1

Published in Occasional Papers in Sociology (nr. 49), Department of Sociology,

University of Manchester, 1996.
.
Comparing Neo-Kantians: Ernst Cassirer and Georg Simmel

by Frédéric Vandenberghe *

Abstract

In this working paper, the author does four things: (i) presenting neo-Kantianism as a form

of post-Hegelian philosophising, he inquires whether it has any implications for sociology;

(ii) he compares Simmel's relationist conception of knowledge with Cassirer's proto-

structuralist analysis of the concept; (iii) he compares Simmel's vitalist theory of culture with

Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms and, finally (iv) he tries to put sociology back on the

Kantian tracks of practical philosophy.

1) Neo-Kantianism and Sociology

In an interview, Michel Foucault once declared: "Nous sommes tous néokantiens". 1

We are all neo-Kantians -- or aren't we? That is the question. To find out, we must, of course,

first inquire what neo-Kantianism is. Neo-Kantianism (or neo-criticism, as it is often called)
2

* Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. An earlier version of this paper was
presented at the Midterm Conference of the Research Committee on the History of Sociology of the
International Sociological Association which took place in Amsterdam, 16-18 May 1996. I am very glad that
Peter Halfpenny has kindly accepted to publish this paper in this series, as it testifies of my temporary
presence as a lecturer at the University of Manchester. I would like to thank Pete Martin and Stephen Turner
for their helpful comments, and Anna Grimshaw for her linguistic assistance and, more generally, for her
gentle presence as well.
1 Foucault, M. quoted in Tenbruck, F.: “Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibung der Philosophie am Beispiel
des Neukantianismus”, Philosophische Rundschau, 1988, 35, p. 4. Whether Foucault had adequate knowledge
of neo-Kantianism is, however, another question.
2 For an introduction to neo-Kantianism, see Köhnke, K.: Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus. Die
2

is best characterized, I think, not as a philosophy, but as a certain way of post-Hegelian and

post-metaphysical philosophising which takes its cue from Kant -- drawing on Kant is
3

obviously not the same and doesn't have the same implications as, say, drawing on Spinoza or

Hegel. Any reasonably good encyclopaedia of philosophy will tell you that neo-Kantianism

has to be defined in plural. It refers to a group of professoral, purely academic movements (or

"professoral systems", to borrow Lukács' disparaging characterisation ) that prevailed in 4

Germany somewhere between 1850 and 1920. These had little in common beyond a strong,

almost visceral reaction against the speculative idealisms of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, and

a conviction that philosophy could and should be a rigorous science. This can only be the

case, it is argued, if philosophy returns to the spirit and method of Kant, as laid out in the

preface to the Critique of Pure Reason and in the Prolegomena to any future metaphysics

that will be able to present itself as a science. The two most distinguishing characteristics of

the Kantian revival of the late 19 th. Century are thus: rejection of the metaphysical systems

of absolute idealism, and orientation around the fact of science and culture in an attempt to

uncover their conditions of possibility.

Trendelenburg, Prantl, Fisher, Helmholtz, Meyer, Haym, Ueberweg, Lange, Cohen,

Natorp, Windelband, Rickert, Cassirer, Lask- those names of once famous neo-Kantians

probably don't ring any bells anymore, apart from the last ones maybe. So far as an

deutsche Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus, Frankfurt/Main, 1986. In neo-

historicist fashion, Köhnke pretends to have written the true history of neo-Kantianism but, funnily enough,
his book ends there where neo-Kantianism is generally said to begin, i.e. with the intellectual predominance of
the Baden and the Marburg schools. Thomas Willey’s Back to Kant. The Revival of Kantianism in German
Social and Historical Thought, 1860-1914, Detroit, 1978 offers a good overview, but its focus is rather
narrow, as it mainly restricts itself to an outline of the political and ethical positions of neo-Kantianism. Given
the restrictions of both books, I think Hans-Lüdwig Öllig’s booklet Der Neukantianismus, Stuttgart, 1979,
represents the best bargain.
3 On post-metaphysical thought, cf. Habermas, J.: Nachmetaphysisches Denken. Philosophische Aufsätze,
Frankfurt/Main, 1988, ch. 1.
4 Lukács, G.: Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, Berlin, 1955, p. 255.
3

intellectual movement can be said to have a beginning and an end at a specific moment of

time, neo-Kantianism began with the publication at Stuttgart in 1865 of Kant und die

Epigonen by Otto Liebmann, a minor philosopher, whose motto -"Back to Kant!" ("Also muß

auf Kant zurückgegangen werden!") -, which closed every chapter of the book, has become

famous. It died at Davos in 1929 with the ominous dispute which opposed Ernst Cassirer's

epistemological interpretation of Kant to Heidegger's ontological one. Opposing Cassirer's

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neo-Kantian interpretation of the Kantian doctrine as a general theory of knowledge, more

particularly as an attempt to give a transcendental foundation to scientific knowledge,

Heidegger reinterpreted Kant, primarily and basically, as an attempt to found metaphysics

from within an existential analysis of the finitude of Dasein. Kant or Nietzsche? - this

nagging question, which once opposed Cassirer and Heidegger, and which nowadays opposes

modernists and post-modernists, was resolved in favour of Nietzsche. Consequently, the

question of Being (Seinsfrage) gained ascendency while the question of knowing

(Erkenntnisfrage) receded.

Whereas Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, and others had used the words of Kant while being

alien to their spirit, the neo-Kantians were, on the whole, faithful to the spirit while being

revisionists with respect to the letter. Hermann Cohen, for instance, presented an

interpretation of Kant which was so idealistic that it simply tended to merge into a form of

neo-Platonism; Friedrich Paulsen, on the other hand, interpreted Kant in such a way that he

appeared as a student of Hume, and he drove Kant's complicity with positivism to the point

that eventually Comte almost appeared as his student. Of the scholars we're going to

5 The protocols of the meeting, written by Bollnow and Ritter, have been published in the fourth edition of
Heidegger, M.: Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Frankfurt/Main, 1973, pp. 246-268. The waning of
neo-Kantianism is linked, on the intellectual level, to the rise of existentialism and phenomenology and, on
the historical level, to the forced exile and prosecution of its Jewish representatives.
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consider, neither Georg Simmel nor Ernst Cassirer accepted the positivist reinterpretations of

Kant. Because of the complexity and the internal tensions in Kant's philosophy, particularly

those between the empiricist-positivist strand and the a priorist-rationalist one, not all the

neo-Kantians brought home the same message from the Sage of Königsberg, and the

diversity of their teachings was as great as their quarrels were notorious. Using military

metaphors, Marck says that "the different columns of neo-Kantianism were united in their

attacks and marched separately" . In any case, when it came to the critique of absolute
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idealism, which eventually collapsed in the wake of Hegel's death in 1831 ("Zusammenbruch

des Idealismus"), the neo-Kantians marched in line to rehabilitate philosophy in the form of a

critical analysis of the conditions of possibility of knowledge, and, more generally, of culture.

By “absolute idealism” I mean the post-Kantian systematic philosophies of Fichte,

Schelling and Hegel. These can be defined by three theses, liberally drawn from Hegel. 7

Absolute idealism defends: 1) the unity of being and thinking, 2) the unity of the true, the

good and the beautiful, and 3) the philosophical system as science of the absolute.

Ad 1) Unity of Being and Thinking: Absolute idealism does not oppose the common

sense idea that knowledge and being are different, but it grasps their interplay as a dialectical

unity, or, as Hegel said in his Wissenschaft der Logik, as "the identity of the identity and the

non-identity", which admittedly can only be explicitated in terms of the Absolute. According

to Hegel, the absolute is the Idea, and the Idea can only be understood as Reason (Vernunft),

that is as identity of the subject and the object, of the ideal and the real, of thought and being,

6 Marck, S.: "Am Ausgang des jüngeren Neukantianismus", in Öllig, H.-L. (Hg.): Materialien zur
Neukantianismus-Diskussion, Darmstadt, 1987, p. 20.
7 Cfr. Schnädelbach, H.: Philosophie in Deutschland 1831-1933, Frankfurt/Main, 1991, pp. 17-21.
5

or to say the same in better known terms, of the rational and the real. Against this reduction
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of ontology to logic, which deduces Being from thinking, the neo-Kantians firmly believe

with Kant that “only the critical way remains open". Philosophy has to take an
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epistemological turn. Concretely, it means that, instead of making dogmatic claims about the

nature of Being, of the "things in themselves", philosophy has to ask itself what statements

about Being, about objects of knowledge in general signify and how knowledge of objects of

experience is possible. This epistemological turn is precisely what is implied by Kant's so-

called "Copernican revolution": instead of starting with the objects of knowledge, instead of

starting with an ontology, philosophy has really to start with an analysis of the genesis and

the structure of the subjective constitution of the objects of knowledge. Kant has nicely

expressed this idea as follows: "The proud name of an ontology that presomptuously claims

to supply, in systematic doctrinal form, synthetic a priori knowledge of things in general ...

has to make modestly place for a mere analytic of the understanding” (KrV, B 303).

