p According to Cassirer, the view of the universum of culture as a system of symbolic forms enables one to show the true unity of cultural forms as an organic whole and to indicate in this whole the proper place for each of them, including art. The connection between the different forms of culture, which forms the basis of this unity, is functional and not substantial. As an example of such a connection the German philosopher takes the connection between art and language. The common “basic” function of all the forms of culture is symbolic. Thus, the central position of Cassirer’s aesthetics-his premise that art is a symbolic formenables us to talk of his semantic orientation. Further evidence of this is Cassirer’s frequent recourse to the analogy between art and language.
p Art, like all symbolic forms, has two sides or two “ dimensions”. One is physically present being, the other the underlying mental aspects, which are manifested in physical meaning and constitute a common factor of everything we designate with the name “culture”. Cassirer points to three logically possible types of the connection between “physical” and “meaning” in symbolic form: 1) expression, 2) representation, 3) pure meaning. These three possible types of 128 connection function for Cassirer as the logical substantiation of a historically established typology of forms of culture: myth and art (expression), language (representation), science (pure meaning). [128•1
p At the stage of pure meaning-i.e. in science-the dominant role is played by sense, meaning. [128•2 At the stage of representation in language a certain balance can be observed of the two polar elements: what is given through the senses represents something quite different.
p Art corresponds to the stage of expression. Here the balance is violated in the direction of the sensuous, the physical, while meaning is somehow diffused in these. Reality can here be seen in the fusion of external and emotion-arousing features with features which have a physiognomical and affective character. The world is represented in its primal, expressive value, whereby all phenomena reveal their specific, direct and spontaneous nature. The expressed phenomena are gloomy, tender, exciting or pacifying. Aesthetic experience is in this respect richer than simple sensory perception, in which many possibilities are not realized. One of the greatest manifestations and deepest enchantments of art is in the way it reveals that the sensory aspects of things are infinite in their variety.
p In order to give a fuller characterization of this property of art Cassirer turns once again to the analogy with language. “Art,” he argues, “may be defined as a symbolic language" (10, 168). But this definition does not point to art’s specific features. In the opinion of the German philosopher, modern aesthetics is so exclusively concerned with the 129 commonality of art and language that the specific features of art have been left in the shade. For example, Croce insists that between language and art there is “full identity”, not just a close connection. “There is, however, an unmistakable difference between the symbols of art and the linguistic terms of ordinary speech or writing.” One of the manifestations of this difference is that in art “a representation in the medium of sensuous forms differs widely from a verbal or conceptual representation" (10, 168).
p Thus the peculiarity of the physical bearer of meaning in art consists in the fact that art is a sensuous form, in which meaning is, as it were, diffused. Recognition of the importance of sensoriness, of the physical in art is a valuable factor in Cassirer’s aesthetics. In this connection he correctly criticizes Croce and Collingwood for their underestimation of the sensory factor in art.
p One characteristic of symbolic form is that it is not static, functioning like a dynamic principle. “The philosophy of symbolic forms,” writes R. Hartmann, “is a philosophy of creation. .. The symbolic form ... represents the process of creation itself" (16, 292-93). The act of creating symbolic form in art is similar to analogous processes in language and science.
p In accordance with the idealistic principle of the Marburg school, which holds that knowledge must seek the origins of its “data” in thought, Cassirer asserts that in language and science we must classify our sensory perceptions and subsume them under general concepts and rules, in order to give them objective meaning. Such classification is the result of simplification. The ability to define the indefinite, to limit the limitless, to derive the finite from chaos does not only belong to the theoretical concept. Artistic contemplation also possesses this ability. It has its own method of classification, which works not through thought and theoretical concepts, but with the help of pure form, Gestalt, and has an organic character. In contrast to a logical classification into classes and types, in the order of universality, the division in art is closer to the basic principle of life itself, that is, retains the freshness and directness of individual life. In contrast to the 130 processes of conceptual simplification, abstraction and deductive generalization the processes of condensation, concentration, intensification and concretization are operative in art.
p As Cassirer stresses, the above-indicated productive process of creating symbolic form is necessarily carried out in some sensuous medium (another thing underestimated by Croce and Collingwood). For great artists colour, line, rhythms and words are not simply part of their technical apparatus, but an essential factor in the very productive process.
p Taking place as they do in the sensory sphere, a cognitive, formative act in art remains essentially a mental process, an act of symbolic consciousness, whose objective condensation is pure forms, or Gestalten. This idea is given clear expression by the German philosopher in describing the method, initiated by Lessing, of classifying art in dependence on the nature of sensory signs. Recognizing the value of such an approach (applied by Lessing to painting and poetry, by Herder to music), Cassirer warns however that the essence of the problem should not be forgotten. The variety of the means of portrayal, of form (Gestalt), he says, does not only proceed from the material portrayed. What is decisive in every art, independently of the sensuous matter with which it operates, is meaning (7, 335).
p Cassirer’s disciple W. Urban, in his description of this method, calls this principle the “primacy of meaning" (16, 409). This principle is by no means reducible to emphasizing the role of ideal meaning with relation to sensuous matter. Elucidating the essence of his method, which he calls phenomenological, Cassirer points out that his understanding of phenomenology is the same as Hegel’s: to understand the development of spiritual forms from within, not from without (17). At the same time he rejects the speculative idealistic explanation (offered by Hegel and Schelling) of culture and art, describing this method of explanation as aesthetics from above. Neither does he recognize aesthetics from below, to which he assigns the naturalistic interpretation of art.
