SOURCE: "From Language to the Art of Language: Cassirer's Aesthetic," in The Quest for Imagination, edited by 0. B. Hardison, Jr., The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971, pp. 87-112.

[In the following essay, Eggers compares Cassirer's views on language with those of other aesthetic philosophers.]

Ernst Cassirer's interest in the symbolic form called language arises directly out of his allegiance to the long tradition of idealist philosophy. The history of attitudes toward language which comprises the introductory chapter of his Phenomenology of Linguistic Form (the first volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms) reaches from Plato to Croce, and whatever impedes the gradual revelation of Kantian epistemology in the realm of language analysis gets short shrift. For example, he dismisses the dull mechanics of modern descriptive linguistics as an evasion of that same, fundamental problem of language which empiricism in all its historical shapes could never solve. A psychology of simple associations, whether strictly rationalist or "psychophysical," offers no explanation for language in its creative aspect. For this we need an image of man which frees him to create, a philosophy which grounds a "universal principle of form" in the originality of human action. Such has been the basic tenet of idealism throughout its history:

This desire and capacity for giving form to experience is what Herder and Humboldt show to be the essence of language, what Schiller points to as the essential nature of play and art, and what Kant shows us to be true of the structure of theoretical knowledge. For them, all of this would not be possible as outgrowth, as sheer product, if unique modes of formal construction [spheres of possibility] did not underlie [the working out of] these creations. The very fact that man is capable of this type of productivity is precisely what stands out as the unique and distinguishing characteristic of human nature. [The Logic of the Humanities]

That the actions of man are essentially problematic, that the modes themselves through which he perceives his world are finally irreducible, sui generis—it is here that Plato, Kant, and Croce all begin.

To Croce goes the credit for turning the tide against linguistic positivism by equating language with spiritual expression and viewing the analysis of language as ultimately a problem in applied aesthetics. But Crocean "expression" is too reductive a concept for a systematic philosophy of the scope which Cassirer proposes. Aesthetics has its place within the full range of symbolic forms; but each of these forms, each of the "sciences of expression," must be kept in place if only for methodological reasons. Unless first we recognize their independence one from another, we cannot go on to describe the generic humanity which underlies them all: "Despite any systematic combination into which [language] may enter with logic and aesthetics, we must assign to it a specific and autonomous position within the whole." It is true that there is "no break in the life of the spirit" between the various symbolic forms; they are functionally identical as modes of symbolization, and the symbol-systems they produce lie on a continuum. Indeed, it is this argument which ties the three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms together. But this is the argument to be proved, and we can proceed only analytically. In fact what Cassirer discovers when he surveys the full range of languages and possible languages is that although the impulse which lies behind the perpetual recreation of language is spiritually free, its evolution seems inevitably to be away from the metaphorical and the concrete toward "the expression of pure relation." His demonstration is a complex one, and we will return to this point later in this essay.

Cassirer attacks Croce's notion of expression on more strictly aesthetic grounds as well. For Croce, all of the human domain is divided into two parts, the artistic and the scientific, the intuitive and the logical:

Knowledge has two forms: it is either intuitive knowledge or logical knowledge; knowledge obtained through the imagination or knowledge obtained through the intellect; knowledge of the individual or knowledge of the universal; of individual things or of the relations between them; it is, in fact, productive either of images or concepts. [Croce, Aesthetic]

Not only are these two realms independent of each other, they are fundamentally antagonistic—the artistic image is "pure intuition," simple and singular in its expression, revealing no trace of the abstract, the logical, the universal. Moreover, expression itself is bound immediately to intuition—to isolate the phenomenon of expression is only to view the process of intuition the other way around, from object to subject, from image to artist. It is on this basis that Croce is able to condemn as "the greatest triumph of the intellectualist error" the concept of "genre," the "theory of artistic and literary kinds." We cannot, he argues, apply a canon of normative values to a work of art which, by the nature of its inception in the imagination of the artist, posits its own rules. The logical mind is unable to penetrate artistic intuition: it can with its abstract schemes manipulate the art-object, but it cannot apprehend the object of expression because the object manifests a unity of its own.

Cassirer too is suspicious of normative aesthetics. What he disputes is Croce's apparent disregard of artistic medium. In Crocean terms, the distinctions between material modes of artistic construction are simply accidental; intuition will out in one form or another, and the very individuality of the expression becomes an argument against considering material form: "one painting is as different from another as it is from a poem; and painting and poetry have value, not because of the sounds filling the air or the color refractions in the light, but because of what they are able … to convey to the mind." Cassirer's complaint is that to regard distinctions in material form as "mere 'physical differences in means of presentation" is to destroy that same unity of intuition and expression which Croce insists upon:

As I see it, such a view does not do justice to the artistic process; for it would break the work of art into two halves, which would then stand in no necessary relation to each other. In actuality, however, the particular manner in which the work of art is expressed belongs not only to the technique of the construction of the work but also to its very conception. Beethoven's intuition is musical, Phidias' intuition is plastic, Milton's intuition is epic, Goethe's intuition is lyric. In each case this fact involves not only the surface but the very heart of their creative work. It is only with this reflection that we strike the bedrock, the true meaning and profound justification for the classification of the arts into various "species." [Aesthetic]

What may here appear to be little more than an assertion on Cassirer's part takes on the weight of argument when we regard it as an integral element of his complex system: significantly it is by generalizing on this subject of genre that he concludes his Logic of the Humanities. The chapter from which it is drawn, "The 'Tragedy of Culture,'" is perhaps Cassirer's most expansive and most eloquent statement of his broad humanistic concerns. Like Croce with whom he takes issue, he uses the art-construct as a paradigm of human freedom. Their vocabularies here are identical: "By elaborating his impressions, man frees himself from them. By objectifying them, he removes them from him and makes himself their superior." In all, there could be no better summation of Cassirer's own humanistic thrust than these words of Croce.

