-
plex hermeneutics. Unfortunately, Cassirer does not elaborate upon
the nature of this hermeneutics by which the different essential forms
of understanding that create the myriad works of culture come to be ab-
stracted. Once the different forms of culture have been established, an
analysis of form is required to establish the what or essence of each
form and its function within the whole of culture. Here we arrive at a
theory of culture that in the end must seek its conclusion in a philoso-
xxxviii TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
phy of symbolic formseven if this conclusion appears as an innitely
distant point that we can approach only asymptotically. Cassirer em-
phasizes that we must attempt to apply the concept of causality not to the
forms of culture but only to their content, to the phenomena within a
specic form. The forms themselves are fundamental phenomena
(Urphnomene) in the Goethian sense of the term: they appear and are, but
cannot be traced back to their causes. Only now can we inquire
through an analysis of act into the mental processes from which they have
emerged and of which they constitute the objective expression. Again
we see that we can come to know man only through his works, that is to
say, in the mirror of his culture.
The Tragedy of Culture
Having expounded his conception of human spirit and culture, in the -
nal study Cassirer devotes himself to the task of combating the cultural
pessimism that results from the critique of spirit advanced by such life
philosophers as Georg Simmel. For Simmel, the life of spirit is caught up
in a paradoxical and tragic structure. On the one hand, spirit can achieve
its existence only by externalizing itself in the objective forms of culture.
These cultural formations reify the life of spirit, the pure self-movement
of the I, thus giving it an objective presence in the world. Only through
this objective presence can spirit become an object of consciousness
become, that is to say, self-conscious. However, this process of external-
ization leads to an alienation of spirit from itself. The objective forms of
culture prove to be a limitation and burden on the I that endanger its live-
liness, its free spontaneous movement. Spirit invests itself in its work, and
in fact must invest itself in its work, but this work stands before it as some-
thing other, as something xed and stable, something external and objec-
tive, something dead. As Simmel writes: it is . . . as if the creative motion
of the soul were to die in its own products (quoted p. :o6). The I no
longer recognizes its own creative impulse in the dead works culture.
There thus exists between the life of spirit and its work a tension that in
the end threatens to become a relation of complete antithesis. The
profound strangeness and enmity that exists between the living and cre-
ative process of the soul on the one hand and its contents and creations
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION xxxix
on the other admits of no settlement and no reconciliation. There is
nothing that spirit can do to overcome this alienation, for it is spirits own
activity that has brought it about, and every further act of spirit can only
heighten this alienation and fortify the cultural barriers that restrict its
movement. Hence the tragedy of culture. For in order for spirit to
know itself, it cannot remain within itself, as a being-in-itself, but must ex-
ternalize itself in the objective forms of culture. It is only in these external
and xed forms that the subjective life of spirit achieves its objective pres-
ence, if not its very existence. However, the anonymous structures and
formations of objective spirit mark the death of the spontaneous free
movement of the I which created them. Cassirer equates Simmels posi-
tion on this point with that of the Christian mystics. Both want to negate
the image worlds of culture, to free themselves from name and image
(that is to say, language and art), in order to overcome the distance and
difference that separates the I from its own objective expression on the
one hand and from God (as the true self of the I) on the other.
However, the reunication that the negation of the image worlds of
culture holds out would destroy the I for whom this reunication is sup-
posed to take place. We have already seen that the separation between
the I and the you, and likewise the separation between the I and the
world, constitutes the goal and not the starting point of spiritual life.
From this perspective we see that the consolidation that life undergoes in
the various forms of culturein language, religion, and artconstitutes
not the simple opposite to that which the I requires by its very nature but
rather a prerequisite for it to nd and understand itself in its own essence.
As Cassirer writes in the introduction to the third volume of the Philosophy
of Symbolic Forms: Life cannot apprehend itself by remaining absolutely
within itself. It must give itself form; for it is precisely by this otherness of
form that it gains its visibility, if not its reality.
34
We must not think of the separation between the I and the you in
terms of spatial imagery.
35
Such spatial metaphors of inside and out-
side are wholly inadequate for understanding the nature of the dynamic
xl TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
. Ibid., p. q.
. Concerning the limits of spatial thinking and metaphors cf. ibid., p. 8, and
Cassirer, Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, p. :.
relation between the I and the you. Even if the I could break out of its
solipsistic world and enter into another, this would not explain how
the I can knowof the you, or the you of the I. How, in other words,
does the I come to be recognized by another? A subject does not become
recognizable or understandable to another by passing over into that
other but by placing himself in an active relation to the other. That is to
say, through their common activity of creating the works of culture.
Cassirer acknowledges the tragedy of culture, the alienation of spirit
in its work, but this appears to him as being only part of the story. We
must follow this creative process to its very end. For the work, in whose
enduring existence the creative process congeals, does not stand at the
end of this path, but rather the you, the other subject who receives this
work in order to incorporate it into his own life and thus transform it back
into the medium from which it originates. The creative process is one in
which the activity of one subject is awakened in another by means the ac-
tive exchange of cultural works. The function of the work, its true signi-
cation, is found in this passage from one subject to another, which unites
and separates them in one and the same creative act. The living process
of culture consists in the very fact that it is inexhaustible in its creation of
such mediations and passages. Cassirer examines a number of examples
of the passage of this creative process from one individual to another,
from one epoch to another. However, in each case the point remains the
same: The thing created does not simply stand vis--vis or over against
the creative process; on the contrary, new life continually pours into these
molded forms, preserving them and preventing their rigidication.
The preservation of the works of culture requires their constant re-
newal through their re-creation. Every act of creation must begin from
something that it takes up and reestablishes in a renewed expression.
Within the dynamic and living process of creativity Cassirer identies
two binary forces that give birth to each other: The productive is in con-
stant opposition to the traditional. . . . The tendencies that are directed
toward preservation are no less signicant and indispensable than those
that are directed at renewal, because renewal realizes itself only upon the
basis of permanence, and because the permanent can exist only by virtue
of a constant self-renewal. Cassirer demonstrates this dynamic process
through the example of language and art. Language exists only insofar as
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION xli
it is spoken, insofar as it is passed from one subject to another, from one
generation to another. Each speaker preserves a language by renewing it
and thus re-forming it. The recipient does not take the gift as he would
a stamped coin. For he can take it up only by using it, and in this use he im-
prints upon it a new shape. Each subject thus speaks a language in a
unique way, and through these different ways of speaking, language is
transformed from within, and thus revitalized. The works of culture are
therefore never completely xed once and for all; they exist only in and
through their constant transformation. And through this transformation
there occurs the revitalization of the spiritual force from which they rst
emerged and of which they constitute the objective expression. The artist
too is always working within a tradition that must be taken up and trans-
formed:
We thus encounter the same uniform process in its basic composi-
tion in the different domains of culture. The competition and op-
position between these two forces, the one seeking conservation
and the other seeking renewal, is endless. Any equilibrium that may
occasionally appear to have been attained between them is never
more than an unstable balance, which can at any moment change
into a new movement. At the same time, with the growth and de-
velopment of culture, the pendulum keeps widening its swing: the
amplitude of the oscillation increases more and more. And with
this, the inner tensions and oppositions gain an ever greater inten-
sity. Nevertheless, this drama of culture never becomes a complete
tragedy of culture. For just as little as there is an ultimate victory
so there is no ultimate defeat.
Now the capacity for modication is a fundamental characteristic of all
organic things. Symbolic forms are distinguished from the organic
forms of nature in a signicant and important way. In the realm of nature
each organism is unique, but the acquired characteristics that distinguish
it from other organisms of the same species do not affect the form of the
species itself. The variations that realize themselves in individual speci-
mens within the sphere of the plant and animal world remain biologi-
cally insignicant; they emerge, only to vanish again. In the domain of
culture, however, we nd that every individual difference modies the
universal form of which it is a particular representative. It has rightly
xlii TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
been emphasized that there is perhaps no individual act of speaking that
has not in some way inuenced the language. Not only the great his-
torical gures of world history, as Hegel would say, but each and every
individual possesses an active share in the construction and reconstruc-
tion of mans cultural life and as such his place in world history.
36
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION xliii
6. Cassirer, Myth of the State, p. .q.
S+tnv :
The Object of the Science of Culture
:
Plato has said that astonishment is the authentic philosophical emotion,
and that we must see in it the root of all philosophical activity.
*
If that is
so, the question arises as to what objects rst awakened this astonishment
in man, and thus led him to the path of philosophical reection. Were
these objects physical or spiritual? Was it the order of nature or was
it mans own creations that took the lead? It may appear that the most ob-
vious hypothesis is that the astronomical world rst began the ascent out
of the chaos. We encounter the veneration of the stars in almost all the
great cultural religions. Here man was rst able to free himself from the
stiing spell of feeling and to rise up to a freer and larger intuition over
the whole of being. The subjective passion that strives to subdue nature
through magical powers receded; in its place there stirs the idea of a uni-
versal objective order. In the trajectory of the stars, in the exchange of
day and night, in the regular return of the seasons man found the rst
great example of a uniform event. This event was raised innitely above
his own sphere and completely removed from the power of his will and
desire. It retained nothing of that temperamentality and unpredictability
that characterize not only ordinary human action but also the activity of
the primitive demonic powers. That there is an effect and thus a real-
ity that is enclosed within xed boundaries and bound to certain un-
changeable laws: such was the insight that began to dawn here for the rst
time.
:

:

