SOURCE: "Ernst Cassirer: Political Myths and Primitive Realities," in Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History: Cassirer, Eliade, Levi-Strauss, and Malinowski, The Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1987, pp. 13-41.

[In the following essay, Strenski contends that Cassirer's work on myth was an attempt to alert intellectuals to the dangers of irrationalism in Weimar Germany.]

WHY DID CASSIRER CARE ABOUT MYTH?

Most people have never given more than passing thought to myth. Thus it is strange when in the course of the history of thought we find great outpourings of learned writing on this subject, and on the second-order subject of the philosophy or theoretical study of myth. Now we have a doubly knotted problem: why did a second group of people care about the way the first group had cared about myth in the first place? To collect and edit myths is strange-enough behaviour. How much more unusual to study the literature of myths in a theoretical way.

Ernst Cassirer, who at two distinct times in his life was a philosopher of myth, is one of those unusual persons. I want to elucidate his theory of myth and at the same time try to understand why he took on such a challenging and specialised subject. I am especially drawn to Cassirer because his theory of myth stands as one of the most ambitious and erudite examples of that enterprise. Moreover, by the time he published his first major work in the philosophy of myth—Mythical Thought (1925), the second volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms—Cassirer had already established himself as a leading authority in epistemology, philosophy of science and Kantian studies. Why should such an illustrious scholar have devoted himself to the theoretical understanding of myth? What could have been so important to Cassirer as to move him to take on this major work? There are, I think, several strong candidate answers to this question.

I think that one can distinguish generally two sorts of reasons why Cassirer took up the philosophy of myth. These are reasons having to do with both the internal and external contexts of his theory; they conform in part to the audiences Cassirer imagined his writing would eventually reach. On the internal side, his prior intellectual interests in language and science and his Kantian and Hegelian philosophising were compatible with his interest in myth. For him, it was a way to deepen his sense of belonging to the traditions of German Idealism, which in Cassirer's day was more than a matter of imagined intellectual affiliation; it was a social matter as well. Specifically, I have here in mind Cassirer's desire to speak as an intellectual heir of Hegel and the first philosopher of myth, Schelling. On the 'external' side, and perhaps more controversially, I want also to argue that Cassirer had strong and even overriding moral and public reasons for studying myth. He wanted to counteract irrationalist trends among his own intellectual class, and chose the subject of myth with special care as a way of doing this. Interestingly, the trends of thought these German intellectuals found attractive were also more properly characteristic of the broad cultural moods of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Germany—especially romantic primitivism and what George Mosse has called 'Volkishness'.

I am the first to admit that it will not be easy (or perhaps even possible) to prove, in a way that historians would regard as conclusive, that Cassirer directed his theory of myth at the general run of German intellectuals. There is no 'smoking gun'. But there is much circumstantial evidence, far too interesting to shelve for possible future use. Using this, I hope to make a convincing and honourable case for significance of the 'external' context for understanding Cassirer's theory of myth. I shall make a special point of trying to show how one might defensibly read Cassirer's theory of myth as a public moral document aimed at arguing the general run of German intellectuals of the Weimar period away from their 'Volkish' and irrationalist habits. In Cassirer's philosophy of myth, I think we have a document whose intellectual relatives were Max Weber's Wissenschaft als Beruf and Ernst Troeltsch's Spectator—Briefe of 1918. Although these are very different pieces, both in explicit content and in style, they share a certain moral tone and sensitivity to the dangers of irrationalism in Weimar Germany, along with a sense that intellectuals should take a firm stand against this corrupting force.

A reader who knew Cassirer only from his posthumously published work The Myth of the State (1946), might find my hesitation puzzling. In this work Cassirer clearly admits the connections to which I have alluded. For the Cassirer of The Myth of the State, myth ought to be understood theoretically because it had already figured in public life. For Cassirer in 1945, myth had revealed its true meaning in Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century, and in the Nazi fulfilment of Gobineau's 'myth of racism, Carlyle's 'myth' of the political hero, and so on. There can be little doubt that Cassirer wrote The Myth of the State with a kind of public purpose, directed at matters external to the strictly academic domain.