But we have concluded before we have begun. One specific purpose of this essay is to elucidate the concept of "genre" in Cassirer's terms, to provide in some detail the defense which he only hinted at for an aesthetics of artistic kinds. For this purpose we must keep Cassirer's dispute with Croce clearly in mind. Yet even in reviewing Cassirer's own terminology we are susceptible to two extremes. On one hand, in order to remain faithful to the spirit of the man, we cannot avoid generalizing as in the paragraph above on some of the broader issues involved. On the other—because this too is a part of Cassirer's philosophic spirit—we must proceed step by step, utilizing the scattered bits of aesthetic theory throughout Cassirer's works for what they reveal. Still, Cassirer does provide a general methodological framework for an investigation of this sort in the three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. The attempt in this essay will be to extend his analysis of language as a symbolic form in Volume I to the particular problem of poetic language, language turned to the special purposes of the symbolic form called art. We should expect of the art of language what we find in each of the symbolic forms, a "specific structural principle," a "modality" which is "specific to it and in a sense lends a common tonality to all its individual structures."

Of all the theorists of language who have had the courage to deal with the problem of its evolution historically and logically, Cassirer is indebted primarily to two—to Herder for his concept of "reflection" and to Wilhelm von Humboldt for solving the objective-subjective crux of communication by incorporating the concept of "subjective universality" in the domain of language analysis. Together these two philosophers provide a firm foundation for an idealist's approach to language, and thus it is here that we should begin.

Even if all language is rooted in feeling and its immediate instinctive manifestations, even if it originates not in the need for communication but in cries, tones, and wild, articulated sounds—even so, such an aggregate of sounds can never constitute the specific "form" of language. [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, I]

Cassirer's insistence upon the radical distinction between man and beast, his identification of the symbolic forms as specifically and exclusively human—this is the axiom upon which his entire systematic philosophy rests, and it is this which accounts for his scientific preoccupation with "threshold experiences," with so-called animal languages, with aphasia and amusia, with Helen Keller and Laura Bridgman, and with as many primitive languages as were available to him. But if the materials he draws upon for demonstration most often take on an historical shape, and if his emphasis falls continually on the rudimentary or the primitive, still, the importance of his historical speculations lies in the models or patterns they offer for the philosophic analysis of linguistic conceptualization. So it is that he is willing to accept a metaphorical explanation where an historical illustration cannot be found.

On "reflection," which he designates as the specifically "human function" in the process of language formation, he quotes Herder at length:

Man demonstrates reflection when the force of his soul works so freely that in the ocean of sensations that flows into it from all the senses, he can, in a manner of speaking, isolate and stop One wave, and direct his attention toward this wave, conscious that he is doing so. He demonstrates reflection when, emerging from the nebulous dream of images flitting past his senses, he can concentrate upon a point of wakefulness, dwell voluntarily on One image, observe it calmly and lucidly, and distinguish characteristics proving that this and no other is the object. He demonstrates reflection when he not only knows all attributes vividly and clearly, but can recognize one or more distinguishing attributes: the first act of this recognition yields a clear concept; it is the soul's First judgment—and what made this recognition possible? A characteristic which he had to isolate and which came to him clearly as a characteristic of reflection. Forward! Let us cry eureka! The first characteristic of reflection was the word of the soul. With it human speech was invented! [Herder, "Uber den Ursprung der Sprache"]

The general Kantian orientation is apparent here, but the discovery which accounts for Herder's enthusiasm lies beyond the strict domain of Kantian epistemology, beyond the simple mechanics of cognition. An application of the Kantian "organic form"—the form which a voluntarist epistemology recognizes as the unfilled content of perception—to the cultural phenomenon of language is an extension of the Kantian model of perception to the domain of the understanding. It makes legitimate an analysis of culture in terms of the "new science" and thus is the necessary first step in the establishment of that "morphology of the human spirit" which Cassirer took as his own life's work.

More specifically, Herder's concept of reflection affirms as irreducible the unit-elements of the understanding. Such an assertion is, as we have already noted, characteristic of the whole tradition of idealist philosophy. But what is more important in terms strictly of language analysis is that it offers a new perspective on that tendency toward the general (or abstract, or universal) which seems inherent in the very process of language formation. Locke saw in the mechanics of language a model example of the sensation combined and separated: the universal is abstracted from the independent particles of empirical data. But with Herder no longer do we have "an artificial system of signs" hung onto our perceptions, the natural stuff of our experience; rather, "here perception itself, by virtue of its spiritual character, contains a specific factor of form which, when fully developed, is represented in the form of words and language." The essence of language could now no longer be sought in "abstraction from differentiation" but only in the "totality of differentiations," since it was this totality which for Herder determined the formal nature of abstraction in language.