*Page numbers from the original German edition appear at the side of the
pageTranslators note.
But this feeling must immediately be connected with another. For even
closer to man than the order of nature stands that order that he nds in
his own world. Here, too, it is by no means mere arbitrariness that rules.
From his rst movements, the individual sees himself determined and
limited by something over which he has no power. It is the power of cus-
tom that binds him. It watches over his every step and allows scarcely a
moment of free space in his activity. Not only his actions, but also his feel-
ings and ideas, his beliefs and delusions are governed by it. Custom is the
perpetually constant atmosphere in which he lives and exists; he cannot
escape from it any more than from the air that he breathes. It is no won-
der that in his thought also the intuition of the physical world cannot be
separated from the ethical world. Both belong together, and they are one
in their origin. In their cosmology and in their ethics, all the great reli-
gions have been based upon this theme. They are in agreement, insofar as
they attribute the creator-god a double role and the twofold task of being
the founder of the astronomical and ethical order and of saving both
from the forces of chaos. In the Gilgamesh epic, in the Vedas, in the
Egyptian account of creation we nd the same intuition. In the Babylon-
ian myth of creation Marduk leads the ght against the shapeless chaos,
against the monster Tiamat. After his victory over it, he erects the eternal
signs and symbols of the cosmic and civil order. He determines the tra-
jectory of the stars; he sets down the signs of the zodiac; he xes the suc-
cession of the days, months, and years. And at the same time he sets the
boundaries to human action that cannot be crossed unpunished; it is he
who looks into the innermost depths, who does not permit the evildoer
to escape, who breaks the insubordinate and succeeds in establishing the
law.
1
To this miracle of the ethical order, however, others no less imposing
and mysterious are joined. For everything that man creates, and that
comes forth from his own hands, still surrounds him as an incomprehen-
sible mystery. When he considers his works, he is very far from suspecting
himself as their creator. They stand far above him; they are not only far
beyond that which the individual is able to achieve but also beyond every-
thing that the species is able to achieve. If man attributes them an origin,
. THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

:. For more details see Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. ., Mythical
Thought, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, :q),
pp. :: ff.
it can only be a mythical origin. A god has created them; a savior brought
them down from heaven to earth and taught man their use. Such myths
of culture traverse the mythology of all times and all peoples.
2
What the
technical skill of man has produced over the course of the centuries and
millennia are not deeds accomplished by him but gifts and presents from
above. For each tool there exists such a supernatural origin. Among some
primitive peoples still todayfor example the Ewe in South-Togoland
sacrices are offered at the annual harvest banquet to certain individual
tools such as the ax, the plane, and the saw.
3
And the intellectual instru-
ments that man has himself created must appear still further removed
from him than these material tools. They too are regarded as manifesta-
tions of a power that is innitely superior to his own. This applies above
all to language and writing, the conditions of all human relations and all
human community. The god from whose hand writing has emerged al-
ways possesses a particular and privileged place in the hierarchy of divine
powers. In Egypt the moon god Thoth appears at once as the scribe of
the gods and as the judge of the heavens. It is he who allows gods and
men to know what is due to them; for it is he who determines the measure
of things.
4
Speech and writing are considered as the origin of measure;
for they are characterized above all by the ability to x the eeting and
variable and to remove it from the accidental and arbitrary.
Already in the sphere of myth and religion, we sense in all this the feel-
ing that human culture is not something given and self-evident, but rather
that it is a kind of miracle that requires explanation. But this leads to a
deeper self-contemplation as soon as man not only feels himself called
and authorized to pose such questions, but instead goes beyond this to de-
velop a separate and independent procedure, a method by means of
which he can answer them. This step occurs for the rst time in Greek phi-
losophyand herein lies its meaning as the great spiritual turning point
in history. Here, for the rst time, a new power is discovered which alone
can lead to the science of nature and to the science of human culture. In
the place of the undetermined multiplicity of mythical attempts at expla-
THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

.. Cf. the material of Kurt Breysig, Die Entstehung des Gottesgedankens und der Heil-
bringer (Berlin, :qo).
. Cf. Jakob Spieth, Die Religion der Eweer in Sd-Togo (Leipzig: Hinrichs, :q::),
p. 8.
. Cf. Alexandre Moret, Mystres gyptiens (Paris: Brionne, :q:), pp. :. ff.
nation, which turn sometimes toward one phenomenon and sometimes
toward another, steps the idea of the general unity of being, to which the
same unity of cause must correspond. This unity is accessible only to
pure thought. The numerous colorful and diverse creations of the myth-
forming imagination [Phantasie] are now subjected to the critique of
thinking and thus uprooted. But to this critical task a new positive task is
coupled. Thinking must, out of its own powers and out of its own re-
sponsibility, reconstruct that which it has destroyed. In the systems of the
pre-Socratics we can follow with what admirable consistency this task
was tackled and carried out step by step. In Platos doctrine of Ideas and
in Aristotles metaphysics it found a solution that remained for centuries
decisive and exemplary. Such a synthesis would not have been possible if
it had not been preceded by a monumental work of individual thinkers.
In it a number of tendencies are involved which at rst sight appear to be
diametrically opposed and take very different ways in their approach to
posing and solving problems. Nevertheless, if we consider its starting
point and its goals, it becomes possible for us to sum up this whole monu-
mental work of thought to some extent in one fundamental idea, which
Greek philosophy rst discovered, and which it developed and expanded
upon in all its factors. It is the concept of logos that played this role in the
development of Greek thought.
5
Already in its rst expression, which it
found in the philosophy of Heraclitus, we sense its meaning and future
richness. Heraclituss doctrine appears, at rst sight, to rest completely on
the Ionian philosophy of nature. He too sees the world as a totality of ma-
terials that transform themselves reciprocally into each other. However,
this appears to him only as the surface of events, behind which he wants
to make visible a depth that has not yet disclosed itself to thinking. The
Ionians, too, did not want to content themselves with the mere knowledge
of the what; they asked about the how and the why. But this ques-
tion is posed by Heraclitus in a new and much more rigorous sense. And
by putting it this way, he is aware that perception, within whose limita-
tions the previous philosophical speculation of nature had moved, is no
longer able to answer them. Only thought can give us the answer: for here,
THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

. I have developed this view in greater detail in my presentation of early Greek

philosophy which I have given in Dessiors Lehrbuch der Philosophie, vol. : (Berlin: Ill-
stein, :q.), pp. :. Cf. also Ernst Cassirer, Logos, Dike, Kosmos in der Ent-
wicklung der griechischen Philosophie, Gteborgs Hgskolas rsskrift (:q:): 6.
and here alone, is man freed from the limits of his individuality. He no
longer follows his own opinion, but rather he grasps something general
and divine. A universal world of law has replaced private insight, i oi p
po vpoi. It is in this way, according to Heraclitus, that man rst escaped
from the mythical dream world, and from the narrow and limited world
of sense perception. For this is precisely the character of being awake and
of having awoken, that individuals possess a common world, while in
dreams each lives in his own world and remains stuck and immersed in it.
With this the whole of Western thought was given a new task and em-
bedded in a new direction from which subsequently it has never been
able to deviate. Ever since this thinking went through the school of Greek
philosophy, all knowledge of reality has, to some extent, been bound to
the fundamental concept of logosand thus to logic in the largest sense
of the word. Nor did this change when philosophy was displaced from its
sovereign position and the universal and divine were sought in another
place inaccessible to it. Christianity contests Greek intellectualism but
cannot, and does not want to, return to a mere irrationalism: for the con-
cept of logos is also deeply embedded in it. The history of Christian dog-
matics shows the persistent struggle that the fundamental motives of the
Christian religion of salvation had to lead against the spirit of Greek phi-
losophy. Considered from the perspective of intellectual history, there
was in this struggle neither a victor nor a vanquished; but nor could a real
internal reconciliation of this conict ever come about. It will always be
futile to attempt to bring the concept of logos of Greek philosophy and of
the Gospel according to John under one denominator. For the mode of
mediation between the individual and the universal, the nite and the in-
nite, man and God is quite different in each case. The Greek concept of
being and the Greek concept of truth are to be compared, according to
the simile of Parmenides, to a well-rounded sphere that rests rmly on
its own center. Both are complete and perfect in themselves; and between
them exists not only a harmony but a genuine identity. The dualism of
the Christian worldview brings this identity to an end. Henceforth no ef-
fort of knowledge and pure thought is able to heal this rift that cuts
through being. Admittedly, Christian philosophy too by no means re-
nounced the aspiration toward unity that belongs to the concept of phi-
losophy. However, as little as it is able to resolve the tension between these
two opposing poles, it nevertheless tries to reconcile them within its own
THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

