cassirer - science, symbols, and logics

7/22/2019 Cassirer - Science, Symbols, And Logics

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Ernst Cassirer:

Science, Symbols, and Logics

John W. Mohr

Department of Sociology

University of California, Santa Barbara

[email protected]

To appear in Christofer Edling and Jens Rydgren (Eds.),

Sociological Insights of Great Thinkers: Sociology through Literature, Philosophy, and

Science. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2010 (in press).

Draft Version 57, (3/8/10)

Word Count 4794 (text 4,044; references 750)


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Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) was a prominent German philosopher, intellectual

historian, and one of the first modern, systematic theorists of cultural studies. Although

he sometimes addressed political and sociological topics, his influence on contemporary

sociological theory is largely indirect. Cassirer is mainly important to sociology because

of the position that he occupied in the German intellectual field at a critical historical

juncture, the way he addressed the research problems at hand, and the influence that he

had on a subsequent generation of scholars who went on to create their own influential

theoretical programs in the cultural and social sciences. Three of Cassirers ideas are

particularly relevant to the concerns of sociologists his distinction between

substantialism and relationalism (as developed in his writings on science), his

conceptualization of cultural analysis (as worked out under the framework of his various

studies of cultural fields) and his approach to understanding institutional logics as

discursive systems (as expressed in his efforts to construct a general philosophy of

symbolic forms).1

Cassirers Life

Cassirer was born into a prominent Jewish family in Breslau, Germany in 1874.

His cousins included the publisher Bruno Cassirer, the art collector Paul Cassirer, and

the pioneering Gestalt psychologist Kurt Goldstein (Skidelsky, 2008, p.3). He was a

twenty year old literature student at the University of Berlin when, seeking more depth

of understanding, he began to attending Georg Simmels course on Kant. Simmel, who

was at the time, an acclaimed Privatdozent teaching in the philosophy department,

encouraged Cassirer to read the work of Hermann Cohen, founder of the Marburg School

of Neo-Kantianism and, not insignificantly, the first Jewish intellectual to hold a

professorship in Germany (Friedman, 2000, p. 4). Simmel emphasized how much he

1 I have relied extensively on a number of excellent Cassirer commentaries including: Verene,

(1966, 2008), Krois (1987), Friedman (2000), Lofts (2000), Bayer (2001), Skidelsky (2008) and

the papers in Barash (2008).


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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 (Cassirer, 1943, p. 222). Cassirer embraced this

challenge and moved to Marburg to take his Ph.D. with Cohen. By all accounts he was

an extraordinary student. Gawronsky (1949) reports that Cassirer read prodigiously, had

a photographic memory, was a relentless workaholic, and possessed an unusual facility

with languages. For his dissertation, Cassirer chose a topic of central concern to Cohen,

the relationship between the Kantian theory of knowledge and the modern natural

sciences. In a style that would go on to characterize all of his future work, Cassirer

approached the problem through the lens of intellectual history. His project had two

parts. The first (on Descartes), he submitted for his doctorate in 1899, the second, (on

Leibniz), Cassirer entered into the Berlin Academy competition in 1901 (which he won).

The two parts were published (together) in 1902 as a general treatise on Leibnizs

philosophy of science.

In spite of this acclaim and the obvious brilliance of his work, faculty

employment was scarce, especially for Jewish scholars, and so Cassirer lived for many

years as an independent intellectual in Berlin. During this period he wrote a number of

important works that made him quite famous. In 1906, he too became a Privatdozent at

the University of Berlin (thanks to the personal intervention of Wilhelm Dilthey) but it

was not until 1919 that he was offered a faculty appointment (a professorship) from the

newly founded (post-war and progressive) University of Hamburg.2 In the next phase of

his career Cassirer flourished he wrote all three volumes of his signature work, The

Philosophy of Symbolic Forms(1923, 1925, 1928) (as well as a great deal more) and

came to be regarded as one of the most significant philosophers in the country. He was

made rector of his university in 1929 (the first Jew to hold such a position in Germany,

Friedman, 2000, p. 4), the same year that he participated in a famous public debate with

2 Ringer describes the difficulties facing Jewish intellectuals at this moment in German history.

Even Simmel was not granted a regular faculty appointment until 1914, four years before he

died (1968:136).


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Martin Heidegger (in Davos). But when Hitler came to power (in 1933), Cassirer quickly

left Germany (never to return). He taught at Oxford for two years, moved to the

University of Goeteborg (Sweden), and finally (in 1941) to the United States, as a visiting

Professor, first at Yale, then at Columbia. He died of a heart attack in New York City in

1945, three weeks before the allied victory in Europe.

