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The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1: Language
“An outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, Nature
The Symbolic Forms has long been considered by many who knew it in the original German as the greatest of Ernst Cassirer's works. Into it, he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which mankind has expressed itself and given intelligible objective form to the human experience.
The Symbolic Forms has long been considered by many who knew it in the original German as the greatest of Ernst Cassirer's works. Into it, he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which mankind has expressed itself and given intelligible objective form to the human experience.
342 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1923
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About the author
Ernst Cassirer
391 books166 followersErnst Cassirer was one of the major figures in the development of philosophical idealism in the first half of the twentieth century, a German Jewish philosopher. Coming out of the Marburg tradition of neo-Kantianism, he developed a philosophy of culture as a theory of symbols founded in a phenomenology of knowledge.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 13, 2016
I read Charles Hendel's extensive but rewarding introduction—which accounts for a considerable portion of the page total of this opening volume—as well as the first few chapters of Cassirer's brilliantly-assembled thought. Unfortunately, and notwithstanding that I'd been ingesting, straight from the horse's mouth, of the Kantian Critical Philosophy shortly before cracking this symbolic trilogy of Neo-Kantian exposition, it quickly became apparent that I was becoming bound within chains of thought of thinkers whom I knew too little about: and, hence, I'd have to shelve Cassirer until I'd sufficient knowledge of the aforesaid under my belt that I could both better follow the author's philosophic trail and not be forced to take as given such a large portion of the latter's interpretations—either that, or the symbolic form that kept forming in my head whilst I turned the page was one with four posters, a box-spring base, and two super-fluffy pillows whose midnight garb was permanently scarred by run-off from my mouth. I shall return anon, however, since, at the very least, I simply cannot stop marveling at this stark, monochromatic cover, wherein one's gaze is seized and held by the overawing size—though remaining well-within patrician aesthetic standards—of Cassirer's fabelhafte forehead. I contemplate viewing the likes of Battleship Potemkin, in all of its widescreen glory, across the breadth of that stately brow, its Eisensteinian filmic miracles rendered holier through being containedly-projected below and betwixt the argent solar flares that comprise Herr Cassirer's hair.
The material opted for his philosophical foundation is mined from ontological quarries, as per his averment that all philosophies begin with the question of being, but that for the Pre-Socratics this was a quest for the origin and foundation of being, and hung at midpoint between the material and spiritual. As Plato was the first to exemplify, it is when philosophers moved from regarding being as a question to be settled, a facticity to be uncovered, to seeing it as a plenary problem concerned with meaning, with principles, that we find early philosophy transitioning into a mature state. Kant's Copernican Revolution was not merely making knowledge of empirical objects a synthesizing process of the subjective mind and objective phenomena, but that in this cooperative mental venture between judgments of understanding, objective forms, and sensible intuitions by means of the relevant categories we come to understand that the process of determining knowledge is one of taking the information provided by the individual object and, through the extension of logical operations, forming universal laws, axioms, etc that apply to the whole. This Kantian methodology eschews set-piece declamations delivered up in whole in favor of a system, an analytic procedure of wending antinomies, contradictions, and conflicts, that the tension between potency and act can be brought to bear fruitfully upon the epistemological quest. Cassirer expands upon this by saying that the Transcendental Idealism of Kant—one wherein the function is motive in legislating over the object it is applied to—can be productive via more than just cognition; through his Critiques of Practical Reason and Judgment we come to realize it is applicable across the entire field of human culture, in that certain processes of spiritual energy endow individual aesthetic and ideated objects with attributes that can be used, in the same fashion of logical application, to discover the universal rules or structure of each.
Beginning with Descartes, we see the spirit and its cogitations acknowledged as having objective components, but they all become subsumed under the rigors of a logic that melds the lot into a universality. Hegel takes this to the greatest extreme with his theory of the dialectic in History. Cassirer claims that all of the modern philosophies have cultural components within their purview, but the problem is how the strata of logic tends to blur all differentiation between them and bring all into the suzerainty of itself and cogitation. What Cassirer therefore seeks is how to discover universal laws and meaning for each cultural adjunct—science, myth, religion, language, art—using the analytic and categories of the critical philosophy while maintaining each in its own particular sphere.