This Kantian motif of the substitution of ontology by an analytic of understanding

appears again and again in philosophical critiques of sociology. The charge is always the

same: hypostasis of the concept. Just witness the following series of that selfsame reproach of

ontological subreption: Marx attacks Hegel, Simmel and Weber curse Marx, Parsons

criticises Weber, Habermas blames Parsons, and in the same way as all the others have

criticised their illustrous predecessors, Honneth has recently complained that Habermas

surreptitiously substitutes his analytic concepts to reality. This series of unending criticisms

can be explained (among other things) by the two following reasons:

8 The locus classicus where Hegel expresses most bluntly the identity of the real and the rational is the
Preface to his Philosophy of Law (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in Werke, Band 7, Frankfurt/Main,
1970, p. 24): “Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich, and was wirklich ist, vernünftig” - “What is rational is real,
and what is real is rational”.
9 Kant, I.: Kritik der reinen Vernunft (from now onwards: Krv) in Werke, Band 4, Darmstadt, 1983, B 884.
6

Firstly, in so far as the collision of ontological discourses is concerned, one should

notice with Cassirer that “the conditions of scientific production differ from those of critical

reflection”. Indeed, given that we cannot use our intellectual functions to construct the
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reality of experience and at the same time submit them to a critical investigation, an

incommensurability exists between the operational ontology of the working sociologist and

the ontology which is implied by the philosophical critique of sociological concepts.

Whenever sociologists are doing research or developing a theory, they necessarily make,

whether they want it or not, ontological affirmations - in a vaguely Hegelian way they talk

about "stratification", “revolutions", "political systems" and so on, assuming that those

abstractions correspond to something real out there. Philosophers or, given that philosophers

don't really seem to care about sociology, philosophically inclined sociologists, when they

critically discuss and analyse the theories of others, take a Kantian posture in order to debunk

them: they often charge that sociologists confound categories of thinking with the things

themselves, commiting thus the "fallacy of the transcendental subreption" (KrV, A 643). In

this respect, two opposing strands can be distinguished in classical German sociology: the

neo-Hegelian strand, as represented by neo- and para-Marxists, from Marx himself to Lukács

and the Frankfurt School, and the neo-Kantian (or neo-Nietzschean) strand, as represented by

bourgeois sociologists like Simmel and Weber - the second strand charging that the first one

is hypostatizing thought; the first one attacking the second strand for its incapacity to mediate

the facts in a dialectical way.

Secondly, passing from the collision of ontological discourses to the absence of any

consensus concerning the empirical referents of the discourses, one can only notice the

babylonian confusion which reigns among sociologists. Thus, where individualists declare in

10 Cassirer, E.: Substance et fonction. Eléments pour une théorie du concept, Paris, 1977, p. 244.
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truly Thatcherian fashion that only individuals (and families) are real and that society does

not exist (in scholastic terms: society as ens rationis), collectivists reply that society exists,

even more, that, given that it is society that constitutes individuals, it is more real than

individuals (society as ens realis or even ens realissimum). Halfway between the

individualists and the collectivists, interactionnists maintain for their part that neither society

nor individuals are real, save by their mutual implication. Given that ontological

controversies cannot be solved consensually by theoretical discussions, one should not expect

that they will come to a close. When we see, for instance, that realist scholars like Harré and

Bhaskar, who share after all a common philosophical platform, cannot even agree on the

ontological status of collective entities, we can only predict that the attacks in terms of

hypostasis of concepts will not abade. 11

Ad 2) Unity of the true, the good, and the beautiful: As a philosophy of the absolute

Idea, Hegel's absolute idealism interprets the unity of thought and Being, of the rational and

the real, of the subject and the object as the unity of the true, the good and the beautiful. Thus

absolute idealism rehabilitates the scholastic tenet according to which ens et verum et bonum

convertuntur. The difference between "is" and "ought", "Sein" and "Sollen" is no longer

accepted as the last word of philosophy. Metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics; theoretical and

practical philosophy are integrated in an all encompassing system which pretends to absolute

truth. From a neo-Kantian perspective, which is somewhat infused by a dose of

Nietzscheanism, the cosmological unity, which once characterised Christian medieval

society, is gone for good. As a result of the transition from a simple to a complex society

11 Compare, for instance, Harré, R.: Social Being, Oxford, 1979, pp. 37-43 and 139-160, where he claims that
references to macro-collectivities can only have a rhetorical status, with Bhaskar, R.: Dialectics. The Pulse of
Freedom, pp. 38-204, where he tries to develop the idea that voids do exist and that they have causal powers.
8

(which can be simply or reflexively rationalised ), from "mechanic" to "organic" solidarity,

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the differentiation of the "value-spheres" has become a social fact. The autonomisation of

science, religion, ethics, aesthetics, politics and economics cannot be reversed. We just have

to accept, as Weber said quoting Baudelaire, that "something can be true, although it is

neither beautiful, nor sacred, nor good". In the same way as Kant, in his three Critiques,
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inquired into the conditions of possibility of science, ethics and aesthetics, philosophy has

now to extend its reach and submit all value-spheres to a critique. It is the task of philosophy

to develop a critique of reason in all its extension - from a critique of pure reason (Kant) to a

critique of historical reason (Dilthey) and a critique of culture as such (Cassirer).

This neo-Kantian affirmation of the relative autonomy and irreducibility of the

different axiological spheres has important implications for sociology, for it is enough to

translate the Heidelbergian notion of "value-spheres" into the more systemic one of "social

subsystems" to see that many current sociologies can claim a neo-Kantian pedigree. This is

not only the case, however, with neo-functionalist analyses of subsystems, whether those are

presented as “fields” (Bourdieu) or as “autopoetic systems” (Luhmann). Even Lyotard’s

Wittgensteinian analysis of language games, Walzer’s theory of the spheres of justice, or

Boltanski and Thévenot’s presentation of different axiological “cités” can be seen as so many

sociological instantiations of a Kantian intuition. Moreover, with this problematic of the

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functional differentiation of society, we also see the old Marxian problem of the

"determinations in the last instance" and other "overdeterminations" reemerge. Sociologies

which accept accept the modern fact of irreversible complexity and its main implication,

12 Cfr. Beck, U., Lash, S. and Giddens, A.: Reflexive Modernization, Cambridge, 1994.
13 Weber, M.: Wissenschaft als Beruf, in Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung I, Band 17, Tübingen, 1992, p. 100.
14 Cfr. Lyotard, J.-F.: Le différend, Paris, 1983; Walzer, M.: Spheres of Justice, Oxford, 1983; and Boltanski,
L. and Thévenot, L.: De la justification. Les économies de la grandeur, Paris, 1991.
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namely that society can no longer be conceptualized in terms of the “moral unity” of the

subject and the object, and which consequently refuse to engage in politics which advocate

the elimination of the state or the market can also be seen as legitimate successors of Kant.

More generally, every sociology which accepts the differentiation of value-spheres and the

relative autonomy of the subsystems - whether those are autopoietic or not-, and which

refuses the eliminative reductionism of the "last instances" can claim a neo-Kantian pedigree.

Ad 3) Systematic philosophy as science of the Absolute: A philosophy, which takes

the divine point of view of the union of thought and Being, of the subject and the object, of

the true, the good and the beautiful, can only expose its knowledge in an absolute, all

encompassing totality, that is: in a system. In order to be scientific (in the Hegelian sense of

the word) such a system has to be all encompassing. It cannot accept anything which falls

outside of its reach, and, therefore, as soon as it has spotted an element which escapes its

grip, it has to spiritualize and incorporate it in its system, almost in the same way, according

to Adorno, as a wild animal devours its prey. Kant firmly rejected the idea of the all
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encompassing scientific system as a mystic fiction. The incorporation of knowledge in an

encyclopaedic, self-deploying, emanative totalising idealistic system cannot be the aim of

philosophy. Moreover, for the neo-Kantians, the existence of a plurality of competing

philosophical systems shows that the claims of absolute idealism are preposterous. Instead of

spiritualizing the sensible, philosophy has to respect it in its content. In this regard systems

are like concepts (KrV, B 75): without experience they remain empty. The period of

idealistic system-building is over. Philosophy can only pretend to be scientific as a

foundational discipline, that is as a critical theory of knowledge.

