Symbols and Their Worlds

Transcription

1 REVIEWS Symbols and Their Worlds ELISE0 VIVAS Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, , edited by Donald Phillip Verene, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, xii f304 pp. $ STUDENTS OF PHILOSOPHY owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Verene for this collection of unpublished papers and lectures of Ernst Cassirer. It is known that Cassirer was one of the most important thinkers of his day and that he was also-as it was said of Rabelais in his own day-an abyss of learning. It is also known that he was one of the many scholars of great stature we have to hank the Nazis for. Driven from Germany, ne taught for a short time in Sweden and in England and finally came to a chair at Yale, where he taught for too brief a time. He died suddenly in New York in April The book contains a long introduction, presumably by Professor Verene, twelve essays or lectures, and a useful appendix describing the still unedited papers of Cassirer. Professor Verene has grouped the papers under five headings: Philosophy of Culture, Philosophy of History, Language and Art, The Myth of the State, and Knowledge and Perception. Were I asked to state in a few words Cassirer s most important contribution to contemporary philosophy, I would say that although he made important contributions to the philosophy of science and the history of ideas, his most important contribution is to be found in the three volumes entitled The Philosophy of Syrnbulic Forms (published in 1923, 1925, and 1929, and translated by Ralph Manheim and published by the Yale University Press in 1953, 1955, and 1957). At least that is how the reviewer views the matter. The notion of symbolic forms is a modification-if I were not doubtful of the possibility of modernizing philosophy I would use the expression--of the Kantian theory of knowledge. The giant of Konigsberg taught that the world in which we live-the familiar world in which we enjoy health and suffer disease and finally die-is a phenomenal world. The word phenomenon, as here used, means just appearance and not, as vulgarly used, a remarkable or unusual event or thing. The phenomenal world is the product, Kant taught, of reports called intuitions, deriving from the world external to the mind, and the means the mind contributes to make up our picture of it. Kant took these means to be universal and grouped them under two headings: two forms of intuition and twelve categories of the understanding divided in four classes. This means that no one is in direct contact with the world itself. Students know that Kant was a rigid man. Numerous veridical anecdotes, some quite amusing, are current about him. They also know that his rigidity led him to claim there were twelve categories-eleven wouldn t doeven if to complete the dozen he had to invent one. Cassirer s modification of the Kantian theory consisted in discarding Kant s means of knowledge and substituting for them fluid and loose symbols. At this point a most important linguistic distinction must be noted: Symbols are not signs, although at times, in the English text at least, the word sign is used when the word symbol is called for. Signs merely point, symbols are, as Cassirer puts it, formative, or as I prefer to put it, constitutive. There is another important distinction 78 Winter 1980

2 between Kant and Cassirer: Kant deduced his means of knowledge; Cassirer does not offer us a deduction ci la Kant. In his American book, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (1944), after a sixty-two page discussion of the problems of philosophical anthropology, he takes up, in Part 11, an exposition of the symbolic forms in this order: Myth and religion, language, art, history, and science. The exposition of these distinct modes of human experience (as I prefer to call them) makes up a philosophy of culture. It is of course an obvious implication that the varieties of culture men create are the result of the fluidity and looseness of the means used to create them. For some reason in the American book Cassirer placed myth and religion before language, although usually he considers language, as seems reasonable, first. Note also that Cassirer seems to be thinking of high or fully developed civilizations. It can be argued that all cultures possess science in the sense of practical knowledge--all cultures possess knowledge lying, as Samuel Pepys said of the shipwrights of his day, in their hands, confusedly. But science in the sense in which we use the term, honorifically, is probably absent from the greatest number of cultures. throughout history. It is absent, I would insist, even if it were argued, as it can fairly be, that it is not always a question of either or but of more or less. Further, since Cassirer distinguishes between myth and history, it should be noted that not all cultures possess history, which in the West began relatively late with the Researches of the magnificent storyteller of Hallicarnassus. How does Cassirer arrive at the symbolic forms? He tells us that a philosophy of man would be one that would give us an insight into the structure of human activities and which at the same time would enable us to understand them as an organic whole. He adds that we cannot neglect any possible information. We must examine all the available empirical evidence, and utilize all the methods of introspection, biological observation, and historical inquiry. It is of interest to notice, first, that Cassirer refers to biological observation. Biology can teach us, no doubt, something about human nature, but I dare say it cannot teach us anything distinctive about man, since biologically, strictly speaking, he is no different from his near relatives. It is also of interest to notice that Cassirer does not mention anthropology, as an American thinker would have. Since he refers to Wilhelm von Humboldt s work on language, he must have known his brother s account of his travels in Mexico and the Upper Orinoco, Voyages am regions equinoziales du Nouveaux Continent. But Cassirer was not sensitive to the value of the study of primitive men for philosophical anthropology. His method, then, is an unsystematic survey of human experience. But the survey is not fairly open to objection on this ground, since it was conducted by a man of vast learning and catholic interests. But why did he pick on the six forms and not on less or more than six? I do not find an answer to this question in the Cassirer I have read. Why does he not mention magic, for instance, since he considers myth? Surely magic is as deeply rooted in all human cultures without exception, and plays as important a role in them, as myth does. While pretending to explain events and to control them, magic serves to organize human experience in a pseudo-rational way that appears to be satisfactory to minds that are not fully rational-as no mind is. The view that men live in a phenomenal world is today, in somewhat different versions, fairly current. In the last few years, in my unsystematic reading, I have come across a number of assertions that hold, as one would put it in philosophic terms, that the languages men speak are constitutive of the worlds-r more precisely, the conceptions of the worlds-in which they live. The best known of these hypotheses is that of Benjamin Lee Whorf, who owes his theory, I believe, to Edward Sapir, in whose writings I first encountered the notion of the relation of language to culture. But Whorf deserves credit because he carried the hypotheses further, I believe, than Sapir. It should be noted that while linguistic and psychological Modern Age 79