sphere and with its own ways of thinking. All the great systems of scholas-
tic philosophy have grown out of such attempts. None of them dares to
contest the opposition that exists between revelation and reason, between
belief and knowledge, between the regnum gratiae and the regnum naturae
[the realm of grace and the realm of nature]. Reason, philosophy, cannot
by its own powers construct a worldview; all elucidation of which it is ca-
pable originates not from itself but from another and higher source of
light. But if it holds its gaze rmly directed toward this source of light
if, instead of opposing an independent and automatic power to faith, it
allows itself to be guided and directed by itthen it will reach its as-
signed goal. The basic force of faith, which can be bestowed on man only
through a direct act of grace, through divine illuminatio, determines both
the content and the extent of knowledge. In this sense the term des
quaerens intellectum [faith seeking understanding] becomes the quintes-
sence and motto of all medieval Christian philosophy. In the systems of
high scholasticism, and particularly in Thomas Aquinas, it might appear
as if the synthesis had been accomplished and the lost harmony restored.
Nature, grace, reason, and revelation do not contradict each
other; on the contrary, the one points to the other and leads to it. As a re-
sult, the cosmos of culture appears once again closed and related to a
xed religious center.
But this elaborately constructed structure of scholasticism, in which
the Christian faith and ancient philosophical knowledge should have re-
ciprocally supported and maintained each other, collapses before that
new ideal of knowledge that has determined and shaped, more than any-
thing else, modern science. The mathematical science of nature returns to the
ancient ideal of knowledge. Kepler and Galileo are able to begin directly
from the fundamental ideas of Pythagoras, Democritus, and Plato. But at
the same time, in their research these ideas assume a new meaning. For
they are able to build the bridge between the intelligible and the sensuous,
between the xo oo vopto and the xo oo o poto [the intelligible uni-
verse and the visible universe], in a way that had continued to elude an-
cient science and philosophy. Before mathematical knowledge the last
barrier separating the sensuous world and the world of understand-
ing now appears to fall. Matter as such proves to be permeated with the
harmony of number and to be ruled by the lawfulness of geometry. Be-
fore this universal order all those oppositions that had found their xation
6 THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

in Aristotelico-scholastic physics disappeared. There is no opposition be-

tween the common and the superior world, between the world
above and the world below. The world is one, as surely as the knowl-
edge of the world, the mathematics of the world is and can only be one. This
basic idea of modern research found its radical philosophical legitimiza-
tion in Descartess concept of mathesis universalis. The cosmos of universal
mathematics, the cosmos of order and measure, encloses and exhausts all
knowledge. It is in itself completely autonomous; it requires no support
and can acknowledge no other support than the one that it nds in itself.
Now, for the rst time, reason grasps the whole of being in its clear and
distinct ideas, and only now is it able to completely penetrate and domi-
nate this whole with its own powers.
That this fundamental idea of classical philosophical rationalism not
only fertilized and expanded science, but that it has given it a completely
new meaning and goal, requires no further elaboration. The develop-
ment of the systems of philosophy from Descartes to Malebranche and
Spinoza, and from Spinoza to Leibniz, provides continuous evidence for
this. In this development it can directly be demonstrated how the new
ideal of universal mathematics keeps conquering ever new spheres of the
knowledge of reality. Descartess ultimate system of metaphysics is not in
accordance with his original conception of a single comprehensive
method of knowledge, insofar as in the progress of its movement thought
is in the end led to certain radical differences of being which as such it
simply has to accept and acknowledge. The dualism of substances limits
the monism of the Cartesian method and sets it a certain boundary. Fi-
nally, it seems that the goal that this method sets itself is not achievable for
the knowledge of reality as a whole, but only for certain parts of it. The
corporeal world is subordinate without any reservation to the power of
mathematical thought. There is no inconceivable remainder in it, no
dark qualities that, over against the pure concepts of size and number,
are independent and irreducible. All this is eliminated and extinguished:
the identity of matter with pure extension ensures the identity of the
philosophy of nature and mathematics. But apart from the extended sub-
stance there is the thinking substance, and both must, in the end, be de-
rived from a common universal ground, from the being of God. When
Descartes sets out to uncover and to prove this original stratum of reality,
the guiding principle of his method deserts him. Here he no longer thinks
THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

in the concepts of his universal mathematics but in the concepts of me-

dieval ontology. Only insofar as he presupposes the validity of these con-
cepts, insofar as he takes the objective existence of ideas as his starting
point, thence to infer the formal reality of things, can his proof suc-
ceed. Descartess successors attempted with increasing energy and suc-
cess to remove this contradiction. They wanted to achieve, in the same
and equally convincing way, for the substantia cogitans and the divine sub-
stance what Descartes had achieved for the substantia extensa. It is in this
way that Spinoza is led to his positing of God and nature as one; it is in
this way that Leibniz arrives at the outline for his universal characteris-
tic. Both are convinced that the complete proof of pan-logicism and
pan-mathematicism can be provided for only in this way. The outline of
the modern worldview is portrayed here in utmost sharpness and clarity
over against the ancient and medieval worldviews. Spirit and reality
are not only reconciled with each other but have reciprocally interpene-
trated each other. Between them there exists no relation of mere external
inuence or external correspondence. Here we are dealing with some-
thing other than the adaequatio intellectus et rei [rendering equal the mind
and thing] that the ancient, as well as scholastic, epistemology had estab-
lished as the standard of knowledge. We are dealing with a preestab-
lished harmony, an ultimate identity between thought and being, be-
tween the ideal and the real.
The rst restriction that this pan-mathematical worldview encountered
stems from a complex of problems that for the newly beginning philoso-
phy as such still hardly existed, or in any case was seen only in its initial
outlines. The second half of the eighteenth century rst represented a
new great demarcation, as it recognizes more and more the characteristic
features of this complex of problems and nally moves it simply into the
center of philosophical self-reection. Classical rationalism had not con-
tented itself with the conquest of nature; it had also wanted to construct
a coherent natural system of the sciences of spirit. The human spirit
had to cease forming a state within a state; the project was to make it
known by the same principles and to subject it to the same lawfulness as
nature. Modern natural law, as it is founded by Hugo Grotius, appeals to
the thorough analogy that exists between the knowledge of law and
mathematical knowledgeand Spinoza creates a new form of ethics,
which follows the model of geometry and allows it to determine its own
8 THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

goals and its own means. With this, the circle appeared for the rst time to
be closed; the circle of mathematical thought has been able to embrace in
the same way the corporeal world and the spiritual world, the being of
nature and the being of history. But at this point a rst decisive doubt now
settles in. Is history capable of the same mathematization as physics or as-
tronomy? Is it nothing more than a special case of the mathesis universalis?
The rst thinker to pose this question in all its pungency was Giambat-
tista Vico. The original contribution of Vicos philosophy of history
does not lie in what its contents teach us with regard to the historical
process and the rhythm of its individual phases. The differentiation of
the epochs of the history of mankind and the attempt to demonstrate in
them a determinate rule of succession, a transition from the divine to
the heroic, from the heroic to the human age: all this is in Vico still
thoroughly mixed with purely fantastic features. But what he clearly saw,
and what he has defended with utmost decisiveness against Descartes, is
the methodical peculiarity and the intrinsic methodical value of histori-
cal knowledge. And he does not hesitate to place this value above that of
purely mathematical knowledge and to nd in it the genuine fulllment
of that sapientia humana [human wisdom], the concept that Descartes es-
tablished as the ideal in the rst sentences of his Regulae ad directionem in-
genii. According to Vico, the real goal of our knowledge is not the knowl-
edge of nature but human self-knowledge. If philosophy, instead of
contenting itself with this, demands divine or absolute knowledge, then it
oversteps its limits and permits itself to be enticed into a dangerous error.
For the cardinal rule of knowledge is, according to Vico, the statement
that each creature truly understands and penetrates only that which it it-
self produces. The circle of our knowledge extends no further than the cir-
cle of our creative work. Man understands only insofar as he is creative
and this condition can in all rigor be satised only in the world of spirit
and not in nature. Nature is the work of God, and consequently it is com-
pletely transparent only to the divine mind that has brought it forth.
What man can truly understand is not the essence of things, which for
him is never completely exhaustible, but the structure and particular na-
ture of his own works. Mathematics too owes the self-evidence and cer-
tainty it possesses to this fact. For it refers not to physically real objects
that it wants to copy but to ideal objects that thought produces through
free design. But of course its characteristic value denotes at the same time
THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE q

:o

the limit that it cannot overstep. The objects [Objekte] with which mathe-
matics is concerned possess no other being than that abstract being that
spirit has lent them. Hence the inevitable alternative before which our
knowledge sees itself placed. It can either direct itself toward real
things; in which case, however, it cannot completely penetrate its object
[Gegenstand], but only describe it empirically and piecemeal according to
individual features and marks. Or it obtains a complete insight, an ade-
quate idea, which denotes the nature and essence of the object; but then
it does not step out of the circle of its own concept formation. In this case,
the object [Objekt] possesses only that condition which knowledge has at-
tributed to it by virtue of an arbitrary denition. According to Vico, we
gain a way out of this dilemma only once we go beyond the sphere of
mathematical knowledge as well as beyond that of the empirical knowl-
edge of nature. The works of human culture are the only ones that unite in
themselves both conditions in which perfect knowledge is based; they
have not only a conceptually apprehended existence but also a thor-
oughly determined, individual and historic one. However, the internal
structure of this existence is accessible and open to the human spirit only
because it is its creator. Myth, language, religion, poetry: these are the ob-
jects [Objekte] that are truly appropriate to human knowledge. And it is
above all to these that Vico turns his gaze in the construction of his
logic. For the rst time logic dares to break through the circle of objec-
tive knowledge, the circle of mathematics and of the science of nature to
constitute [konstituieren] itself instead as the logic of the science of culture,
as the logic of language, poetry, and history.
Vicos Scienza nuova rightly bears its title. For in it a true novelty was
found; but of course this novelty manifests itself less in the solutions that
the work offers than in the problems that it has posed. The treasure of
these problems was not entirely uncovered by Vico himself. It is only
through Herder that what still slumbers in half-mythical twilight in Vico
is raised into the light of philosophical consciousness. Herder too is not a
rigorously systematic thinker. His relationship to Kant shows how un-
sympathetic he is to a critique of knowledge in the proper sense of the
term. He does not want to analyze but to regard: he considers as empty
all knowledge that is not concrete and determined throughout, that is not
saturated with intuitive content. Nevertheless, Herders work is signi-
cant not only for its content, not only for what it contains in new insights
:o THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