In fact, it was The Myth of the State which led me to ask whether one could trace the same awareness of the external or public realm in Cassirer's earlier work on myth. Was Cassirer as farsighted in the 1925 Mythical Thought The Myth wise was of the State in the Or as he of retrospective The Myth the State perhaps a liberal's public ^? act of contrition for not having been more explicitly critical of mythical thought in 1925, when it might have done some good? Since no explicit criticisms of 'Volkish' mythical thinking are to be found in Mythical Thought, one would have to assume that the critique (if present) appears in cryptic or coded form. If this is so, in writing Mythical Thought Cassirer felt compelled to restrain himself to some extent. This view credits Cassirer with the same public spirit and awareness of the popular implications of mythical thought as he had in 1945, and sees the differences between the two books as resulting chiefly from the different environments in which they were written: the first in an intimidating environment, and the second in relative freedom from political threats. The alternative view casts the Cassirer of 1925 as a rather introverted and high-born scholar who paid little attention to contemporary cultural trends and thus was virtually oblivious to the possible relation between 'Volkish' mythologising and the specialised philosophical and anthropological term 'myth'. This seems to be what Peter Gay has in mind when he cites Cassirer for a 'failure to do justice to the social dimension of ideas' and labels his thought as 'unpolitical Idealism'. On this view, The Myth of the State was written to correct this 'flaw'.

From all we know of Cassirer's inquisitive and thoughtful nature, it is absurd to believe that he was ignorant of the deeper import of the 'Volkish' and primitivist trends on 1925. The Myth of the State was not written under the spell of new revelations. Cassirer was a scholar's scholar, but he was also an extraordinarily worldly man. Toni Cassirer tells us that her learned husband read the sports pages of the daily newspaper avidly and followed economic news with as much relish. Whether plotting the fortunes of his favourite professional football teams through an exciting season, or of the stock market during the rampant inflation of the 1920s, Cassirer was, it seems, always on the look-out for reasons why events were taking a particular course. Likewise, he comprehended the anti-semitism and political radicalism of his day as well as anyone. Although he maintained faith in Germany, he harboured no illusions about the Nazis. He led his family into exile shortly after Hitler assumed power in 1933. In her biography of her husband Toni Cassirer explains what led him to this decision. Speaking of the first weeks of the Hitler regime she says,

The first [official Nazi] publications were not all that alarming. Nothing was mentioned about persecution or laws restricting Jews. But then one day one of Hitler's edicts read, 'Whatever serves the Fuhrer is law.' Ernst said to me, 'If tomorrow every jurist in Germany to a man does not rise and protest these paragraphs, then surely Germany is lost.' Not a single voice spoke out. [Toni Cassrer, Aus Meinem Leben mit Ernst Cassirer]

Cassirer also had a historical sense of the political role of myth at this time, although it was not as well developed as it was to become in The Myth of the State. In Mythical Thought, Cassirer notes with Schelling and the German romantic nationalists that myth lays the basis for nationhood. It is behind the feeling of nationality, and gives it its force. As Schelling says, in a remark Cassirer quotes but whose implications even he could not fully comprehend at the time, 'it is inconceivable that a nation should exist without a mythology'. But what a nation and what a mythology, Cassirer would fully realise only many years later.

Yet Cassirer did not brood about this; he thought and acted. He seems to have internalised the moral lessons of his time even as its affairs engulfed him. Dimitri Gawronsky, Kerensky's personal secretary, had recently escaped from Lenin's Russia to the safety of Switzerland. He and Cassirer had known each other as students of Hermann Cohen. Now Gawronsky had taken it upon himself to warn German socialists of the treachery awaiting them at the hands of the Bolsheviks. In his biographical essay on Cassirer, Gawronsky tells us that as early as 1917 Cassirer had conceived The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms partly as an attempt to speak of the chaos which fell hard upon the Germans after their defeat in the First World War. In connection with the political concept of 'myth', Gawronsky also offers the opinion that Cassirer had been influenced by Georges Sorel. Gawronsky believed Cassirer shared Sorel's view of myth as a driving irrational force in human affairs. But whether Cassirer took note of Sorel is doubtful. Sorel was influential for Mussolini's religious view of fascism, but much less so in his native France or Germany. Perhaps Gawronsky mentions Sorel because of his relation to Lenin's idea of revolution led by the 'conspiratorial plot' of the small disciplined party.