3 theories can be said to corroborate Cassirer s view of the relation of his symbolic forms to men s phenomenal worlds, they do not do so logically or systematically; they merely argue roughly the same thesis, since they do not bring to bear on the problem the heavy weaponry Cassirer brought to bear on his hypothesis. Sapir was a very learned man. Anthropologists of the stature of Clyde Kluckhohn, A. L. Kroeber and Robert H. Lowie-themselves men of stature-have praised him in the highest terms. But then, Sapir-endowed with a fine philosophical mind-was no philosopher, Cassirer was. Cassirer was, indeed, a philosopher, and not merely, like the majority of us, a teacher or at best a student of philosophy. But he was human. It is desirable to dwell on some of the lacunae and blemishes of his views. I shall not rcpcat thc criticisms of his philosophy of science made by experts but will notice first a defect that may be considered minor but that interfered seriously with my re-reading, recently, of his chapter on Art in An. Essay On Man. I had not quite gone through half the chapter when I became aware of thp fart thnt 1 was having difficulty keeping my mind on the exposition because of the rushing down-pour of citations and names thrown at me. Not all of these stayed sharply in focus on the topic under discussion. I tried not to think of a peacock I had seen not long ago strutting in display of a fully spread tail before a fountain. In vain. A more serious blemish consists in the fact that although the analysis of the constituents of culture are often brilliant and at times profound, the reader will not find in this part of the book a discussion of a number of topics that are required before a complete philosophical anthropology can be claimed to have been presented. One misses a genetic account of the modes of experience or the symbolic forms, obviously relevant to the problem of human evolution. Cassirer considers quite adequately a number of theories of the origin of language. but one gathers that he takes the problem to be beyond solution. One misses a discussion of the ways in which the modes of experience cooperate-of their interinanima- tion, in I. A. Richards term-and of their conflicts and repulsions, although he has stated that they ought to be taken up as an organic whole. Neither the relation of art to religion nor that of art to morality are discussed. Cassirer had at his disposal means to make an important contribution to these problems and did not use them. Considered as a mode of symbolic expression art is, strictly speaking, autonomous. To be art it must serve its own ends. But partisans would have it serve their ends. T. S. Eliot would have it serve morality while Krushchev chained it to politics. Timothy Dwight feared it as the antichamber of the brothel. Since the matter for art (CCzanne s edible apples) is transubstantiated as it is in-formed, and particularly in poetry it is the stuff of human life, it is no wonder its autonomy is misunderstood. This is a problem, as we know, that has been nagging us since Plato s days, about which the quarrel is as intense and lively today as it ever was. A somewhat similar statement can be made about the relation of art to religion. At one pole these modes of eyppriel?ce seem to be 9 intim&?!y fcsed 2s to be indistinguishable, as in Greek Orthodox ceremonies; at another we encounter the Euclidean aesthetics of the meetings of the friends. Short of a discussion of these topics and others of similar nature we cannot say that a philosophical anthropology is complete. As regards Cassirer s discussion of language, it cannot be faulted so far as it goes. His immense learning of this subject is conveyed in a lucid exposition. But Cassirer lived in a time when the notion of language was restricted to the sort of noises we make when we talk or to the thoughts we have when we write or think. On this view, language erects an impassible barrier between man and the other animals and man alone is thought to be capable of conceptual thought. Relatively recently this view of language has been successfully eradicated by teaching Ms. Washoe, a distinguished chimp, the sign language of the deaf, called in the United States Ameslan. This young lady not only uses Ameslan but she has taught friends with 80 Wder 1980

