Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

* Book: Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. By Ernst Cassirer.

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Shorter exposition of the same ideas, written in english: An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven, 1944)

Description

"Ernst Cassirer has shown how, in all peoples and in all religions, creation appears as the creation of light. Thus the coming of consciousness, manifesting itself as light in contrast to the darkness of the unconscious, is the real 'object' of creation mythology. Cassirer has likewise shown that in the different stages of mythological consciousness, the first thing to be discovered is the 'subjective reality', the formation of the ego, and individuality." (cited by Erich von Neumann in 'The Origins and History of Consciousness')

Discussion

From Encyclopedia.com, Donal Verene:

" Cassirer recast his conception of symbolic forms in An Essay on Man (1944). This was followed by The Myth of the State (1946); both works were written in English.

Cassirer regards religion as part of the symbolic form of myth. In An Essay on Man he labels this as the symbolic form of "myth and religion" within a series of symbolic forms that includes also language, art, history, and science. Each of these areas of human culture represents a way in which people form their experience through symbols. Cassirer defines the human as an "animal symbolicum." Consciousness forms its object in many different ways. No one mode of formation offers a "literal" presentation of the real; all human activities are equally "symbolic." The symbol is the medium of all people's cultural activity, whether mythic-religious, linguistic, artistic, historical, or scientific. The interrelationships of all these manners of symbolizing form the system of human culture.

Religion arises as a stage within the mythical mode of symbolizing. In the second volume of Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (see part 4) Cassirer says that the break between religious consciousness and the mythical symbol occurs when consciousness begins to regard the images and signs of myth as pointing to meanings beyond immediate existence. Like true linguistic signs, Cassirer says, religious signs are understood as referring to an order of reality beyond the plane of immediate sensuous existence. In mythical consciousness the dancer who wears the mask of the god is the god; he does not signify the god who exists in another realm of being. Religion introduces a distinction between a finite and an infinite realm, a distinction that is beyond the power of the mythic symbol. For mythical consciousness, symbol and symbolized occupy a single plane of reality. In religious consciousness the sensuous and the spiritual divide, but they remain in this division as continuously pointing to each other in a relationship of analogy.

In An Essay on Man Cassirer approaches the relationship between myth and religion less in terms of the epistemology of the symbol and more in sociocultural and moral terms: "In the development of human culture we cannot fix a point where myth ends or religion begins. In the whole course of its history religion remains indissolubly connected and penetrated with mythical elements" (p. 87). Cassirer says that myth and religion originate in the "feeling of the indestructible unity of life" and in the fear of death as a break in this unity. In his phenomenology of the third volume of Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Cassirer connects myth with the Ausdrucksfunktion of consciousness, with the primordial phenomenon of "expression." Religion never loses its roots as an expression of the unity of life and the fear of death.

Religion also has roots in the "sympathy of the Whole" that underlies magical practices in primitive societies. But religion arises, Cassirer says in An Essay on Man, when the totem and taboo system of society based on magical practices begins to break down. In the taboo system the individual has no responsibility for his own actions. Religion gives scope to a new feeling, that of individuality. Cassirer regards the prophetic books of the Old Testament as an example of the rise of the new ideal of individual moral responsibility that marks the appearance of religious consciousness out of the taboo system. In religion there develops this first sense of the moral self."

(https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/philosophy-and-religion/philosophy-biographies/ernst-cassirer)