15 “The system is the stomach which has become spirit” - cfr. Adorno, T.W.: Negative Dialektik, in
Gesammelte Schriften, Band 6, 1973, Frankfurt/Main , p. 33.
10

Although nowadays nobody takes the pretension of Hegel's scientific system seriously

anymore, the critique of identity-metaphysics has potentially wide ranging implications for

sociology. By definition, sociology is an empirical discipline, but this definitional statement

doesn't say anything about the degree of "empiricity" as such. The hatred of the conceptual

which we find, for instance, in the symbolic interactionism of a Herbert Blumer or the hyper-

empiricism which is characteristic of Harold Garfinkel's latest version of ethnomethodology

can, to a certain extent, be seen as sociological versions of Kant's rejection of metaphysics.

However, rejection of metaphysics is one thing, trying to empirically grasp the “things

themselves” is another. Between the concept and its empirical content, there’s always a

hiatus irrationalis, and it cannot be breached, not even by respecification. There’s always an
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empirical remainder which necessarily escapes the concept. From this perspective, the

ethnomethodological attempt to get rid of the concept and to identify empirically the non-

identical remainder appears paradoxically as an empiricistic avatar of identity metaphysics.

To conclude: Neo-Kantianism can best be characterised, I think, in terms of its

critique of absolute idealism. In summary, I propose, therefore, to define it as a form of post-

Hegelian or post-metaphysical philosophising, distinguished by the following three

interdependent moments: first, the rejection of Hegelian identity metaphysics, second, the

primacy of epistemology as methodological form of this scientific philosophising, and, third,

the primacy of culture in general and science in particular as content of the philosophical

critique. In so far but only in so far as we, as philosophically inclined and somewhat sceptical

sociologists, all reject the metaphysics of identity and want to establish sociology on sound
16Cfr. Garfinkel, H.: “Evidence for locally produced, naturally accountable phenomena of Order*, Logic,
Reason, Meaning, Method, etc. in and as of the essential quiddity of immortal ordinary Society, (I of IV): An
Announcement of Studies”, Sociological Theory, 1988, 6, pp. 103-106.
11

epistemological foundations, we can indeed agree with Foucault and claim that we are all

neo-Kantians.

2) From Substance to Relations and Functions

The two principal schools of the neo-Kantian movement are the logistic or Marburg

School, led by Cohen and Natorp, and the axiological or Southwest (Baden) School, led by

Windelband and Rickert. They are divided on whether the spirit of Kantian philosophy is best

furthered by inquiry into logic and the foundations of the natural sciences, or by inquiry into

the theory of value and the foundations of the cultural sciences. Ernst Cassirer belonged to

the Marburg School, but in his philosophy of symbolic forms, he made significant

contributions to the foundations of the cultural sciences. In 1943, he wrote a tribute to his

jewish mentor Hermann Cohen, whose works were then banned and burned by the fascists. In

this article, Cassirer tells us that as a young student he failed to penetrate Kant's Critique of

Pure Reason. Neither Paulsen nor Simmel, whose lectures he attended in Berlin, could help

him further. But Simmel put him on the track of Cohen's interpretation of Kant. Here is

Cassirer's testimony:

"I made a second attempt, says Cassirer, to find a clue in the labyrinth of the Critique of

Pure Reason by attending the lectures of Georg Simmel. And here I was lucky from the

beginning. Simmel was a very original and penetrating thinker. He worked in almost all the

fields of modern philosophy, and later he became one of the first founders of philosophical

sociology. At that time, however, he was still a young Privatdozent who delivered his

lectures before a small but very interested and attentive audience. In one of the first hours he
12

gave a short bibliography of the literature on Kant. And it was on that occasion that I first

heard the name of Hermann Cohen. Simmel emphasized how much he himself owed to the

study of Cohen's books, but he immediately added that those books, in spite of their real

sagacity and profundity, suffered from a very grave defect. They were written, he said, in

such an obscure style that as yet there was probably no one who had succeeded in

deciphering them. That was, of course, a great paradox that could not fail to make an

impression on the mind of a young man". 17

Prompt in acting, as suits a boy of nineteen, Cassirer bought Cohen's book Kants

Theorie der Erfahrung, and began to study it. Later onwards he moved to Marburg and quite

quickly he established himself as Cohen's leading student. In contrast to the Southwest

School of neo-Kantianism, as represented by Windelband, Rickert and Lask, who were

mainly concerned with the reformulation of philosophy as axiologics, the Marburg School of

Cohen and Natorp oriented itself towards the natural sciences with the aim to develop a

theory of the principles of science and, more generally, of all culture. The main thesis of

Cohen's panlogistic transcendental philosophy is that the objects, including the objects of

experience, are not given, but that they are generated (erzeugt) by a prioric subjectivity.

Thought accepts nothing as given. Eventually, even Kant's noumenal things have to go as a

metaphysical remainder. In every given, thought discovers a generation (Erzeugung).

Thought generates content as well as form, and, according to Cohen, the content of self-

contained thought is reality itself as object of knowledge. Taking his cues from his study of

the history of differential calculus, Cohen ends up stating that every fact is generated by

thought and determined by its position in a logically necessary scheme. This idea of the

17 Cassirer, E.: "Hermann Cohen, 1842-1918", Social Research, 1943, 10, p. 222.
13

functional determination of facts by the conceptual field in which they are generated will be

developed by Cassirer in his first writings. However, before exposing Cassirer's proto-

structuralist theory of the concept, I want to consider Simmel's relativist theory of

knowledge.

In so far as Georg Simmel appears at all in the typologies of neo-Kantianism, he is

usually classified as the solitary founder of the school of relativist or sociological neo-

Kantianism. Among the neo-Kantians, Simmel is without any doubt the least systematic one.

As the unifying theme of his thought different notions and motifs have been proposed - from

the metaphor of the door and the bridge (Freund) to the concept of the individual law (Dahme

and Rammstedt) and the opposition of life and forms (Jankélevitch, Naegele, Kantorowicz). I

think, however, that the essence of his thought is best captured by the metaconcept of dualism

or of the duality in interaction. The constitutive a priori which generates, so to speak,

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Simmel's thought is that the coexistence of polarities, which logically suppose each other in

their mutual opposition, is constitutive of life itself. "It is the essence of human life, he says

towards the end of his Soziologie, that the vital conditioning of its particular moments is the

existence of its opposite". In his work the principle of dualist structuration manifests itself in
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3 different ways:

1) In his formal sociology, the dualist principle functions as a synthetic principle of

the forms of sociation. The forms of sociation always appear as a more or less fragile

synthesis of opposing tendencies. Fashion, for instance, is presented as a form of sociation

18 I have worked that out in my Ph. D. Cfr. Vandenberghe, F.: La réification. Histoire critique de la
sociologie allemande. Vol. 1: De Marx à Lukács, Paris, forthcoming, ch. 3. An English translation should
appear as well at the University of Minnesota Press.
19 Simmel, G.: Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, Frankfurt/Main, 1992, p.
685.
14

which allies the tendency to emulate the group and the tendency to distinguish one's self from

it; subordination appears as a form which brings together submission and resistance; conflict

as a union of tendency to inter-group opposition and intra-group integration, and so on. In

any case, in Simmel's sociology, the social forms are synthetically determined by an alliance

of polarizing forces.

2) In his relationist epistemology, the dualist principle functions as a heuristic or

regulative principle. Simmel's theory of knowledge is clearly indebted to Kant. In accord

with Kant, Simmel "exterminates" the ontological concepts of metaphysics, or better he

transforms them into regulative concepts which fulfill a useful heuristic function by directing

and organising the conceptual exposition and the empirical research in a systematic way.

According to Simmel, the world is much too complicated to be grasped from a single point of

view or to be deduced from a single principle. Therefore, he rejects every form of prima

philosophia, that is every form of absolute idealism which deducts the ontic totality from an

ontological principle, like the subject or the object, for instance, or being and becoming.