The material opted for his philosophical foundation is mined from ontological quarries, as per his averment that all philosophies begin with the question of being, but that for the Pre-Socratics this was a quest for the origin and foundation of being, and hung at midpoint between the material and spiritual. As Plato was the first to exemplify, it is when philosophers moved from regarding being as a question to be settled, a facticity to be uncovered, to seeing it as a plenary problem concerned with meaning, with principles, that we find early philosophy transitioning into a mature state. Kant's Copernican Revolution was not merely making knowledge of empirical objects a synthesizing process of the subjective mind and objective phenomena, but that in this cooperative mental venture between judgments of understanding, objective forms, and sensible intuitions by means of the relevant categories we come to understand that the process of determining knowledge is one of taking the information provided by the individual object and, through the extension of logical operations, forming universal laws, axioms, etc that apply to the whole. This Kantian methodology eschews set-piece declamations delivered up in whole in favor of a system, an analytic procedure of wending antinomies, contradictions, and conflicts, that the tension between potency and act can be brought to bear fruitfully upon the epistemological quest. Cassirer expands upon this by saying that the Transcendental Idealism of Kant—one wherein the function is motive in legislating over the object it is applied to—can be productive via more than just cognition; through his Critiques of Practical Reason and Judgment we come to realize it is applicable across the entire field of human culture, in that certain processes of spiritual energy endow individual aesthetic and ideated objects with attributes that can be used, in the same fashion of logical application, to discover the universal rules or structure of each.
Beginning with Descartes, we see the spirit and its cogitations acknowledged as having objective components, but they all become subsumed under the rigors of a logic that melds the lot into a universality. Hegel takes this to the greatest extreme with his theory of the dialectic in History. Cassirer claims that all of the modern philosophies have cultural components within their purview, but the problem is how the strata of logic tends to blur all differentiation between them and bring all into the suzerainty of itself and cogitation. What Cassirer therefore seeks is how to discover universal laws and meaning for each cultural adjunct—science, myth, religion, language, art—using the analytic and categories of the critical philosophy while maintaining each in its own particular sphere.
September 7, 2014
maybe the best book of the 20th century. Cassirer predates neurolinguistics with a wry, devastating summary of linguistics, philosophy and anthropology, essentially restarting all three fields as a singular probe into human consciousness. filled with notation and depth, Cassirer gracefully follows procedure (comparative linguistics) with theorem and proof. His central thesis is that language is merely a cover language for a more attuned one we can't use yet in our heads, and its flaws are mostly hidden from us. some even in our unconscious. his citations are the peak of the early 20th century german academies, as well as earlier minds like Grimm (linguist and brother of the team), Kant, Seler, Meinhof. Cassirer's theoretical leaps are not the stuff of meaning (like semiotics) but of gesture, integrations, hierarchies. The stuff of advanced, future languages. When he reaches polysynthetic languages like Quechua and Maya, he quickly describes their shift in structure, an advancement of verb isolation and dominance. The science of the mind appears to be evolving with our linguistic skills. If you piece together his jigsaw, you can see where language goes next.
September 16, 2020
Does form precede structure or does structure precede form, or in other words, is the word the thing or is the thing the word. Gadamer in 1960 will say in Truth and Method “All understanding is interpretation. Being that can be understood is language”. Cassirer in this volume (in the 1920s) makes our symbols as significant and meaningful as the thing-in-itself because he thinks of them as primal and that what they point to is as real as the objective reality that the subjective indicates by them.
Cassirer will mention that Adam got to name all the beasts on the land, birds in the air, and fish in the sea and all other things and that naming gives the form to language that gives the understanding and interpretation. Gadamer said that each word by itself is without form until the sentence or the thought is first understood, while the thought is not understood until the words themselves are comprehended. Cassirer will argue similarly as he steps the reader through his phenomenology of knowledge through signifiers starting with language and as hinted in this volume myth, art and culture such that our truth of being and are meaning are part and parcel tied with our symbols through our signs of the forms.
Cassirer is not just writing a book for the erudite. He knows something awful is happening as he is writing and sees the collapse of the sane as his country starts to take seriously Oswald Spengler (the truly God awful book that everyone should read today is Spengler’s Decline of the West, Volume I) and his dangerous ramblings of ‘cultural determinism’ and Cassirer is writing a book that will slow down that madness by providing a foundation that gives priority to the universal truths that he thinks are expressed through our acquisition of language as humans. (The 60 page introduction in this book mentions Spengler and why it is important to Cassirer’s project).