The thrust of Herder's argument was of course directed against empiricist skepticism: having forsworn the rationalist faith in a pre-existent harmony between the ideal and the real, the universal and the particular, Berkeley for one could only conclude that if language is a mirror, the mirror of language falsifies and distorts. Humboldt followed Herder in attempting to affirm the truth value of language in general and poetic language in particular. But before we proceed to consider Humboldt's contribution to the idealist philosophy of language, we need to examine further the implications of "reflection" for Cassirer's own system in the Language volume.

Cassirer devotes an entire chapter to the problem of "concept and class formation in language" and opens it with his own attack on the nominalist view of abstraction. Language, it is argued, provides not only the perfect paradigm for concept formation in general; in fact, says the nominalist, language is the functional basis for conceptualization. And the means through which the concept arises is linguistic abstraction: common characteristics are abstracted from similar things, and these characteristics are identified by names. But the question is, how do we get the concepts by which we judge "common characteristics"? The nominalist argument on this point is simply circular: "any attempt to form a concept by abstraction is tantamount to looking for the spectacles which are on your nose, with the help of these same spectacles."

To solve this problem, Cassirer attempts to discover the conditions of that first intuition or "primary formation" effected in language which provides the foundation for later complex syntheses. The "secret of predication" is discoverable in the factors of synthesis and analysis which determine the formation of individual words, and as he builds his examination of the verbal concept from rudimentary to the complex, Cassirer explicates the term "reflection" more precisely.

The first step in concept formation is not to raise our perceptions to a higher degree of universality but rather to make them more determinate. In order for contents of perception to be classed according to similarities, they first must be identified as contents, they must be objectified. The content is recognized as objectively real—and yet this reality is not independent of the content. Rather, the content is determined for knowledge, "identical with itself and recurrent amid the flux of impressions." This act of "objectivization" (reflexive in the sense that it posits its own phenomenal reality) is designated a "naming": a "whatness" is conferred upon specific content as it is individuated, and this "whatness" is its form. Thus the formal nature of the primary intuition is irreducible; but as we shall see, what logically are secondary elaborations of this process of objectivization, complex "namings," retain this same quality of irreducibleness.

The next step in the formation of the concept is the articulation of various relationships between "named" contents. The relationships are not arbitrary since they themselves disclose objective forms; yet neither can they be abstracted from their contents and considered apart from them. Now for there to exist objective and yet not substantial relationships between perceptual contents, we must conclude that the giving of a name, the logically original formation, has been a qualifying formation—the thing is named on the basis of some particular property:

The work of the spirit does not consist in the subordinating the content to another content, but in distinguishing it as a concrete, undifferentiated whole by stressing a specific, characteristic factor in it and focusing attention on this factor. The possibility of "giving a name" rests on this concentration of the mind's eye: the new imprint of thinking upon the content is the necessary condition for its designation in language. [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, I]

All of this is rather difficult, but we need to follow the intricacies of Cassirer's argument on this one point in order to appreciate fully the impact of the general argument which lies behind it. And we are here at the heart of the one issue which will most concern us throughout this essay. Once again, the process of linguistic conceptualization is functionally identical with "objectivization" in any and each of the symbolic forms. When we turn to the specific problem of artistic genre—the designation in artistic symbols of relationships between contents of perception—there too will we see that the complex "naming" is irreducible, that the relationships are objective and yet not substantial, an lat the intuition of relationships may be viewed as simultaneous with the "naming" of simple contents since this "naming" itself is a qualifying formation. For now, what we need to recognize about the nature of reflection in each of the symbolic forms is that as an intuitive transformation of impressions into representations and representations into concepts it does not abstract but particularize and that in its particularity it determines the whole before the part. By now it should be clear that for Cassirer reflection designates man's symbol-making function itself: the paradox of a concept which in its particularity expresses the whole is the familiar paradox of the symbol.

The final elaboration or complication of concept formation in language manifests itself in that whole which is an entire language. And here we return to Humboldt, for it is at this point that Cassirer introduces Humboldt's concept of "inner form":

That each particular language has specific inner form meant for [Humboldt] primarily that in the choice of its designations it never simply expressed the objects perceived in themselves, but that this choice was eminently determined by a whole spiritual attitude, by the orientation of man's subjective view of objects. [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, I]

It is this general orientation which man brings to the formation of his language—to the very process of naming—which is determinate. The example Cassirer draws here he repeats later in the Essay on Man: that the moon in Greek is named "the measurer" and in Latin "the glittering" indicates that words in different languages cannot be fully synonymous, for here the same sensory impression is "assigned to very different notions of meaning and made determinate by them." And the inner form of a language determines its larger structural features, not simply its vocabulary. With the help of Humboldt, Cassirer has extended the scope of the reflective process to include among the undifferentiated and irreducible unities of expression languages themselves. But here two difficulties arise. If we cannot grasp the special subjectiveness of various languages, how do we attain the objectivity in language which makes communication possible? And how can we rise from the perspectives of various languages to the perspective of language itself, since it is with language as a unique symbolic form that we are primarily concerned? These questions are, of course, directly related, and it is Humboldt again who provides the basis for an answer to them both.

