Abstract
If we wish to read Ernst Cassirer from a contemporary perspective and want to ascertain his philosophical significance, it might make some sense to follow how Foucault fared in his similar attempt with Hegel. In his inaugural address at the Collège de France – later published under the title The Order of Discourse – Foucault asserts that it is never easy to distance oneself from Hegel: ‘In order to really free oneself from Hegel, we first have to assess the cost of renouncing him. We have to realize the extent to which Hegel perhaps secretly influences us; that our thoughts against him might actually come from him.’1 Of course Cassirer isn’t Hegel, and we can’t characterize the 65-odd years that separate us from Cassirer as a time of opposition against him, since Cassirer has been either ignored or forgotten for two-thirds of those 65 years.
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Notes
Michel Foucault, Die Ordnung des Diskurses ( Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991 ), 45.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1: Language, trans. Ralph Manheim ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971 ), 76.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, Mythical Thought, trans. Ralph Manheim ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971 ), 12.
Ernst Cassirer, Leibniz’ System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen, in: Cassirer, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Birgit Recki (Hamburg: Meiner, 1998–2009), vol. 1, 418. For a comparison of Cassirer’s philosophy of the symbol with leibnizian Monadology, see the chapter ‘Symbol und Ausdruck: Die Leibnizschen Quellen der Philosophie der symbolischen Formen’, in Massimo Ferrari, Ernst Cassirer: Stationen einer philosophischen Biographie, trans. Marion Lauschke (Hamburg: Meiner, 2003), 163–82. For a general overview, see
Martina Plümacher, Wahrnehmung, Repräsentation und Wissen: Edmund Husserls und Ernst Cassirers Analysen zur Struktur des Bewußtseins ( Berlin: Parerga, 2004 ).
Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function, trans. William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953 ), 281.
Ibid. In recent research in the philosophy of science, the concept of representation is used similarly. A representation is here not understood as a presentation ‘of something’ but a presentation ‘in something’. See Hans -Jörg Rheinberger, Michael Hagner, Bettina Wahrig-Schmidt (eds), Räume des Wissens: Repräsentation, Codierung, Spur (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), 9f: ‘The molecular turn in biology since the middle of the 20th century appears to imply that the traditional relation between representation and reference might have been turned upside down insofar as the molecular script can no longer be thought of as a presentation of something. Instead it is the primordial instance that first generates the representation… Representation realizes itself in completely different forms than experimental order.’
See also Andreas Graeser, Ernst Cassirer ( München: Beck, 1994 ), 31.
Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge, trans. Ralph Manheim ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957 ), 128–9.
In this connection, see also Oswald Schwemmer, Ernst Cassirer: Ein Philosoph der europäischen Moderne ( Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997 ), 89–107.
Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 1, 107. In Zur Logik des Symbolbegriffs,from 1938, Cassirer answers the critique of Konrad Marc-Wogaus by clarifying that the separation between presentation and representation is a ‘relative separation’ or an ‘ideal separation’. See Ernst Cassirer, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Birgit Recki (Hamburg: Meiner, 1998–2009), vol. 22, 120f. Elsewhere Cassirer makes it clear that it is impossible to uncover a layer of immediate experience. Present and representative only display themselves in their attachment.
See Ernst Cassirer, Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, eds John Michael Krois and Oswald Schwemmer (Hamburg: Meiner, 1995–2009), vol. 1, 48f. In fact, to differentiate a sensory consciousness from a mental one is problematic. Oswald Schwemmer interprets the relation between presentation and representation as a relation between ‘primary’ ideational realization and secondary realization, in Schwemmer, Ernst Cassirer, 95ff. The formulization of Cassirer’s that he quotes appears to justify this interpretation. A process in which the artistic symbolic ‘interprets’ the natural symbolic is therefore hypothetical. A ‘primary’ ideational realization cannot actually be ‘conscious’ –- without negating the stated relational character of consciousness. Such a kind of sensory consciousness must be rejected. See also Dominic Kaegi, ‘Jenseits der symbolischen Formen: Zum Verhältnis von Anschauung und künstlicher Symbolik bei Ernst Cassirer’, Dialektik 1 (1995), 73–84.