To his credit, Gawronsky maintains the right sort of balance in talking about Cassirer, noting that, while he was primarily a 'philosopher, not a politician', he 'found his own way of expressing his attitude toward ultimate human values.' To substantiate this, Gawronsky claims that Cassirer wrote Freiheit und Form (1916) under the disillusioning influence of duty in the War Press Office. Consider Toni Cassirer's inside account of its writing:

At first the work in the office interested him [Cassirer] very much. But, in the end, it destroyed every illusion he had about the war, and especially about the 'German Case'. His task was to study all the French newspapers carefully, and to seek out certain places in them which he had to revise (with the help of a pair of scissors) until they suited the purpose of misleading ordinary German opinion. He went through the motions of this reprehensible social game in exemplary fashion. When he came home in the evenings he did not need to violate official secrecy to explain to me what was going on inside him. It was not only the daily work which oppressed him, however. In the office, he felt he was really being changed into a machine, and like every soldier, being robbed of personal responsibility. And now he knew nearly two years before the end of the war that Germany would lose. Yet, he confronted this gloomy realisation in characteristic style: despite his heavy duties in the service, he worked on a new book in his office—Freiheit und Form—and then locked up the manuscript in his desk at the office every evening. In this way he salvaged for himself the image of the indestructible and unchangeable Germany which was to become wholly unrecognisable because of the 'rubbish' which was dumped on it.

Thus, turned by his war experiences away from an interest in history of philosophy, epistemology and philosophy of science, Cassirer worked to reaffirm the indigenous liberal-humanist and Idealist traditions of German thought. By 1916, at least, Cassirer had become a spokesman and interpreter for the Germany of Luther, Leibniz, Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel and the other heroes of Freiheit und Form.

Cassirer also represented German liberalism in situations where an academic code language was less appropriate and perhaps unnecessary. He never totally abandoned his sense of the role of the scholar, even when he appeared in explicitly political gatherings. Perhaps the most celebrated and typical of such occasions (which, to be sure, were rare for Cassirer) was his Weimar Republic Constitution Day speech of August 1928. Cassirer cut short his won vacation to accept the invitation of the politically beleaguered Social Democratic senate of the city of Hamburg to deliver this public address. They wanted a man of Cassirer's stature to lend his support and personal prestige to an event which in the late 1920s had taken on a rather marked political significance. It was already the practice of German academics conspicuously to ignore the national celebration of the republican constitution and to celebrate instead the old Reich holiday. By enlisting Cassirer's support, the city fathers hoped in some way to help stem the reactionary tide among its youth and intelligentsia. By many accounts, Cassirer performed brilliantly. He argued cleverly that the republican ideal was not ultimately French in origin (and therefore anti-German), despite the precedent of the French Revolution. In fact, this republican upheaval would not have been possible without the intellectual foundations laid for it by a host of German thinkers. Therefore, what could be more German than to be republican! Cassirer's courage is all the more surprising when one considers that as a Jew he was taking considerable personal risks in participating in what he and everyone else knew to be an outright political attempt to rally support for the weak liberal-democratic Weimar regime and its constitution. Cassirer was, in short, neither politically naive nor uninformed. As a Jew and a scholar, he knew professional politics was both impossible and personally unsuitable for him. Yet, his personal life and scholarship reflect a brave yet prudent public spirit.

THE 'MANDARINS' AND DAS VOLK

But just who were those German intellectuals to whom, in part, Cassirer addressed both his Constitution Day speech and his theory of myth? Why should they have been interested in such exotica as myth?