With Humboldt, the subjective-objective dualism of language is almost completely resolved. Each individual language is an individual world view, and objectivity is attainable only within the community of world views:

… language is subjective in relation to the knowable, and objective in relation to man as an empirical-psychological subject. Each language is a note in the harmony of man's universal nature: "once again, the subjectivity of all mankind becomes intrinsically objective." [Cassirer quotes Humboldt, "Uber das Vergleichende Sprach-studium"]

We are not far at this point from the Kantian subjective universality in epistemology, but what is more important here is the idea that objectivity is not a given only to be described but "a goal which must be achieved by a process of spiritual formation." Language-making is a function of man's characteristically purposive activity. That objectivization which is an integration of individual world views into the languages by which we communicate constitutes the project of language as symbolic form. Such we should expect is the relationship too between individual artistic intuition and the articulate whole which is art.

We have so far left out of our consideration the second and third chapters of the Language volume, and before we can proceed to draw our own conclusions from Cassirer's systematic investigation of this primary symbolic form we need to recognize the distinction he draws between "sensuous" and "intuitive" expression. The plan of the volume as a whole is progressive—Cassirer builds from the simple to the complex, from the mechanics of naming to the "expression of pure relation"—and thus to rearrange its chapters is to violate the essential unity of his argument. Yet the sense we now have of the argument as a whole should help enforce the point of these central chapters and carry us from language to the art of language. For in Cassirer's terms it is with the radical distinction between sensuous and intuitive expression that we find the moment of the symbolic form called art.

To this point we have reviewed Cassirer's logical demonstration that the genesis of the linguistic concept is unique. In chapters two and three he substantiates his understanding of the genesis of language on other than logical—on anthropological—grounds. At the center of the anthropologist's view of language is the element of "dynamism"—expression viewed as the movement of will and action directed toward one single point—and this concept is sanctioned even by the psychologists. Dynamism as willed action argues against the very basis of sensationalist psychology, however; and its workings are apparent even in the simple gestures of sign languages. The sensationalist would regard the pointing gesture of the human as an attenuation of the grasping or clutching movement of the animal. But this is false anthropology. Rather, Cassirer insists, the very disparity between animal movement and human action underscores the uniqueness of the human animal: "It is one of the first steps by which the perceiving and desiring I removes a perceived and desired content from himself and so forms it into an 'object,' an 'objective content.'" Since for Cassirer conceptual learning means surpassing "sensory immediacy," the human gesture of indication is a threshold experience in man; it reveals a process of objectivization as dynamic activity.

But besides the deictic or indicative gesture there is the mimetic or imitative, and this second fundamental class seems by its nature to deny that very freedom from the constraint of sensation which we regard as characteristically human: the more accurate the imitation, the more bound the "I" is to outward impression, the less spontaneous. But imitation may be understood in a broader, distinctly Aristotelian sense as something more than mere reproduction. The difference between the inarticulate imitation of animal sounds which express mere sensation and the articulate mimesis of human speech is that mimetic "reproduction never consists in retracing, line for line, a specific content of reality; but in selecting a pregnant motif in that content and so producing a characteristic 'outline of its form." This is to say that the simplest human mimetic act is implicitly symbolic. With the spoken word, the symbolic possibilities of mimetic gestures are manifest, since the single word not only expresses immediate duration and location in the moment of its utterance but it carries with it as well reference to a systematic whole of which it is the definitive part: "the element exists only insofar as it is constantly regenerated: its content is gathered up into the act of its production." Language is vital precisely in that it is self-perfecting strictly according to its own laws. Cassirer devotes the remainder of his second chapter to this new perspective on the evolution of language through its mimetic, its analogical, and finally its fully "symbolic" phases.

Yet once again what appear to be later and more complex phases of development in the process of language formation prove instead to be aspects of the intuitive whole which is language itself, aspects separated one from another strictly for purposes of explanation. It is difficult here as throughout the Language volume to decide upon the logical or chronological priorities involved. Where a phonetic representation breaks the tie with a single sensuous object or sense impression to express relation, we have an instance of analogical signification. The linguistic phenomenon of reduplication is a good example. At first reduplication seems to be governed by the principle of imitation since phonetic repetition resembles repetition in the sensuous reality or impression. But there is a curious inconsistency which argues against such an interpretation. Reduplication can be an intensifier or an attenuator, and in temporal sequences it can designate past, present, or future: "This is the clearest indication that it is not so much a reproduction of a fixed and limited perceptual content as the expression of a specific approach, one might say a certain perceptual movement." Cassirer wants to view the linguistic phenomenon of reduplication as an implicit trope, itself an "unfilled content" which becomes functional in language according to the purpose it takes on. He has reduced what might seem a secondary and mechanical complication of the principle of imitation to a simple and primary intuition in itself. It is the semblance of purpose which this phenomenon reveals—its "content as the expression of a specific approach"—and not its relational character which Cassirer stresses. What he discovers is that in fact his tripartite division of linguistic functions breaks down; for however we wish to describe the character of the individual linguistic phenomenon in its capacity to designate (whether the relationship between sign and referent is imitative or analogical), in its capacity to signify the individual element of language partakes of the symbolic function of language as an intuitive and undifferentiated whole:

All these phenomena, to which we might easily add others of like nature, make it evident that even where language starts as purely imitative or "analogical" expression, it constantly strives to extend and finally to surpass its limits. It makes a virtue of necessity, that is, of the ambiguity inevitable in the linguistic sign. For this very ambiguity will not permit the sign to remain a mere individual sign; it compels the spirit to take the decisive step from the concrete function of "designation" to the universal and universally valid function of "signification." In this function language casts off, as it were, the sensuous covering in which it has hitherto appeared; mimetic or analogical expression gives way to purely symbolic expression which, precisely in and by virtue of its otherness, becomes the vehicle of a new and deeper spiritual content. [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, I]

In this passage too, Cassirer seems to establish a sequence of development in language from designation to signification. But we misapprehend the very basis of his argument if we fail to recognize that language as symbolic action presupposes a fundamental identity between the objective and subjective spheres of intuition, an identity which renders designation and signification simultaneous aspects of a single process. This point should become clearer as we move on to Cassirer's third chapter.

