Ernst Cassirer Quotes on Knowledge
Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) extended the Marburg Neo-Kantian programme into a comprehensive philosophy of culture in the three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29), arguing that knowledge in the strict scientific sense is one symbolic form among several — language, myth, religion, art, history — through which the human spirit constitutes its objective world. Substance and Function (1910) prepared the ground by replacing the substance-metaphysics of classical logic with the functional analysis of mathematical and physical concepts as the structural ancestor of the symbolic-form analysis. The framework remains the most ambitious twentieth-century attempt at a transcendental philosophy of culture.
Quotes
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Attributed to Ernst Cassirer:
“Man is a symbolic animal.”
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Attributed to Ernst Cassirer:
“Language is the great symbol-making activity of the human mind.”
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Attributed to Ernst Cassirer:
“Human culture taken as a whole may be described as the process of man's progressive self-liberation.”
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Attributed to Ernst Cassirer:
“We can only know ourselves through the works we create.”
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“Love and knowledge have one and the same goal, for both strive to overcome the separation in the elements of being and return to the point of their original unity.… To know an object means to negate the distance between it and consciousness; it means, in a certain sense, to become one with the object: cognitio nihil est aliud, quam Coitio quaedam cum suo cognobili. [Knowledge is nothing else than a kind of union with what is known.]”
The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (1927), trans. Mario Domandi (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1963), p. 134 | The Latin Quote is from Franciscus Patricius , Pararchia, Lib. XV: De intellectu, Nova de universis philosophia (Ferrara, 1591), fol. 31 -
“The Latin Quote is from Franciscus Patricius , Pararchia, Lib. XV: De intellectu, Nova de universis philosophia (Ferrara, 1591), fol. 31”
Love and knowledge have one and the same goal, for both strive to overcome the separation in the elements of being and return to the point of their original unity.… To know an object means to negate the distance between it and consciousness; it means, in a certain sense, to become one with the object: cognitio nihil est aliud, quam Coitio quaedam cum suo cognobili. [Knowledge is nothing else than -
“End of Ch. 1, pp. 40–41”
No former age was ever in such a favorable position with regard to the sources of our knowledge of human nature. Psychology, ethnology, anthropology, and history have amassed an astonishingly rich and constantly increasing body of facts. Our technical instruments for observation and experimentation have been immensely improved, and our analyses have become sharper and more penetrating. We appear, -
“The facts of science always imply a theoretical, which means a symbolic, element.”
Ch. 5, p. 82 -
“Science is the last step in man's mental development and it may be regarded as the highest and most characteristic attainment of human culture.”
Opening sentence of Ch. 11, p. 161 -
“Opening sentence of Ch. 11, p. 161”
Science is the last step in man's mental development and it may be regarded as the highest and most characteristic attainment of human culture.