According to Simmel, no first principle can ever serve as a bedrock for thought. "Relativism,

he says in his book on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, denies that the relativity of being has to

be carried by an absolute". No philosophical system can possibly incorporate the totality of

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Being. At the limit, every first principle finds its complement and its foundation in its

opposing principle. Ultimately, the subject depends on the object, and vice versa, with the

result that the closure of thinking is rejected ad infinitum. The opposition of the opposing

terms cannot be resolved in a dialectical synthesis. "The unitary moment A, he says, is

decomposed in a and b. ... a can only find its foundation in b and in its turn b can only find its

20 Simmel, G.: Schopenhauer und Nietzsche, Hamburg, 1990, p. 70.

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foundation in a". Each of the terms enters thus in a relation of reciprocal substitution and, as
21

a result, the opposition is dissolved into interaction. For heuristic purposes, Simmel advises

us to conceive the world alternatively from the premisses of idealism and materialism, of

rationalism and empiricism, of holism and individualism. In any case, the world is

conceivable from within a multiplicity of unilateral perspectives, each of which projects unity

into the infinity of an imagined focus, none of which, however, reaches the point of the

adequatio rei et intellectus. Thus, none can pretend to cognitive hegemony.

Simmel is not only a neo-Kantian, he's also a influenced by Nietzsche's and Bergson's

philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie). As such, he's opposed to any formal system of

thought which, instead of following the flux of life, freezes it conceptually. Moreover, he

also rejects any form of conceptual substantialism which hypostatises thought and substitutes

its objectivating abstractions to reality, taking thus for real what is only an imposition of

mummified concepts on reality. In modern culture, Simmel perceives, however, an evolution

towards the dissolution of things and substances into relations. Modern science, for instance,

less and less apprehends phenomena as particular substances and more and more as

movements whose carriers have no longer qualities:

"Science, says Simmel somewhere in his Philosophy of Money, tries to express the properties

which inhere in the things as so many quantitative determinations and, thus, as relative

determinations; instead of the absolute stability of organic, psychic, moral and social

formations, science teaches us an ongoing evolution in which each element occupies a well

limited place, which can only be determined by a relation to a before and an afterwards; it

21 Simmel, G.: Das Individuum und Freiheit. Essais, Frankfurt/Main, 1993, p. 108.
16

renounces to the being in itself of the things, and limits itself to establish the relations which

unite them with our mind, as they are seen from the point of view of the mind". 22

Later, he links this relativist dissolution of things and substances to the growing

abstraction and spiritualisation which characterises modernity. We no longer have to do with

things themselves but with secondary symbols, with abstractions which, in terms of content,

have no direct relationship anymore with what they represent. In the same way as token

money without intrinsic value numerically represents the value of things, the quantitative

determinations of science stand for the qualitative ones, and, at the end, it appears that the

ideal of knowledge is to reduce all qualitative determinations of reality to the quantitative

determinations of science. So, we see not only in the sciences, but also in economy a trend

towards "symbolisation" - access to reality is mediated by symbols, and those symbols take

the place of objects and values which fall under the senses. As we shall see soon, this will be

systematically worked out by Cassirer.

3) Thirdly and finally, in his metaphysics of life, the dualist principle manifests itself

in a tragic way in the form of an almost cosmic opposition between life and forms. The

tragedy of culture and society, the fact that the socio-cultural creations of the human spirit

become autonomous and turn themselves against their creators, is only a particular instance

of the universal tragedy of life, of the fact that life, to express itself, has to pass through

forms which kill life. I'll come back to Simmel's vitalistic philosophy of culture in the next

section.

22 Simmel, G.: Philosophie de l'argent, Paris, 1987, p. 86.

17

But first I want to go back to Cassirer and show how, in his first writings on the

conceptual foundations of the natural sciences, he developed Simmel's somewhat vague

intuitions about the scientific dissolution of substances in relations and the symbolisation of

things into a full blown and systematic theory of the concept. Starting with the idea that

Kant's analysis of the conditions of possibility of knowledge has to be updated, Cassirer

analyses, in the first two volumes of Das Erkenntnisproblem, the history of philosophy and

science, from Nicolas of Cusa to Leibniz and Kant and from Giordano Bruno to Newton. The

progressive dissolution of the Aristotelian concept of the substance and its concomitant

replacement by a functional theory of the concept, which is clearly inspired by a Kantian

reading of Leibniz , forms the guiding thread of his systematic reconstruction of modern
23

thought. Eventually, Cassirer will systematically present the results of his historical study in

Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (The Concept of Substance and Function), significantly

subtitled Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik (Investigations on the

Fundamental Questions of the Critique of Knowledge).

In this seminal book, which I consider as his best book, Cassirer presents a solid

critique of the traditional Aristotelian theory of the concept. This theory, which is part and

parcel of Aristotle's theory of the syllogism, starts from the assumption that the function of

the concept consists in uncovering, through a process of abstraction, the substantial form of

the things. Reality presents itself to the observing mind as a discrete multitude of existing

things. The activity of the mind consists exclusively in determining and isolating qualitative

elements that are common to the variety of existing things, uniting them into classes, and

23 Before Das Erkenntnisproblem, Cassirer had published a work on Leibniz. He also produced a three-
volume edition of the philosophical writing of Leibniz and a ten-volume edition of Kant's work. Both of those
philosophers were extremely influential for Cassirer - to the point that one could both describe him as a neo-
Leibnizian and as a neo-Kantian.
18

repeating this procedure as long as possible. According to Aristotle, the final goal of such a

classification process is to arrive at the most comprehensive and abstract concept in such a

way that the particulars can be subsumed under it. This theory of the concept, which has

reigned for almost two millenia, presupposes that ontology precedes logic; more precisely, it

presupposes an ontology of substantial forms.

According to Cassirer the substantialist theory of the concept is fatally flawed. Its

flaw is double: On the one hand, the common features that are isolated by abstraction are

supposed to correspond to the universals in re, but nowhere among the characteristics of a

thing do we find this abstract similarity. We do not, as Lotze once remarked, form "a class of

reddish, juicy edible things, under which cherries and meat might be subsumed". On the 24

other hand, it is clear that the increasing extension of the concept goes together with a

progressive reduction of its content, with the result that, at the end of the day, the most

general concepts become purely analytic and almost absolutely vacuous. This problem, which

was already clearly spotted by Nietzsche and which will become the central problem of Lask

and maybe also of Adorno, is dubbed by Simmel as the "tragedy of human

conceptualisation". 25

Against this traditional theory of classes, Cassirer advances the functional logic of

generating relations, which he found at work not only in modern mathematics, but also in the

natural sciences. The logic of relations dissolves the junction between the sciences and the

ontology of the substantial forms. The basic concepts are obtained, not through a process of

24 Lotze, H., quoted by Kaufmann, F.: "Cassirer's theory of Scientific Knowledge", in Schilpp, P. (ed.): The
Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, Evanston, 1949, p. 189.
25 Simmel, G.: Philosophie de l'argent, p. 259.
19

abstraction, but through an integrative or synthetic act of the mind which, by offering a

constructive scheme of interrelated concepts, constitutes a determinate objectivity. The

function of the concept is not to bring thought to an ever greater level of generality, but to

bring it to the highest degree of determination. What binds the elements of perception

together is not a common property but a function, that is a general law of arrangement

through which a rule of succession is established:

"It can indeed appear, says Cassirer, as if the work of thought were limited to selecting from

a series of perceptions a, a, ay ... the common element a. ... [However,] that which binds

the series of the elements of the series a,b, c ... together is not itself a new element, that is

actually infused into them, but it is the rule of progression, which remains the same, no

matter in which member it is represented. The function F (a,b), F (b,c) ... determines the sort

of dependence between the successive members". 26

Cassirer's analysis of the concept of function is directed toward the elaboration of a

transcendental logic in which the object is no longer presupposed by logic, but is, so to speak,

generated by it. Scientific concepts do not stand unrelated to each other, but they are

organised in conceptual “fields” or “figurations” or, to use Cassirer's preferred expression, in

a lawful series of progression which discloses and constitutes a region of reality. The 27

particular object is no longer subsumed under the general. Between the particular and the

universal, there's now, as in Hegel's theory of the "concrete universal", a functional

26 Cassirer, E.: Substance et fonction. Eléments pour une théorie du concept, Paris, 1977, p. 28.
27 This functional view of interrelated (or even internally related) concepts has important implications for
scientific research. The standard Humean view of causality as constant conjunction of events, for instance, has
to go as it is based on he tacit assumption underlying both the conception and the establishment of a law that
the phenomena do not change their properties irreversibly if they are cut off from other connections or from
each other. But they do, and as soon as the hidden ceteris paribus formula is uncovered, the linkage of
independent and dependent variables is revealed to be simply contingent.
20

interrelation between both. The particular is reduced to an instance of the possible, appearing

at the crossroads as the synthesis of a bunch of relations. The real is thus indeed relational, as

Bourdieu says with an ironic wink to Hegel. In this rationalist-relationist perspective, in

28

which theory overdetermines the facts, functions and relations have clearly priority over

objects and things. In fact, the passage from a formal logic to a transcendental logic

transforms the substantial unity of the thing into a relational one: "From now onwards, says

