Cultural Studies and the Symbolic: Theory Studies, Presented at the Univeristy of Glasgow's Centre for Intercultural Studies: v. 1: Occasional papers in cassirer and cultural

Theory Studies, Presented at the Univeristy of Glasgow's Centre for Intercultural Studies

Paul Bishop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781904350033
• eBook ISBN: 9781351196574
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Social Sciences

"Given the growing disenchantment, on all sides, with the 'high theory' of the 1970s and 1980s, and with the dominant master-trope of literary and cultural reflexion of the 1980s and 1990s, the extended metaphor or 'allegory', this volume offers a timely re-examination of what, according to Goethe, is a deeper mode of understanding the symbol. Via the life-long preoccupation of Ernst Cassirer with the problems of 'symbolic form', as he christened it, the papers collected here try to come to terms with the thinking of Goethe and Schiller on the symbol, and on related issues. Taken together, they attempt to elucidate the filiation of German classicism down through the nineteenth century to the present, in the belief that some of Cassirer's ideas have fed, often unacknowledged, into the mainstream of contemporary cultural theory, and that the rigour of his thought can help clear up much of the confusion in that 'theory'."

Cassirer and the Problem of Language

BY BIRGIT RECKI

Ladies and Gentlemen! It is a great honour for me to be invited to speak to you in this lecture-series on Ernst Cassirer in the year of the 550th anniversary of the University; and I am especially pleased that in 2001, the 'European Year of Languages', I am to address you concerning one of the most important systematic problems in Cassirer's opus. I say this because Cassirer's theory of language is closely connected to the problem of the foundation of the philosophy of culture. And yet, especially because it is the 'Year of Languages', I should, I think, preface my lecture, not only with my most sincere thanks for your friendly invitation to speak, but also with my apologies — regarding my competence in the English language. There should be little to find fault with in the written version of my lecture — at least in its grammatical aspect; for it was translated for me by a native speaker. In the discussion afterwards, things might well be different! — and I have no choice but to beg your indulgence beforehand for any clumsy or fragmentary English. It would, therefore, be helpful if one or other of the Kantians in the audience felt moved to join the discussion afterwards. For then I might feel a bit more at ease: as you know, for us Kantians it is good will that counts. This much, at least, I can promise you: try my best I will.

In his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Ernst Cassirer sets out a philosophical anthropology as interpreted through a theory of symbols. Man has his reality in culture as the sphere of productive objectivizations of all kinds. The ontological status of these products is not to be determined by their character as things, but rather solely by the meaning realized through them — by their becoming concrete as mind and spirit. In their articulation, poiesis and praxis work together inextricably: through them, we make our world by making something out of our very selves; and we do this together, with others. In doing so, we create culture as the universe of many and diverse mediations — as a system of representation.

It is within the framework of such a foundational anthropology that Cassirer develops a theory of language in connection with insights of the philosophy of language which have obtained since Plato's Cratylus. His goal is not an original concept of language — indeed, how could it be, Cassirer himself sharing with most philosophers the conviction that philosophy is not a place for invention, but for the reconstructive explication of the human understanding of self and world? With regard to the philosophy of language, this means that Cassirer himself need not, and should not, be more original and innovative than Kleist and the three great H's — Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt. In particular, Cassirer is able to build on the substantial work already achieved by the Kantian, Wilhelm von Humboldt. In his first, phenomenological approach to language, Cassirer grasps it as the energetical 'system of phonetic symbols'.¹ Its particular nature lies in the fact that — according to the Aristotelian distinction adopted by Humboldt — it is more energeia than ergon, more activity than a final work or result. And even as ergon it conveys the trace and the impetus of spiritual activity; it has its function in the expression and communication of thought.

So much for the concept of language as developed by Humboldt. The terminology of symbols from Cassirer's own philosophy of culture adds nothing new to this knowledge of language previously gained upon the basis of Humboldt's reflections. For the point of Cassirer's broad concept of the symbol is immediately apparent: very generally, it seeks to emphasize the function of the sensualization of sense. I quote here the relevant definition of a symbolic form, which concerns the functional principle of representation as the embodiment of sense in a sensual, that is, a physical medium, as it is active in the many forms of culture:

That which should be understood under 'symbolic form' is every energy of the spirit through which meaning-bearing content, mental or spiritual, is attached to a concrete, physical sign and with which this sign is inwardly endowed.

[Unter einer "symbolischen Form" soll jede Energie des Geistes verstanden werden, durch welche ein geistiger Bedeutungsgehalt an ein konkretes sinnliches Zeichen geknüpft und diesem Zeichen innerlich zugeeignet wird.]²

Notably this translation cries out for commentary. The German term Geist in 'Energie des Geistes' is substantially ambiguous, insofar as the German idealist thought emerging from Kant's Copernican revolution is that human mind, in its productive activity, forms the objective world which in its autonomous development and meaning are to be understood as spirit.³ The term Geist refers, then, to both 'mind' and 'spirit'. Hence you will find me trying to cope with the problem of translation throughout my whole paper, and — deciding from the context — sometimes walking on the razor's edge.

But at this point, looking at the sentence quoted, it is easy to see that the core of this definition of symbolic form is constituted by the determination of the symbol as the intimate association of a spiritual or mental (i.e., geistig) content with a physical sign. Cassirer speaks elsewhere of an 'expression of the "mental" in the widest possible sense through physical "signs" and "pictures" ('Ausdruck eines "Geistigen" durch sinnliche "Zeichen" und "Bilder", in seiner weitesten Bedeutung').⁴ One may gather from the entire theoretical direction of his thought that Cassirer does not assume that signs occur in the world previous to or independent of this relation, though his unclear manner of speaking of an association between mental, meaning-bearing content, and sign might lead one to believe that such an assumption has been made. On the contrary: that which is physically present becomes 'sign' only in that relation to the mental which is understood as symbolic.⁵ One should not assume that the spiritual exists in any way outside of such a connection with the physical and sensible.⁶ It is rather the case that spirit and mind are manifest in the world by virtue of the fact that everything is full of symbols.

