Cassirer's Phenomenology of Culture

Cassirer's Phenomenology of Culture
Author(s): Donald Phillip Verene

Source: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2013), pp. 33-46
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jspecphil.27.1.0033
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Cassirer’s Phenomenology of Culture
Donald Phillip Verene

emory university
abstract: Ernst Cassirer claims in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms that the
transcendental analysis of science, ethical freedom, and aesthetic and organic natural
forms of Kant’s three Critiques is extended to other forms of culture, such as language,
myth, and art. In this way, Cassirer holds, the “critique of reason becomes the critique
of culture.” This claim tends to place Cassirer within the tradition of Neo-Kantianism.
But this view is offset by Cassirer’s further claim that his philosophy is based on a
phenomenology of knowledge “as established and systematically grounded by
Hegel.” He also subscribes to Hegel’s dictum that “the True is the whole.” In order
to achieve his philosophy of symbolic forms Cassirer joins Kantian transcendental
method with Hegelian phenomenology. In so doing Cassirer replaces the idea of
system with a conception of “systematic overview,” which he connects to a theory of
“basis phenomena,” especially the basis phenomenon of the work (das Werk). This
phenomenon allows him finally to conceive his philosophy of culture as a fulfillment
of the Socratic pursuit of self-knowledge. In this way Cassirer’s thought moves from an
epistemology to a philosophical anthropology.
Critique and Phenomenology
From the beginnings of the critical literature on the philosophy of symbolic

forms, commentators have raised the question of its connection to Hegelian
philosophy.1 That Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy is Kantian is well known, but
journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 27, no. 1, 2013

Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
JSP 27.1_02_Verene.indd 33 12/02/13 11:14 AM

34 donald phillip verene
whether, and to what extent, it is Hegelian is a matter for examination. The

new critical editions of his works and of his Nachlass that have underpinned
the renaissance in Cassirer studies taking place in Europe, and which have
taken on a resonance in the United States, are reasons to consider this
question.2
We find ourselves in a time when a comprehensive concept of
human culture is greatly beneficial. What Cassirer called “the crisis in
man’s knowledge of himself” has not been resolved by the movements
of contemporary thought because none of them offer Cassirer’s synoptic
vision of the human or of the centrality of self-knowledge for philosophy.3
How does Cassirer expand Kantian philosophy into his philosophy of
human culture? This is the question I wish to address. The complete answer
to this question is as many-faceted as the great range of the modern fields
of knowledge covered by Cassirer’s thought. My purpose in the remarks
that follow is only to present an account of the philosophical foundation
from which Cassirer puts forth his far-reaching conception of culture.
In the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant
announces: “Our age is truly the age of critique [Kritik], to which all must
submit.”4 In the general introduction to the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,
Cassirer characterizes his philosophy of culture as an extension of Kant’s
three Critiques. In the sequence of these Critiques, he regards Kant as pass-
ing from the system of pure reason, presented in the First Critique in terms
of the transcendental analysis of mathematics and physics, to the realm of
ethical freedom in the Critique of Practical Reason and to the realm of art
and that of organic natural forms as represented in the Critique of Judgment.
To these workings of the human spirit Cassirer intends to add critiques
of the functions of linguistic thinking, mythical and religious thinking, and
artistic perception and to connect these to cognitive or theoretical thinking
based on developments in modern logic and the natural sciences. “Thus,”
Cassirer says, “the critique of reason becomes the critique of culture.” And,
in so doing, each critique “seeks to understand and to show how every
content of culture, in so far as it is more than a mere isolated content, in
so far as it is grounded in a universal principle of form, presupposes an
original act of the human spirit.” Cassirer concludes: “Herein the basic
thesis of idealism finds its true and complete confirmation.”5 The doctrine
of the idea or eidos that commences in Plato, which is transformed by the
transcendental method of reflection in Kantian Kritik, finds its comple-
tion in Cassirer’s conception of symbolische Form. Cassirer says: “Under a

cassirer’s phenomenology of culture 35
‘symbolic form’ should be understood each energy of spirit [Geist] through

which a spiritual [geistig] content or meaning is connected within a con-
crete, sensory sign and is internally adapted to this sign.”6
Kant is not only the discoverer of the full and systematic capabilities
of philosophical critique; he is, in a particular way, the instigator of the
possibilities of phenomenology as a fundamental philosophical science. The
first use of the term Phänomenologie as part of a philosophical system was
made by Johann Heinrich Lambert, the mathematician and scientist, in his
Neues Organon (1764). He concludes this work with a theory of appearance
or Schein, using the title Phänomenologie oder Lehre von dem Schein. He calls
this Phänomenologie a transzendente Optik.7 This “optics” allows us to see
through forms of appearance, avoid error, and employ human reason. On
September 2, 1770, Kant wrote to Lambert: “A quite special though purely
negative science, general phenomenology [phaenomenologia generalis],
seems to be presupposed by metaphysics. In it the principles of sensibility,
their validity and their limitations, would be determined, so that these
principles could not be confusedly applied to objects of pure reason, as has
heretofore almost always happened.”8
With this remark Kant suggests a much wider sense of phenomenology
and its importance for philosophy than it commands in Lambert’s concep-
tion. Lambert regards phenomenology in the more limited sense of a means
for distinguishing truth from illusion in logical and scientific reasoning. In
the famous letter to Marcus Herz of February 21, 1772, Kant claimed that
he planned to write such a general phenomenology as the first part of a
metaphysics.9 In describing the generation of the idea of phenomenology,
Herbert Spiegelberg, in The Phenomenological Movement, remarks on Kant’s
claim concerning phenomenology in this letter: “Thus Kant’s first phenom-
enology was clearly nothing but what he called ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ in
a later paragraph of the same letter, and hence by no means a study of mere
illusions, as in Lambert.” Spiegelberg adds: “But there is no clear indication
that he considered it also as a study of phenomena in contrast to things
in themselves (noumena), as one might suspect.”10 The first edition of the
Critique of Pure Reason appeared in 1781, just less than a decade later than its
projection in the letter to Herz.
As Cassirer began to give definite shape to his philosophy of
symbolic forms, he appears to have conceived it as both a critique and a
phenomenology of cultural forms. A manuscript title page for the first
volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms shows that Cassirer originally

intended to give the multivolume work the general title of Phaenomenologie

der Erkenntnis, which later became the title of the third volume. In
English, this manuscript title page reads: “Phenomenology of Knowledge/
Fundamental Features of a Theory of Spiritual Forms of Expression/First
Part/Linguistic Thought.”11 What appeared in print was titled Philosophie
der symbolischen Formen. Erster Teil. Die Sprache. This volume is headed
by Cassirer’s general introduction to the philosophy of symbolic forms
containing the assertion, quoted above, concerning the critique of reason
becoming the critique of culture and followed by the internal title of the
first volume proper: “On the Phenomenology of Linguistic Form.”
In this general introduction, Cassirer endorses Hegel’s conception of
phenomenology as the means to “think of the human spirit as a concrete
whole,” but he criticizes Hegel for having the forms of consciousness of
the Phenomenology of Spirit culminate in the thought-forms of the Science of
Logic. Yet Cassirer points out that this tendency to reduce all cultural forms
to the one form of logic is inherent in philosophical idealism itself. He
concludes: “If we can find a medium through which all the configurations
effected in the separate branches of cultural life must pass, but which
nevertheless retains its particular nature, its specific character—we shall
have found the necessary intermediary link for an inquiry which will
accomplish for the totality of cultural forms what the transcendental critique
has done for pure cognition.”12 The “intermediary link” is the distinctively
human phenomenon of the symbol, upon which all human knowledge and
culture depend. As Cassirer puts it in An Essay on Man: “Human knowledge
is by its very nature symbolic knowledge.”13 He regards transcendental
critique as the corrective to the totalizing tendency inherent in dialectical
or Hegelian phenomenology. When Cassirer speaks of phenomenology
he has in mind phenomenology in the Hegelian sense or a modification
thereof—comprehending the forms of Geist or some specific form of it as
a self-developing movement.
In the preface to the second volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,
Mythical Thought, Cassirer refers to the ladder metaphor in the preface to
Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which Hegel says that the individual has a right
to demand a ladder whereby to ascend from the standpoint of sensory
consciousness through self-consciousness to the level of Wissenschaft.
Cassirer says that he agrees with Hegel that “science is to provide the
natural consciousness with a ladder leading to itself, [but] it must first set
this ladder a step lower.”14 Hegel, by beginning his phenomenology with the