4 whom she lives a few of the signs she knows. It is unnecessary to say that her use of Ameslan is extremely limited. But the literature on the subject leaves no doubt that she and her fellow chimps are capable of using concepts that are more than mere signs; they are symbols. It would be absurd to claim that Ms. Washoe is in a class with Kant or even with the village idiot. The claim is solely that if we enlarge the notion of language to include the sign language of the deaf, Ms. Washoe and her friends are not altogether devoid of the capacity to conceptualize, even if in a very rudimentary way, the way that Kant did. The upshot? Obviously one more point for Saint Charles and his bull-dog, Thomas Henry. Before leaving this topic it should be noted that Cassirer is not open to criticism because of his failure to enlarge his conception of language. Until American psychologists conceived the idea of teaching Ameslan to chimps and succeeded in so doing the belief that non-human animals were capable of conceptual thought was nothing but pure faith grounded on an unempirical extrapolation of the theory of evolution. Another criticism, in the reviewer s opinion a most serious one, must be recorded. In the Introduction there is a section entitled Cassirer and Ethics. Succinctly put, the criticism is that on Cassirer s definition of man his moral philosophy is inadequate; or to put it differently, that on his view of man he cannot develop what, in my arbitrary use of the term, I call an ethical as distinct from a moral theory. This is a criticism that a Kantian scholar ought not to be open to, but Cassirer is-which to my mind shows that Cassirer was not as seriously interested in moral philosophy as he was in other subjects. An ethics, in my use of the term, is reared on the unqualified assumption of the primacy of the person of the other, whereas moralityagain as I use the term-is built on the assumption that one s values, his private values as well as those he shares with his fellows, are to be augmented or at least preserved. The distinction between ethics and morality could not be more radical. And the criticism of Cassirer is that on a functional definition of man, there can be no theoretical answer, as distinct from a pragmatic one, to those who accept as true the beastly obscenities of, let us say, a Julius Streicher. Let us see why. Note first that Cassirer could not be more emphatic and clear than he is about his definition of man, about which he tells us in An Essay on Man that the philosophy of symbolic forms starts from the presupposition that, if there is any definition of the nature or essence of man this definition can be only understood as a functional one, not a substantial one. A few lines below we are told that man s outstanding characteristic is not his metaphysical or physical nature but his work. By man s work, I guess, Cassirer must be taken to mean, primarily, his capacity to rear cultures by means of his symbolic endowment. Let us grant this to be the case, although he is not explicit about it. Surely unless you take Melville Herskovits extreme position-an utterly absurd hypothesis that I have shown up on more than one occasion-that there is no difference in quality among cultures, we must acknowledge that some cultures are worthy of praise as contrasted with others. Unfortunately today we do not need a concrete instance of an evil culture. One almost succeeded in establishing itself for a thousand years. But if it is the case that one culture is preferable to another and man s nature is defined by his work, no answer can be given in theory-again as distinct from a pragmatic answer-to a man who would advocate the beastly obscenities of a Julius Streicher. You may be able to show this man that he is wrong and his activities in doing away with a people because their work is evil are wrong. But this is a pragmatic reply, not a theoretical refutation. The ethical man, in the arbitrary sense I use the term, as distinguished from the moral man, asserts that the denial of the personality of another human being is wrong. Nor is this to say, let me note in passing, as it is sometimes interpreted to mean, that war or capital punishment, without further qualification, is wrong. Note, however, that I am not saying that Cassirer the man was not an ethical man. Modern Age 81