Cassirer's primary concern in this chapter is with the interpenetration of sensuous and spiritual experience in language, and for this purpose he describes the dependence of linguistic conceptualization upon the Kantian intuitions of space, time, and number. For the substance of his argument he draws a full array of illustrations from anthropology and child psychology. But more pertinent to our investigation is the new conclusion he reaches about the relationship between designation and signification. It is true that a part of what language does is to give us new specifications for what we regard as the world of objects; this function (we might call it the "nominal" function of language, the "naming" or "noun-making" function) is expressive in that the objective and subjective spheres are correlative (to confer a name is to objectify the self). But language has another independent means of giving form to subjective existence, for the terms which disclose the reality of the self are not drawn exclusively from those of the external world. The pronoun does not "stand for" a noun: its priority is a necessary inference from the nature of the speaking situation. This new function of language (in the broadest sense "pronominal") is perhaps best exemplified by the modal distinctions in verbs, another implicit trope or system of tropes by which the "I" expresses any of various attitudes toward or relationships with the sphere of objective reality.

And yet, as Cassirer goes on to point out, this subjective "I" continually seeks objective form: the worlds inside and outside must, when language first incorporates the "I," be differentiated on objective grounds. Thus the first personal pronouns are possessive pronouns. Nonetheless, such objectivization is spiritual expression, and once more we discover that any attempt to break down the spiritual unity of expression into its component phases finally must fail:

… the power demonstrated by language … lies not in regarding the opposition between subjective and objective as a rigid, abstract opposition between two mutually exclusive spheres, but in conceiving it as dynamically mediated in the most diverse ways. Language does not represent the two spheres in themselves but reveals their reciprocal determination—it creates as it were a middle realm in which the forms of substance and the forms of action are referred to one another and fused into a spiritual unity of expression. [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, I]

The model here for the relationship between subject and object obtains with reference to all symbolic activity; the concept of symbolic form as mediation is important for Cassirer's aesthetics.

He begins the last chapter of the Language volume with another of Humboldt's fundamental insights, that the true and original element in all language formation is not the simple word but the sentence. It was Humboldt who described the conceptualization of the single word as expressive of "inner form," and up to this point it has been with the single word in its formation that Cassirer has dealt almost exclusively. And yet his procedure here is identical with his procedure throughout: what might seem a secondary complication is revealed as logically or chronologically prior. Now Cassirer is able to adopt the principle of "organism" and make it his own. Aristotelian "organism" postulates the whole as prior to its parts, and language proves itself organic in nature as we see "inner form" specifically expressed in the relationship between linguistic elements.

Here again that relation between "essence" and "form" which is expressed in the old scholastic dictum forma dat esse rei, is confirmed also for language. Epistemology cannot analyze the substance and form of knowledge into independent contents which are only outwardly connected with one another; the two factors can only be thought and defined in relation to one another; and likewise in language, pure, naked substance is a mere abstraction—a methodological concept to which no immediate "reality," no empirical fact corresponds. [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, I]

Thus the "progression" toward the "expression of pure relation" which characterizes the development of language culminates in the expression of pure relation, the copula itself, the "is." And thus the culmination of linguistic development is at the same time the threshold of judgment, the expression without which no judgment is possible. Yet even here there is no breakdown in the unity of subject and object, of the spiritual and material, in expression. For even the abstract form of pure relation cannot cast off its materiality or there can be no expression; rather,

Here again, the spiritual form of relational expression can be represented only in a certain material cloak, which, however, comes ultimately to be so permeated with the relational meaning that it no longer appears as a mere barrier, but as the sensuous vehicle of a purely ideal signification. [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, I]

In the chapter on art in An Essay on Man, his most extended treatment of the subject, Cassirer focuses on two problems: first, he attempts to demonstrate the specifically symbolic character of artistic form, and second—because the danger arises immediately of our granting the domain of symbolic expression exclusively to art—he argues that artistic form is only one of the various symbolic realms of expression. It is here then that we should find the distinction Cassirer draws between language and the art of language. And it should be possible to elaborate Cassirer's aesthetics on the basis of our review of the Language volume. In particular, his discussion of genre in this chapter is only cursory. Perhaps on the basis of this chapter and the systematic philosophy of symbolic forms we can organize what are scattered arguments in defense of genre into a coherent exposition.