Cassirer, the real is dissolved into different relational structures which are mutually

interlinked by a whole system of laws which mutually condition each other". 29

By stressing the constructive and synthetic character of science, Cassirer joins not

only the transcendentalism of Kant and Cohen, but also the rationalism of Duhem and

Bachelard. In any case, the function of science does not consist in proposing a copy or a

reflection of sensible reality (exit Abbildtheory):

"All our knowledge, however finished it might be in itself, never delivers us the objects in

person, but only signs of those objects and of their mutual interrelations. ... Thought , instead

of turning itself immediately towards reality, constructs a system of signs and learns to use

those signs as representatives of the objects. ... The scientific concepts appear no longer as

imitations of thinglike existences but as symbols representing orders and functional links

28 Bourdieu, P.: Raisons Pratiques. Sur la théorie de l’action, Paris, 1994, p. 17. More than any other
sociologist, Bourdieu, who published most of Cassirer's work in the collection which he directed at the
Editions de Minuit, is influenced by Cassirer - in a double way: Firstly, the influence of the relationist
conception of knowledge, which will later be developed into a full blown theory of the properties of the field,
is already manifest in one of his first articles Cfr. Bourdieu, P.: “Structuralism and the Theory of Sociological
Knowledge”, Social Research, 1968, 35, 4, pp. 681-706. Secondly, the influence of Cassirer’s philosophy of
symbolic forms is openly acknowledged in his major statement on the intellectual genesis of his notion of
symbolic power. Cfr. Bourdieu, P.: “Sur le pouvoir symbolique”, Annales E.S.C., 1977, 3, pp. 405-411. It
would be interesting to further explore Bourdieu’s indebtedness to Cassirer (and Panofsky, his colleague at the
Warburg Institute in Hamburg), but, of course, this cannot be done here.
29 Cassirer, E.: Substance et fonction. Eléments pour une théorie du concept, p. 288.
21

within reality. ... The reality of the objects has dissolved itself in a world of ideal relations,

specifically in mathematical ones". 30

Thus, we pass, to quote Bachelard, "from the substance to the substitute". Scientific31

knowledge substitutes to the world of the sensible, the ever changing and confusing

impressions of the empiricists, a symbolic system of concepts, laws and relations which does

not so much reflect reality as it conceptually forms or generates it. So, by turning away from

the impressions of the senses, by introducing an "epistemological break" with naive realism,

science constructs a dematerialised spiritual or symbolic world. And what the world loses in

terms of substances, it gains in relations. The empirical as such does not disappear, however,

but it reappears as a theoretical effect of a conceptual field, and thus as a scientific symbol.

Indeed, for Cassirer the symbol is nothing else but an empirical content which is

overdetermined by a cultural form. Here, where Cassirer stressed the formative influence of

mind, we already feel that his theory of scientific conceptualisation is inscribed in the larger

framework of a general theory of symbols. Indeed, in so far as the Philosophy of Symbolic

Forms is not only concerned with science but also with myth, religion, art and language, in so

far as it passes from a "critique of reason" to a more general "critique of culture", it can best

be seen, I think, as a kind of "comparative epistemology". I'll come back to that later, but first

I want to switch to Simmel's theory of culture.

3. Life, Forms, and Dialectics

30 Cassirer, E., repectively Substance et fonction, p. 342, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Band III:
Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis, Darmstadt, 1954, p. 53, and Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und
Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, Darmstadt, 1971, Band 1, p. 3.
31 Bachelard, G.: Philosophie du non, Paris, 1940, p. 59.
22

Simmel is quite well known in some sociological quarters as a sociologist of modern,

if not post-modern culture. However, the philosophical underpinnings of his sociology of

culture and modernity, as they are most clearly exposed in his (still untranslated)

Lebensanschauung, his philosophical testament which he wrote on his deathbed, are much

less well known. In the second chapter of this book, which bears the Platonist title "The
32

Turn towards the Idea", Simmel developed a vitalist version of the neo-Kantian theory of the

differentiation and autonomisation of value-spheres. This theory of culture is Kantian in so

far as it is predicated on the somewhat woolly distinction between form and content, and it is

vitalist in so far as it opposes the fluidity of life to the alienating fixity of the forms.

The underlying idea of his theory of cultural forms is that the substrate of life consists

of an infinite multiplicity of contents which, like Kant's "things-in-themselves", exist outside

of time and space. Simmel calls the totality of free floating contents the "world-stuff"

(Weltstoff). As a multiplicity of contents, the world-stuff is amorphous. It can only be

synthesised into a unity through the intervention of forms. Forms can be looked upon as

principles which are brought to the contents, and by means of which contents are selected and

gathered into a whole. The form, which systematically connects contents by a network of

relations, is thus the principle of unification of the amorphous multiplicity. Simmel

distinguishes different kinds of forms like knowledge, art, philosophy, religion, ethics, and so

on, and to the extent that each form can organise the contents in its own distinguished way,

he denies the existence of a unique criterion of unification. When the totality of contents is

32 Weingartner's excellent systematisation of Simmel's philosophy of culture is still unsurpassed. Cfr.

Weingartner, R.: "Form and Content in Simmel's Philosophy of Life", in Wolff, K. (ed.): Georg Simmel,
1858-1918, Colombus, 1959, pp. 33-60 and Experience and Culture. The Philosophy of Georg Simmel,
Middletown, 1960, pp. 15-84.
23

grasped and systematically synthesised by one specific form, like religion or art, for instance,

they form what Simmel calls a "world" or "world-form":

" A world, in the full sense of the term, he says, is thus a collection of contents in which, in

the perspective of mind, each piece is freed from its isolation and gathered in a unified

system, in a form which is, in principle, capable to contain the known and the unknown". 33

Simmel's worlds may be regarded as languages or language games, each of which is

adequate to refer to all contents. Like the late Goffman, Simmel thinks that contents that are

already formed may be subject to further forming (or "keying") by another principle. Thus, 34

for instance, the contents of a work of art may in turn be reframed by, say, a religious form.

And like Schütz, Simmel thinks that the real world, the practical world of everyday life

which most of the people most of the time consider as the paramount world, is not the only

world but just one world among others. Simmel's main thesis is that self-referential worlds
35

emerge when forms emancipate themselves from their pragmatic ends. Originally, the forms

which structure the world-stuff are simply means to the ends of satisfying vital needs. Rooted

in the necessities of practical life, they serve the self-conservation of man. Then, when men

and women feel the need to cultivate the forms as such and apply themselves to

systematically work out the forms, the forms detach themselves from their primary ends to

become ends in themselves: "First, says Simmel, men know in order to live; but then there

are men who live in oder to know. ... In general, we see in order to live. The artist, however,

lives to see". Following Plato, Simmel describes this passage from proto-forms to fully
36

33 Simmel, G.: Lebensanschauung. Vier metaphysische Kapitel, München, 1922, pp. 27-28.
34 Goffman, E.: Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Cambridge, 1974.
35 Schütz, A.: "On Multiple Realities", in Collected Papers, Vol. 1: The Problem of Social Reality, The
Hague, 1962, pp. 207-286.
36 Simmel, G.: Lebensanschauung, pp. 55 and 63. The hidden reference is to Plato’s Phaedo, 99D sq.
24

fletched cultural forms as "the great turn towards the idea". In all provinces of life, in art and
37

religion, law and technology, and economy and politics as well, we can see the same

depragmatization of knowledge, the same inversion of ends and means, which consequently

leads to a general outdifferentiation (Luhmann's Ausdifferenzierung) and autonomisation of

the socio-cultural spheres. What we can call, following Broch, the "radical logicity" of

cultural fragments which aspire to totality, expresses itself in maxims like "business is

business", "war is war", "art for art's sake", "fiat iustitia pereat mundus", and so on.

In contradistinction to Max Weber, who insists in his famous "Intermediary

Consideration" on the horizontal dimension of the conflict which opposes the different

autonomous value-spheres to each other , Simmel stresses the vertical dimension of the
38

conflict which opposes life to the forms. Although he recognizes that conflicts can emerge

within different value-spheres, he somehow excludes conflicts between them. He seems to

think that religion, science, art, etc., precisely because they constitute totalities sui generis

which can incorporate all contents, can very well peacefully coexist without excluding or

opposing each other. According to Simmel, there can be "no mixing, no overlapping, no

crossing" of worlds and, as a result, there can be no dialectical movement of oppositional

incorporation between the worlds either. In Simmel, there's no dialectic, for instance, of

religion and science. Like sounds and colours, they gently coexist with each other.