There’s a whole lot of linguistic analysis of languages from American Indians, Chinese, Arabic, European Languages and obscure other languages and their grammar structure and what it means for Cassirer’s theory as a whole detailed in this book. Also, he quotes a lot from Wilhelm von Humboldt and his language theories. I have no idea if Humboldt’s linguistics or Cassirer’s Philosophy of Language are still held in high esteem today, or if the guesses put forth in this book are just as valid as the guesses put forth today on the development of language. Though, I do know that the philosophy for understanding and interpretation is still relevant for today.
Bergson and Kant are two of his major influences in the first half of this book, and just as Deleuze did in Difference and Repetition Cassirer filters Kant through Leibnitz more than through Hume (Kant does the opposite, btw). There were a whole lot of similarities between these two books, btw. Though, Deleuze was more interested in being and not being while Cassirer seems to think that the being that can be understood is language (and myth, culture and art, and so on) through are symbols that are as real as the things themselves.
Why did I end up reading this book? Well, I’ll tell you. I’ve been currently reading Time of the Magicians and Cassirer is featured prominently in that book and I wanted to figure out why before I finished that book. I had previously read Cassirer’s The Philosophy of the Enlightenment and knew little else about him. I’m glad I did read this book because I learned something I didn’t realize at the time of reading his Enlightenment book. I realize now that he breaks the world that he is studying into the different understandings that he uses to interpret the meaning of the being through his forms of his signifiers. He’s doing that in this book too. Small note, Deleuze in his Difference and Repetition book has a wrong take on his certainty of a universal meaning about meaning just as Cassirer does, but, I always think it’s best when reading an intelligently presented book that one should suspend their disbelief and try to accept the author’s preconceptions about reality (or just assume that the forms come before the structure as in this case) in order to see what the author is getting at and just maybe grow a little in the process, because understanding is interpretation and being that can be understood is language even when a signifier is not the same as the signified and the mythical consensus belief for the language (or the myth of the myth, the art or the culture) sometimes just might not be the best or only interpretation required for the understanding.
Cassirer will mention that Adam got to name all the beasts on the land, birds in the air, and fish in the sea and all other things and that naming gives the form to language that gives the understanding and interpretation. Gadamer said that each word by itself is without form until the sentence or the thought is first understood, while the thought is not understood until the words themselves are comprehended. Cassirer will argue similarly as he steps the reader through his phenomenology of knowledge through signifiers starting with language and as hinted in this volume myth, art and culture such that our truth of being and are meaning are part and parcel tied with our symbols through our signs of the forms.
Cassirer is not just writing a book for the erudite. He knows something awful is happening as he is writing and sees the collapse of the sane as his country starts to take seriously Oswald Spengler (the truly God awful book that everyone should read today is Spengler’s Decline of the West, Volume I) and his dangerous ramblings of ‘cultural determinism’ and Cassirer is writing a book that will slow down that madness by providing a foundation that gives priority to the universal truths that he thinks are expressed through our acquisition of language as humans. (The 60 page introduction in this book mentions Spengler and why it is important to Cassirer’s project).
There’s a whole lot of linguistic analysis of languages from American Indians, Chinese, Arabic, European Languages and obscure other languages and their grammar structure and what it means for Cassirer’s theory as a whole detailed in this book. Also, he quotes a lot from Wilhelm von Humboldt and his language theories. I have no idea if Humboldt’s linguistics or Cassirer’s Philosophy of Language are still held in high esteem today, or if the guesses put forth in this book are just as valid as the guesses put forth today on the development of language. Though, I do know that the philosophy for understanding and interpretation is still relevant for today.
Bergson and Kant are two of his major influences in the first half of this book, and just as Deleuze did in Difference and Repetition Cassirer filters Kant through Leibnitz more than through Hume (Kant does the opposite, btw). There were a whole lot of similarities between these two books, btw. Though, Deleuze was more interested in being and not being while Cassirer seems to think that the being that can be understood is language (and myth, culture and art, and so on) through are symbols that are as real as the things themselves.