That same "basic division in the interpretation of reality" between objective and subjective which we found in the philosophy of language is apparent in the history of aesthetics. Only, surprisingly, philosophers of art are even more susceptible than philosophers of language of falling to one or the other of the extremes of interpretation and of failing, in either case, to recognize the specifically symbolic function of the artistic form. The chief danger in the realm of language is to regard symbol as sign, to deny linguistic form its special autonomy and its expressive power. We tend not to see the trope in the syntactical element or the word. Although of course we never deny language its practical value as a vehicle of communication, its expressive value is seldom recognized. Aesthetic theorists, on the other hand, especially sensitive to the problem of communication, either defensively assert or radically deny the continuity of art with the rest of man's activities. But there is another alternative. We can dismiss the criterion of communication as inadequate to explain either the motivation or the function of the art symbol and look instead to its expressive value. Beauty, according to Schiller, is "living form"; it is an active, "spontaneous" intuition of the forms of things. And the symbolic function of the articulate whole which is art resolves the possible antinomy between truth and beauty:

To be sure, it is not the same thing to live in the realm of forms as to live in that of things, of the empirical objects of our surroundings. The forms of art, on the other hand, are not empty forms. They perform a definite task in the construction and organization of human experience. To live in the realm of forms does not signify an evasion of the issues of life; it represents, on the contrary, the realization of one of the highest energies of life itself. We cannot speak of art as "extrahuman" or "superhuman" without overlooking one of its fundamental features, its constructive power in the framing of our human universe. [Essay on Man]

But the spontaneous, constructive power of art (as of language) may be called into question by another misconception of its truth-function, the imitation theory.

In art as in language there is a sense in which the mimetic impulse is primary: "Language originates in an imitation of sounds, art is an imitation of outward things. Imitation is a fundamental instinct, an irreducible fact of human nature." But in the sense that imitation is constraint, in the sense that it is understood as a mere mechanical reproduction either of external things or internal emotions, in that sense the symbolic form of art would be denied the very quality of spontaneity which distinguishes it as symbolic. Art is not the shadow of reality but reality itself expressed in a unique mode of symbolization.

The artist does not find creative freedom simply by turning his attention from the external to the internal, from the sensual to the emotional life. It was Croce's mistake to think that freedom is attained for artistic intuition simply by its becoming inner-directed, that it gains its creative strength by withholding itself for the moment of art from sensuous medium. Croce's emphasis upon the spiritual is a healthy one, but as a solution to the problem of freedom in art it is simply inadequate. By denying the function of sensuous medium in the process of artistic intuition, Croce has fallen back upon an essentially imitative concept of art; he has failed to recognize that as a symbolic form art unifies the spiritual and the sensual and only thereby attains freedom:

Like all the other symbolic forms art is not the mere reproduction of a ready-made, given reality. It is one of the ways leading to an objective view of things and of human life. It is not an imitation but a discovery of reality. [Essay on Man]

The purposive activity of art as symbolic form is the same process of "objectivization" which characterized "discovery" in language.

But the Crocean construct of the imagination is inadequate on other grounds as well. At this point we need to explore further the way in which such objectivization works in the symbolic domains of language and art. Once again, the "motive for metaphor," the impulse toward the symbolic use of language is a private one; it does not rise out of any need to communicate. To Goethe's despair over the way that language seems finally to be a barrier and not a bridge between men, Cassirer answers:

If the function of language and art were only that of building bridges between the inner worlds of different subjects, the objection that this task is utopian would be justified.…[But] language is not merely an externalization of ourselves; like art and any of the other symbolic forms, it is a pathway to [the realization of] ourselves. It is productive in that consciousness and knowledge of ourselves is first achieved by means of it. [Logic of the Humanities]

The artist discovers himself in the art which he creates in that, simply, the artist expresses himself in substantial form. For such an internal dialogue there is no direct need for an audience. If art is to be understood as communication, it is communication, as Susanne Langer says, "not anxious to be understood." On this point there would seem to be no disagreement with Croce, for what Cassirer is reminding us of is that the objectivity which we attribute to our surroundings is a quality which we have given them, that when the artist identifies what is inside with what is outside he does so not to get along with the external world but to satisfy an order within. But Cassirer qualifies his argument with his concept of symbolic form as mediation within that community of "artists" which as a community represents the possibility for objective value in art:

… the "I" does not exist as an original and given reality which related itself to other realities… thus entering into communion with them. [Rather,] separation between "I" and "you," and likewise that between "I" and "world," constitutes the goal and not the starting point of the spiritual life. [Logic of the Humianities]

We can see more clearly the tradition in which Cassirer stands by comparing his concept of symbol as mediation with what Schiller has to say about the freedom which art affords in the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Schiller's starting point too is language, but the myth of the origin of language which he draws has broader implications:

Whilst man, in his first physical condition, is only passively affected by the world of sense, he is still entirely identified with it; and for this reason the external world, as yet, has no objective existence for him. When he begins in his aesthetic state of mind to regard the world objectively, then only is his personality severed from it, and the world appears to him an objective reality, for the simple reason that he has ceased to form an identical portion of it.

What art instructs us in is the capacity for reflective contemplation:

Whereas desire seizes at once its object, reflection removes it to a distance and renders it inalienably her own by saving it from the greed of passion. The necessity of sense which [man] obeyed during the period of mere sensations, lessens during the period of reflection; the senses are for the time in abeyance; even ever-fleeting time stands still whilst the scattered rays of consciousness are gathering and shape themselves; an image of the infinite is reflected upon perishable ground … Nature, which previously ruled him as a power, now expands before him as an object. What is objective to him can have no power over him, for in order to become objective it has to experience his own power. [Schiller, Letters on The Aesthetic Education of Man]

What Schiller describes as the objectivizing power of the artistic symbol Cassirer would extend to all of man's symbolic forms, which is to say from one point of view that all of man's symbols are artistic and from another that art holds no unique sway over the powers of the imagination. This is a point to which we will return immediately, for in it lies the crux of Cassirer's dispute with Croce. But about Schiller we should notice first that he makes no distinction here between artist and audience but rather speaks of man in his aesthetic state of mind and second, and in this connection, that the criterion of communication between artist and audience plays no part in the power the symbol has in freeing the human spirit through objectivization.