::

in such spheres as the philosophy of language, the theory of art, and the
philosophy of history. Together with this, what we are able to study in this
work is the rising up and nal breakthrough of a new form of knowledge,
which, to be sure, cannot be abstracted from its matter but which be-
comes visible only in the free formation of this matter and in its spiritual
domination and penetration of it. Just as Vico had turned against
Descartess pan-mathematics and against the mechanism of his view of
nature, so Herder turns against the Scholastic system of Wolff and
against the culture of abstract understanding of the Enlightenment pe-
riod. What he combats is the tyrannical dogmatism of this culture,
which, in order to help reason to victory, must enslave and suppress all
of mans other mental and spiritual forces. Against this tyranny he ap-
peals to that fundamental maxim that had rst been implanted in him by
his teacher Hamann: what man has to achieve must spring from the syn-
thesis and unbroken unity of his powers; everything isolated is reprehen-
sible. At the outset of his philosophy this unity still appears to Herder in
light of a historical fact that stands at the beginning of human history. It
is for him a lost paradise, from which humanity has alienated itself more
and more with the progress of the much-praised civilization. Only poetry
has, in its oldest and original form, still preserved a remembrance of this
paradise for us. Accordingly, it is regarded by Herder as the original
mother tongue of the human racejust as Hamann and Vico had re-
garded it. In it he seeks to recall and revitalize that original unity that, in
the beginning of human history, had fashioned language and myth, his-
tory and poetry into a genuine totality, an undivided whole. But this
Rousseauistic longing for the primitive and the primeval is more and
more overcome in Herder the further he progresses along his way. In the
denitive form that his philosophy of history and culture attained in the
Ideen, the goal of totality no longer lies behind us but before us. With this
the entire emphasis of his doctrine shifts. For now the differentiation of
the spiritual powers is no longer regarded simply as a secession from the
original unity and as a kind of original sin of knowledge but has attained
a positive meaning and value. The true unity is one that presupposes the
separation and that restores itself from the separation. Every concrete
spiritual event, all genuine history, is only the appearance of this per-
petual process of systole and diastole, of separation and reunica-
tion. Only after Herder has risen to this universal conception can the in-
THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE ::

:.

dividual elements of the spiritual obtain for him their true independence
and autonomy. None of them is any longer simply subordinate to an-
other; each intervenes as an equal factor in the whole and in its construc-
tion. Even in the purely historical sense there is as such no rst or sec-
ond, no absolute earlier or later. History, considered as a spiritual
fact, is by no means a mere succession of events that replace and displace
each other in time. It is an eternal present, a o ou ao v [everything to-
gether], in the midst of this change. Its meaning is in none of the indi-
vidual moments aloneand yet, on the other hand, it is complete and un-
broken in each of them.
As a result, however, the historical problem of origins, which played
such an important role in Herders rst investigations, particularly in his
prize essay on the origins of language, is transformed and raised to a
higher level of consideration. The historical perspective is never super-
seded; but it becomes apparent that the historical horizon cannot be-
come visible in its full scope and freedom if we do not unite the historical
problem with a systematic one. What is required now is no mere develop-
mental history but a phenomenology of spirit. Herder does not under-
stand this phenomenology in the sense in which Hegel has understood it.
For him there is no xed course, predetermined and prescribed by the na-
ture of spirit, which in a uniform rhythm in the three steps of the dialec-
tic, and with immanent necessity, leads from one form of manifestation
to another, until at last, after running through all the forms, the end re-
turns again to the beginning. Herder makes no such attempt to capture
the ever-owing life of history in the circular movement of metaphysical
thought. But instead of this another problem becomes apparent to him,
which, to be sure, is visible in his work only in its initial and still undened
outline. As he continues to penetrate more deeply into the peculiar na-
ture of language, into the nature of poetry, into the world of myth and
that of history, the question as to our knowledge of reality assumes an
ever more complex form and undergoes an ever richer structuring. It now
becomes clear and unmistakable that this question not only cannot be
solved but cannot even be stated in its proper and full sense, so long as
physical objects constitute the only theme and the only aim of reec-
tion. The physical cosmos, the universe of the science of nature, consti-
tutes only a special case and paradigm for a much more general way of
posing problems. It is this way of posing problems that now gradually
:. THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

supplants that ideal of the pan-mathematic, the mathesis universalis, which

had dominated philosophical thought since Descartes. It is not only in the
mathematical and physico-astronomical cosmos in which the idea of a
cosmos, the idea of a thoroughgoing order, presents itself. This idea is not
limited to the lawfulness of the phenomena of nature, to the world of
matter. We encounter it wherever a determinate unied structural law
becomes apparent within multiplicity and diversity. The rule of such a
structural law: this is the most general expression of what we denote, in
the largest sense of the term, by objectivity. In order to render this fully
clear for us, we need only refer to the essential meaning of the concept of
cosmos, which ancient thought had already established. A cosmos, an
objective order and determinateness, is readily available wherever differ-
ent subjects relate to a common world and consciously participate in
it. The construction of the physical worldview through the medium of
sense perception is not the only case of this. What we grasp as the mean-
ing of the world we encounter everywhere is that, instead of enclosing
ourselves in our own image of the world [Vorstellungswelt], we turn toward
a world that is transindividual, general, and valid for all. And nowhere
does this possibility and this necessity of breaking through the individual
barriers emerge so unquestionably and so clearly as in the phenomenon
of language. The spoken word never exhausts itself in the mere sound or
noise. It wants to signify something: it unites with others to form the
whole of a discourse, and this discourse is only in that it passes from
one person to another and links them together in dialogue. Thus the lin-
guistic understanding becomes for Herder, as it already was for Heracli-
tus, the original and typical expression of the understanding of the
world. Logos establishes the bond between the individual and the whole;
it assures the individual that instead of being enclosed within the caprice
of his I, in ioip po vpoi [private insight], he can reach a universal exis-
tence, a xoivo v xoi 0ri ov [general and divine].
From reason, which is invested in language and which expresses itself
in its concepts, the path leads on to scientic reason. With its characteris-
tic means, language cannot generate nor even arrive at scientic knowl-
edge. But it is a necessary stage on the way to it; it constitutes the medium
in which alone the knowledge of things can emerge and continue to grow.
The act of naming is the indispensable preliminary stage and condition
for the act of determination that constitutes the characteristic task of sci-
THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE :

ence. It follows from this thatand whythe theory of language consti-

tutes a necessary and integral factor in the construction of a theory of
knowledge. Whoever begins the critique of knowledge with the theory of
science, with the analysis of the fundamental concepts and principles
of mathematics, physics, biology, or history applies, so to speak, the lever
at too high a point. But those for whom knowledge is nothing more than
a simple observation of what is immediately given to us in elements of
sense perception likewise miss the correct approach. Psychological analy-
sis, insofar as it is conducted without epistemological prejudices, also
makes this fact stand out clearly. For it shows us that language is ab-
solutely not a simple impression of contents and relations that sensory
perception immediately presents to us. Its ideas are in no way the mere
copies of impressions, as the dogma of sensationalism would have it. On
the contrary, language is a specic fundamental tendency of spiritual ac-
tivity: a sum of psychospiritual acts, and in these acts a new side of the re-
ality, the actuality of things, rst opens itself up to us. For this state of af-
fairs Wilhelm von Humboldt, a student of both Herder and Kant, coined
the expression that language is a function and not an affection. It is not a
simple product but a continuous, permanently self-renewing process; and
the more this process progresses, the clearer and more determinate the
contours of his world become for man. Thus the name is not simply at-
tached to a nished and readily available objective intuition as an exter-
nal label, but in it a determinate path, a way and direction of learning to
know, expresses itself.
*
Indeed, everything that we know about the development of childrens
language conrms this basic view. For it is evidently not the case that in
this development a certain stage of already acquired objective intuition
joins itself to another stage, in which this given property is now named, in
which it is denoted and grasped by words. It is rather linguistic conscious-
ness, the awakening of symbol-consciousness, which impresses its stamp
upon perception and intuition to the extent that it grows stronger and ex-
tends and claries itself. Both perception and intuition become objec-
tive inasmuch as the energy of language succeeds in clarifying, differ-
: THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