Substantialism or Relationalism? How to theorize a science of the social

Many sociologists will recognize Cassirers name from the writings of Pierre

Bourdieu who cited him frequently, most often with reference to Cassirers distinction

betweensubstantialismand relationalism. On the first page ofPractical Reason, a late-

career collection of essays geared to show what I believe to be most essential in my

work (1998, p. vii), Bourdieu says that there are really just two fundamental qualities

that define his approach, a specific philosophy of action (articulated in his inter-related

suite of concepts field, habitus, capital, etc.) and a particular philosophy of science

that one could call relationalin that it accords primacy to relations. (p.vii). Bourdieu

explains, I refer hereto the opposition suggested by Ernst Cassirer between

substantial concepts and functional or relational concepts (p.3). Bourdieu describes

relationalism as the philosophical style of the modern natural sciences and, also, as the

grounding for his own (distinctive) research program. He says:

this philosophy is only rarely brought into play in the social sciences,

undoubtedly because it is very directly opposed to the conventions ofordinary (or semi-scholarly) thought about the social world, which is more

readily devoted to substantial realities such as individuals and groupsthan to the objective relationswhich one cannot show, but which must be

captured, constructed and validated through scientific work. (1998 p.vii)

Thus, Bourdieu sees himself as crafting a relational science of the social which is

necessary to penetrate beneath the surface appearance of things, to move to a deeper level

of understanding, down to the objective relations that serve as, the structuring

structures of the social world. But why is it that Bourdieu thinks that we can only


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achieve genuine understanding if we embrace relationalism, and what exactly does he

mean by the term? To answer these questions, it is helpful to go back to Cassirer.

In his classic text, Substance and Function(SaF), Cassirer introduced the

distinction between substantialism and relationalism, defining them as two different

modes of scientific thinking, grounded in two different logics. Substantialism is the more

traditional of the two. It begins with Aristotle but variations live on in scientific theories

for centuries afterwards. Over all that time, the actual center of gravity of the system had

not changed (p.4). In other words, for Cassirer there is a deep level, in the logic itself,

the set of structuring structures, that shape how scientific theories are assembled. It is

this core logic that remains stable, even as different theories come and go. In this respect,

Cassirers project bears a similarity to Foucaults (1970) analysis of an episteme as the

apparatus which permits separating out from among all the statements which are

possible those that will be acceptable withina field of scientificity, and (thus)what

may (or) may not be characterized as scientific (1980 p.197). Like Foucault, Cassirer is

not interested in the contentof specific theories, so much as the logicalformaccording to

which statements within those theories come to be perceived as rational.3

The logic of substantialism assumes that abstraction occurs in the sorting of

things, according to common features, into taxonomic hierarchies, as species and genus.

Just as we form the concept of a tree by selecting from the totality of oaks, beaches and

birch trees, the group of common properties, so, in exactly the same way, we form the

concept of a plane rectangular figure by isolating the common properties which are found

in the square, the right angle, rhomboidwhich can be immediately seen and pointed

out (p.5). It is thus by the mental act of comparison that abstract thought (and, by

implication, scientific knowledge) is generated, it is by (r)eflection, which passes hither

3 Did Foucault read Cassirer? As a graduate student Foucault had translated one of Kants later

works into French and provided a commentary (Foucault, 2008). Because Cassirer edited Kants

collected works and provided many classic commentaries, Foucault certainly knew some of

Cassirers writings, but whether he had read Cassirers substantive work, I cannot tell. At one

point, White (1973) reports that Foucault indicated an affinity for the thought of the late Ernst

Cassirer (p. 25), but of course there were also vast differences between them. Cassirer was

the quintessential modernist, and Foucault, the classic post-modernist.


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and thither among the particular objects in order to determine the essential features in

which they agree (p.5).

As a logic for analysis, this has some merit because (i)ts presuppositions are

simple and clear; and they agree so largely with theordinary view of the worldthat

they seem to offer no foothold for criticism (p.4). But what is necessarily highlighted in

this approach is an essentialism, a focus on the giveness, the reification of things as they

appear in the world and this justifies the pursuit of the elemental substances from which

the thing of the world are fashioned. (T)he determination of the concept according to its

next higher genusreproduces the process by which the real substance successively

unfolds itself and its special forms of being (p. 7). Thus, (t)he biological species

signifies both the end toward which the living individual strives and the immanent force

by which its evolution is guided (p.7). In other words, our logics both enable and

constrain us. For substantialists (q)uantity and quality, space and time determinations,

do not exist in and for themselves, but merely as properties of absolute realities which

exist by themselves (p. 8).