stage of Die sinnliche Gewissheit, presents consciousness on the threshold of

the representational function of consciousness, in which linguistic symbols
refer to things. But the world of things, Cassirer holds, originates from the
world expressed as an interplay of images of benign and malignant forces
that are given form in myth.
In the preface to the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,
The Phenomenology of Knowledge (Erkenntnis), Cassirer again turns to Hegel,
informing the reader: “In speaking of a phenomenology of knowledge
I am using the word ‘phenomenology’ not in its modern sense but with its
fundamental signification as established and systematically grounded by
Hegel.”15 He then cites Hegel’s famous assertion: “The truth [Wahrheit] is
the whole,” using the term Wahrheit rather than Hegel’s Wahre, the “True.”16
Cassirer agrees with Hegel that this whole must be unfolded progressively.
He again cites Hegel’s ladder metaphor, saying: “Philosophical reflection
does not set the end against the middle and the beginning but takes all three
as integral factors in a unitary total movement. In this fundamental principle
the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms agrees with Hegel’s formulation, much
as it must differ in both its foundations and development.”17
In the sketch of the introduction Cassirer wrote for the fourth volume
of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, the first sentence is: “We start with the
concept of the whole: the whole is the truth [Wahrheit] (Hegel). But the
truth of the whole can always only be grasped in a particular ‘aspect.’”18 By
this Cassirer says he means that knowledge requires us to see the whole
in an aspect of it. Knowledge cannot simply be composed of pieces strung
together. Each part of knowledge carries in it the form of the whole. He
holds that the concept of form was grasped in this way in Greek philosophy
and that it “goes through the whole history of Western philosophy.”19
Inner Form and Systematic Review
For an area of experience to count as a symbolic form it is required to have

an “inner form” (innere Form) that can be articulated in transcendental
terms—that it embody categories, forms of space, time, and number and
of self or subjectivity.20 These must manifest a specific “tonality” (Tönung)
such that its inner form can be distinguished from other symbolic forms.21
Cassirer gives a full account of the conditions for the possibility of only
myth, language, and science, and he suggests in An Essay on Man some

of the distinctive characteristics of art and history as symbolic forms. In

principle, however, a full transcendental analysis could be accomplished
for any symbolic form.
Critique is a negative method, in that it aims first of all at identifying
those aspects of experience of which the mind cannot in principle attain
certain knowledge. The mind can know with perfection only the principles
or form of its own operations. Kant captures this in the one fully poetic
passage in the First Critique, in which he describes the island of the pure
understanding, “enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is
a land of truth—enchanting name!—surrounded by a wide and stormy
ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a
swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores,
deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engag-
ing him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to
carry to completion.”22
Kant’s warning about the propensity to employ reason beyond the
confines of the understanding echoes Descartes’s warning, in the Discourse
on the Method, to those who would listen to fictitious narratives. They are
liable, Descartes says, “to fall into the excesses of the knights-errant in
our tales of chivalry, and conceive plans beyond their powers.”23 To seek
the realm of reason is to seek the Abenteuer of deluded seafarers or the
extravagance of paladins tilting at philosophical windmills, engaging in
fictions as if they were real life.
Critique as a method of thought can never reach the whole because
it divides experience into the thing as it appears and the thing in itself.
The thing in itself is beyond appearance—hence, in Kantian terms, beyond
experience. For Hegel, however, the distinction between the thing as it
appears and the thing in itself is a distinction that consciousness makes
within itself, concerning its sense of the object. Thus the thing in itself
is subject to the “science of the experience of consciousness,” that is,
phenomenology for Hegel. The thing in itself is in fact a particular kind
of phenomenon that consciousness experiences. Cassirer, without special
notice, abandons the doctrine of the thing in itself, as does philosophical
idealism in its own historical development.
The problem Kant addresses in the doctrine of the thing in itself is
confronted by Cassirer in his metaphysics of symbolic forms regarding the
interrelation of Geist and Leben, which he presents in Hegelian terms.24
The ongoing stream of Leben is transformed into the self-developing