If Simmel tends to underplay the conflict between the forms, he tends, on the other

hand, to overdramatize the conflict which opposes the fluidity of life to the fixity of the

37Idem, p. 37.
38 Weber, M.: "Zwishenbetrachtung: Theorie der Stufen und Richtungen religiöser Weltablehnung", in
Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, Tübingen, 1966, Band 1, pp. 536-573.
25

forms. Drawing on Nietzsche, he distinguishes life as the experience of flux - what he calls

"more-life" (Mehr-Leben) - to life as form - what he calls "more-than-life" (Mehr-als-Leben).

Life is the antithesis of form, but the tragedy of life consists in the fact that, to realise itself,

life has to produce forms and pass though forms - which eventually strangle it. The negation

of life is thus inherent to life itself:

"The essence of tragedy, says Simmel, can be determined in the following way: a destiny is

oriented in a destructive fashion against the will to live of an existence, against its nature, its

meaning and its value - but, at the same time, we sense that this fate comes from the depth

and the necessity of this existence itself". 39

Simmel does not really hesitate to transpose the cosmic tragedy of life to the socio-

cultural realm. When his attention turns to the fate of the individual, the drama of life

transforms itself from within into the tragedy of culture and society. Following Hegel,

Simmel interprets culture as a double process of objectivation or exteriorisation of the soul in

objective forms (objective culture) and the inverse process of the subjectivation or

introjection of objective forms in the soul (subjective culture). Objective culture does not,

however, obey to the same laws as subjective culture. According to Simmel, the risk of

alienation is inherent to the process of objectivation itself, because as soon as the cultural

contents are objectivated, they become autonomous, join the world of cultural forms

(Popper's "world 3"), follow their own laws, and, eventually, they become alienated from

their origin as well as from their end - from their end, because, ideally, the end of culture is

to cultivate the individual. But culture cultivates itself, so to speak, and the hypertrophy of

39Simmel, G.: Philosophie de la modernité II. Esthétitique et modernité, conflit et modernité, Paris, 1990, p.
295.
26

objective culture is proportional to the atrophy of individual culture: the more we are

surrounded by cultural objects, the more we are tempted by them, but it is quite clear to

anyone that there's no way we can possibly keep track of and cope with the sheer mass of

culture - which crushes us. The same fatal process, which leads to loss of meaning in the

cultural sphere, leads to loss of freedom in the social sphere. In the same way as the value-

spheres become autonomous, the spheres of the state and the economy crystallyse into self-

referential and self-regulated subsystems. Together, they form society, and society confronts

the individual and crushes him/her.

At first view, it seems as if Simmel prolongs the Hegelian-Marxian critique of the

alienating inversion of the subject and the object. But, whereas for Marx the processes of

alienation, fetichism and reification are economic processes which are historically

determined, for Simmel they are metaphysical processes:

"The fetichistic value, he says, which Marx ascribes to economic objects in the era of

commodity production is only a particular case, somewhat different, of this universal fate of

our cultural contents. Those contents fall prey to the following paradox: they are, for sure,

created by subjects, but in the intermediary phase, when they take an objective form above

and underneath those instances, they evolve according to their own immanent logic, and thus

they alienate themselves not only from their origins but from their ends as well". 40

By reducing fetichism to a particular instance of the universal tragedy of culture,

Simmel has not only dehistoricised Marx's theory of alienation, but he has also fallen prey to

40 Simmel, G.: “Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur”, in Philosophische Kultur, Berlin, 1986, p. 213.
27

the charm of the Nietzschean fatalism of the amor fati. The dialectic between life and the

forms has come to a standstill. It is precisely at this point, as we shall see, that Cassirer is

going to intervene.

If I had to summarize the 1200 pages or so of Cassirer's massively erudite Philosophy

of Symbolic Forms, I would say that it is a work of comparative epistemology in which the

forms of language and myth are treated as forms of knowledge in the first two volumes and,

in the third, are conceived of as specific functions of consciousness, respectively the

expressive function (Ausdrucksfunktion) and the representative one (Darstellungsfunktion),

which become the bases for a developmental account of scientific-theoretical knowledge. The

whole project can best be understood, I think, as an attempt to systematically play through

Kant's "Copernican turn". Going beyond Kant's logocentric fixation on scientific knowledge,

Cassirer seeks to uncover the fundamental categories of the constitution of objectivity in the

main spheres of human experience: in science, of course, but also in language, myth, religion,

art, ethics, law, history, and technology. Extending thus the transcendental question well

beyond the scientific domain, "the critique of reason turns into a critique of culture". And in 41

the same way as Substance and Function defended the primacy of function over substance,

the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms advances the primacy of the function over the form, of the

production over the product or, to say the same thing in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt,

of energeia over ergon.

Starting with the factual multiplicity of systems of the objective spirit, which confront

us as finished products, Cassirer will inquire, in good Kantian fashion, into their conditions

41 Cassirer, E.: Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Band I: Die Sprache, Darmstadt, 1964, p. 11.
28

of possibility, and interpret science, myth, religion, etc. as so many objectivations, as so

many ways of "world-making" (Goodman) to which specific spontaneous acts of the subject

correspond. So, notwithstanding the fact that the cultural forms always appear in plural, they

still can be unravelled as the modulated expression or objectivation of one single function:

the function of symbolisation. In this sense, one can indeed say with Cassirer that

objectivation is the basic function of mind and that objectivation always implies mediation

through symbolic forms.

With the correlative notions of the "symbolic function" and the "symbolic form" we

have arrived at the very heart of Cassirer's philosophy of culture. The main idea of Cassirer's

theory of the symbol, which is essentially a reshaping of Kant's idea of the schema (KrV, B

176 sq.), is essentially anti-empiricistic: an empirical given is never simply reflected in

consciousness; it is always generated and formed by a spontaneous act of consciousness. We

can never have access to the material contents of the world as such; our experience is always

a synthesis of the ideal and the sensual, of the spiritual and the material. Everything that is, is

meaningful, according to Cassirer, precisely because it can only be grasped through a

synthetic act of symbolic formation which finds meaning in, or imbues meaning to, the

empirically given. To grasp the "wonder" of the fact that the sensory material, simply by

being attended to, is endowed with meaning; to grasp the internal connection which exists

between the form and the content, between sense and sensibility, Cassirer coins the very

notion of symbolic form, which he defines in the following terms: "Under a symbolic form,

he says, should be understood every energy of mind through which a mental content of

meaning is connected to a concrete, sensory sign and made to adhere internally to it". 42

42Cassirer, E.: “Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften", in Wesen und
Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs, Darmstadt, 1956, p. 175.
29

So, reminding us of Simmel's notion of form, Cassirer, with his notion of symbolic

form, means to refer to the synthetic act of symbolic formation of any given material content

by the human mind. The ideal exists only in so far as, in one way or another, it incorporates

itself in the sensual. If the number of sensory signs or contents is unlimited, the number of

symbolic forms, on the other hand, given that they must be "applicable to any object

whatsoever" , is necessarily limited. Cassirer mentions language, myth, religion, art, science,
43

ethics, law, history, and technology, but, in fact, only the symbolic formation of reality

through language, myth, religion, and science is fully worked out. Symbolic forms are like

windows: they are cultural matrices that open up an understanding of the world; they are

structuring structures of world-making; they are ways of objectivation of the world. The

world, whether it is the world of science, the world of myth or the world of language, is

always the modularised crystallisation of the symbolic function. In fact, we could say that in

the same way as the different languages distinguish themselves from each other by means of

their specific way of looking at the world, which is always a way of constituting the world

(cfr. Whorf-Sapir), so the different symbolic forms, to start with language itself (Humboldt),

objectivate the world and mediate access to it in different ways. Maybe we can translate the

contents of one symbolic form into another one, but we always move and remain within a

symbollically constituted world. Without symbolic forms, so much is sure, we simply don't

have a world. To illustrate what he means by symbolic formation, Cassirer devised the

following thought experiment: Imagine a line and consider its particular appearance, its

shape, its spatial and other characteristics. What appears to us as an aesthetic phenomenon

with a certain jagged or flowing form, appears to a cultist from New Guinea as a mark with

43 Cassirer, E.: The Myth of the State, Yale, 1975, p. 34.

30

magic significance. And if an art historian might think of it as an illustration of a particular

style, to a mathematician it will appear as a graphic expression of the development of the

mathemathical function of the cosinus. 44

In his Essay on Man, Cassirer not only summarizes his philosophy of symbolic forms

for the American public, but he also gives it an anthropological twist. Although he thinks that

the classic definition of man as "animal rationale" remains valid in so far as it expresses a

fundamental moral imperative, Cassirer prefers to define man as "animal symbolicum". 45

