Ernst Cassirer Quotes on Mind
Ernst Cassirer’s three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29) and the late Essay on Man (1944) gave twentieth-century neo-Kantian philosophy its most ambitious treatment of the symbolic activity of the human mind. The central thesis is that the human animal is the symbolic animal — the creature whose distinctive cognitive achievement is the construction of the symbolic forms (language, myth, religion, art, science) through which the immediate manifold of experience is articulated into the various culturally specific worlds of meaning that the philosophical anthropologist must analyze in their irreducible plurality. The framework, drawing on the Marburg neo-Kantian tradition Cassirer inherited from his teacher Hermann Cohen and integrating it with broader humanistic and historical resources, shaped the subsequent twentieth-century philosophy of culture through Susanne Langer and the broader Continental philosophy of mind.
Quotes
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Attributed to Ernst Cassirer:
“Man is a symbolic animal.”
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Attributed to Ernst Cassirer:
“Myth is not a passive reflection of nature, but an active form of symbolic thinking.”
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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:
“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 -
“Man is always inclined to regard the small circle in which he lives as the center of the world and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe. But he must give up this vain pretense, this petty provincial way of thinking and judging.”
Ch. 1, p. 31