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Ernst Cassirer and Political Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

John J. Schrems
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Extract

Ernst Cassirer's renown is the fame of a philosopher, not of a political theorist. Amongst his voluminous writings only The Myth of the State is regarded as a political treatise and its precise political character is problematic. Nevertheless, the rudiments of a Cassirer political philosophy may be derived from an exposition of his understanding of culture and from an examination of his views of freedom, myth, and the state. Cassirer extolled freedom, and he sought to “combat” myth. His own fulfillment of man's “progressive self-liberation,” however, presents difficulties which are the subject matter of this essay.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , April 1967 , pp. 180 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1967

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References

1 Cassirer, Ernst, The Myth of the State (New Haven, 1946).Google ScholarHereafter cited as MS. Various reviews raise the question of the meaning of the myth of the state. Cf., esp.Google ScholarCook, Thomas I., “Review of The Myth of the State,” American Political Science Review, XLI 1947, 331–33;CrossRefGoogle ScholarStrauss, Leo, What Is Political Philosophy? (Glencoe, 1959), p. 292;Google ScholarSabine, George, The Philosophical Review, LVI (1947), 315–318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Cassirer, Ernst, An Essay on Man (New Haven, 1944), p. 1. Hereafter cited as EM.Google Scholar

3 EM, p. 21.Google Scholar

4 Cassirer, Ernst, “Naturalistic and Humanistic Philosophies of Culture,” in, The Logic of the Humanities, trans. Howe, Clarence Smith (New Haven, 1961), p. 12.Google Scholar

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13 Ibid., p. 128.

14 Ibid., p. 165.

15 Ibid., p. 141.

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16 Cassirer, , “Galileo: a New Science and a New Spirit,” The American Scholar, XII (1943), 8.Google Scholar

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18 Ibid., p. 166.

19 Ibid., pp. 167–170.

20 EM, p. 7. Such external circumstances from which man is freed are “riches, rank, social distinction,... health or intellectual gifts,” but also those external circumstances of “the end for which man lives” and “that which is perfective of the end, namely the Good.”Google Scholar

21 Ibid., p. 172. We should note precisely what Cassirer has in mind as Grotius' classical expression of natural law. Cassirer writes: “Even the will of an omnipotent being, said Grotius, cannot change the principles of morality or abrogate those fundamental rights that are guaranteed by natural laws. These laws would maintain their objective validity even if we should assume—per impossible—that there is no God or that he does not care for human affairs.”

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23 Ibid., p. 173–174.

24 Philosophy of Enlightenment, p. 41.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., p. 238.

26 Reprinted in Schilpp, (ed.), The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (Evanston, 1949), p. 24–25.Google Scholar

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28 Ibid., p. 268.

29 Ibid., p. 274.

30 Ibid., p. 273; cf. Cassirer, , The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau, tr. and ed. by Gay, Peter (Bloomington, 1954), p. 57.Google Scholar

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40 Ibid., pp. 30–31.

41 Ibid., p. 32.

42 Ibid., p. 35.

43 Ibid., pp. 57, 58.

44 Ibid., p. 42.

45 Ibid., p. 40; cf. Question of Rousseau, p. 70.

46 Ibid., p. 43.

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48 Ibid., p. 172.

49 Cassirer has defined rationalism in these terms in his article on rationalism in the 14th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1929). There he states: “Rationalism is that trend of philosophy which intercedes for the rights of ‘natural reason’ and sees in it the source of all truth. Common to all historical forms of rationalism is the belief in the ‘autonomy of thought,’ i.e., that view that thought can discover by its own strength, without support from a supernatural revelation and without appeal to sense perception, a system presented to thought within its own realm and comprehended by thought as necessary.” He goes on to say that according to the fundamental idea of rationalism “reason can recognize completely only that which it can produce according to its own design.” This “fundamental idea” plays an essential role in Cassirer's understanding of modern thought, and, indeed, in our understanding of Cassirer.

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51 Ibid., p. 288.

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53 Ibid., 540a.

54 MS, p. 145.Google Scholar

55 Ibid., p. 3.

56 Ibid., pp. 183–184.

57 Ibid., Chapter XVIII, “The Technique of the Modern Political Myths.”

58 Ibid., p. 298.

59 Ibid., p. 295.

60 Ibid., p. 60.

61 Ibid., p. 113.

62 Cf. supra, notes 19 and 20, and MS, p. 101.Google Scholar

63 EM, p. 228.Google Scholar

64 Ibid., pp. 228 and 71.

65 MS, p. 45.Google Scholar

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68 Ibid., p. 26.

69 Ibid., p. 62.

70 Ibid., pp. vii–viii.

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73 Cassirer, , Logic of Humanities, p. 183. Italics mine.Google Scholar

74 This is not an unlikely point, for Maritain, in Moral Philosophy (New York, 1964), pp. 92–116Google Scholar, appears to make a similar suggestion concerning the closely related Kantian ethics. From my reading of Maritain the absence of love, the absolute rejection of a “subjective moral end,” and the apotheotic reverence for law all seem to suggest that ethics void of happiness as an end makes impossible any condition of happiness, or any condition of being worthy of happiness.

75 EM, p. 221.Google Scholar

76 Logic of Humanities, pp. 192–193.Google Scholar

77 Ibid., pp. 184–192.

78 EM, pp. 223 and 224.Google Scholar

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80 Logic of Humanities, p. 215. Cassirer has in another place (cf. Cassirer “Spirit and Life” in Schilpp, op. cit., pp. 865, 875–877) made it clear that when he speaks of the “Spirit... which enters into the world of Life” he does not speak of an Aristotelian “spirit” “from without” but instead of a spirit “from within.”Google Scholar

81 EM, p. 206Google Scholar. For a further discussion on history see: Kearney, Francis William, O.F.M., “On Cassirer's Conception of Art and History,” Laved Theologique et Philosophique, I, no. 2 (1945), 131–153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

82 EM, p. 191.Google Scholar

83 Ibid., pp. 187.

84 Ibid., pp. 184.

85 Ibid., pp. 191.

86 Gutmann, James, “Cassirer's Humanism,” in Schilpp, op. cit., p. 449.Google Scholar

87 Ibid., p. 451.

88 Ibid., p. 461.

89 Ibid., pp. 461–462. Gutmann quotes from EM, p. 222.

90 Hartmann, Robert S., “Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,” in Schilpp, op. cit., p. 333.Google Scholar

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94 Ibid., p. 98.

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99 Ibid., pp. 183f, and 192f.

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103 MS, p. 282.Google Scholar

104 Ibid., p. 296.

105 EM, p. 81.Google Scholar

106 Ibid., p. 20.

107 Ibid., p. 81.

108 Ibid., p. 82.

109 Cassirer, , “Giovanni Pico della Mirandola” Journal of the History of Ideas, III (1942), 322.Google Scholar For a critique of the point made by Cassirer, see de Koninck, Charles, “Concept, Process, and Reality,” Laval Theologique et Philosophique, II (1946), 141–146.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Italics in the quote are mine.