The 'Principle of Concrescence' and 'das Lebensgeftihl'

Cassirer's reading of anthropological literature led him at first to the conclusion, shared by many in his time, that the thinking of primitive man was flatly irrational. This was evidenced by the anarchy of myths, totemic associations and other manifestations of mythical thinking. For one thing, it seemed that anything could happen in myths—any relationships could be posited between elements in a mythical story: 'Whereas scientific cognition can combine elements only by differentiating them in the same basic critical act, myth seems to roll everything it touches into unity without distinction. Or, in particular connection with the notion of class membership, such as in totemism, Cassirer says, 'In mythical thinking, any similarity of sensuous manifestation suffices to group the entities n which it appears into a single mythical "genus". Any characteristic … is as good as another.…'

Thus, if anything could happen in myths, how could one make a case for their logical integrity? How could myth reveal any sort of a priori whatsoever? Even if one claimed that myth revealed a unique mode of rationality, one would still need to show what this was. Myths seemed unlikely to be able to do so, since all they showed Cassirer was anarchy.

Yet Cassirer was unwilling to admit that other men could be incorrigibly and consistently irrational. His Enlightenment humanist faith held firm. When it came to the subject of the manifest inconsistencies in mythical thinking, therefore, this faith in universal rationality led Cassirer into the peculiar view that mythical thinking was governed by the 'law of concrescence'. I say 'peculiar' because this so-called 'law' seems really only Cassirer's label for logical anarchy—the law of 'anything goes':

mythical thinking shows itself to be concrete in the literal sense: whatever things it may seize upon undergo a characteristic concretion: they grow together. Whereas scientific cognition seems a synthesis of distinctly differentiated elements, mythical intuition ultimately brings about a coincidence of whatever elements it combines.. [the] law of concrescence or coincidence of the members of a relation in mythical thinking.… [Mytbical Thought]

One is, I think, free to interpret Cassirer here as writing partly tongue-in-cheek. Because he distinguishes this mythical unity from the 'logical' unity of science, he clearly realises a certain difference in meaning. Yet he wants to press on with the concept of the 'law of concrescence', knowing all the while that the regularity of irregularity does not make for any sort of 'law'. Is this just another example of what Peter Gay calls Cassirer's 'rage for coherence', a kind of Kantian polemical habit he could break? Or does Cassirer perhaps have certain reasons—related to the external context of his theory—for wanting to find the prototypes or traces of logical thinking in unlikely places?

The argument of this section, and, indeed, of this chapter, has been that Cassirer had external as well as internal contexts in mind when constructing his theory as he did. It seems to me that in coming up against such a notion as the 'law of concrescence' one naturally feels the need to look for signs of extra-textual concerns. The tortuous way Cassirer labours to construct his position here cries out for closer attention. How does it serve his extra-textual arguments—whether internal or external?

To answer this question one needs to attend more closely to the way 'grow together', as Cassirer puts it. For him, mythical thinking coheres in an 'emotional' unity. The 'wholeness' of myth is not logical or 'rational'; it is 'emotional'. In his later essay on Man Cassirer says, 'Myth and primitive religion are by no means entirely incoherent, they are not bereft of sense or reason. But, their coherence depends much more upon unity of feeling than upon logical rules.'

What is more, Cassirer identifies that particular emotion unifying myth as none other than das Lebensgefühl. This feeling of the unity of life connoted an especially sentimental attitude to mindlessness perhaps unknown outside the tradition of German romanticism. In the ideology of the Mandarins, as well as in popular parlance, terms such as das Leben and Lebensgefühl suggested a vague and moody opposition to modernity and all its trappings. Lebensphilosophie taught the superiority of immediate experience over reflection, emotion over reason, synthesis over analysis, past over present, and so on. As Fritz Ringer puts it, 'In a very general sense, life philosophy was the doctrine that life in its immediacy is man's primary reality'.

Cassirer well understood this philosophy and its popular manifestations. Yet, unlike strict opponents of Lebensphilosophie, Cassirer sought to reconcile das Leben with its dialectical opposite, der Geist. This he tried to do theoretically in his essay' "Spirit" and "Life" in Contemporary Philosophy' (1930) and, indirectly, in his work on mythical thinking. Mythical thought demonstrates a unity of spirit (der Geist) and feeling (das Geftiho. Here Cassirer was undertaking nothing less than a reconciliation of romanticism with rationalism, primitivism with modernism, tribalism with cosmopolitanism—to mention only a few possible meanings of the noble opposition of Leben and Geist.