One can identify this audience as that amorphous elite group Fritz Ringer calls the 'Mandarins', drawing upon the ambivalent associations this term has had at least since Max Weber's Religions of China. In their own ways, the Mandarins fused the concerns of the higher and lower strata of German culture. They led the revival of German philosophical Idealism and the great movements of educational reform in the humanities to which we are heirs today. But many also led various movements characterised by 'Volkish' cultural chauvinism and irrationalism, propensities shared with the German masses.

As intellectuals, the Mandarins counted among their number several different sorts of thinkers: the learned leaders of the Idealist Baden School of neo-Kantians, Rickert and Windelband; the pioneers of the method of Verstehen and empathetic understanding, Dilthey and his followers; plus the partisans of Lebensphilosophie, from Klages to Heidegger.

At the risk of superficial generalisation, one can identify certain concerns common to all these thinkers. If Ringer is to be believed, it would be hard to overestimate the vast influence the Mandarin discontent with modernity had on German academic life. Here originate many of the attitudes against modern mass society still heard today. The Mandarins decried the specialisation and professionalisation a technological society demanded of its educated elites. They felt that these trends narrowed human perspectives to the merely utilitarian or instrumental aspects of life. These in turn aided the mechanisation and bureaucratisation of society, producing in the end a lifeless culture unfit for human beings. Opposition to modem society had to be thorough and fundamental, the Mandarins reasoned. In some way, the intellectualism and positivism grounding technological society had to be undermined, and plausible alternatives constructed. If industrial society 'alienated' mankind across a whole range of activities, a humanised society would have to work to build humankind into a 'whole' again. Thus, for example, knowledge and world-view might be harmonised so that knowledge would become 'relevant' to spiritual concerns. No longer could one hide behind the cloak of neutrality which positivism interposed between knowledge and values. 'Objectivity' and 'critical analysis' had to be moderated by a recognition of the place of subjectivity and speculative synthesis in the agenda of modern knowledge. Especially when it came to the question of the proper study of mankind, the Mandarins insisted that the human sciences or humanities stood on their own independent and autonomous ground, because they were disciplines which sought an inner understanding of human life. This consisted in encouraging empathetic understanding of human experiences as people actually felt they lived them.

These were emphatically not methodological proposals alone. Such methodological points arose out of moral and ideological conviction. Methodological attention was turned to subjectivity, for example, because the Mandarins sought to do right by the dignity of humankind. Thereby they hoped to achieve spiritual revival in the mechanistic age. They sought to nourish both the 'inner man', by paying heed to the inner life of the persons studied, and the imaginative talents of the humanist scholar for empathising with that 'inner' nature.

Finally, by bringing together subject and object with the inner and outer aspects of their study, the Mandarin humanists thought they could achieve a truly rounded view of humanity. This, for them, marked a real breakthrough to synthetic knowledge, a chance to produce work which reflected the 'whole' man. This in turn would bring one closer to the ideal of discovering moral certainties. If one could achieve virtually complete knowledge of humankind, by covering, as it were, all the angles, perhaps one could bridge the fact-value gap and discover how one ought to live.

As intellectual revolutionaries in the humanities, the Mandarins have probably never been equalled. Yet their revolution, like others before, was fraught with ambiguities—especially at a time when, to scholars such as Ringer, their ideas seemed to play into the hands of the forces associated with the rise of Nazism. In general, Ringer believes that Mandarin ideas fostered softheadedness and escapism, which the romantic propaganda of Nazism readily exploited: their flight from utilitarian and humdrum concerns left these necessary jobs to those perhaps less competent or more opportunistic. Their disenchantment with the ideal of objectivity made public discussion difficult, and their exaltation of subjectivity opened a door for authoritarianism. Their infatuation with the 'inner man' left the 'outer man' in the hands of others all too willing to command. Their craving for wholeness and synthesis at times seemed indulgent and escapist—a grasping for verities at a time when they were not to be found.

The Mandarins' 'Volkish' side was evident in their yearning for the simple, unified, organic agrarian life they saw being broken on the rack of Germany's rapid industrialisation. For them, as for others, nationalism provided a kind of tonic to counter alienation, a sense of 'rootedness in a time of change. This sense of ethnic belonging also extended to the imagined historical and racial antecedents of modern Germans. Thus, the Mandarins indulged a taste for archaism, if not outright primitivism and, at times, racism. Mandarin primitivism excited the fashion for ancient Teutonic myth, ritual drama, the occult, magic and astrology.