While such a system may be suited to the descriptive and classifying natural

sciences, this logic was a brake on the advance of other kinds of science and

mathematics itself. Drawing on close readings of the history of science, Cassirer

suggests that a new logic of analysis, explicitly modeled on mathematical rationality,

begins to emerge among scientists as early as the Renaissance. This alternate approach

finds its footing when some scholars refuse the questions imposed by conventional

(substantialist) thought. Galileo avoided the question as to the cause of weight and

Robert Mayer, famous for his pronouncement that energy can be neither created nor

destroyed, says of his own project, I do not know what heat, electricity etc. are in their

inner essence just as little as I know the inner essence of a material substance or of

anything in general; I know this, however, that I see the connection of many phenomena

much more clearly than has hitherto been seen, and that I can give a clear and good

notion of what a force is (p.139-140). In contrast to Aristotelian analysis that does not

change the constitution of consciousness and of objective reality, but merely institutes

certain limits and divisions in it, (p.14) the new logic expands abstraction outwards,

away from the knowledge of particulars toward generalized principles of understanding.


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In this style of thinking the world of sensible thingsis not so much reproduced as

transformed and supplanted by an order of another sort (p.14). It is (t)his

transformation, this change into a new form of logical being, (that) constitutes the real

positive achievement of abstraction (p.22-23). Verene explains the philosophical

significance of this insight: Cassirer realizes that the concept of the mathematical

function shows with complete clarity what philosophy has long been seeking the

inseparability of the universal and the particular achieved through their mutual

determinations (Verene, p. 2008, p. 97).

Function-conceptsmake explicit use of mathematical principles, but the most

refined expressions of this logic are those cast in purely relational terms. Relationality

in this sense implies a theory of the whole and its parts according to which the meaning

of the thing is given in its relatedness to the whole. No doubt Cassirers connection to

Simmel, Cohen, and the Gestalt theorists, his own studies of Leibniz, as well as his grasp

of turn of the century mathematics and physics all contributed to his presumption that,

we first have true knowledge when we survey the total movement of the process as a

purposively ordered whole. We must understand how one element demands another; how

all the threads are mutually interwoven finally into one web, to form a single order of the

phenomena of nature (Page 133).

About the time that SaFwas first published (1910), Kurt Lewin was a young

graduate student in psychology at the University of Berlin where he attended

Privatdozent Cassirers lectures on the philosophy of science. Lewin was another

brilliant, underemployed Jewish intellectual. He was wounded in the war, completed his

Ph.D. under Stumpf, had close ties to the Frankfurt school, and like Cassirer, left

Germany in 1933. Unlike Cassirer, however, Lewin went almost immediately to the

United States where he built a successful academic career and became an important, if

iconoclastic, leader in the field of American social psychology. In his tribute essay,

Lewin notes that in the 40 years that he had known Cassirer, scarcely a year passed

when I did not have specific reason to acknowledge the help which Cassirers views on

the nature of science and research offered, (1949, p.272). Certainly the parallels in their

projects are striking. Lewin, for example, published an essay (1935) in which he sought

to apply Cassirrers ideas about the two styles of scientific logic (The Aristotelian and


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The Galoliean) to understand his own academic field. In that piece, and later as he

worked on developing his own field theoretic approach to social science, Lewin focused

wholeheartedly on the development of a genuinely relational approach to social science.

Lewin had arrived in the United States just as quantitative styles of analysis were

beginning to firmly take root in the American social sciences (Mohr & Rawlings,

forthcoming; Platt, 1996). As Stevens (1959) notes, these were the years during which

the business of pinning numbers on things(had)become a pandemic

activity(where) the attitude seems to be: if it exists, measure it (p.18). Lewin was

skeptical of much that he saw in this regard. Though he was fiercely committed to

developing a scientific program of research, he was nonetheless convinced that his own

discipline was hopelessly locked into susbtantialist styles of thinking, leading them to

produce elaborate schemes for measuring thing-concepts, which, often as not, end up

producing a well polished container of nothing (1949, p.272). Recalling Cassirers

discussion of the history of physics and chemistry, Lewin notes that (s)ome of the

present day theoretical problems in psychology show great methodological similarities to

these controversies although they are historically separated by centuries (1951, p.30).