Indeed, what defines man as man, what sets the human kingdom apart from the animal one, is

not so much the "excentric position" of man, as Plessner thought, nor his "biological

defectiveness", as Gehlen thought, but it is his capacity of "symbolic ideation". Man is that

being that has access to reality and to him- or herself only in and through symbols. Man is

never confronted with immediate reality, but only with a reality which is symbollically

mediated. Unlike animals, man does not respond immediately to the stimuli of his

environment, but as Mead and Dewey had noted already well before Cassirer, man delays his

response by inserting a complex process of mind and tools which present the world to him

both as will (tools) and as representation (mind). Paradoxically, man can only have access to

reality by distancing himself from it, by inserting a "symbolic net" or a "symbolic system"

between himself and his environment. Without mentioning Simmel's theory of the

depragmatisation of knowledge as the precondition of the autonomisation of the forms,

Cassirer nevertheless arrives at the same conclusion:

44 This thought experiment is repeatedly taken up by Cassirer. [Link] und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs, pp.
211 sq.; Symbol, Technik, Sprache, Hamburg, 1985, pp. 5 sq. and Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen,
Band III: Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis, Darmstadt, 1964, pp. 191 sq.
45 Cassirer, E.: An Essay on Man, New Haven, 1972, p. 26.
31

"Long before it enters into those forms, life is in itself oriented toward certain goals. But

knowledge always implies a break with this immediacy of life. ... All knowledge of the world

and all spiritual working on the world requires that the I acquires a certain distance from the

world. ... This acquisition of the 'world as representation' is the goal and the product of the

symbolic forms - it is the result of language, myth, religion, art, and theoretical knowledge.

Each constructs its own intelligible realm of internal significance that detaches itself neatly

and sharply from all purely purposive behaviour in the biological sphere". 46

However, unlike Simmel, Cassirer refuses to consider this "turn towards the idea" as a

one-way street in which life alienates itself. Culture does not so much signify the alienation

of life from its origin and its end as it signifies its genuine fulfillment. In accord with Kant,

Cassirer denies that culture's task is eudaemonistic. Culture does not promise happiness, but

gradually it realises freedom. By inserting a middle realm of culture between himself and his

environment, man becomes free as the "power of impression" consciously gives way to the

"power of expression". Through culture man becomes aware of his own formative influence,
47

and, like Hegel, Cassirer is convinced that becoming conscious is the the alfa and the omega

of freedom.

Simmel, however, as we have seen, reached the opposite conclusion: culture is tragic;

it reifies life and alienates man, leading to a generalised loss of meaning and freedom.

Cassirer severely criticises Lebensphilosophie in general and Simmel's theory of the tragedy

of culture in particular. According to Cassirer, the opposition between life and the forms,
48

46 Cassirer, E.: Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Band III, p. 322-333.

47 Cassirer, E.: Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Band II, p. 31.
48 Cfr. Cassirer, E.: "Die 'Tragödie der Kultur' ", in Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften. Fünf Studien,
Darmstadt, 1961, ch. 5 and passim; " 'Spirit' and 'Life' in Contemporary Philosophy", in Schilpp, P. (ed.): The
Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, pp. 857-880, and Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Band I, pp. 48 sq.
32

between culture and the soul, on which Simmel's analysis ultimately rests, is a false one. It is

the triple result of undialectical thought: First, instead of dialectically interrelating the life

and the forms, by showing that they both presuppose each other, Simmel tends to oppose

them as if they were two substances, the one belonging to the subjective, the other to the

objective sphere. As a result, Simmel not only misses the interplay, but, according to

Cassirer, he relapses into a kind of substantialism which he himself had previously overcome.

Next, and more importantly, Simmel treats the cultural forms as finished, almost thinglike

entities. If, instead of considering forms as finished products, we generalise Humboldt's

injunction to treat language not as ergon but as energeia, not as work but as praxis, then the

problem immediately assumes a different form. Not only do the forms appear as the

expression of form-creating power, but, given that culture cannot vicariously be understood,

we also gain access from within to the realm of culture. And when we do that, when we

actively enter and take part in the formation of objective spirit, we no longer lose ourselves in

an act of alienation, but we rather find our-selves and our fellow-human beings in an act of

participation. Then it appears that we not only reproduce cultural forms, but that we are also

produced by them. And by reproducing forms, which are always already there as a legacy of

our predecessors, we not only form ourselves, but we also gain access to a supra-individual,

intersubjective world of meaning which we share in common with our fellow human beings.

Indeed, in so far as culture appears as the common ground of human beings, we can indeed

say with Cassirer that culture in general and language in particular provide "a bridge from

individual to individual". In summary, Cassirer expresses his ideas in a beautiful passage,

49

49Cassirer, E.: "Davoser Disputation zwischen Ernst Cassirer und Martin Heidegger", in Heidegger, M.: Kant
und das Problem der Metaphysik, p. 264.
33

which not only reminds us of G.H. Mead, but which already anticipates Habermas theory of

communicative action : 50

"This thing-world is radically despiritualised... Therefore, in this image of nature, human

culture can find neither a place nor a home. In any case, culture is an 'intersubjective world; a

world which does not exist in 'me' but which is accessible to all subjects and in which they

should all participate. But this participation is completely different from participation in the

physical world. Instead of relating themselves to the same spatio-temporal cosmos of things,

the subjects find and unite themselves in their common action. And when they accomplish

that with one another, they recognize each other and they all know of each other in the

medium of the different form-worlds, out of which culture is constructed. ... I and Thou are

not ready givens, which, through the effects which they exercise on each other, create the

forms of culture. It rather appears that in those forms and thanks to them both spheres, the

world of I and the one of Thou as well, are first constituted. ...The true 'synthesis' is first

accomplished in the active exchange which we see in typical form in every linguistic

understanding [Verständigung]. The constancy which we need for that is ... the constancy of

meaning". 51

Last but not least, Cassirer criticises Simmel because, like Weber in his treatment of

bureaucratisation and the routinisation of charisma, he brings the dialectic to a standstill.

50 Cassirer is very much influenced by Von Humboldt. Reading Cassirer, I have got the feeling that
Habermas’ main intuition, according to which the telos of understanding inheres in language as such, can
already be found in Humboldt’s philosophy of language. It would be worthwile to see to what extent
Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action picks up and systematically develops ideas which Humboldt first
formulated in his famous introduction to the Kawiwork. Cfr. Von Humboldt, W.: “Ueber die Verschiedenheit
des menschliches Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts”, in
Werke, Band III: Schriften zur Sprachphilosophie, Darmstadt, 1963, pp. 368-756.
51 Cassirer, E.: Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften. Fünf Studien, 1961, Darmstadt, pp. 75 and 50.
34

Culture as a form creating power is at the same time necessarily and really a "form-breaking,

a form-destroying one". There's indeed a tension between stabilisation and creation, between
52

a tendency which leads towards stable and rigid forms, and one which breaks this rigidity -

but, unless one wants to ravel in despair, there's no need to assume that the future is closed

off. Instead of mystically yearning for a return, we must rather try to move forwards.

It has been said that Cassirer has always been somewhat "reluctant to accept the

negative". This is true, but if he underplays the tragic opposition of life and form, he
53

nevertheless pays due attention to the opposition between the forms themselves: "The true

place of combat reveals itself, he says, not simply there where the mediacy of the spirit is

fighting the immediacy of life, but rather there where the missions of the spirit itself, in so far

as they always differentiate themselves more finely, at the same time more and more alienate

themselves from each other". 54

Unlike Simmel, who thought, as we have seen, that the forms do no more oppose each

than "colours and sounds" do, Cassirer stresses the potential of conflict between the forms.

Some of the forms can, others can not, coexist in the same mind or in the same cultural

environment. Language, for instance, lives together with religion peacefully and in fruitful

cooperation; scientific knowledge and technology complement each other, and even tend to

fuse happily into each other. But scientific knowledge and myth are incompatible with each

other and the same is true for religion and secular law, and for technology and ethics as well.