FOR AND AGAINST THE MANDARINS

Cassirer opposed the Mandarins, yet represented what was best in them. Since he traced his philosophical lineage from the 'critical' or Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, he was somewhat at odds with the metaphysical tendency of the Idealist or Baden branch of neo-Kantianism. Although historians are correct to consider Cassirer an Aufklidrer rationalist and classicist misplaced in the hostile anti-intellectual environment of Weimar German, he was also a great defender of the romantics and nineteenth-century German Idealist philosophers. This much is evident from Cassirer's particular devotion to Hegel, but in The Myth of the State it is especially remarkable. Writing in the darkest days of both Jewish and Aryan Germany, Cassirer here launched what was then an extraordinarily unfashionable defence of the German romantic thinkers at whose feet so much of the blame for Nazism had been laid.

Accordingly, some scholars call Cassirer an 'accommodationist' thinker: he leaves himself open to association with the Mandarin Idealists and romantics on a number of fronts. In Mythical Thought Cassirer seems wedded to the Mandarin quest for a grand synthesis, putting together ideas from here and there and, by the vocabulary he uses, often creating misleading impressions of agreement with those chiefly associated with it. This certainly blunts his would-be criticisms of Mandarin mythologising. That Cassirer the philosopher of science should have taken up the subject of myth at all in the 1920s—laden as it was with 'Volkish' and primitivist associations—also creates its confusions. This urban, modernist republican was no partisan of the occult or the mystical. Cassirer held science and mathematics in the highest esteem. Yet, with the Mandarins, Cassirer felt his share of unease about the mechanisation of modern life. Reporting on this, Robert S. Hartman says,

after showing the entire many-branched labyrinth of man's development to modernity, Cassirer focuses on the hero himself, modern Theseus, who has left the guiding hand of nature and, at the end of his course, encounters a monster, the master of the maze, the Minotaur of Machinery, ready to devour him.… ["Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms"]

Cassirer was also deeply divided about the need for and nature of 'wholeness':

Philosophy cannot give up its search for a fundamental unity in this ideal world. But it does not confound this unity with simplicity. It does not overlook the tensions and frictions, the strong contrasts and deep conflicts between the various powers of man. These cannot be reduced to a common denominator. [Essay on Man]

Finally, although, like the Mandarins, a critic of positivism, in the 'critical phenomenology' of Mythical Thought Cassirer makes a self-conscious attempt to bridge the gap between the newly revived Idealism and positivism. Thus, he argues mightily on behalf of the autonomy, unity and integrity of the human sciences (the Mandarin Geisteswissenschaften) as well as the extra-scientific modes of culture, such as myth. Yet all this is done on behalf of an unfavourable comparison to science. Myth embodies a form of primitive thought which, though flawed in comparison to modern knowledge, prepares the way for it.

This picture of Cassirer's accommodationist attitude to myth and other primitivist elements in culture agrees well with the remarkably similar convictions of one of Cassirer's chief intellectual patrons of the Hamburg years: the art historian and benefactor Aby Warburg. The special collections of the Warburg Library encouraged Cassirer to develop his interest in occult and primitive subjects, such as myth. But it is generally overlooked that Warburg's scholarship on the survival of pagan and primitive elements in Western art also roughly paralleled the theories of Cassirer. Even a casual perusal of the monographs sponsored by the Warburg Library during the 1920s and later will show how Warburg sought both to promote an appreciation of 'primitive' subjects and to warn of their potential threat to the fragile structure of rationality which protected liberal-democratic culture. Although Cassirer and Warburg thought along very much the same lines, it is hard to know about specific cases and/or directions of influence. Cassirer claims that The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms was already well under way by the time he accepted the chair of philosophy at Hamburg. But it will surprise no one familiar with Warburg's work that Cassirer's first publication of myth, Die Begriffsform im Mythischen Denken, should have appeared under the auspices of the Warburg Library in 1922.