Lewin set out to design his own system for measuring social psychological

processes in a relational manner by following Einsteins notion of field space which he

defined as the totality of coexisting facts which are conceived of as mutually

interdependent (1951:240). Borrowing from topology theory, a branch of mathematics

concerned with the formal analysis of relational systems, Lewin developed a

mathematical system (he called hodological space) for examining models of the life

space which he defined as the person and the psychological environment as it exists for

him (1951:57). They included goals, stimuli, needs, social relations..., indeed,

everything that affects behavior at a given time (1951:241), each represented as a

region in the space, where the meaning of each region was defined by its location vis--

vis the other regions within the life space. This was measurement without reference to

metric extension or dimensional orientation. Here, Lewin cites Cassirer who points out

again and again that mathematization is not identical with quantification. Mathematics

handles quantity and quality. This is particularly apparent in those branches of geometry


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which make non-quantitative but still mathematically exact statements in regard to

position and other geometrical relations (Lewin, 1951:30-31).

Still, Lewin ended rather like Cassirer. His own project on hodological

measurement space disappeared after his death. But Lewins indirect influence was

strong and widespread. Many of his students would go on to be leaders in social

scienceLeon Festinger, Morton Deutsch, Richard Emerson all carried segments of

Lewins ideas forward. Two of his students are especially relevant for sociology, Dorwin

Cartwright and Alex Bavelas. Both were instrumental in decoupling Lewins ideas from

the more complex hodologicalmeasurement system, and switching it over instead to a

young branch of mathematics known as graph theory, thus creating some of the first

mathematically precise approaches to the analysis of a social network (Mohr,

forthcoming). Finally, there is Bourdieu. Building on Lewins field theory, Bourdieu

crafted a project that probably represents the strongest active linkage between Cassirer

and the practices of modern sociology. Notice how in Bourdieu relationalism accounts

for cultural fields, it animates his approach to power as forms of capital, it defines his

conception of interpretation as a semiotic process, and even dictates his use of formal

methodologies.

From The Critique of Pure Reason to The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

Beneath the study of science there are the problems of philosophy. For his part,

Cassirers interest in modern physics was never innocent. He had written SaFas a way to

preserve Kantian philosophy in the face of its imminent demise. Recall that Kant, near

the end of the 18thcentury, among his other accomplishments, had resolved old debates

(between empiricists and rationalists) concerning the nature of thought and the character

of knowledge by arguing that the human mind provides fundamental ordering principles

that are necessary for interpreting sensory data synthetic aprioriqualities of mind that

orient us to perceptual experiences of temporality, spatiality, causality, etc (Buroker,

2006). One goal of the Marburg school was to show that these ideas were not overly

determining (defining fixed qualities of mind), so much as a theory about the minds

capacity for symbolization that is also coupled to an existential experience of


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embodiment. This was an important focus of philosophical dispute at the time.

Positivists like Ernst Mach hoped to dismiss Kant as irrelevant by accusing him of

smuggling an implicit metaphysics into philosophy and pointing to evidence from post-

Newtonian science that undermined Kants claims and about the universality of the

categories of time and space. So, developments in 19th

century mathematics showing that

Euclidean Geometry, which corresponds to our bodily sense experience of space, was

only a special case of a much broader set of mathematical systems built on entirely non-

Euclidean assumptions were anomalies for the neo-Kantian paradigm. So were Einsteins

theories showing that time itself had knowable qualities that were beyond embodied

experience.

Cassirers arguments in SaFwere intended to rebut these critiques. This was a

central theme of Cassirers career. He never wavered in his commitment to defending the

core principles of Kantian philosophy, and especially the clear sense that the rational

pursuit of knowledge could yield progress in both scientific understanding and ethical

thought. And yet, the more deeply Cassirer became engaged by these pursuits the

harder he worked at saving Kant the more he found himself maneuvering well beyond

the bounds of any conventional neo-Kantianism. In SaF, but even more strikingly in the

three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer seeks to rebuild Kants

critical philosophy by systematically substituting a theory of symbolization for a theory

of mind or, as Verene puts it, with Cassirer, the critique of reason becomes the critique

of culture (2000, p.vii). (I)nstead of defining man as an animal rationale, you should

define him as an animal symbolicum says Cassirer (1944, p.26). And so, part of

Cassirers original innovation in his work on science was to suggest that it is in the logic

of symbols, not in the logic of mind, that the Kantian synthesis is accomplished. Thus

scientists embrace of symbolic systems, energized by a logical core, specifies how they

will notice, experience, and imagine the natural world.

