[In the following essay, Carini explores the often-neglected implications of Cassirer's language philosophy for the field of modern psychology.]

While Ernst Cassirer's three volume philosophy of symbolic forms is clearly a philosophy, there is also a psychology presented there that Cassirer assumed would be the forerunner of any modern psychology. But Cassirer's optimism on that score was not borne out, for that psychology has been completely bypassed. And yet, Cassirer was so astute on scientific matters that Margenau, the Yale physicist, in his Preface to Cassirer's Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics, concludes that, except for minor details, Cassirer's 1935 views may still be taken as the last word on that issue. The psychology that Cassirer espoused had the novel feature of unifying perception and language; it should prove worthwhile then to examine the psychology that Cassirer outlined in the 1920s.

The psychology that Cassirer provided was related to Gestalt psychology, but there are features in it which also differ from what the Gestaltists presented, and these characteristics have been lost to American psychology. He proposed that even our percepts of things are a way of formulating those things, and thus a symbolic element had to be contained in our most ordinary perceptions of things. He says:

If perception did not embrace an originally symbolic element, it would offer no support and no starting point for the symbolism of language. [The difficulty in] the skeptical critique of language consists precisely in making the universal begin only in the concept and word of language, whereas perception is taken as something utterly particular, individual, and punctual. When this is done, there remains an unbridgeable gap between the world of language, which is a world of meanings, and the world of perception, which is regarded as an aggregate of simple sensations.

A symbolic moment in perception would take it out of the realm of being "… utterly particular, individual, and punctual," and provide a bridge between perception and language. The two would be unified by sharing a symbolic component.

The assumption of an aggregate of simple sensations as comprising perception was also one of the tenets of introspectionist psychology. Gestalt psychologists, of course, objected to the sensationistic view, and proposed instead that all percepts were themselves the fundamental units, and were not decomposable into elementary sensations. But Cassirer goes further than that. He is suggesting that if psychology starts from the proposition that perception must be devoid of even a potential, personal meaning before the labels of language are applied, then words and percepts become arbitrarily separated when they in fact operate together and belong together. Words are not the only containers of meaning with percepts meaningless; there is a symbolic component in percepts which places perception and language in the same realm. The arbitrary, and merely assumed, separation between words and percepts has the tendency of making irreconcilable that which belong together.

Cassirer continues discussing the skeptical critique which allows only to language a symbolic component:

"But the question takes on a different form once we realize that the dividing line that is here drawn between the worlds of perception and language should actually be drawn between the worlds of sensation and perception." Sensations may be meaningless, but percepts are not meaningless and thus the symbolic must already be present in the perceptual world. When we observe the Necker cube it may at first present its nearer face as up, and then with continued viewing it presents its front face as down. Up is one meaning perceptually presented to us; down is a second meaning perceptually presented to us. Language does not give us these different meanings; the meanings inhere directly in the percepts themselves.

From this point of view, and as evidenced in the Necker cube example, perception changes from being a merely passive receiver of stimuli, to being an organizer of stimuli in an active fashion. As Cassirer formulates it:

Perception is no longer purely passive, but active, no longer receptive, but selective; it is not isolated or isolating, but oriented toward a universal. This perception as such signifies, intends, and 'says' something bust as the Necker cube 'says' that the front face is up, and though we have to use language to express that fact the upness is given in the perception]—and language merely takes up this first significatory function to carry it in all directions, toward realization and completion. The word of language makes explicit the representative values and meanings that are embedded in perception.…

Cassirer shows just how language does this in a real-life example. He reports on walking through a wood and seeing before him on the path some lime saturating the ground. Then suddenly he realized that it was not lime, but merely the sun shining through the trees onto the ground. Now he saw light on the ground, but he had just seen lime on the ground. Lime is one meaning and it is given directly as a percept; sunshine is a second meaning—also given directly as a percept. Thus even in perception there can be seeings from differing perspective. It is Cassirer's position that differing perspectives would have to arise in a symbolic realm. And though the perspectives of perception are limited, they are there and thus share with a word the symbolic form. Language greatly extends the meanings inherent in perception, but language is not on a different order from perception.

Cassirer has thus proposed a new view of the relations between perception and language. But how can we know that what he says is so? For he intends here no mere abstract proposition, but a proposal grounded in fact. He is not proposing merely an alternate interpretation of the phenomena, but a belief that there can be an empirical determination in the facts. That determination is to be found, according to Cassirer, in the known perceptual facts derived from brain pathology. Indeed, he says:

…the thoroughly individual, singular perception which sensationalism and with it the skeptical critique of language sets up as a supreme norm, an ideal of knowledge, is essentially nothing more than a pathological phenomenon … which occurs when perception begins to lose its anchor … [Cassirer observed Gelb and Goldstein's brain damaged patients. He says of one of them] … his sensations of light and color were intact or so little modified that their impairment could be regarded as irrelevant to optical recognition. [Then he quotes Gelb and Goldstein.] 'The patient sees colored and colorless spots… He also … sees whether a certain spot is … thin or thick, large or small, short or long… altogether, the spots arouse a chaotic impression and not, as in the normal individual, the impression of a specifically formed whole.

The sensationistic impressions that the introspectionist doctrine espoused appear to be found only in the brain damaged individual. His perceptions are spots rather than organized entities whose meaning is directly given: lime, sunlight, face up, etc. The spots do not possess spontaneous meanings, but are empty of meaning and can be used only by making intellectual inferences about them.

And despite the severity of his brain damage, this patient is able to make inferences about what is happening. At one point Cassirer is walking with the patient when there is a man sweeping about 50 paces away. Cassirer reports:

The patient says spontaneously: 'That man is sweeping, I know it. I see him every day.' (What do you see [Cassirer asks]?) 'A long line, then something down below, sometimes here, sometimes there.' On this occasion he relates spontaneously how he distinguishes people from cars on the street. People are all alike: narrow and long, cars are wide; you notice that at once, much thicker.

Instead of seeing a person, he sees a kind of line and infers that it is a person; instead of seeing a car, he infers that the extended spot is a car.

It is the brain damaged then who fit the picture that a sensationalist and intellectualist psychology provided. The optical picture of their world is one of isolated fragments which have no meaning. And the meaning is then inferred by an intellectual operation. The sensationalistic and intellectualistic doctrine which was ment to describe all normal perception is found to apply only to the brain damaged. As Cassirer says: "In normal perception every particular aspect is always related to a comprehensive context, an ordered and articulated totality of aspects, and draws its interpretation and meaning from this relation." The French-English dictionary before me is certainly particular, but it has a general component. That dictionary has a place among all other dictionaries and 'draws its interpretation and meaning from this relation.' The percept, just as is the concept of language, 'is always related to a comprehensive context.' Cassirer has here united his definition of the concept with his definition of the percept. The concept is a general term which organizes and relates those items that belong together and separates them from those that do not belong with them. But the percept also, he says, has the quality of relating and separating. The lime seen is related to other white powders—and this is given in the percept—and the lime is separate from the nonpowders—and this too is given in the percept itself.

Cassirer has united percepts and language by showing that the sensationalistic and intellectualistic doctrines that would rob the percept of its own meaning apply only to the brain damaged. He then shows that percepts themselves have, in rudimentary form, the relating and separating qualities that concepts have. And since concepts are linguistic, language and percepts share a symbolic component and function in a like manner. Even today the empirical fields of perception and of the psychology of language have not fully grasped this unification.