With benefit of hindsight, one might be tempted to look uncharitably on the likes of Cassirer and Warburg. One wishes they had spoken more forthrightly against Weimar primitivism, rather than tried to see its best side. Yet it would be absurd to blame them, as accommodationists, for deficiencies in courage or for the errant course history took in their day. Even Ringer's indictment of the Mandarins is perhaps too severe. After all, the Nazis were as good at being 'machine-like' and 'scientific' as they were at tapping the irrationalist and romantic primitivist sentiments of their day. The ability of intellectuals to affect the events of their time is probably more circumscribed than they themselves would care to admit. Perhaps the best one can expect of them is to tell the truth as they see it. Cassirer did this and more in the way he dealt with mythical thinking. Without losing his own bearings, he tried to appeal to the best in the mythically motivated movements of his day. He tried to show them how they might interpret their own mythologising instincts as part of the same human intellectual tendencies as culminated in science and ordinary reason. By arguing that Mandarin mythophiles should see in 'rational' thinking a neutralised yet transcended form of mythical thinking, Cassirer sought to reconcile them to the kind of liberal-rationalist tradition for which he stood. That he failed to sway his irrationalist contemporaries may testify more to the limitations of his time and place than to any deficiency in his own moral courage. He was not in the position to be a Max Weber. As it was, one ought to admire the ingenuity of Cassirer's plan, as well as the risks he took on behalf of liberal values in a period unfriendly to republican (and especially Jewish) intellectuals.

If Cassirer's work on myth can be well located within these interwoven 'internal' professional and 'external' cultural and political contextual networks, it also accords well with the overall logic of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Mythical Thought, the second volume of this work, fits with the first volume, on language, and with the third and final volume, on knowledge, in a way which is integral to Cassirer's thought. It is to some extent independently intelligible in terms of the arguments of the three volumes, although we should not understand the reason for the existence of this volume, nor of the thrust of its arguments as Cassirer had intended them, without considering the context in which those arguments were conceived. We shall now, therefore, consider how Mythical Thought fits the progression of Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms and weave our findings this back into the contextual network already elaborated. Cassirer starts with language.

HUMBOLDT AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

Language holds a special place in Cassirer's epistemological scheme as the ordinary medium of rational or cognitive discourse. But he was troubled by the discrepancies between the presupposed ontologies of modern physics and ordinary language, which in turn cast doubts on the utility of rational discourse to order human affairs. Cassirer saw that, unlike ordinary language, modern physics dispensed with the old fundamental categories of substance and property. The world it laid bare was devoid of emotion, meaning or human warmth; yet it had immense cognitive prestige. As best one knew, the cosmology of modern physics told one what the world was really like. For Cassirer, this created a double problem: he was inclined to respect science as much as he cared about the integrity of ordinary rational discourse. How could one avoid the inevitable conclusion that ordinary language reflected merely a 'form of misunderstanding', as Suzanne Langer put it? And how, moreover, could one resist the even harsher incipient criticism of the fantastic worldview of myth? Cassirer's answer to this dilemma is first to view myth historically, as an 'archaic mode of understanding' rather than just a 'mode of misunderstanding'. Along with language, myth had to be given a second look in order to evade the damaging consequences of the rise of the 'ideal languages' of modern physics and mathematics.

One way to escape these consequences of an unfavourable comparison with the new ideal languages was to think about ordinary language as an activity rather than a mere counter-sign or picture of reality. Though the ideal languages may represent superior 'pictures' of reality, they are inferior 'agents' in the drama of social life. Ordinary language, by contrast, while representing a poor picture of reality, is an excellent agent force in social life. With this in mind Cassirer could proceed to defend ordinary language and, by extension, myth.