activity of Geist, which functions by means of a continual dialectic with

Leben. But Cassirer rejects outright two prominent features of Hegelian
phenomenology—the Absolute and the principle of Aufhebung. In so
doing, Cassirer rejects Hegel’s insistence on philosophy as system. Cassirer
does not hold that there need be a complete speech of Geist such that all
in human culture is brought under an explicit set of internal relationships
governed by the Absolute. He insists that the conflicts and tensions that
are found in the interactions of the symbolic forms of culture are not to be
aufgehoben into an ever increasing totality. He advocates harmony within
the contrariety of the symbolic forms, but he envisions this as an ideal.
With what does Cassirer replace Hegel’s insistence on Geist as system?
There is a natural drive within German philosophy, and especially within
philosophical idealism, toward system. With his doctrine of critique, Kant
passes beyond the earlier systems of “dogmatic” philosophy, such as that of
Christian Wolff. Cassirer, while employing Hegel, passes beyond Hegel’s
commitment to system. The danger of the philosophical drive toward
system is that when the book is bound, the system is complete. We speak
of any great philosophy as being a system, but little more need be meant
than that the works of the philosopher are comprehensive of a great deal
of experience and that the philosopher’s thought aims at coherence in its
treatment of what is comprehended.
The terms that Cassirer substitutes for system are systematic overview
(systematischer Überblick), systematic review (systematischer Rückblick),
and systematic reconstruction (systematischer Rekonstruktion).25 Cassirer’s
philosophy is systematic, but it is not a system in any traditional sense—not
comparable to the systems of nineteenth-century philosophical idealism.
In a fragment written between 1921 and 1927, Cassirer makes clear that
philosophy is not itself a symbolic form. He states: “It is characteristic of
philosophical knowledge as the ‘self-knowledge of reason’ that it does not
create a principally new symbol form, it does not found in this sense a new
creative modality—but grasps the earlier modalities as that which they are:
as characteristic symbolic forms.”26 Thus the “inner form” of philosophy
is not that of a particular symbolic form that is placed over or standing
alongside the other forms of culture in the phenomenology of culture.
Philosophy does not differ in “tonality” from the other forms; rather, it
determines the tonal differences of each from the other. The inner form of
philosophy, so to speak, is that of the ideal harmony that can be conceived
among all of the symbolic forms of culture.

Philosophy’s relation to the series of symbolic forms that constitute

human culture is functional. Its relation is analogous to Cassirer’s
conception of the Funktionsbegriff, the bond of Φ(χ), in which Φ is the
principle of order of a series (χ), that is, χ1, χ2, χ3, et cetera.27 The variables
of the series have no independent meaning apart from their place in
the series, and the series has no status as a series independent from the
principle that orders it. In like manner the principle of its order has no
meaning independent of what it orders.
Systematic review is a version of the transcendental method, in the
sense that philosophy establishes the conditions for the possibility of each
area of culture that constitutes a symbolic form. But if philosophy were to
pursue only the transcendental analysis of culture, the results would be
simply a static critique of culture, a fixed ordering of the total set of sym-
bolic forms. There would be no dynamic account of the forms, of their
genesis within culture as a whole. What is achieved by the Kantian tran-
scendental method must be supplemented by the Hegelian dialectical
method to produce a phenomenology of culture. This dialectic will not be
a logic of illusion because it is directed only to the movement of Geist as it
develops its identity within the process of culture.
The object of philosophy always remains in the sphere of phenomena.
What things really are is what they are within human culture. Ultimately,
systematic review means that the philosopher may take up any particu-
lar element in culture and give an account of it in terms of its origin and
genesis as it exists within the world of symbolic forms viewed as a whole.
The unity involved is functional and not substantial or fixed. Philosophi-
cal thought can be ever expanding, but its account is always systematic
and determinate at any point, in the sense that the Φ of any series can be
a variable in a series of another order and the (χ) can stand in a bond to a
subseries as the principle of the order of the subseries.
Basis Phenomena and Animal Symbolicum
In An Essay on Man, Cassirer makes two striking assertions that are especially
relevant for the comprehension of his conception of a phenomenology
of culture. In the first sentence of this work, Cassirer claims: “That self-
knowledge is the highest aim of philosophical inquiry appears to be generally
acknowledged.” He says that even among conflicting philosophical schools