But this was just the beginning of Cassirers intellectual journey. By the time he

had taken up his professorship at Hamburg, he had survived the First World War (doing

propaganda analysis for the German government) and come to acknowledge (like so

many of his age) that human societies were not necessarily governed by enlightened


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reason.4 It was surely symbolization that mattered, but, as Cassirer realized,

symbolization comes in a wide variety of forms, man lives in a symbolic universe.

Language, math, art and religion are parts of this universe. They are the varied threads

which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience (1944, p.25). Thus

Cassirers mature project starts with his goal of conducting a broad-scale analysis of the

primary symbolic domains of human societies. He follows Kant by critically examining

each of the primary symbolic domains in terms of their characteristic forms.

In this work, Cassirer developed the beginnings of a systematic interrogation of

cultural systems. Indeed, as Caws (1988) notes, Cassirers work on The Philosophy of

Symbolic Formsanticipates remarkably most of the insights and concerns of

structuralism. The symbolic forms language, math, religion, art, and science represent

for Cassirer the different modes in which human thought expresses the world to itself

(p.16). On this, Ricoeur (1970) concurs, Let us do justice to Cassirer: he was the first to

have posed the problem of the reconstruction of language. But these comments just

serve to highlight the question of why Cassirer has been so little noticed in the history of

structuralism and the cultural projects that grew from that stem. Noting Cassirers

preference for the term symbol rather than sign, Caws suggests (only half in jest), that

(h)ad it not been, in fact, for an unfortunate terminological choice, Ernst Cassirer would

certainly now be recognized as the founder of philosophical structuralism (p.16). Of

course, the matter is more complex. Ricoeur (1970) puts it simply. Cassirers problem

was that he defined the concept of the symbol too broadly as the general function of

mediation by which the mind or consciousness constructs all its universes of perception

and discourse(p.10). For Ricoeur, this crosses a true dividing line: the distinction

between univocal and plurivocal expressions. It is this distinction that creates the

hermeneutic problem(p. 11). In other words, Ricoeur thinks that to effectively interpret

symbolic forms, one must focus more specifically on the ways in which a systematic

substitution occurs in the symbolic order.

4 In his last book, Cassirer (1946) argues that fascism was an expression of the return to mythic

forms of culture achieving dominance in the logic of the state.


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While Cassirers conception of symbolic forms took him down a somewhat

different path from mainstream semiotic analysis, there are a number ways in which his

approach to the distinctive qualities of specific symbolizing domains bore important fruit.

Panofsky (1991) famously used Cassirers approach to describe the distinctive symbolic

forms of architectural theory, and Suzanne Langer (1957) was able to do much the same

with respect to her studies of music and the arts, arguing, for example, that the unique

symbolic form of music enabled it to capture and express the forms of feelings that are

incapable of being expressed linguistically. Langer acknowledges Cassirers influence

explicitly on this work. She says, It was Cassirer though he never regarded himself as

an aesthetician -- who hewed the keystone of the structure, in as broad and disinterested

study of symbolic forms; and I, for my part, we put that stone in place, to join and sustain

what so far we have built (1953, p.410).

Conclusion: Form, Content, and Logic

Here I have only begun to scratch the surface of the many ways that Cassirers

thought has had an impact on the modern social sciences. First, as a theorist of science,

Casssirer provided instructions for how to conduct effective research, and second as a

theorist of culture where he developed a foundational grounding for modern structuralism

and, hence, for much that has grown up in the field of cultural studies over this last

century. Cassirers ideas have influenced other scholars whose work we now take for

granted. There are many other examples that could be cited of scholars who were

influenced by Cassirer. He was certainly known and read by other early structuralists

including, for example, the Russian Formalists (Steiner, 1984), Bakhtin (1981) Merleu-

Ponty (1998) to name but a few. There is also much more that could be said about, the

relationship between Cassirers theory of discursive logic and the contemporary interest

in studies of the cultural and institutional logics (Friedland, 2009). In this respect it is

worth noting that there is a whole new part of Cassirers work that is beginning to come

to light as the posthumously published fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic

Forms(1996) has now begun to attract the attention of scholars (Bayer, 2001; Verene,

2008). Here the most interesting news is Cassirers apparent turn in these last works


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toward developing a more elaborate theory of practice and to the sense of the

interconnections of mind and body, logic and institution.


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cassirer - science, symbols, and logics

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