By posing the problem this way, Cassirer was able to draw upon the linguistic thinking of the Kantian Wilhelm von Humboldt. In Humboldt's work one meets a rationalist theory of language similar in some ways to Noam Chomsky's. Humboldt believed that language 'creates' the world, rather than merely reflects it. Language presses certain a priori forms onto bare sensations, and orders them into totalities, ideas and world-views. Here, language may be said to 'act' or be an instrument. It is therefore practical, although for Humboldt (and Cassirer) linguistic 'praxis' is what I should call 'Idealist'. For Humboldt and Cassirer, language works spontaneously and creatively for human beings. In fact, the Idealist theory of praxis rests on the belief that human beings create only when free from compulsion. Yes, the causality of linguistic processes differs from that of material processes—but not in a way which diminishes the integrity of language. Although language may not reflect the material world as physics does, it does reflect the spontaneity of the spirit, while also working to build the human realm of culture.

One can thus see how for Humboldt and Cassirer language became a prototype of culture, which they understood similarly to the Mandarin revivers of Idealism. Since culture is produced by the spirit, it bears the trademark of the spirit—freedom. It is therefore incumbent upon us to distinguish the products of the epistemologically quite different worlds of physics and ordinary language. This in turn inspires the quest for an autonomous theory of language, a quest begun by Humboldt and continued by Cassirer as a theory of the autonomous symbolic (cultural) forms. In Humboldt's view, reports Ellen Wood, 'man has the right to fulfil his essential creative nature, the nature that is best exemplified by the spontaneous and creative qualities of language'.

Thus Cassirer's debt to Humboldt is profound: Humboldt allows Cassirer to accept the bifurcation of nature which the new ideal language of physics demands. But this does not force Cassirer to degrade the lived-in world of human culture. Indeed, this becomes a spacious and challenging place in which men can exercise the freedom that is theirs by right. What does it matter if the natural sciences show us a world of strict determinism? Let the natural sciences monopolise the role of picturing reality—if indeed they really do. The symbolic forms of language, myth, art, religion, and so on, apply themselves to the far more interesting task of producing culture.

Built as it is on Humboldt's theory of language, Cassirer's theory of myth should also be seen as pragmatic in the Idealist sense. In myth, Cassirer says, 'word and name do not designate and signify, they are and act'. Myth labours in a 'great spiritual process', a process by which 'consciousness frees itself from the passive captivity in sensory impressions and creates a world of its own in accordance with a spiritual principle'. Thus in mythical stories, as indeed in every aspect of culture, one finds evidence of creative human agency, here operating on the epistemological plane.

HEGEL

If one were to try to isolate the chief Kantian element in Cassirer's theory of myth, it would surely be his a priori approach. Although Cassirer differs from Kant in supposing that many a priori modes of experience may be isolated, he goes about his investigations with a Kantian eye for the principles of formation which make possible various symbolic forms. But scholars have been particularly troubled by idealistic (particularly Hegelian) elements in Cassirer's thought. Some believe he departed from the strictly 'critical' line of Cohen and Natorp and verged toward the Idealist neo-Kantian position, because he did not unambiguously grant mathematics and science pride of place as prototypes of human knowledge. Cassirer's resistance to the positivist monistic scheme of knowledge did not, however, prevent him from thinking of mathematics and the sciences as ideals. Like a true positivist, Cassirer maintained his respect for mathematics and science, but he put them into relation with the symbolic forms of culture. Here, as elsewhere, Cassirer accommodated contrasting positions by synthesis. But no Absolute haunts the scene. Cassirer simply wants to affirm the autonomy of the various symbolic forms: 'all content of culture presupposes and involves a primordial act of mind, an act of creative integration'.

Although he dismissed the Absolute, one must not think that Cassirer could or would do without Hegel. He very much needed and wanted Hegel. Through the theory of Auflebung, linked as it is with an evolutionary progressive theory of the growth of knowledge, Hegel offered Cassirer the classic model of accommodationist synthesising. One will accordingly recognise in Mythical Thought that, although myth may itself be a lowly form of consciousness, it develops into the higher forms of knowledge we call science, mathematics, and so forth. Hegel's organic metaphor also entails that primitive forms (like the larval stage of insect growth) die away as the higher forms come to maturity. Thus the theory of Aufhebung permits Cassirer both to criticise mythical thinking as a 'primitive' form of consciousness (not really as good as the later stages—immature) and at the same time to accept it gratefully as a necessary stage in the birth of higher, more mature forms of knowledge. Referring to the process Cassirer says,

the same universal forms of intuition and thought … constitute the unity of consciousness as such and … accordingly constitute the unity of both the mythical consciousness and the consciousness of pure knowledge. In this respect it may be said that each of these forms, before taking on its specific logical form and character, must pass through a preliminary mythical stage. [Mythical Thought].