p Cassirer rightly criticizes naturalism (in particular Taine) with its attempt to derive art from nature and to reduce the study of culture to a natural science. “No matter,” he writes, 131 “from how many viewpoints we may observe and analyze the marble as a natural object, the result will never divulge anything about its form and the beauty of its form" (11, 339). Cassirer holds that a causal analysis of art and culture must be supplemented by a structural analysis, an analysis of form. This methodological requirement, which is correct in itself, receives, with him, an idealistic explanation. Despite his reservations to the effect that a structural analysis should be supplemented with a causal consideration, that it is impossible to construct a theory of art and culture in a void of abstraction and speculation, Cassirer in fact opposes the structural approach to the causal explanation. This is apparent not only from the fact that the structural approach is claimed to be the leading principle of the analysis, and the cognition of form its main objective, but also in the suggestion that we should turn in the causal analysis to phenomena “within a particular form”. In other words, the primary cause for the development of art and culture should be sought actually within art and culture, within the mental processes, out of which they arise and whose objective condensation they form (9, 98). [131•1 Thus the structural approach to art is transformed by Cassirer the neo-Kantian into an instrument of idealistic interpretation. This approach for him means the requirement to interpret art as a process of a priori, spontaneous creation of ideal form, an act which takes place entirely within the mind.
p According to Cassirer’s idealistic epistemology, by creating symbolic form art performs its main function, that of cognition. Cassirer regards the view of art as a complement, an adornment to life as greatly mistaken. To think this is to underestimate the real significance of art and its active role in human culture. Art is the revelation of reality, its 132 interpretation (representation), but it achieves this through the intuition, and not with the help of concepts, through sensuous forms and not thought. The artist is just as much of a discoverer as the scientist, only in contrast to the latter, who discovers facts and laws of nature, the artist discovers forms. A great artist shows us the forms of outer things, and, for example, a dramatist the forms of our inner life. The main purpose of art, its influence is the deep penetration into the formal structure of reality. But what, we may ask, does Cassirer understand by reality?
p For the neo-Kantian Cassirer the forms of the outer and inner world which art discovers, have absolutely no existence independent of art. Like all other symbolic forms art is not only a reproduction of an already existing, given reality. The forms which art discovers are free of any mystery, they are accessible, visible, audible, but are not given to us directly, and we only find out about them when they are revealed to us in the works of great artists. In fact, art helps us cognize not the forms of the objective world, but the forms created by art itself. The creation of forms is at the same time the cognition of these forms. Forms in art do not reflect the forms of objective reality, their main task is to construe and organize human experience. The fundamental feature of art, as of other symbolic forms, is its constructive power in the framing of our human universe (10, 167). [132•1
p Thus, the agnosticism of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms is consistently extended to cover the explanation of one of these forms: art. The epistemological source of agnosticism, the drawing of a fundamental boundary between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, is manifested here in the fact that the world of “phenomena” of art is in principle hedged off from the objective world (whose reflection it in fact constitutes) and is taken to be the only accessible object of cognition in the sphere of art.
133p According to Cassirer the symbol is the thread of Ariadne, which unites the different approaches to man, to the general nature of human culture. The essence of man consists from this point of view in the ability to produce and use symbols. Man should therefore be defined not simply as an animal rationale but as an animal symbolicum. This definition, argues Cassirer, also points to the specific distinction of man, and enables one to understand the path which lies ahead of him-the path to civilization, to culture. The social consciousness is formed on the basis of the symbolic forms of culture, and it is this, according to Cassirer, which alone distinguishes man and human society from the animal forms of social life.
Apropos of such definitions Marx and Engels had written in as early a work as The German Ideology that although men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else, the first historical act of these individuals, thanks to which they are distinguished from animals, is not the fact of their thinking, but of their beginning to produce their means of subsistence. Cassirer approaches the problem in an idealistic way, in direct contradiction to this, the only true approach to the genesis of man and human society.
Notes
[128•1] H. Buczynska, correctly pointing out that for Cassirer the rationalist and “apriorist” an empirical substantiation of the typology of symbolic forms of culture would be “inconsistent” and that in his system only a logical substantiation is possible, advances the rather doubtful argument that Cassirer lacks not only the empirical but also the logical substantiation, and that therefore his entire classification is arbitrary (13, 44).
[128•2] As the West German author Lorenz Dittmann correctly remarks, at the third level of “meaning” the term “symbol” is for Cassirer tantamount to non-sensory sign (See L. Dittmann. Stil. Symbol. Struktut. Munchen, 1967, p. 106.).
[131•1] In an article analysing Cassirer’s views on art Katharine Gilbert correctly remarks that “in all contexts the Kantian Cassirer asserts the primacy of the spontaneity of consciousness”. Harry Slochower also writes of this. In his opinion Cassirer, even when concerned with social reality, effectively considers it in terms of its mental (“Geistige”) situation. He restricts the material aspect to “material form" which is manipulated by art and other cultural expressions (16, 619, 654-57).
[132•1] In her commentary to Cassirer, Langer notes that insofar, according to Cassirer, “as there are alternative symbolic forms, there are also alternative phenomenal ’worlds”’. Art, alongside language, myth and science, creates its own phenomenal world (16; 18).