As Cassirer repeats on all levels of his theory, symbols are characterized as the expression of the mental by a dialectic of articulation. This means that symbols provide a representation in which what is represented neither loses nor gains anything; in fact, symbols represent in such a way that what is represented firsts gain its reality through its representation. In this respect, symbols are always signs without abbreviation!⁷ The intended breadth of this concept of the symbol is remarkable, for thus the concept qualifies as the 'systematic focal point' not only of all 'basic disciplines of philosophy',⁸ but also of all branches of science. Remarkable, too, is the very coining of the term: for if Cassirer grasps a symbol as the particular case of 'the sensuous' being 'filled with meaning', as every single case of 'particularization and embodiment',⁹ then his 'symbolic forms' are not to be understood as the particular carriers of meaning (i.e., signs), but instead as regularly active and typical kinds of symbolization — 'energies of forming'¹⁰ or 'energies of the spirit', as Cassirer calls them. In 1932, the year celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Goethe's death, Cassirer's colleague in Hamburg, Erwin Panofsky, composed for him the following verse:

Deines Geistes Reife
Tat mir arg Beschmutztem wohl.
Nimm, drum, diese Goethe-Seife
Teils als Form — teils als Symbol.

Your soul's maturity
made well my sullied soul;
take, then, this Goethe-soap from me,
part form and part symbol.¹¹

The lines annoyed Cassirer: 'Part form and part symbol' — this is just the way one should not speak about 'symbolic forms', if one has understood what is meant by the expression. Let us therefore impress upon ourselves once more, that a symbolic form is a typical manner of symbolization which is to be thought of as a spiritual power.

One of the symbolic forms, one of the typical kinds of symbolization and hence also of the formation of reality, is, according to Cassirer's programmatic plan, language. In my lecture I shall be concerned primarily with the question as to whether this transition from the general programme of the philosophy of symbolic forms to the philosophy of language contained therein provides an appropriate appraisal of the place of language in culture. Is language really only one cultural form among all others, as the indefinite article in the phrase 'a cultural form' humbly suggests? As soon as we realize that the concept of the symbol adds nothing new to our understanding of language, we must also notice that the pointed emphasis upon language's primary capacity of symbolization in no way provides the specific difference of language from other symbolic forms, but rather only explicates the function that is common to them all. The expression of thought in an articulated sound is one kind of symbolization among many. No more information than this can be attained through the concept of the symbol. Through the integration of language into the system of symbolic forms, no new concept of language is gained!

Cassirer does, however, develop a theory or language, by means of which its place and value in the totality of human capacities is to be determined. We find this theory in the monograph on Language from 1923, the first volume of the broad philosophy of culture, and in both of the important essays on Language and Myth from 1925 and Language and the Structure of the World from 1932; and finally in the chapters of An Essay on Man from 1944. In these latter, and shorter, texts we find Cassirer's theory of language in an even more concentrated, concise, and pithy form. In the aforementioned monograph of 1932, Cassirer is also concerned with a fundamental introduction to the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, as well as with detailed reconstructions taking stock of traditions of thought in the philosophy of language. In what follows I shall consider these texts in sketching a basic outline of the most salient features of Cassirer's theory of language, in order that I may clarify a question which I have already briefly defined. It is a question which we may also address with the definite article as 'the problem of language in the writings of Ernst Cassirer', since it is the systematic problem of his philosophy of language. Namely: does Cassirer ultimately understand language as one form among other systematically equivalent symbolic forms, or does he assign it a special status in the system of cultural symbolizers? We shall see that questioning the eminent status of language amounts to another question, one which is the focus of interest in almost every modern theory of language: is there thought without language?

Language as Exemplary and as Foundational — Language and the Structure of the World (1932)

In his monograph on Language, Cassirer writes: 'Language stands in a focus of cultural life, a point at which rays of quite diverse origin converge and from which lines of influence radiate to every sphere of culture' ('Die Sprache steht in einem Brennpunkt des geistigen Seins, in dem sich Strahlen ganz verschiedenartiger Herkunft vereinen und von den Richtlinien nach allen Gebieten des Geistes ausgehen').¹² Here this much is clear: language takes up a special place in the entire process of the objectivization of the spirit; a process which Cassirer grasps as culture. On the one hand, Cassirer simply counts language off in his often repeated statements of principle: language, myth, religion, art, science; also technology, economy, history, and law — this is the spectrum of cultural symbolizers.¹³ Wherever he describes the programme of his anthropology, he apparently places value on a diversity of culture which is free of hierarchical derivations. On the other hand, he approaches language from the very beginning with the aim of discerning in it something fundamental to culture itself— something fundamental to the function of all forms of the human spirit. Language is, in this respect, always grasped as one symbolic form among many, and yet not only one among many. Though language seems initially to take on the role of prima inter pares in the systematic context of o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• 1. Cassirer and the Problem of Language
• 2. Ernst Cassirer's Concept of Kulturwissenschaft and the Tradition of the Humanities in the Modern University
• 3. Analysis or Synthesis? A Cassirerian Problem in the Work of Freud and Jung
• 4. Nietzsche's Aestheticism and the Value of Suffering
• 5. The Proper Object of Cultural Study: Ernst Cassirer and the Aesthetic Theory of Weimar Classicism
• Index