The ideal audience, that audience the writer writes for, is his projection of himself in the realm of freedom; the reader who approximates this ideal realizes that freedom which for Cassirer separates man from beast. What we learn from our experience of art is that the artist creates in a state of freedom; what we do then, because we too would be free, is to become artists ourselves, to recognize the manifold symbolic forms which constitute culture as human creations and strive to make them beautiful. To return to Schiller:

Does … a state of beauty in appearance exist, and where? It must be in every finely harmonized soul; but as a fact it is only in select circles, like the pure ideal of the Church and state—in circles where manners are not formed by empty imitations of the foreign, but by the very beauty of nature; where man passes through all sorts of complications in all simplicity and innocence, neither forced to trench on another's freedom to preserve his own, nor to show grace at the cost of dignity.

Cassirer and Croce both subscribe to the idea that culture as a purposive activity is a possible realm of expressive freedom.

But Croce would subsume all of man's cultural activities under the broad heading of aesthetics. Cassirer spends a good portion of his chapter on art in the Essay on Man marking the bounds of the aesthetic domain, marking it off from others of the symbolic forms:

Language and science are abbreviations of reality; art is an intensification of reality. Language and science depend upon one and the same process of abstraction; art may be described as a continuous process of concretion.… [Art] does not inquire into the qualities or causes of things; it gives us the intuition of the form of things.

What we call "aesthetic semblance" is not the same phenomenon that we experience in games of illusion. Play gives us illusive images; art gives us a new kind of truth—a truth not of empirical things but of pure forms.

Science gives us order in thoughts; morality gives us order in actions, art gives us order in the apprehension of visible, tangible, and audible appearances … Art may be defined as symbolic language. But this leaves us only with the common genus, not with the specific difference. In modern aesthetics the interest in the common genus seems to prevail to such a degree as almost to eclipse and obliterate the specific difference. Croce insists that there is not only a close relation but a complete identity between language and art … There is, however, an unmistakable difference between the symbols of art and the linguistic terms of ordinary speech or writing. These two activities agree neither in character nor purpose; they do not employ the same means, nor do they tend toward the same ends. Neither language nor art gives us mere imitation of things or actions; both are representations. But a representation in the medium of sensuous forms differs widely from a verbal or conceptual representation.

Taken together, these remarks scattered throughout the chapter all point in one direction. The specific difference between art and language is a difference of medium, and so Croce, who would leave out of aesthetics any consideration of material form, misapprehends the very process of artistic creation.

It is precisely this consideration of material form which demands that as critics of art we recognize the function of artistic genre. The principle of Aristotelian "organism" which is evident in language in the priority of the sentence over individual syntactical elements and individual words—a phenomenon in language which Humboldt designates "inner form"—has its parallel application within the realm of art. Artistic intuition is unique and undifferentiated in its logically and temporally primary phase: it is an intuition of the whole which only subsequently (or consequently) becomes differentiated into its parts. Thus Cassirer may speak of the various idioms of art and the architectonic process by which intuition finds material expression.

Such a statement carries its own qualification, for the intuition does not seek out the medium of its expression; rather, characteristically of symbolic activity in general, the medium itself is a part of that intuition:

The context of a poem cannot be separated from its form—from the verse, the melody, the rhythm. These formal elements are not merely external or technical means to reproduce a given intuition; they are part and parcel of the artistic intuition itself.

Croce argues that to remove from the individual poem a single one of its constituents is to destroy its essential unity, that "the poem is born with [its] words, rhythms, and meters." "From this," says Cassirer,

it also follows that the aesthetic intuition is born at the same time—i.e., as musical, plastic, lyric, or dramatic—and that these distinctions are, therefore, not mere verbal labels or notations which we fix on works of art, and finally, that true differences of style, divergent directions of artistic intention, correspond to these differences. [Logic of the Humanities]

The term "epic" as it applies to an epic poem works in two ways. On one hand it designates a certain complex of characteristics which seem derived, seem to be secondary elaborations of individual words or lines or images when those elements of the poem are taken as its simplest constituents—when, that is, we read the poem word by word, line by line, image by image. An epic poem is a complex poem. At the same time, though, the simplest constituent element of an epic poem is that single, comprehensive intuition (or "direction of intention") which is its epicness. And this is what the term epic signifies. When does that epic form come into being? Not, of course, until the complex of the poem which it designates is complete. And yet that comprehensive intuition which "epic" signifies exists prior to the individual words, lines, images, etc., which embody it since it determines their relationship one to another. In more simple terms, the form is fulfilled over the course of the poem—fulfilled and discovered simultaneously. In more practical terms, the reader comes to an epic poem with a certain expectation of its major form, and that expectation is satisfied or frustrated.