For a convincing defence of ‘reference’ in literary criticism, see Eckhard Lobsien, ‘Mimesis und Referenz: Paradigma Ulysses’, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 50:2 (2005), 227–43. Lobsien understands reference–or what is represented in literature–to be something that ‘is realized in the presence of the circumstance referred to’, 242. All representations–artistic ones included–are for him (and Cassirer) ‘primary definitions’: ‘Representation produces that which is represented. The representation is necessary for the evocation of the represented’ (235f). He develops a minimal definition for the concept of ‘reference’ that is only essentially fulfilled in the use of a non-simulated name. Meaning accrues first through the linking and embedding of this name in connection with a formulation, by which it is simultaneously transcended (238). ‘Reference is a singular empirical fact. The expression realized by this reference bears this fact in a context that is not a reference, but rather an elementary model of the world’ (241).
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997 ), 7.
Uwe Spörl, ‘Konzeptionen von Performanz im Rück- und Ausblick’, KulturPoetik, 5:1 (2005), 95–7 (trans. W. Dunlavey).
Dieter Schlenstedt, ‘Darstellung’, in: Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2000), 838 (trans. W. Dunlavey).
Schlenstedt here quotes Samson S. Sauerbier, Gegen Darstellung–Ästhetische Handlungen und Demonstrationen: Die zur Schau gestellte Wirklichkeit in den zeitgenössischen Künsten (Köln: Walter König, 1976), 247 (trans. W. Dunlavey).
Karl Heinz Bohrer, ‘Die “Antizipation” beim literarischen Werteurteil: Über die analytische Illusion’‚ in Bohrer: Plötzlichkeit: Zum Augenblick des ästhetischen Scheins (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 31 (trans. W. Dunlavey).
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004 ), 12.
See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Diesseits der Hermeneutik: Die Produktion von Präsenz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 12. He discusses the terminus of Heidegger’s notion of being in the world, in order to explain the void of distance in aesthetic perception.
See Gernot Grube, Repräsentationen: Skizze für einen relationalen Repräsentationsbegriff unter kritischer Bezugnahme auf Ernst Cassirer und Nelson Goodman (Berlin: dissertation. de, 2002), 56f: ‘The concept of representation is at the center of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms. To be precise, one must say that Cassirer builds a theoretical center, because this decisive conceptual instrument strikes throughout the whole world.’
Enno Rudolph, ‘Metapher oder Symbol–Zum Streit um die schönste Form der Wirklichkeit: Anmerkungen zu einem möglichen Dialog zwischen Hans Blumenberg und Ernst Cassirer’‚ in Reinhold Bernhardt, Dietrich Ritschl and Ulrike Link-Wieczorek (eds), Metapher und Wirklichkeit: Die Logik der Bildhaftigkeit im Reden von Gott, Mensch und Natur (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999), 326 (trans. W. Dunlavey).
Paul Celan, ‘Ansprache anläßlich der Entgegennahme des Literaturpreises der Freien und Hansestadt Bremen’‚ in Gesammelte Werke in sieben Bänden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), vol. 3, 186 (trans. W. Dunlavey).
Susanne K. Langer, ‘De profundis’, Revue International de Philosophie, 110: 4 (1974), 439.
Christiane Schmitz-Rigal, ‘Modi des Symbolischen und plurale Sinnwelten: Zum Verhältnis der symbolischen Formen Ernst Cassirers’‚ Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 29:3 (2004), 249–61, 251 (trans. W. Dunlavey).
Karl Heinz Bohrer, ‘Vorwort’, in Bohrer, Plötzlichkeit: Zum Augenblick des ästhetischen Scheins ( Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981 ), 7.
Martin Seel, Ästhetik des Erscheinens ( Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003 ), 62.
Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer ( New York: Dover Publications, 1953 ), 58.
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Lauschke, M. (2012). ‘Representation’ and ‘Presence’ in the Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer. In: Hoel, A.S., Folkvord, I. (eds) Ernst Cassirer on Form and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007773_9
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