Ernst Cassirer Quotes

Man is always inclined to regard the small circle in which he lives as the center of the world and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe. But he must give up this vain pretense, this petty provincial way of thinking and judging.

Knowledge of the name gives him who knows it mastery even over the being and will of the god.

The course of the world constantly and inevitably frustrates our moral demands.

It is necessary, first of all, to find a correct logical starting point, one which can lead us to a natural and sound interpretation of the empirical facts.

...it would be a very naive sort of dogmatism to assume that there exists an absolute reality of things which is the same for all living beings. Reality is not a unique and homogeneous thing; it is immensely diversified, having as many different schemes and patterns as there are different organisms. Every organism is, so to speak, a monadic being. It has a world of its own because it has an experience of its own. The phenomena that we find in the life of a certain biological species are not transferable to any other species. The experiences - and therefore the realities - of two different organisms are incommensurable with one another. In the world of a fly, says Uexkull, we find only "fly things"; in the world of a sea urchin we find only "sea urchin things.

There is no remedy against this reversal of the natural order. Man cannot escape from his own achievement. He cannot but adopt the conditions of his own life. No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art, and religion are parts of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. All human progress in thought and experience refines and strengthens this net. No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium. His situation is the same in the theoretical as in the practical sphere. Even here man does not live in a world of hard facts, or according to his immediate needs and desires. He lives rather in the midst of imaginary emotions, in hopes and fears, in illusions and disillusions, in his fantasies and dreams. 'What disturbs and alarms man,' said Epictetus, 'are not the things, but his opinions and fantasies about the things.

Absolute trust in the reality of things begins to be shaken as the problem of truth enters upon the scene. The moment man ceases merely to live in and with reality and demands a knowledge of this reality, he moves into a new and fundamentally different relation to it. At first, to be sure, the question of truth seems to apply only to particular parts and not to the whole of reality. Within this whole different strata of validity begin to be marked off, reality seems to separate sharply from appearance. But it lies in the very nature of the problem of truth that once it arises it never comes to rest. The concept of truth conceals an immanent dialectic that drives it inexorably forward, forever extending its limits.

The form of observation , which underlines all speech and language development, always expresses a peculiar spiritual character , a special way of conceiving and apprehending. The difference between the several languages, therefore, is not a matter of different sounds and marks, but of different world conceptions.

Such is the strange situation in which modern philosophy finds itself. No former age was ever in such a favourable position with regard to the sources of our knowledge of human nature. Psychology, ethnology, anthropology, and history have amassed an astoundingly rich and constantly increasing body of facts. Our technical instruments for observation and experimentation have been immensely improved, and our analyses have become sharper and more penetrating. We appear, nonetheless, not yet to have found a method for the mastery and organization of this material. When compared with our own abundance the past may seem very poor. But our wealth of facts is not necessarily a wealth of thoughts. Unless we succeed in finding a clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can have no real insight into the general character of human culture; we shall remain lost in a mass of disconnected and disintegrated data which seem to lack all conceptual unity.

Rousseau created a new responsibility for evil; neither God nor man but human society.

Prior to the studies by Renan and Straus, historians thought myth was an obstacle to be removed in the search for the actual truth of history. But these new writers treated myth as a source of insight into the ways people viewed themselves and their universe. What if instead of treating myth as an illusion and a falsification, we saw it as an expression of people's deepest dreams?

Omul nu mai trăieşte într-un univers pur fizic, ci trăieşte într-un univers simbolic. Limbajul, mitul, arta şi religia sunt părţi ale acestui univers. Ele sunt firele diferite care ţes reţeaua simbolică, ţesătura încâlcită a experienţei umane. […]. Omul nu mai înfruntă realitatea în mod nemijlocit, el nu o poate vedea, cum se spune, faţa în faţă. Realitatea fizică pare să se retragă în măsura în care avansează activitatea simbolică a omului. În loc să aibă de a face cu lucrurile înseşi, omul conversează, într-un sens, în mod constant cu sine însuşi. El s-a închis în aşa fel în forme limgvistice, imagini artistice, simboluri mitice sau rituri religioase încât el nu mai poate vedea sau cunoaşte nimic decât prin intermediul acestui mediu artificial. Situaţia lui este aceeaşi în sfera teoretică şi în cea practică. Chiar şi aici, omul nu trăieşte într-o lume de fapte brute, sau confiorm nevoilor şi dorinţelor lui imediate. El trăieşte mai curând în mijlocul unor emoţii imaginare, în speranţe şi temeri, în iluzii şi deziluzii, în fanteziile şi visurile sale.

The special task of philosophy must always be to oppose the intellectual division of labour, no matter how useful and even indispensable it may be to the progress of science. Philosophy can never deny its own universal character, and if it yields to the spirit of mere facts, if it ceases to be systematic and “encyclopedic,” it will really have renounced itself.

The past is preserved only in darkness, the future is not raised to the level of an image, as something which can be anticipated. It is the symbolic expression which first creates the possibility of looking backward and looking forward... What occurred in the past, now separated out from the totality of representations, no longer passes away, once the sounds of language have placed their seals on it and given it a certain stamp.