in the history of philosophy this aim “proved to be the Archimedean point,

the fixed and immovable center, of all thought.”28 This claim suggests
not only that the philosophy of symbolic forms is to be understood as
an embodiment of philosophical idealism achieved by the connection of
Kantian and Hegelian thought but that it is at the same time a return to
the Socratic conception of philosophy. The philosophical comprehension
of human culture is ultimately the civil wisdom that constitutes self-
knowledge. All the particular pursuits of knowledge reflected in the
various corresponding symbolic forms, when comprehended by means of
systematic review, result in self-knowledge.
In describing the human world as it exists in space and time, Cassirer
declares of his entire project: “Our objective is a phenomenology of human
culture.”29 Human nature cannot rightly be understood in metaphysical
terms that regard the human being as having a substantial essence to
which various forms of cultural life remain accidentally attached. What
the human being is equates with what is done or made in culture. The
human being’s nature is writ large in human culture understood as a self-
functioning whole.
Without explicitly saying so, Cassirer, in An Essay on Man, adopts
Giambattista Vico’s famous dictum that verum esse ipsum factum—the true
is the made.30 The medium of this distinctive human making that is human
culture is the symbol. As Cassirer puts it: “Hence, instead of defining man
as an animal rationale, we should define him as an animal symbolicum. By
so doing we can designate his specific difference, and we can understand
the new way open to man—the way to civilization.”31
Cassirer grounds the human organism in the theoretical biology of
Jakob von Uexküll: “In the world of the fly, says Uexküll, we find only ‘fly
things’; in the world of a sea urchin we find only ‘sea urchin things.’”32
In Uexküll’s biology, every organism higher or lower in its organization
adapts to its Umwelt in terms of a certain Merknetz, a receptor system, and a
certain Wirknetz, an effector system. These two dimensions or capabilities
of any organism are interwoven in terms of a Funktionskreis, a functional
circle. The human organism is distinguished by the presence of an inter-
mediary system between these two that Cassirer describes as the symbolic
system. “This new acquisition,” he says, “transforms the whole of human
life.”33 The human organism can react to and effect its environment in its
own way, as can any organism in its own way. But the human organism
has the additional ability to mediate these actions and reactions through

its symbolic system. Furthermore, once in possession of this system, the

human organism has the ability to refract its world freely in terms of the
self-developing power of the symbolic act. The productions of the symbolic
system are the phenomena of the human cultural world.
If this symbolic system, which is the key to the functional comprehension
of human nature itself, is the subject matter of a phenomenology of
human culture, can we speak of any phenomena that lie at the basis of
its productions? Can the nature of the symbolic system itself be accessed
phenomenologically? The answer is: yes. And to do so we may connect the
idea of the animal symbolicum back to what Cassirer, in part of his Nachlass,
described as Basisphenomene, or “basis phenomena.”34
It is not my intention here to summarize Cassirer’s unique essay on
basis phenomena. It deserves considerable discussion in its own right,
and I have addressed it elsewhere in relation to his whole corpus.35 My
intention, in these final remarks, is to suggest how it plays a role in the
phenomenology of culture, and in so doing I wish to focus on the third basis
phenomenon, the Werk. Cassirer characterizes the first of the three basis
phenomena as “the phenomenon of the ‘I,’ of the monas, of ‘life’ itself” (das
Ich-Phänomen). He says: “This cannot be inferred from something else,
but instead lies at the basis of everything else.”36 This I is not a developed
individual; only when it is developed into the activity of Werk is it realized
in the sense of a self that is capable of self-knowledge.
The second basis phenomenon is that of “action” (das Wirkens-
Phänomen). Action stands over and against the life process of the “I.”
Cassirer says: “This ‘standing in opposition,’ this ‘resistance’ is originally
encountered in the experience of the will, but not a merely impersonal ‘It’
[Es]. Rather we find it originally as a ‘Thou’ [Du].”37 Cassirer makes the same
claim of nonderivability for this second basis phenomenon as he does for
the first.
By the third basis phenomenon, “the sphere of the work” (das
Werk-Phänomen), Cassirer intends work or Werk to be understood in the
sense of something made: factum. The work opens up for us the sense
of the objective world of things that can be represented in the work. The
work allows us to be in the world on our own terms, not simply to be in it.
Thus it differs from the roles played by the I and the Thou of the first and
second basis phenomena. These two basis phenomena are not especially
original with Cassirer, although he develops them in his own terms. But
the Werk is the key to the making and continuance of human culture. The