But our "practical" conclusion begs several very practical questions. Is genre in fact an intuition born of the artistic medium and not a mechanical and academic deduction on the artist's part from a tradition of historical precedents? Can the intuition which is genre ever be perfectly expressed? Is its expression invariable? What specifically is the relationship between one epic poem and another? Cassirer answers questions like these in a convincingly practical way by examining the function of tradition in the history of culture at the conclusion of his Logic of the Humanities.

Clearly the kind of coherence, the unique "rationality of form," which the successful poem or statue or piece of music exhibits is a sufficient guarantee and the only guarantee of its truth, for such coherence is the only criterion for symbolic expression. Yet the symbolic form called art, like the other symbolic forms, is a comprehensive and articulate whole with its own specific modality (representation in the medium of sensual forms) and its own history.

Two opposing factors are continually at work in the historical evaluation of art and the arts, the factor of "constancy of form" and the factor of "modifiability of form." But this evolution, this process, can only be carried on by individual artists. The tradition remains in one sense autonomous, and the individual retains his freedom within that tradition:

The creative process must always satisfy two different conditions: on the one side, it must tie itself to something existing and enduring, and, on the other, it must be receptive to new use and application. Only in this way does one succeed in doing justice to both the objective and the subjective demands [implicit in the creative act] … The tie to tradition is most readily evident in what we call technique in the various arts. It is subject to rules as fixed as in any other use of tools; for it is dependent upon the nature of the materials in which the artist works. Art and craft, imaginative activity and skill, have disengaged themselves only very slowly; and it is precisely when artistic achievement is highest that we are likely to find a particularly intimate union between these two factors. No artist can really speak his language if he has not previously learned it through the relentless experience of give and take with its materials. And this is by no means restricted merely to the material-technical side of the problem. It also has its exact parallel in the sphere of form as such. For, once created, even the artistic forms become part of the fixed tradition handed down from one generation to another.…The language of forms assumes such fixity that specific themes, with their determinate modes of expression, seem so firmly grown together that we encounter them again and again in the same or only slightly modified forms. [Logic of The Humanities]

Indeed Cassirer observes of lyric form that "there are, after all, only a few great and fundamental themes to which lyric poetry may apply itself." The reason for this phenomenon lies not so much in the limitations of human experience, of course, as in the restricted nature of that experience which lyric intuition discloses. For Croce, such "restriction" seems a constraint, but only because he persists in regarding form and matter as antagonistic forces in the process of creation. With Cassirer, the opposition of form and matter is resolved in their reciprocal determination:

From the standpoint of phenomenological inquiry there is no more a "matter in itself" than a "form in itself "; there are only total experiences which can be compared from the standpoint of matter and form and determined and ordered according to this standpoint. [The Phenomenology of Language]

The concept of genre is a meaningful one precisely in that the degree of determination which it identifies is the measure of freedom achieved. Such, as Harry Slochower describes it, is the thrust of Cassirer's insistence upon art as mediation.

But there can be no perfect lyric, no perfectly lyrical poem. Nor is the expression of lyric intuition invariable.

We can erect critical paradigms for genres in art—in fact as critics responsive to generic unity within individual works of art we are obliged to—but we will find no single example which perfectly conforms to the paradigms we erect. Does this invalidate the concept of genre as a critical tool? Here we can appropriate Cassirer's defense of Burkhardt's generic "Renaissance man":

Shall we regard it, in the logical sense, as a null class—as a class containing no single member? That would be necessary only if we were concerned here with one of those generic concepts arrived at through empirical comparison of particular cases, through what we commonly call "induction." [Logic of the Humanities]

But neither the historian nor the critic of art works quite this way. What Burkhardt discovered about men of the Renaissance was no common characteristic or set of characteristics but rather a "specific ideal connection," a "unity of direction, not a unity of actualization," a "common task," the manifestation of a specific "will."

The historian's apprehension of epochal characterization, because it is a "logico-intellectual activity which is sui generis," is not functionally different from the aesthetic critic's apprehension of genre. The relationship between one epic poem and another is, likewise, an ideal relationship: epic poets cooperate in the task of disclosing epic experience, and the critic who is able conceptually to identify such unity of direction has penetrated into that articulate whole which is the symbolic form of art as it evolves in time. The process of that evolution, the dynamics of innovation in the arts, is, as we should expect, much like that in language itself. To speak of genre as static form with fixed characteristics would be to deny the vitality of culture as an achievement:

In this process the hardened forms are also ever and again melted down, so that they cannot "clothe themselves in rigid armor"; but on the other hand, only in this process do even the momentary impulse, the creation of the moment, receive their continuity and stability. This creation would, like a bubble, have to dissolve before every breath of air if it did not, in the midst of its originating and becoming, encounter earlier structures—forms already originated and in existence—to which it may cling and hold fast. Thus even this which has already come into being is for language not merely material, against which foreign and ever stranger material is ever pressing; but is the product and attestation of the same formative powers to which even language itself owes it existence.… And the same fundamental relationship exhibited here in the realm of language holds true of every genuine "symbolic form." [" 'Spirit' and 'Life' in Contemporary Philosophy"]

We can return in this connection to Schiller's description of the relationship between artist and audience. The critic's activity is finally not much different from that of the artist himself, for in his apprehension of genre the critic engages in the process of objectivization inherent in all symbolic activity. Artist and critic alike are liberated for participation in that culture which is their common task.