5 What I am saying is that his philosophy offered no grounds for an ethics in the arbitrary sense I use the term. 1 turn last to a criticism of Cassirer s aesthetics, a criticism the validity of which I hold with confidence, but that I advance with some hesitation, since I am keenly aware of Cassirer s acquaintance with European literature and art and I am also aware of his knowledge of the history of criticism and of his profound interest in aesthetics. Indeed, in the original plan for The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, we have been told, a fourth volume on art was to be included that was never written. In the book under review three papers on art are to be found, and in his last book there is a chapter on art already referred to. My criticism, succinctly put, is that Cassirer failed to draw the implications and entailments of his theory of the constitutive role of the symbolic forms for his definition of the function of art. I must limit the exposition of my point severely, for an adequate presentation of it would call for a long essay loaded with long quotations. And I shall restrict my comments to the chapter on Art in An Essay on Man, since it is presumably his most mature treatment of the subject. There is much in the chapter that I shall overlook, for instance Cassirer s misunderstanding of Croce and Collingwood, fully disposed of by Katherine Gilbert. What is here of interest is Cassirer s discussion of the general theory of imitation, about which he tells us that it seemed to hold its ground and to defy all attacks up to the first half of the eighteenth century. Had he written that it was accepted as true, had he stressed the seeming, he could not be faulted. For the theory of imitation was not true up to the first half of the eighteenth century and then became false; the truth has never been decided by counting heads-except, perhaps, in Tammany Hall and joints of that sort. Anyhow, after Rousseau, Cassirer writes, art was no longer taken to be imitative, but it was taken to be formative before it was beautiful. For man has in him a formative nature, which displays itself in activity as soon as his existence is secure. It is best not to dwell on the historical aspect of this statement, except to assert, on the authority of Franz Boas, that no people, however primitive and destitute, has ever been known that did not spend energies needed for survival on the making of art. It is because man has a formative nature, which is to say that an element of creativity enters in all he does (until it becomes well established and therefore routine) that the theory of imitation is and has always been, whether before or after the first half of the eighteenth century, hopelessly in error. If the work of art is the product of man s formative nature, or as I prefer to put it, of man s creative capacity, or more precisely, insofar as it is, that objecta portrait, a still life, a novel or a play-is unlike the phenomenal world that may have originally suggested it. The apples on CCzanne s canvas painted, let me guess, after close scrutiny of the edible apples he had piled on a table on a tablecloth, these apples are not an imitation of the edible apples, nor are they, as Cassirer tells us a few lines below the last statement cited, a condensation and concentration of reaiity, or as he puts it again, an intensification of reality. If in this statement Cassirer means-as he must-an intensification of the phenomenal world, it is reality that has to do with art and not art with reality because, as he put it earlier and put it truly, art is formative. This is the muddle that I mention with hesitation. Cassirer tells us that art gives us an intuition of the forms of things. He qualified by adding that this is not a mere repetition of something we had before. But he adds further that the artist is as much a discoverer of the forms of nature as the scientist is a discoverer of facts or natural laws. What I am saying is that on Cassirer s own theory, if he had not been as concerned as he was with the wretched theory of imitation, he would not-emphasis on the negative-have asserted without qualification that art discovers the forms of nature. This assertion can be made by an epistemological realist, not by a phenomenalist. The artist cannot step beyond the phenomenal world into the world in itself. Art does indeed 82 Winter 1980

6 discover forms, but these are forms created by the artist out of intuitions that cannot be observed by themselves but that are always observed already in-formed by the constitutive power of the mind. What the artist and those who use his art do is to project forms into a nature they can never discern by itself. This means that they use it as a means to discover phenomena that otherwise they would fail to perceive or to perceive clearly. But notice that between these two statements there is a radical difference. Myopic people will know what I mean when I say that the world is not really visible for him without eyeglasses. What I see without them is a blur. When I put them on the world becomes visible. And here I have stated, in passing, as I have already suggested, the function of art. Art is used for many purposes, but its residential function, that function that it must serve if it is to be art and not something else, is to be a means of perception-using the term perception in its former psychological sense. Is the point I have tried lo make against Cassirer barely discernible-a distinction without a difference? It may not be disccrniblc to those whose interests are to be found elsewhere. Those interested in aesthetics cannot disdain it. On the distinction is based the utility and the worth of art. It would be ungrateful of the reviewer to close on a negative note. He owes Cassirer an immense debt. What, he knows about the function of art he stole from many counters, usually under the very nose of the floorwalker. One of the counters from which he made his most valuable rip-off was the Cassirer counter and one of the most valuable jewels he put away in his pocket was the theory of the constitutive role of art-a theory that he has the chutzpa to boast that by the study of Cassirer he came to understand more clearly than the German did. But whether this is the case or not the reviewer has no doubt that Cassirer is one of the major figures of contemporary philosophy. There may be others of equal stature, there are no others that surpass him.