Werk is different in kind from any product produced by action. By action

we establish some practical end. But a work in its fullest sense has a being
that goes beyond any particular effect it may have. The ability of the work
to outlive its particular “moment” and become an enduring part of human
culture “is the basic determining factor in the make-up of a ‘work.’”38
The symbolic forms of culture presuppose the basis phenomenon
of the work. Furthermore, philosophy presupposes the work. The basis
phenomenon of the work, then, is what underlies our ability to grasp form as
something objective in and of itself. Without this ability we cannot produce
or possess human culture. Cassirer sees the work as ultimately rooted in
the Socratic conception of philosophy as contemplation (Contemplatio), and
contemplation is the means to self-knowledge. He says, “Know your work
and know ‘yourself’ in your work: know what you do, so you can do what
you know. . . . Submit to the imperative of the work.” Cassirer claims: “The
discovery of this imperative of the work—its autochthonic and autonomous
sense, its ‘binding character’—that is Socrates’ real deed. With this he
accomplishes the ‘turn to the Idea.’”39
In conclusion, Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms may at first
appear to us as a theory of knowledge, in which the forms of knowledge
are expanded from cognitive to noncognitive forms such as mythical
thought, language, and art. But from the start Cassirer joined the critique
of such forms with the phenomenology of them as forms of culture,
conceiving culture as the self-development of Geist. This developmental
phenomenology emerges as the modern embodiment of the original
Socratic pursuit of self-knowledge that is reached by comprehending
culture as the manifestation of the basis phenomenon of the work. The
symbolic forms are forms of both knowledge and culture, and these forms
are the various directions taken by the phenomenon of the human itself,
composed of the nonderivable phenomena of the monadic I, the action of
the will, and the achievement of and objectivity of the work.
notes
The original version of this article was prepared for the American Philosophical
Association, Pacific Division, symposium session “Cassirer and Neo-Kantianism,”
April 2012, Seattle.
1. See the remarks on Hegel in the essays of Felix Kaufmann, Robert Hartman,
M. F. Ashley Montagu, Wilbur Urban, Helmut Kuhn, and Fritz Kaufmann in

The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston: Library of
Living Philosophers, 1949).
2. Ernst Cassirer, Gesammelte Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe, 26 vols., ed. Birgit
Recki (Hamburg: Meiner, 1998–2009); Ernst Cassirer, Nachgelassene Manuskripte
und Texte, 18 vols., ed. Klaus Christian Köhnke, John Michael Krois, and Oswald
Schwemmer (Hamburg: Meiner, 1995–2009). Recent American interpretations
include Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger
(Chicago: Open Court, 2000); Thora Ilin Bayer, Cassirer’s Metaphysics of Symbolic
Forms: A Philosophical Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001);
Edward Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2008); Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger,
Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Donald Phillip
Verene, The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011).
3. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human
Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944).
4. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Hamburg: Meiner, 1967), 7n; my
translation.
5. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 3 vols., trans. Ralph
Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–57), 1:80; hereafter cited as
PSF by volume (1, 2, or 3) and page number.
6. Cassirer gave this first definition of symbolic form in his Warburg
Library 1922 essay, “Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der
Geisteswissenschaften,” in Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Oxford: Bruno
Cassirer, 1956), 175; my translation. See also Cassirer’s phenomenological
demonstration of symbolic form in his thought experiment of the Linienzug
(PSF 3:200).
7. See the remarks on Lambert in Johannes Hoffmeister, “Einleitung des
Herausgebers,” in G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes
Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1952), viii. Prior to Lambert, the Protestant
Pietist theologian Friedrich Christoph Oetinger used phenomenology to refer to
a way of grasping appearances. See the remarks on Oetinger and Hegel in Glenn
Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2001).
8. See Hoffmeister, “Einleitung,” xiii; my translation.
9. Ibid., xiv.
10. Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical
Introduction, 2 vols. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), 1:12. Kant’s Metaphysical Elements
of Natural Science (1786) contains a fourth part, titled Phänomenologie, in which
motion and rest are considered wholly in relation to how they appear to the senses.
11. See the reproduction of this manuscript page in the introduction to Ernst
Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4: The Metaphysics of Symbolic