52 Cassirer, E.: " 'Spirit' and 'Life' in Contemporary Philosophy", in Schilpp, P. (ed.): The Philosophy of Ernst
Cassirer, p. 879.
53 Kroise, J. M.: Cassirer. Symbolic Forms and History, Yale, 1987, p. 210.
54 Cassirer, E.: Symbol, Technik, Sprache, p. 78.
35

In the second and especially in the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,

Cassirer takes the conflicts within and between the forms as the starting point of a

"phenomenology of knowledge" which considers the odyssey of spirit in terms of a

55

progressive movement of ever increasing spiritualisation (Vergeistigung). Cassirer

distinguishes three functions of mind, which he respectively names the "expressive", the

"representational" and the "conceptual function". And not unlike Hegel, he describes those

functions as so many dialectical stages in the development of the mind's relationship to its

object. The expressive function, as it most purely represented by myth, is a stage of the

simple unity of symbol and object; no genuine distinction is made between symbol and

object. The representational function, as expressed in language, is a stage of disjunction of

symbol and object; the object is regarded as wholly other than the symbol. The conceptual

stage, as it is most purely expressed by science, is a stage in which the separation is

overcome; the object is viewed as a construction of the symbol, as a symbol of different

order. Moreover, moving from the mimetic to analogical and the symbolic phase, each of the

forms has to go through an analogous three-phasic movement of unity, disjunction and

reunification. Although Cassirer severely criticises Hegel for abolishing the autonomy of the

symbolic forms, he's clearly influenced by him, even to the point that he seems to be caught

in a genuine Kantian-Hegelian dilemma : On the one hand, he follows Kant and recognises
56

the qualitative diversity of the symbolic forms. The symbolic forms are autonomous, self-

sufficient objectivations of the spirit; each following its immanent laws and none being

reducible to another one. On the other hand, he follows Hegel, and placing himself explicitly

in the traces of the Phenomenology of Spirit, he transmutes the forms into dialectical
55Cassirer, E.: Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Band III, p. VI. For an excellent outline of Cassirer's
phenomenology cfr. Verene, P.: "Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer: The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms", Journal of the History of Ideas, 1969, 30, 1, pp. 33-46.
56 Knoppe, T.: Die theoretische Philosophie Ernst Cassirer's. Zu den Grundlagen transzendentaler
Wissenschafts- und Kulturtheorie, Hamburg, 1992, ch. 9.
36

processes and, eventually, ends up considering the functions which they express as so many

phases in the ongoing movement towards greater spiritualisation. It is true that Cassirer's

dialectisation of the conflict between the forms does not end up in a metaphysical philosophy

of history, which substantialises and reifies one of the forms, with the double result that a

symbolic function is transformed into a substance, or maybe better into a subject, and that the

other forms are modalised as so many ways of the essential being of that subject.

Nonetheless, once we stress the dynamism, envisaging the development of spirit as a

succession of forms, the immanence and autonomy of the forms singly taken is seriously

called in question.

According to Cassirer, some cultural forms have an immanent tendency to hegemony.

Instead of peacefully coexisting with each other and complementing each other, instead of

accepting their relative position in the whole, some of the forms pretend to absolute validity

and try to subdue the other forms by incorporating their contents. In The Myth of the State,

Cassirer analyses the fascist catastrophe in terms of a pathological, systematically induced

dedifferentiation or fusion of the autonomous symbolic forms. What characterises fascism,

according to Cassirer, is “repressive desymbolisation” : myths are no longer a free product of

57

imagination, but they are "made according to plan". Politicical myths - like the myth of race
58

and the myth of the Führer - are systematically manufactured and diffused by the media to

the masses. As a result, life is ritualised, the racial community is affectively cathected, the

emotions take precedence over rational faculty, and the individual’s autonomy is abolished.

In fascism, technology and myth are fused, and as they become hegemonic, they paralyse the

57 The notion of “repressive desublimation” has been forged by a French scholar as a parallel to Marcuse’s
notion of “repressive desublimation”. Cfr. Gaubert, J.: La science politique d’Ernst Cassirer, Paris, 1996, p.
103, n. 132.
58 Cassirer, E.: The Myth of the State, New Haven, 1973, p. 282.
37

oppositional power of the other forms, with the result that no critical instance remains which

can regulate and subdue the hegemonic forms. According to Cassirer, it is the task of the

philosopher and of every citizen to contribute to the development of the critical forces of art,

science, and ethics, so that the mythical monsters are continually checked and subdued by

superior forces.

4. Towards a Practical Sociology

Cassirer is a truly cosmopolitan thinker. By taking a critical stand, he has given a

practical turn to his philosophy of symbolic forms, inflecting thereby his thought from a

philosophy of representation to a philosophy of the will. Thereby, he has implicitly

ascertained the primacy of practical reason over pure reason and put his critique of culture on

new praxeological foundations. Using the standard philosophical lingo, one could say that in

his political writings he has developed a critique of practical reason, this last one being

conceived as symbolic reason.

According to Cassirer, the principal aim of all cultural forms consists in the task of

building up a common world of thought and feeling, a world of humanity which pretends to

be a koinon kosmon. Drawing on Humboldt, Cassirer conceives of language, as we have seen,

as the first and decisive step to that common world towards which culture strives. Culture in

general and language in particular provide a common ground of human beings which

connects them to each other. Culture, however, is not a thing, it is a process. As such, it

“demands a system of actions”. Culture can only be realized if it is appropriated by

59

59Cassirer, E.: “Critical Idealism as a Philosophy of Culture”, in Verene, D. (ed.): Symbol, Myth, and
Culture. Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935-1945, New Haven, 1979, p. 65.
38

individuals who, by appropriating culture, realize themselves. Culture connects, and although

culture is always bound to particular national and even individual conditions, it is potentially

universal. It transcends particular communities and offers a basis for the construction of a

common world. This common world is, however, not a given, it is an idea and an ideal. Like

reason, culture is thus not a given, but a task. In this sense, culture does indeed demand a

system of actions - actions that actualise the potential of culture and try to realise the

promises of practical reason.

In accordance with its ultimate vocation, philosophy is the guide and the caretaker of

culture and reason. Its duty is to remind us that we have to struggle for the ideals on which

our culture rests. “In the hour of [fascist] peril, the watchman slept, who should have kept

watch over us”. Nowadays, fascism is gone, but it continually reemerges under different
60

guises (nationalism, fundamentalism, etc.). We have to remain vigilant and I like to think

that, as a critical discipline, sociology has its role to play as well in furthering "the unfinished

project of Enlightenment" (Habermas). However, this presupposes that we put sociology back

on the tracks of practical philosophy. All too often, sociology has conceived of itself in a

scientistic spirit as a kind of youthful heir and emulator of the natural sciences. Without

explicitly saying so; in fact, without knowing it and maybe even without wanting it, it has

thus oriented itself towards the first critique of Kant. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant

launched, as we all know, an inquiry into the conditions of possibility of scientific

knowledge. However, his philosophical critique guarantuees the possibility of objective

knowledge only in so far as it pertains to the domain of the phenomenal world; the noumenal

domain of practice, understood in its irreducible moral dimension, cannot aspire to objective

60Albert Schweitzer, quoted by Cassirer in “The Concept of Philosophy as a Philosophical Problem”, in

Verene, D. (ed.): op. cit., p. 60.
39

or positive knowledge. Free, practical activity belongs to the realm of freedom, and for Kant

freedom falls outside the scope of science. Here, I want to argue that sociology has chosen

the wrong track and that, instead of taking its cues from the first critique, it should

systematically orient itself towards the second critique. In the Critique of Practical Reason

Kant inquires into the conditions of possibility of autonomous, moral action. Sociology

belongs to the moral sciences. Its object is the subject. It is only by dropping, once and for

all, its references to an onto-epistemological model which doesn't suit its object that it can

realise its promises as a human science, that is as a science of man as a free and moral agent.

It is only by orienting itself towards theCritique of Practical Reason that sociology can

pursue its own project. That project is at once moral and critical. It aims to further the project

of Enlightenment, and to enhance the autonomy of the subject and of society. In short:

confronted with the Kantian opposition between the domain of lawful phenomena, which are

the object of empirical knowledge, and the noumenal domain of ethical and political

freedom, which is the object of practical philosophy, sociology has to choose, and, if it

seriously and reflexively considers its subject, it has no other option but to become a practical

sociology.

For Kant, all practical philosophy is inextricably linked with the question of the

inalienable rights of man. In the question of human rights he finds the completion of practical

philosophy. However, if philosophy wants to realise its goals and enhance the autonomy of

man and society, it has to pass over from a scholastic to a worldly conception of philosophy

(conceptus cosmicus - KrV, B 867). Of course, Kant thinks that pure knowledge, knowledge

for the sake of knowledge, is important. And yet he is not satisfied with understanding

philosophy according to the pure scholastic conception of it. Philosophy has to relate itself to

the world. Properly conceived, its task is to connect all knowledge to the essential aim of
40

human reason itself. Reason is not a given, as Fichte used to say, it is a task. I like to think

that sociology has a role to play here as well. We have to struggle not only to defend the

ideals of reason, but also to realise them.