Hegel encouraged a salutary optimism about, and willingness to think the best of, the long-term consequences of modern civilisation—something many of Cassirer's Mandarin contemporaries found impossible. One thinks especially of Spengler's gloomy forecast of the decline of the West and Heidegger's resigned vision of human Geworfenheit (man's being thrown into or abandoned in the world). In The Myth of the State Cassirer assessed these fashionable philosophies of the 1920s and noted their ill effects on the time:

the new philosophy did enfeeble and slowly undermine the forces that could have resisted the modern political myths.. [It has] given up all hopes on an active share in the construction and reconstruction of man's cultural life. Such philosophy renounces its own fundamental theoretical and ethical ideas. It can be used then as a pliable instrument in the hands of the political leaders.

Thanks to Hegel, Cassirer could see in the rise of the new physics and the developments of mathematics a marked improvement in what we know. Here were not signs of man's alienation or 'need for roots', as the anti-modernist Mandarin critics of science believed. Moreover, even in the face of less reassuring signs, such as inhumane technological and economic developments, Cassirer's Hegelian faith could keep him going. These bleaker aspects of modernity were transient and would be overcome (aufgehoben). As a result, Cassirer could muster a marvellous confidence at a time when many of his compatriots were laid low by the pessimism that followed Germany's defeat in 1918. In this context, Cassirer's Hegelian faith in the future led him to place his hope in the eventual defeat and transmutation of mythical thinking, and the progressive triumph of reason in history.

CATEGORIES OF MYTHICAL THOUGHT AND 'WHOLENESS'

It would be impossible to appreciate this grand vision without some sense of the nature of the mythical a priori. What made it for Cassirer at once the source of higher modes of thinking and a level of consciousness which enlightened folk would want to transcend?

One will seek in vain in the rambling details of Cassirer's account of particular categories of mythical thinking for the nature of the mythical a priori. Cassirer himself really cares only about the common 'tonality', or dominant integrating idea characteristic of mythical thinking. Like many another Idealist thinker, he is much too concerned with the central principle to care much about the welter of details. Admitting as much he says,

This tonality assumed by the particular concepts within the mythical consciousness seems at first glance totally individual, something which can only be felt but in no way known and understood. And yet beneath this individual phenomenon there lies a universal … [which] encompasses and determines the particular configurations of this thinking and, as it were, sets its imprint upon them. [Mythical Thought]

And what might this 'universal' be? It is nothing less than the Mandarin idea of 'wholeness' or 'unity'. With respect to mythical space Cassirer says, for example,

All species and varieties of things have their 'home' somewhere in space, and their absolute reciprocal strangeness is thereby annulled: local mediation leads to a spiritual mediation between them, to a composition of all differences in a great whole, a fundamental mythical plan of the world. [Mythical Thought]

Yet not only are the distinctions presented in the myths more apparent than real, but there is also something bogus about the unity of myth. Although their tasks paralleled each other, Cassirer believed that he and Kant discovered rather different sorts of 'unities' in the fields they investigated. Cassirer believed the unity of myth was essentially 'emotional', while the epistemological investigations of Kant disclosed so-called 'logical' or 'rational' unities or wholes. The world of myth, Cassirer tells us, 'becomes intelligible only if behind it we can feel the dynamic of… feeling from which it originally grew'. In this sense, there is something bogus about the unity or wholeness of myth for Cassirer.

This is unfortunately a complicated point, but I should like to try to elucidate it by treating the grounds of Cassirer's viewpoint here. Two items need to be discussed in this connection: (1) the nature and status of the principle by which myths are thought to cohere internally; (2) the meaning of the idea of 'emotional' unity.