*Cassirer employs a play on words here between Kennzeichen (mark or label) and
Kennen-Lernen (to come to know) which is difcult to render into English. Zeichen is a
noun whereas Lernen is a nominalized verb. Cassirer is playing with the contrast be-
tween a static sign and the activity of learningTranslators note.
entiating, and organizing the dull and undifferentiated chaos of simple
states of affairs. Linguistic symbolism opens up a new phase of the men-
tal-spiritual life. A life in meanings supplants the life of mere impulses,
of being absorbed by the immediate impression and into the various
needs. These meanings are repeatable and recurring; something that
does not cling to the bare here-and-now but is meant and understood in
countless life-moments and in the appropriation and use by countless dif-
ferent subjects as being the selfsame something, identical with itself. By
virtue of this identity of intention, which rises above the multifariousness
and diversity of momentary impressions, there emerges, gradually, and
by stages, a determined continued existence [Bestand], a common cos-
mos. What we call learning a language is therefore never a purely re-
ceptive or reproductive process but one that is productive in the highest
degree. In this productive process the I not only gains insight into an ex-
isting order but has its part in constructing this order; it gains its share in
this order, not insofar as it inserts itself simply into it as if it were some-
thing given and readily available, but rather insofar as each individual ac-
quires it for himself and by virtue of this acquisition cooperates in its con-
servation and renewal. From a genetic point of view we may therefore say
that language is the rst common world into which the individual en-
ters, and that it is through its mediation that the intuition of an objective
reality is rst made accessible to him. Even in relatively advanced phases
of this development it is often evident how closely and indissolubly lin-
guistic consciousness and the consciousness of objects are bound to-
gether and intertwined with each other. Even the adult who learns a new
language does not simply acquire more new sounds or signs. As soon as
he enters into the spirit of the language, as soon as he begins to think
and live in it, a new sphere of objective intuition has also opened itself up
to him. Intuition has not only gained in breadth but also in clarity and de-
terminateness; the new world of symbols begins to arrange, to articulate,
and to organize the contents of experience and intuition in new ways.
6
Only on the basis of such considerations can we bring to full clarity the
THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE :

:6

6. In the present considerations I have attempted only to provide a short outline

of these matters; for a more detailed justication, I must refer the reader to the
thorough exposition of the problem which I have given in my essay Le language
et la construction du monde des objets, trans. P. Guillaume, Journal de Psychologie
Normale et Pathologique o (:q): :8.
contrast between the problem of objectivity for philosophy and for the
particular sciences. Aristotle is the rst to have brought this contrast to a
precise formula. He declares that philosophy is a general theory of being,
that it is concerned with being as being. The individual sciences focus
on a particular object and inquire into its nature and determination;
metaphysics, ape tp ioooi o [rst philosophy], directs itself toward be-
ing as such, toward o v

p o v [being as being]. However, in Aristotle, and in

all who have followed him, this distinction of kinds and goals of knowl-
edge leads to a distinction within the eld of objectivity itself. To the log-
ical difference corresponds an ontological difference. By virtue of the
form of this knowledge, what is known philosophically is removed be-
yond the sphere of empirical apprehension. In contrast to the empirically
conditioned, it becomes something unconditioned, something existing in
itself, something absolute. Kants critical philosophy has put an end to
this absolutism of metaphysics. But this end was at the same time a new
beginning. Kants critique, too, intends to differentiate itself from the em-
piricism and positivism of the individual sciences; it, too, strives for a uni-
versal grasp of and a universal solution to the problem of objectivity.
Kant was able to accomplish this solution only because he inquired into
the particular sciences themselves, and by following closely their struc-
ture. He begins with pure mathematics, in order thence to advance to the
mathematical science of nature; and in the Critique of Judgment he widens
the sphere of examination, again, as he inquires into the fundamental
concepts that make a knowledge of the phenomena of life possible. He
has not attempted to give a structural analysis of the sciences of culture
in the same sense in which he has given it for the natural sciences. But this
by no means signies an immanent and necessary limit to the problem of
critical philosophy. It indicates merely a historical and in this respect ac-
cidental limit, which resulted from the state of science in the eighteenth
century. With the disappearance of this limitation, with the emergence,
since Romanticism, of an independent science of language, science of
art, and science of religion, the general theory of knowledge found itself
faced with new tasks. At the same time, however, the present formation of
the individual sciences shows us that we can no longer make the same cut
between philosophy and the individual science that was made by the em-
pirical and positivistic systems of the nineteenth century. We can no
longer relegate the particular sciences to the extraction and collection of
:6 THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

facts, while we reserve the study of principles for philosophy. This

separation between the factual and the theoretical proves to be thor-
oughly articial; it dissects and cuts to pieces the organism of knowledge.
There are no naked factsno facts other than those that can be ascer-
tained by reference to, and with the aid of, determinate conceptual
premises. Every observation of fact is possible only within a particular
context of judgments, which for its part is based on certain logical condi-
tions. Consequently, appearance and validity are not two spheres
that admit, as it were, of being spatially separated from one another, and
between which there runs a xed boundary. Rather, they are correlative
factors that belong to each other and that constitute the basic and origi-
nal stock of all knowledge only in this belonging together. It is the scien-
tic empirical method itself that in this respect contains the most decisive
refutation of certain theses of dogmatic empiricism. In the sphere of exact
science, too, it has turned out that empirical method and theory, fac-
tual knowledge and the knowledge of principles, are united to each other.
In the construction of science, the Heraclitean saying, that the way up
and the way down are the same, holds good: o oo o ve xo te i p. The
more the edice of science develops, and the more freely it rises into the
air, the more it requires the examination and the continual renewal of its
foundations. To the inux of new facts the deepening of foundations
must correspond, which according to Hilbert belongs to the essence of
every science. If this is true, it is clear thatand whythe work of dis-
covering and securing the principles cannot be taken away from the indi-
vidual sciences and allocated to a particular philosophical discipline, to
a theory of knowledge or a methodology.
*
But what claim and what
particular sphere still remain for philosophy if even this domain of ques-
tions is more and more claimed by the individual sciences? Must we not
now nally abandon the old dream of metaphysics and the old claim of
philosophy to establish a theory of being as beings and instead leave it
to each individual science to implement its own conception of being and
determine its object in its own way and with its own means?
However, even if the time had come when philosophy itself must de-
cide on a new vision of its own concept and task, we would still nd our-
THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE :
*There is a misprint in the German text: der Einzelwissenschaften nicht
abgenommen should be den Einzelwissenschaften nicht abgenommen
Translators note.
selves confronted with the enigmatic problem of objectivity, whose so-
lution could not be imposed on the individual sciences alone. For this
problem belongs, if we take it in its full generality, to a sphere that cannot
itself be grasped and exhausted by science even taken as a whole. Science
is only one member and one factor in the system of symbolic forms. In
a certain sense it may be regarded as the copestone in the edice of these
forms; but it does not stand alone and it could not accomplish its specic
performance if it were not for the other energies that share with it in the
task of synoptic vision, of spiritual synthesis. The statement that
concepts without intuitions are empty also holds good here. The concept
seeks to encompass the whole of the phenomena; and it reaches this goal
by way of classication, subsumption, and subordination. It arranges the
manifold into species and genera, and determines it through general
rules, which in themselves constitute a tightly unied system in which
each individual phenomenon and each particular law is assigned its
place. But in this kind of logical structure the concept must be tied
throughout to intuitional structures. It is by no means the case that
logic, conceptual scientic knowledge, carries out its work as if it were
in the void. It encounters no absolutely amorphous stuff on which to ex-
ercise its formative power. Even the matter of logic, even that particu-
lar that it presupposes in order to raise it to universality, is not as such
structureless. Not only could the structureless not be thought, it could not
be perceived or become objectively intuited. The world of language and
the world of art offer us direct proof for this prelogical structuring, for
this stamped form that precedes and underlies the work of concepts.
They show us ways of coordination that move along other paths and
obey other laws than the logical subordination of concepts. We have al-
ready made this clear in the case of language, but it holds equally for the
organic nature of the arts. Sculpture, painting, and architecture seem to
have a common object. What comes to be represented in them appears to
be the comprehensive pure intuition of space. And still the spaces of
painting, sculpture, and architecture are not the same; but rather in
each of them a specic and unique manner of apprehension, of spatial
vision is expressed.
7
All of these multifarious perspectives must on
:8 THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

:8

. Cf. esp. Adolf Hildebrandt, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture (New
York: Steckert, :qo).

:q

the one hand be separated from one another, and on the other hand be
recognized in their reciprocal relation and thus unite under a higher
point of view.
This separation and reintegration, oio xpioi and ou yxpioi, is what
Plato considered as the task of dialectic, the authentic and philosophi-
cally basic science. Based upon Platonic dialectic, ancient thought con-
structed a metaphysical worldview that has dominated and shaped all in-
tellectual development for two millennia. The revolution in the way of
thinking that begins with Kant declares this worldview to be scienti-
cally ungroundable. But although Kant thus renounced the claims of any
metaphysical doctrine of being, in doing so he by no means meant to re-
linquish the unity and universality of reason. This was not to be shaken
by his critique; rather, it was to be safeguarded and grounded upon a new
basis. Now the task of philosophy is no longer to grasp a universal being
rather than the particular being that is accessible only to the individual
sciences, or to ground an ontologia generalis as the knowledge of the tran-
scendent rather than the knowledge of the empirical. This form of
knowledge of o v

p o v, this hypostasis toward an absolute object [Objekt] is

renounced. For Kant too rational knowledge [Vernunfterkenntnis] is still
rigorously and sharply distinguished from the mere knowledge of the
understanding [Verstandeserkenntnis]. But instead of seeking its own object
beyond the latter, which is free of the conditions of the knowledge of the
understanding, it seeks the unconditioned rather within the systematic
totality of conditions themselves. In place of the unity of the object we
have here a unity of function. In order to achieve this goal, philosophy no
longer needs to compete with the particular sciences in their own elds. It
can allow them their full autonomy, their freedom and their self-legisla-
tion. For philosophy does not seek to restrict or suppress any of these par-
ticular laws; but rather it seeks to sum up their totality within a systematic
unity and to recognize it as such. In place of a thing in itself, an object
beyond and behind the world of appearances, it seeks the multifari-
ousness, the fullness and inner diversity of appearing itself. This full-
ness can be grasped by the human spirit only by virtue of the fact that it
possesses the power of differentiating itself within itself. For each new
problem that it encounters here it constitutes a new form of conception.
In this respect a philosophy of symbolic forms can maintain the claim
of unity and universality that metaphysics had to abandon in its dog-
THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE :q