Forms, ed. John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene, trans. John Michael
Krois (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), xvi; hereafter cited as PSF 4 by
page number.
12. PSF 1:84.
13. Cassirer, Essay on Man, 57.
14. PSF 2:xvi.
15. PSF 3:xiv. For an analysis of Cassirer’s conception of phenomenology in
relation to phenomenology “in its modern sense,” see Ernst Wolfgang Orth, “Ernst
Cassirer,” in Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer,
1997), 95–99. See Cassirer’s criticism of Husserl in PSF 3:197–200. Also, Fritz
Kaufmann, “Cassirer, Neo-Kantianism, and Phenomenology,” in Schilpp, Philoso-
phy of Ernst Cassirer, 799–854.
16. PSF 3:xiv. Cassirer cites Hegel’s assertion as “Die Wahrheit ist das ‘Ganze’”
here and elsewhere. But Hegel uses Wahre, not Wahrheit—the “True,” not
the “Truth.” See Hegel, Phänomenologie, 21. Das Wahre carries a metaphysical
meaning; die Wahrheit has an epistemological connotation. Die Wahrheit fits more
closely with Cassirer’s purpose in PSF 3, of a phenomenology of Erkenntnis rather
than of Geist. See Verene, Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, chap. 3.
17. PSF 3:xv.
18. PSF 4:193.
19. Ibid.
20. PSF 1:81.
21. PSF 2:61.
22. Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” trans. Norman Kemp Smith
(London: Macmillan, 1958), A235–36, B294–95.
23. René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, in The Philosophical Writings of
Descartes, vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 114.
24. PSF 4, pt. 1, chap. 1; and Ernst Cassirer, “‘Spirit’ and ‘Life’ in Contemporary
Philosophy,” in Schilpp, Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, 857–80.
25. PSF 4:56, 227. Ernst Cassirer also uses the term systematic review in The
Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History Since Hegel, trans. William H.
Woglom and Charles W. Hendel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 19.
26. PSF 4:226.
27. See Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function, auth. trans. William Curtis
Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (Chicago: Open Court, 1923), chap. 1; and
PSF 3, pt. 3, chap. 1.
29. Ibid., 52.
30. On Cassirer’s connection to Vico, see Donald Phillip Verene, “Vico’s
Influence on Cassirer,” New Vico Studies 3 (1985): 105–11.

32. Ibid., 23.

33. Ibid., 24.
34. PSF 4, pt. 2.
35. Verene, Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, chap. 4.
36. PSF 4:138.
37. Ibid., 140.
38. Ibid., 183.
39. Ibid., 186.

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Author(s): Donald Phillip Verene

Donald Phillip Verene

Critique and Phenomenology

From the beginnings of the critical literature on the philosophy of symbolic

journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 27, no. 1, 2013

JSP 27.1_02_Verene.indd 33 12/02/13 11:14 AM

whether, and to what extent, it is Hegelian is a matter for examination. The

JSP 27.1_02_Verene.indd 34 12/02/13 11:14 AM

‘symbolic form’ should be understood each energy of spirit [Geist] through

JSP 27.1_02_Verene.indd 35 12/02/13 11:14 AM

intended to give the multivolume work the general title of Phaenomenologie

JSP 27.1_02_Verene.indd 36 12/02/13 11:14 AM

stage of Die sinnliche Gewissheit, presents consciousness on the threshold of

Inner Form and Systematic Review

For an area of experience to count as a symbolic form it is required to have

JSP 27.1_02_Verene.indd 37 12/02/13 11:14 AM

of the distinctive characteristics of art and history as symbolic forms. In

JSP 27.1_02_Verene.indd 38 12/02/13 11:14 AM

activity of Geist, which functions by means of a continual dialectic with

JSP 27.1_02_Verene.indd 39 12/02/13 11:14 AM

Philosophy’s relation to the series of symbolic forms that constitute

Basis Phenomena and Animal Symbolicum

JSP 27.1_02_Verene.indd 40 12/02/13 11:14 AM

in the history of philosophy this aim “proved to be the Archimedean point,

JSP 27.1_02_Verene.indd 41 12/02/13 11:14 AM

its symbolic system. Furthermore, once in possession of this system, the

JSP 27.1_02_Verene.indd 42 12/02/13 11:14 AM

Werk is different in kind from any product produced by action. By action

JSP 27.1_02_Verene.indd 43 12/02/13 11:14 AM

JSP 27.1_02_Verene.indd 44 12/02/13 11:14 AM

JSP 27.1_02_Verene.indd 45 12/02/13 11:14 AM

32. Ibid., 23.

JSP 27.1_02_Verene.indd 46 12/02/13 11:14 AM

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Cassirer's Phenomenology of Culture

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