Not until (the) purely human goal of all science has been recognized will science be capable (...) of a rigorous systematization. We cannot succeed in this as long as we stay within the realm of purely physical phenomena. The material world is infinite in time and space, so that all knowledge of it must have a merely provisional and inconclusive character. Here research can never hope to attain the goal, for after all it remains rudimentary and preparatory. The situation does not change until we assign to research another task and select another focal point for it. The true center of knowledge lies not in the world but in mankind; not in the universe but in humanity.

The past is preserved only in darkness, the future is not raised to the level of an image, as something which can be anticipated. It is the symbolic expression which first creates the possibility of looking backward and looking forward... What occurred in the past, now separated out from the totality of representations, no longer passes away, once the sounds of language have placed their seals on it and given it a certain stamp (Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs).

The facts of science always imply a theoretical, which means a symbolic, element.

It was a long evolutionary course which the human mind had to traverse, to pass from the belief in a physico-magical power comprised in the Word to a realization of its spiritual power. Indeed, it is the Word, it is language, that really reveals to man that world which is closer to him than any world of natural objects and touches his weal and woe more directly than physical nature. For it is language that makes his existence in a community possible; and only in society, in relation to a "Thee", can his subjectivity assert itself as a "Me.

1919, race riots broke out in Chicago and a dock workers’ strike hit New York; the eight-hour workday was instituted nationally; President Woodrow Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize and presided over the first meeting of the League of Nations in Paris; the Red Army took Omsk, Kharkov, and the Crimea; Mussolini founded the Italian fascist movement; Paderewski became Premier of Poland. Henri Bergson, Karl Barth, Ernst Cassirer, Havelock Ellis, Karl Jaspers, John Maynard Keynes, Rudolf Steiner—indelible figures—were all active in their various spheres. Short-wave radio made its earliest appearance, there was progress in sound for movies, and Einstein’s theory of relativity was borne out by astrophysical experiments. Walter

Einstein's breakthrough was classic in that it sought to unify the elements of a physical analysis, and it placed the older examples and principles within a broader framework. But it was revolutionary in that, ever afterward, we have thought differently about space and time, matter and energy. Space and time-no more absolute-have become forms of intuition that cannot be divorced from perspective or consciousness, anymore than can the colors of the world or the length of a shadow. As the philosopher Ernst Cassirer commented, in relativity, the conception of constancy and absoluteness of the elements is abandoned to give permanence and necessity to the laws instead.

Marx inspired Bourdieu’s understanding of society as the embodiment of concrete relationships rather than separate, abstract entities, like individuals and rules. Weber had formulated concepts such as domination, which Bourdieu developed as unconscious internalization of relations of subjugation. Ernst Cassirer* wrote about violence, power, and capital as “symbolic forms,” which is very similar to the symbolic capital conceptualized by Bourdieu. From Durkheim, as much as from structural linguistics, Bourdieu borrowed the notion of structure and its reproducing mechanisms

All cultural work, be it technical or purely intellectual, proceeds by the gradual shift from the direct relation between man and his environment to an indirect relation. In the beginning, sensual impulse is followed immediately by its gratification; but gradually more and more mediating terms intervene between the will and its object. It is as though the will, in order to gain its end, had to move away from the goal instead of toward it; instead of a simple reaction, almost in the nature of a reflex, to bring the object into reach, it requires a differentiation of behavior, covering a wider class of objects, so that finally the sum total of all these acts, by the use of various "means", may realize the desired end.

In the course of discussing the inevitable disconnection between signifier and signified, Lévi-Strauss again takes up and develops in a new way the theory of Max Müller, who was in mythology a sort of 'disease' of consciousness caused by language. According to Müller, the origin of mythological and religious concepts is to be found in the influence that language, in which paronyms, polysemy, and ambiguity of every kind are necessarily present, exercises on thought. Mythology, he writes, 'is in fact the dark shadow which language throws upon thought, and which can never disappear till language becomes entirely commensurate with thought, which it never will.

It is, as it were, the fundamental principle of cognition that the universal can be perceived only in the particular, while the particular can be thought only in reference to the universal.

Instead, I’d signed up for classes related to linguistic philosophy, for which I had even less talent. In Walt’s own seminar, we were reading neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer—a brick I broke my brain on.

Rather, I draw upon the twentieth-century philosophical principle of “symbolic forms” or “symbolic transformations” as put forward by Ernst Cassirer and Susanne K. Langer. According to this tradition, we human beings perceive nothing nakedly but must reconstruct every perception on the basis of the mind’s previous experience. That is, we have no choice but to make everything new. Cassirer thus speaks of human beings as the “animal symbolicum.” And Langer refers to “the transformational nature of human nature,” and to “the mind’s symbol-making function [as] one of man’s primary activities, like eating, looking or moving about … the essential act of mind.” Both suggest that the mind is biologically grounded in our symbolizing function.