.o

matic form. Not only can it unite these various ways and directions of our
knowledge of the world in itself, but in addition it is capable of recogniz-
ing the legitimacy of every attempt to understand the world, every inter-
pretation of the world that the human spirit is capable of, and of under-
standing them in their specicity. It is in this way that the problem of
objectivity rst becomes visible in its full scope, and taken in this sense it
encompasses not only the cosmos of nature but also that of culture.
8
.
After countless and continually renewed attempts, and after unending
quarrels between schools of philosophy, nineteenth-century science -
nally appeared to have assigned the problem of philosophical anthro-
pology to its proper place. The question What is man? had repeatedly
led to insoluble aporias and antinomies wheneverin conformity with
the basic doctrines of Platonism, Christianity, and Kantian philosophy
man had to be made into a citizen of two worlds. Only in the science of
the nineteenth century did this boundary nally appear to be removed. It
could hold fast to mans special place without having to set him over
against and above nature. The concept of evolution was declared to be the
key that would unlock all previous mysteries of nature and all mysteries
of the universe. Seen from this standpoint, the antithesis between cul-
ture and nature also had to lose all dialectical sharpness. This antithe-
sis was resolved as soon as the problem was successfully shifted from the
terrain of metaphysics onto that of biology and considered and treated
within a purely biological perspective.
To be sure, the concept of evolution as such could not be claimed as an
achievement of the modern sciences of nature. Rather, it goes back to the
rst beginnings of Greek philosophy, and it appears, at the high point of
this philosophy, as one of the most important means with which to break
the sway of the Platonic dualistic worldview. This task is set forth with
full consciousness by Aristotle. But in its Aristotelian form the concept of
evolution is not yet equal to this task. For it breaks down just before the
.o THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

.:

8. The interpretation of the nature and task of philosophy maintained here has
been more thoroughly presented and substantiated in the introduction to Cassirer,
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. :, Language, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven:
Yale University Press, :q), pp. ::.
last crucial question on which it must prove itself. Aristotle depicts or-
ganic nature, and the series of living beings, as an ascending develop-
ment that leads from one form to the next. Even the human soul, in the
broad senseunderstood merely as vegetative or sensitive soulis,
for him, nothing but a natural form that is as such bound to a particular
body. It is the entelechy of an organic body. Still, the Aristotelian psy-
chology as a whole did not admit of being reduced to biology. For a residue
remained that could not be completely expunged by Aristotle himself,
nor by any of his students or followers. The thinking soul deed all at-
tempts to reduce it to the elementary function of the nutritive or sensitive
soul. It afrmed its own and exceptional position; accordingly, it eventu-
ally had to be assigned another and independent origin. If, in the Aris-
totelian psychology, we proceed from perception to memory, from this to
imagination (ovtooi o), and from here to conceptual thought, the prin-
ciple of continuous evolution maintains itself at each of these advances.
But then we suddenly nd ourselves led to a point at which a leap is un-
avoidable. For the power of thought in its highest and purest activity
cannot be reached in this manner. It is and remains an accomplishment
unto itself. The active intellect belongs to the world of the mind, with-
out any possibility of successfully explaining it in terms of the elements of
organic life. Thus here again the dualism breaks throughand it re-
ceives its unequivocal expression when Aristotle declares that the power
of thought (vou ) descends from the outside (0u po0rv) into the world of
life.
It is understandable that Aristotelian metaphysics and psychology
were not able to close the gap that they found here. For the Aristotelian
concept of form is based on the Platonic concept of ideas and remains
bound, even when it appears the farthest removed from it, to the same es-
sential presuppositions. It is only the modern theory of evolution that is
determined to draw the nal consequence. It takes the requirement of
continuity seriously and extends it to all domains. Just as the higher life
forms are bound through smooth transitions to the more elementary
forms, so likewise there can be no capacity in them that goes beyond the
dimension of organic existence as such. Whatever towers above this di-
mension and appears to belong to another world is and remains a mere
castle in the air, insofar as it is not possible to show in what way it emerged
from a fundamental and elementary level of life and continues to be con-
THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE .:

..

nected with it. It is here that a truly biological worldview must apply the
lever. What the speculative concept of evolutionwhether that of Aris-
totle, Leibniz, or Hegelfailed to accomplish should and will be accom-
plished by the empirical concept of evolution. Only through it did the
way to a strictly monistic conception appear to be opened; only now
did the cleft between nature and spirit appear to be closed. Viewed
from this perspective, the Darwinian theory promises to contain not only
the answer to the problem of the evolution of man but also the answer to
all questions concerning the origin of human culture. When Darwins
theory rst appeared, it nally seemed, after centuries of vain efforts, to
have discovered the uniting bond that embraces the science of nature
and the science of culture. In :8 August Schleicher published his
work The Darwinian Theory and the Science of Language. The new program for
a science of culture based upon Darwinian principles is fully dened
here. Schleicher himself originally began from Hegels doctrine. He now
believed to see that and why the solution could not lie there. He de-
manded a fundamental reshaping of the method of the science of lan-
guage that would, for the rst time, elevate it to a knowledge equal to that
of the science of nature.
9
Here, a foundation nally appeared to have
been laid that was common to physics, biology, and the science of lan-
guageand hence indirectly for all that called itself a science of spirit.
It was one and the same causality that embraced all three elds of study
and erased all essential differences between them.
A rst reaction against this conception took place when, in the last
decades of the nineteenth century, doubts concerning the validity of the
Darwinian theory became ever more pronounced in biology itself. Atten-
tion now came to be drawn not only to the empirical limits of the theory
but also, and in far stronger measure than before, to the certainty of its
philosophical foundations. And here suddenly the concept of form expe-
rienced a new resurrection. Vitalism immediately fell back upon this con-
cept; and with this support it attempted to put into practice its thesis of
the autonomy of the organic and the autonomy of life. We shall pursue
here this movement only insofar as it has inuenced the question of lay-
ing the foundations for the sciences of culture and their particular logical
.. THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

q. For further details concerning Schleichers theory see Cassirer, Philosophy of

Symbolic Forms, :: :6 ff.
nature. This question, as such, was foreign to the true champions of vi-
talism. Even as a metaphysician Driesch remained a pure naturalist. At
no time did he attempt to construct a logic of the sciences of spirit; in-
deed, on the basis of his systematic presuppositions he had to doubt the
possibility of such a logic. For he vigorously contested the scientic value
of history. Nevertheless, the new orientation in thinking that was intro-
duced by vitalism also inuenced our problemthough only indirectly,
to be sure. It is instructive to pursue this inuence; for it was in an effec-
tive way the preparation for later work, which received its original and es-
sential impulses from wholly other motives and spheres of problems, and
in many respects cleared the ground for it. Uexkll once stated that the
materialism of the nineteenth century, in teaching that all reality subsists
and exhausts itself within matter and force, has completely overlooked a
third essential factor. It had blinded itself to form, which alone is decisive
and determining.
10
Uexkll wants to restore this factor to its rightful po-
sition in his Theoretical Biology; but he wants, on the other hand, to keep it
free of all extraneous metaphysical and psychological concepts. He
speaks solely as an anatomist, as an objective naturalist. However, ac-
cording to him, precisely the study of anatomy is capable of furnishing
strict proof that every organism presents a self-enclosed world in which
everything weaves itself into the whole. The organism is no aggregate
of parts but a system of functions that are mutually dependent on each
other. In the blueprint of every animal we are able to read off immedi-
ately the nature of this interconnection. The theory of the living being,
according to Uexkll, is a pure natural science and has only one goal
the research into the blueprint of living beings, their origin and their re-
sults. No organism can be thought of as existing for itself, isolated from
its environment. What constitutes its specic nature is its particular re-
lation to this environment: the manner in which it receives its stimuli and
transforms them within itself. The study of these blueprints shows us that
in this respect there is no difference between the lower living creatures
and the most highly developed. For each ever-so-elementary organism
we can establish a determinate receptor system and a determinate ef-
fector system; in each we can clarify how its various functional spheres
THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE .

:o. Cf. J. von Uexkll, Die Lebenslehre (Potsdam: Mller and Kiepenheuer Ver-
lag, :qo), p. :q.
mesh with each other. According to Uexkll, this relation is the expres-
sion and the basic phenomenon of life as such. The stimuli of the exter-
nal world, which an animal is able to receive by virtue of its blueprint,
constitute the only reality present for it, and by virtue of this physical
limit, it closes itself to all other spheres of existence.
11
This problematic of modern biology, which in Uexklls writings is
displayed in a very original way and carried out in an extraordinarily
fruitful way, can point us to a path that we can pursue to a clear and de-
nite delineation of the boundary between life and spirit, between the
world of organic forms and the world of cultural forms. Time and again
the attempt has been made to describe the difference which exists here
as a purely physical difference. We have searched for certain external
features by which to characterize man as such, and by which he was
supposed to be elevated out of the ranks of the other living creatures. It is
well known what fantastic constructions have been tied to such
featuresfor example, the fact of the upright gait of man. But the ad-
vance of empirical knowledge has torn down all of these separations that
we have sought to erect between man and organic nature. Monism held
its ground here with ever increasing clarity and success. In his discovery
of the intermaxillary bone Goethe saw one of the most beautiful and
most important conrmations that no form of nature is absolutely de-
tached and isolated from the others. The difference that we are looking
for here, and that alone we are able to demonstrate with condence, is
not a physical but a functional difference. The novelty that comes forward
in the world of culture cannot be understood and described by pointing
out individual features. For the decisive change does not lie in the ap-
pearance of new marks and qualities but in the characteristic change of
function that all determinations undergo as soon as we pass from the ani-
mal world to the human world. Here and here alone is established a real
rto ooi ri o o yr vo [transition to another class/genus]. The free-
dom that man is able to achieve for himself does not mean that he has
stepped out of nature and can elude its existence or its effect. He cannot
overcome or break through the organic limits that are xed for him just as
for any other living being. But within these limits, indeed by means of
. THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

::. Cf. J. von Uexkll, Theoretical Biology, trans. D. L. MacKinnon (New York:
Harcourt, :q.6). Cf. also Die Lebenslehre (Zurich: Orell Fssli Verlag, :qo).
them, he creates a breadth and self-sufciency of movement that is ac-
cessible and attainable only by him. Uexkll once said that the blueprint
of each living being, and the relation that it determines between its re-
ceptor world and its effector world, encloses this being as rmly as the
walls of a prison. Man escapes from this prison not by tearing down its
walls but rather by becoming conscious of them. Here the Hegelian
statement holds good, that he who knows about a limit is already beyond
it. This becoming conscious is the beginning and end, the alpha and
omega, of the freedom that is granted to man; to know and to acknowl-
edge necessity is the genuine process of liberation that spirit, in opposi-
tion to nature, has to accomplish.
The individual symbolic formsmyth, language, art, and knowl-
edgeconstitute the indispensable precondition for this process. They
are the specic media that man has created in order to separate himself
from the world through them, and in this very separation bind himself all
the closer to it. This trait of mediation characterizes all human knowl-
edge, as well as being distinctive and typical of all human action. Even
plants and animals exist only by means of the fact that they not only con-
tinually receive stimuli from their environment but also, in a certain man-
ner, answer them. And each organism carries out this answer in a dif-
ferent way. Here we nd, as Uexkll has shown in his Umwelt und Innenwelt
der Tiere, the most diverse and subtle gradations possible.
12
For the animal
world on the whole, however, a determined and unied type of action al-
ways follows from the same conditions. The answer must follow the stim-
ulus in immediate temporal sequence, and it must always proceed in the
same way. What we term animal instincts are nothing other than such
xed chains of action, whose individual links engage each other in ways
predetermined by the nature of the animal. A specic situation works as
an impulse to action, which gives rise to certain movements; to this rst
impulse more and more urges add themselves until ultimately a determi-
nate melody of impulses is played out in the same constant way. The
living creature plays this melody, but it cannot voluntarily intervene in it.
The path that it must traverse in order to solve a certain task is prepared;
the organism follows it without having to seek for it and without being
able to alter it in any way.
THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE .

.6

:.. J. von Uexkll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Berlin: J. Springer, :q.:..).
All this changes fundamentally as soon as we enter into the sphere of
human action, which is characterized even in its simplest and most ele-
mentary forms by a kind of mediatedness that is sharply opposed to the
manner in which the animal reacts. This transformation in the mode of
action presents itself most clearly as soon as man makes the transition to
the use of tools. For in order to invent a tool as such, man must look be-
yond the sphere of immediate need. In creating it he does not act from
the impulse and necessity of the moment. Instead of being moved imme-
diately by an actual stimulus, he looks to possible needs, for which he
prepares the means of satisfaction in advance. The intent [Absicht] that
the tool serves contains within itself a certain foresight [Voraus-Sicht]. The
impulse does not originate only from the spur of the present but belongs
also to the future, which must in some way be anticipated in order to
become effective in this manner. This idea of the future characterizes
all human action. We must place something not yet existing before our-
selves in images in order, then, to proceed from this possibility to the
reality, from potency to act. This basic feature emerges still more
clearly when we turn from the practical to the theoretical sphere. There
exists no fundamental difference between the two, insofar as all our theo-
retical concepts bear within themselves an instrumental character. In
the nal analysis they are nothing other than the tools that we have fash-
ioned for the solution of specic tasks and that must be continually re-
fashioned. Concepts do not refer, like sense perceptions, to any particular
given, to a concretely present situation; they move, rather, in the sphere of
the possible and seek, as it were, to delineate the range of the possible.
The more the horizon of human ideas, opinions, thoughts, and judg-
ments expands, the more complex becomes the system of intermediary
links necessary to survey it. The symbols of speech are the rst and most
important link in this chain. However, forms of another kind and another
origin, the forms of myth, religion, art, connect themselves to it. One and
the same fundamental function, the function of the symbolic as such, un-
folds itself in its different cardinal directions and creates within them ever
new formations. It is the totality of these formations that characterizes
and distinguishes the specically human world. The receptor world
and the effector world of animals acquire something new in the human
sphere: they are joined by an image world; and it is this image world
that gains more and more power over man as it develops.
.6 THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

But of course a most difcult question arises here: a question with

which humanity has had to struggle again and again in the course of the
development of its culture. Is the path that is adopted here not a disas-
trous error? Is man allowed to tear himself away from nature in this way
and remove himself from the reality and immediacy of natural exis-
tence? Is what he exchanges for this still good, or is it not the gravest
threat to his life? When philosophy remained mindful of its essential and
supreme task, when it was determined to be not only a certain kind of
knowledge [Wissens] of the world but also the conscience [Gewissen] of human
culture, then, in the course of its history, it had to be led to this problem
again and again. Instead of abandoning itself to a naive belief in progress,
it had to ask itself not only whether the goal of this alleged progress is
attainable but also whether it is worth striving for. And once doubt on this
has been awakened, it seems that it will not be quieted. This shows itself
most forcefully when we x our attention upon mans practical relation to
reality. Through the use of tools man has set himself up as ruler over
things. However, this power has turned into no blessing for him but rather
into a curse. The technology that man invented in order to subjugate the
physical world has turned against him. It has led not only to a heightened
self-alienation but ultimately to a kind of self-loss of human existence.
The tool, which appeared to provide the fulllment of human needs, has
instead created countless articial needs. Each perfecting of the techno-
logical culture is, and remains, in this respect a truly treacherous gift.
Hence the yearning for primitive, unbroken, immediate existence must
repeatedly break forth; and the more numerous the areas of life taken
over by technology, the louder the call, Back to nature! Uexkll re-
marks with respect to the lower animals that each animal is so completely
adapted to its environment that it rests in it as quietly and securely as a
baby in its crib. But this calmness comes to an end as soon as we enter the
human sphere. Each animal species is rmly bound, as it were, to the cir-
cuit of its needs and drives; it has no other world than that which is pre-
scribed for it by its instincts. But within this world, for which the animal is
created, there is no wavering and no transgression: the limits of instinct
offer at the same time the greatest of security. No human knowledge and
no human action can ever nd its way back to this kind of unquestionable
existence and unquestionable certainty. For the intellectual tools that
man has himself created are even more doubtful than his technical tools.
THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE .

.8

Time and again language has been extravagantly praised; we have seen in
it the original expression and unmistakable proof of reason that ele-
vates man above the animal. But are all the arguments that have been
cited in this regard genuine arguments? Or are they perhaps nothing else
than an empty self-idolatry in which language attered itself ? Are they
more than rhetorical? Do they have philosophical merit? In the history of
philosophy there has never been a shortage of important thinkers who
have not only warned against this mixing of language and reason
but who have seen in language the true adversary and antagonist of rea-
son. For them it was not the guide but the perpetual seducer of human
knowledge. Knowledge, so they explained, will reach its goal only if it res-
olutely turns its back on language and no longer allows itself to be enticed
by its content. In vain do we extend our view into the heavens and pry
into the entrails of the earth, says Berkeley; in vain do we consult the
writings of learned men and trace the dark footsteps of antiquity. We
need only draw the curtain of words to behold the fairest tree of knowl-
edge, whose fruit is excellent, and within the reach of our hand.
13
Berkeley himself was able to nd no other way out of this conict than
to absolve philosophy not only of the domination of language but also of
the domination of concepts. For it did not escape him that concepts,
insofar as they are abstract and universal, not only are related to
that generality that is manifested in names and words but are insepar-
able from it. Only a radical solution could therefore help here: reality
must be freed from concepts and logic, and limited to pure awareness
[Wahrnehmung], to the sphere of perception [Perzeption]. Wherever we
leave this latter sphere, wherever we attempt to proceed from percipi to
concipi, we nd ourselves again under the power of language that we
wanted to escape. All logical cognition carries itself out in acts of judg-
ment, in theoretical reection. But already the term reection indicates the
shortcomings that inevitably adhere to it. The reected object is never
the object itselfand each new mirroring surface we introduce threatens
to remove us more and more from the original and authentic truth of it.
Since ancient times such considerations have constituted the real breed-
.8 THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