Why did I end up reading this book? Well, I’ll tell you. I’ve been currently reading Time of the Magicians and Cassirer is featured prominently in that book and I wanted to figure out why before I finished that book. I had previously read Cassirer’s The Philosophy of the Enlightenment and knew little else about him. I’m glad I did read this book because I learned something I didn’t realize at the time of reading his Enlightenment book. I realize now that he breaks the world that he is studying into the different understandings that he uses to interpret the meaning of the being through his forms of his signifiers. He’s doing that in this book too. Small note, Deleuze in his Difference and Repetition book has a wrong take on his certainty of a universal meaning about meaning just as Cassirer does, but, I always think it’s best when reading an intelligently presented book that one should suspend their disbelief and try to accept the author’s preconceptions about reality (or just assume that the forms come before the structure as in this case) in order to see what the author is getting at and just maybe grow a little in the process, because understanding is interpretation and being that can be understood is language even when a signifier is not the same as the signified and the mythical consensus belief for the language (or the myth of the myth, the art or the culture) sometimes just might not be the best or only interpretation required for the understanding.
July 23, 2024
Ernst Cassirer remains one of the most interesting authors that Humanities Academia have seem to have left behind. Yes, he can be a good example of "old" philosophy, extremely academic and dogmatic, but— that is why he is so great. I wonder why people have not taken up his Myth of the State to study all the political decaying that has been happening around us, in which, he seem to have written so eloquently and so accurately 70 years ago.
Having said that, about <>symbolischen Formen> it is a masterpiece of Culture. At times, mainly when Cassirer is dealing with the History of the Philosophy of Language and citations it can be quite uninteresting and redundat, but when Cassirer actually starts posing his <>own> ideas and theories, there's no one who can stop him. They are all so elegantly written and clearly written (a very rare thing for German philosophy, especially when it deals with such a difficult topic as this), that it makes a very easy read even for people not a big knowledge of philosophy in general.
His tremendous and unending research and quotations only serves to show his erudition and the accuracy and foundation he talks about all the themes he does. And then he mitigates one by one, language by language, verb, nouns, symbols, numbers, grammar... such a vast amount of knowledge that leaves not a single important thing behind. Also, the way he deals with so many varied languages from literally, all over the world, in all continents, is extremely amazing. Never really making value judgements about what is inferior or superior, but rather, just showing that the beauty of culture lies in its diversification.
Having said that, about <>symbolischen Formen> it is a masterpiece of Culture. At times, mainly when Cassirer is dealing with the History of the Philosophy of Language and citations it can be quite uninteresting and redundat, but when Cassirer actually starts posing his <>own> ideas and theories, there's no one who can stop him. They are all so elegantly written and clearly written (a very rare thing for German philosophy, especially when it deals with such a difficult topic as this), that it makes a very easy read even for people not a big knowledge of philosophy in general.
His tremendous and unending research and quotations only serves to show his erudition and the accuracy and foundation he talks about all the themes he does. And then he mitigates one by one, language by language, verb, nouns, symbols, numbers, grammar... such a vast amount of knowledge that leaves not a single important thing behind. Also, the way he deals with so many varied languages from literally, all over the world, in all continents, is extremely amazing. Never really making value judgements about what is inferior or superior, but rather, just showing that the beauty of culture lies in its diversification.
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February 24, 2025Un libro raro. Da la sensación de apresurado, en la primera parte plantea muy bien las bases de la investigación pero justo a la mitad se atiborran los datos, deja confuso el texto entre tanto nombre y ejemplo que más que aclarar o sustentar la tesis, revuelve. Aún así siento el vertigo del buen investigador donde a veces da en el clavo e hila ideas sublimes, que da para reflexión.
No creo que los siguientes tomos aclaren el panorama pero habrá que leerlos.
No creo que los siguientes tomos aclaren el panorama pero habrá que leerlos.
March 22, 2025
Excellent layout of the philosophical problem, and a number of fascinating points, although parts of linguistic analysis felt rather spurious and filtered through an evolutionism kind of unrelated to the premises as set out. Every feature German had and every lack it didn't have were signs of primativism, even when the two were diametrical opposites.
May 9, 2025
I think this rating may say more about me than the book. Cassirer’s writing is dense and may not be a jumping off point for exploring this philosophy of language. It may require another read when I am better acquainted with the subject matter.
November 4, 2020
I started to understand it, then it was over ! Looking forward to reading Volume 2 in 2021.
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December 14, 2023Read the introduction before dropping. More on the animal Symbolicum.
December 6, 2022
I guess I am too dumb to understand.
May 8, 2014
It's perfect.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews