Cassirer, Ernst - The Meaning of 'Emotional' Unity
The Meaning of 'Emotional' Unity
All this may be well and good, but it still does not explain just how das Lebensgefühl spoke to the problem of the coherence of mythical thinking. What precisely did the feeling of the unity of life have to do with whether and why a story made sense for traditional folk? How did the feeling of the unity of life perform as any sort of prototype of a Kantian unity? What can Cassirer possibly mean when he tells us that the world of myth 'becomes intelligible only if behind it we can feel the dynamic life feeling from which it originally grew'?
To understand this, one needs to appreciate that Cassirer held a variety of faculty psychological beliefs, treating the 'emotions' and the 'intellect' as if they were subtle internal organs of some sort. Unlike physical organs, which secrete hormones and other physical substances, these subtle organs 'secrete' their own distinctive products—the intellect generates thoughts,...
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