.q

:. Concerning Berkeleys criticism of language see Cassirer, Philosophy of Sym-

bolic Forms, :: :6 ff. [Quotation from G. Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of
Human Knowledge, p. .Translators note.]
ing ground of theoretical skepticism. And in the course of its history not
only the theory of language but the theory of art, too, has had to struggle
continuously with similar problems. Plato renounces and rejects art. He
reproaches it because in the struggle between truth and appearance it
stands not on the side of philosophy but on the side of sophistry. The
artist does not see the ideas, the eternal archetypes [Urbilder] of truth; in-
stead, he wanders around in the realm of copies [Abbilder] and turns all
his energy to forming these copies in such a way that, to somebody look-
ing at them, they feign reality itself. The poet and the painter, like the
sophist, are the perpetual image makers (ri oeoaoio ). Instead of con-
ceiving being as it is, both put us under an illusion of being. So long as
aesthetics is based on a theory of imitation, it is in principle vain to at-
tempt to refute this Platonic objection. In order to justify the imitation
some have attempted a hedonistic, rather than theoretical or aesthetical,
justication of its value. Aesthetic rationalism has also frequently gone in
this direction. It stressed that the imitation obviously cannot exhaust na-
ture, that the appearance cannot attain reality. Instead, it points to
the value of pleasure that the imitation possesses, which grows stronger
the closer it approaches the model. The very rst lines of Boileaus Art po-
tique exhibit this train of thought in classic conciseness and clarity. Even a
monster, Boileau explains, can please in the artistic representation, be-
cause the pleasure concerns not the object as such but the excellence of
the imitation. With this there seemed to arise at least the possibility of de-
termining as such that characteristic dimension of aesthetics and of
granting it an independent value, even though this goal could be reached
only by a strange detour. But on the basis of strict rationalism and meta-
physical dogmatism a denitive solution to the problem was not to be
gained. For once we are convinced that the logical concept is the neces-
sary and sufcient condition for the knowledge of the essence of things,
then everything else, which is specically different and which does not
meet this standard of clarity and distinctness, ends up being only an un-
real appearance. In this case the illusory character of those spiritual
forms that remain outside the sphere of the purely logical cannot be con-
tested; it can, as such, be demonstrated, and in this respect explained and
justied, only to the extent that we inquire into the psychological origin of
the illusion and attempt to illustrate its empirical conditions in the struc-
ture of human imagination and human fantasy [Phantasie].
THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE .q

However, the question takes a completely other turn if, instead of

treating the essence of things as having been xed from the beginning, we
see in it, on the contrary, the innitely distant point toward which all
knowing and understanding aim. In this case, the given of the objects
[Objekt] is transformed into the task of objectivity. And this task, as it can
be shown, does not involve theoretical knowledge alone; rather, every en-
ergy of spirit participates in its own way. Now language and art can also
be assigned their particular objective meaningsnot because they im-
itate [nachbilden] a reality existing in itself but because they pre-form [vor-
bilden] it, because they are determined ways and directions of objectica-
tion. And this holds as much for the world of inner experience as it does
for the world of outer experience. For the metaphysical worldview and
the theory of two substances, soul and body, inner and outer sig-
nify two spheres of being strictly divorced from one another. They are
able to inuence each other, even though the possibility of this inuence
becomes ever more mysterious and problematic the more metaphysics
draws its own consequences; however, the radical difference between
them is not to be overcome. Both subjectivity and objectivity consti-
tute a sphere in themselves; and the analysis of a specic form of spiritual
energy would appear to be successful and complete only once we have ar-
rived at clarity as to which of the two spheres it belongs. Here an either-
or, a this side or a that side, applies. The determination is thought of
according to a type of spatial arrangement, which attributes a phenome-
non its place in consciousness or in being, in the inner world or in the
outer world. However, from the critical perspective, precisely this alterna-
tive dissolves into a dialectical illusion. It shows that inner and outer expe-
rience are not two foreign and separated things but rather that they are
based upon common conditions and that they can constitute themselves
only together and in constant reference to one another. In lieu of sub-
stantial separation there is correlative relation and completion.
It is by no means the case that this characteristic reciprocal determi-
nation holds only in the sphere of scientic knowledge. It is also found
when we look beyond the circle of knowledge and theoretical concepts.
No simple opposition of I and world prevails in language, nor in art,
nor indeed even in myth and religion. Here, too, the intuition of both de-
velops in one and the same process that leads to a continual and progres-
sive clash of the two poles. This clash would be deprived of its true
o THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

meaning if it sublated the relation, if it could lead to an isolation of the

subject pole or the object pole. The separation: symbol or object, also
proves to be impossible, as closer analysis shows us that it is precisely the
function of the symbolic itself that is the precondition for the grasp of all
objects or facts.
14
With this insight the contrast between reality and ap-
pearance assumes another character and another signicance. In the
case of art it becomes immediately evident that if it wanted to simply dis-
pense with appearance [Schein] as such, then the phenomenon [Er-
scheinung] as well as the object of artistic intuitions and forms would also
be lost. For it is in the colorful reection and in it alone that art has its
tting and characteristic life. No artist can represent nature without, in
and through this representation, giving expression to his own I; and no
artistic expression of the I is possible without setting before us something
objective [Gegenstndliches] in all its objectivity [Objektivitt] and vividness.
Subjective and objective, feeling and gestalt must merge into one another
and must be completely absorbed in one another if a great work of art is
to be created. However, it follows from this thatand whythe work of
art can never be a mere reproduction of the subjective or of the objective,
of the mental or of the objective world, but that a genuine discovery of
both takes place here: a discovery that, in its general character, falls short
of no theoretical knowledge. In this respect, Goethe was right in saying
that style rests in the deepest foundations of knowledge, in the very
essence of things, insofar as we are permitted to have knowledge of it
through visible and tangible gestalts. Indeed it would remain a highly
questionable, and in any case a very meager, achievement if art could do
nothing more than simply repeat an outward existence or an inner event.
If it was in this sense an imprint of being, all the reproaches that Plato di-
rected against it would be justied: we would have to deprive it of any
ideal signicance. For genuine ideality, the ideality of theoretical con-
cepts as well as that of intuitive formation [Gestaltung], always entails a
productive and not receptive or imitative attitude. It must discover some-
thing new instead of repeating something old under another form. Art
remains an idle entertainment of the spirit, an empty game, if it does not
do justice to this supreme task.
One needs only cast a glance at the truly great works of art of all time
THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE :

:. Cf. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, :, introduction.

in order to become aware of this basic character. Each of these works
leaves us with the impression that we have encountered something new,
something we had not known before. It is no mere imitation or repetition
that we are confronted with here; rather, the world always seems to be dis-
closed to us in new ways and from new angles. If the epic could do no
more than capture past events and renew them in mans memories, there
would be nothing to distinguish it from mere chronicle. But we need only
think of Homer, Dante, and Milton to be convinced that in every great
epic of world literature it is something quite different that confronts us. In
no way does it concern a mere report of something past; rather, we are
transported by the threads of the epic narrative into a worldview in which
the totality of events and the entire human world appears in a new light.
This feature is characteristic of even the apparently most subjective
art, the lyricism. More than any other genre of art, lyricism seems to be
trapped in the moment. The lyric poem seeks, as it were, to capture in
ight, and to hold onto a unique, ephemeral, never recurring mood. It
springs from a single moment and does not look beyond this moment of
inspiration. And yet it is in lyricism, and perhaps in it above all, that that
sort of idealitywhich Goethe has described with wordsproves that
it is characteristic of that ideal way by which thought makes the eternal
visible in the ephemeral. By immersing itself in the moment and seeking
nothing else than to exhaust its entire feeling content, it thereby invests it
with duration and eternity. If the lyrical poem were to do nothing else
than to x in words momentary and individual feelings of poets, it would
not distinguish itself from any other linguistic expression. All lyricism
would be merely linguistic expression, as all speech would be lyricism.
Benedetto Croce has in fact drawn this conclusion in his aesthetics. Nev-
ertheless, in addition to the genus proximum of expression we must pay at-
tention to the specic difference of lyric expression. Lyricism is no mere
intensication or sublimation of a linguistic sensible sound. It is not sim-
ply the utterance of a momentary mood, nor does it seek simply to tra-
verse the scale of tones between the two extremes of emotion, between
suffering and pleasure, pain and joy, exaltation and despair. If the lyric
poet is successful in giving melody and speech to pain, by so doing, he
has not only enveloped it in a new cover; he has transformed it from
within. Through the medium of the emotions he has enabled us to gaze
into a spiritual depth that until now was closed and inaccessible to himself
. THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE

as well as to us. Again we need only remind ourselves of the genuine turn-
ing points and high points in the development of lyrical style in order to
become convinced of its basic character. Every great lyricist, while want-
ing only to express his I, teaches us to recognize a new feeling of the
world. He shows us life and reality in a gestalt in which we feel we have
never known it before. A song by Sappho, an ode by Pindar, Dantes Vita
nuova, Petrarchs sonnets, Goethes Sesenheimer Lieder and West-stlicher Di-
van, Hlderlins or Leopardis poemseach gives us more than a series of
individual eeting moods that appear before us only to vanish again and
lose themselves in nothingness. Each is and exists; it discloses to us a
knowledge that cannot be grasped in abstract concepts yet nevertheless
stands before us as the revelation of something new, something never be-
fore known or familiar. It belongs to the greatest achievements of art that
it is able to permit us to feel and recognize the objective even in the indi-
vidual, while on the other hand placing all its objective formations con-
cretely and individually before us and in this way lling them with the
strongest and most intense life.
THE OBJECT OF THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE