Read Ernst Cassirer RIGHT NOW
>Wrote masterwork in philosophy that’s completely ignored (Philosophy of Symbolic Forms)
>Synthesised modern science and German idealism
>defended philosophy, art, religion, and myth against positivist/scientism onslaught
>refuted empiricism
>went beyond Kant and Hegel
>unappreciated by the world like all geniuses
>German idealism
lol.
>the greatest philosophical tradition even surpassing platonism
lol.
as much I love Proclus, surpassing Platonism is... not an accomplishment.
Platonism is basically Kantianism except the forms aren’t in your head but intuited by you from the realm of forms
I know exactly one fella who has read this guy and, I kid you not, he's blind.
How did he refute empiricism? By being Kant’s copycat? Also tldr on his debate with Heidegger.
He wasn’t Kants copycat he went beyond Kant in realising that the thing in itself is unknowable and therefore irrelevant or unreal.
This is literally Kant, lmao
No Kant was insistent that the thing in itself exists but is presented to us mediated by a priori forms of cognition
Also he went beyond Kant in expanding on the transcendental forms of cognition also to include religious/aesthetic/mythic/moral forms
And he had a more developed philoskphy of science
Sounds interesting. I had never heard of that guy tbqh.
I might start here since I have an antipathy for Heidegger.
The account of this that I read in Bourdieu's book The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger made me strongly sympathetic toward Heidegger. Bourdieu in general comes across as a snivelling little cunt looking down at Heidegger as a parvenu and identifying himself with haut bourgeois society, so he takes extra pleasure in Cassirer's cunt wife going "lmao Heidegger didn't even know what spoon to use at tea-time."
I should have said Heidegger ms philosophy. Nothing against the man.
Kant was not “insistent” that the thing in itself exists. He isn’t even consistent.
Kant literally affirms that we cannot know the things in themselves several times in the beginning of the First Critique. He repeats that in the Prolegomena. He sometimes take them to exist implicitly, and at other times he is agnostic about them.
I know, I’m not against Kant, just saying that he was clinging onto the existence/importance of the thing in itself which was a slight (very slight) weakness in his position. Idealism says if we can’t know it there’s no point treating it like it exists any more than fairies. For Kant’s view it’s like the thing in itself is more important cause he kind of “needs” it to give something to the transcendental forms of cognition to interpret. Am I wrong? If so I retract. I don’t care about criticising Kant, I just believe Cassirer developed and modernised his thought.
The thing in itself is certainly a problem for Kant, both if we take it as existing or as non existent; that's why Kantians will resort to agnosticism and accusing any criticism of Transcendental Illusion, lol. But I wonder how Cassirer will ground these transcendental forms without an empiricist ground. I think it is very interesting that he considers how myth, religion shape our understanding, after all it all begins with them, but these depend on empirical experience.
He sees art, religion, science, etc. as different “domains” essentially each having their own particular symbolic structure (this is a term unique to him, it means essentially the way they interpret sense-data and the way they express their truths in symbolic form in space and time, science using eg maths symbols and religion using liturgical symbols) and their own coherent internal logic. They are different ways of perceiving the world essentially, different “image-worlds” as he calls them. They are disconnected image-worlds, differing from each other in what kinds of questions they ask, what answers they give, and how they ask and give answers. But behind them all he seeks to find a single spiritual origin; he’s not content with not having a higher synthesis. He asserts philosophy is best equipped to find this synthesis since it stands above all these domains and is able to offer a comparative morphology of them, whereas each domain doesn’t understand the other and accuses it of being inferior.
With respect to empiricism, he takes perception as a given but since we can’t know the thing in itself his philosophy is relegated to explicating phenomenology and nothing else. Experience is the only thing we can know. It differs from empiricism because it denies the existence of “simple impressions” and instead views all experience as being thoroughly and essentially imbued with symbolic form. For example look at this quote I posted here (
) where he says that the experience of a flute presupposes time and can’t really be broken down into a simple impression. He then goes onto explain his project of synthesising the various forms into a single source.
>How did he refute empiricism?
Sensationalism attempts in vain to derive and explain them [that is, the forms of time and causality] from the immediate content of individual impressions. “Five notes on a flute” may, after all, according to Hume’s well-known psychological theory, “give us” the representation of time; however, this result is possible only if the characteristic element of this relation and order of “succession” has already been tacitly incorporated into the content of the individual tones and with it if the general structure of time is already assumed.
[MY NOTE: Once again the empiricist thinks of himself as passively receiving the world and fails to account for the activity of the spirit in the formation of human conscious phenomena]
For psychological as well as epistemo-critical analysis, the real fundamental forms of relation show themselves in the end to be just those simple and irreducible “qualities” of consciousness as the simple sensible qualities, the elements of visual, auditory, or tactile sensation. And yet philosophical thinking cannot content itself with accepting the manifold of these relations as such, as a simple factual state of affairs.
With sensations, we may content ourselves with simply enumerating their different basic classes and arranging them before ourselves as an unconnected multitude; by contrast, what pertains to relations, so it would seem, what they accomplish as individual forms of connections, comes to be grasped and understood by us only if we think of them as connected with one another through a higher mode of synthesis.
Since Plato formulated this problem of the community of forms in The Sophist, the systematic “community” of pure ideas and form-concepts, it has remained alive throughout the history of philosophical thinking….
Interesting. But when it comes to time and sensations as you say, why unconnected? I think that the impressions made are already synthesized in feeling (motion, feeling thereof, etc.) like cause-effect posited as rule and implicitly the idea of succession. Also concerning your note, didn't Hume claim imagination something active and fundamental for our ideas and sensations?
If I understand correctly he seems close to Kuhn's revolution of paradigm concerning the differences among image-worlds. But still, I find it difficult not to see how appealing to experiments, factual evidences abolish much of precedent paradigms and image-worlds.
I think Hume almost saw the bounds of his empiricism in this passage:
>Though it be too obvious to escape observation, that different ideas are connected together; I do not find that any philosopher has attempted to enumerate or class all the principles of association; a subject, however, that seems worthy of curiosity. To me, there appear to be only three principles of connexion among ideas, namely, Resemblance, Contiguity in time or place, and Cause or Effect.
But then his proceeding explanation (which I won't post because it's too long but it's Section III of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding) of what he means demonstrates he didn't really have a clear grasp of it.
>But still, I find it difficult not to see how appealing to experiments, factual evidences abolish much of precedent paradigms and image-worlds.
Simply because the scientific image-world is not the artistic one, they cannot really demolish each other because they ask different questions and accept different answers.
Cassirer wasn't anti-science, he was very pro-science, he just believed that science was an image-world. For example he says the way the squirrel is looked at from the standpoint of the physicist is going to be different than the way the biologist looks at the squirrel. This is because both have different kinds of symbolic structures which determine how they frame the question and what answers are appropriate. He says there is a "manifold" of ways of seeing the squirrel from various points of view.
He was trying to defend art and religious thinking from positivist attacks, he's not against scientific experiments. He just doesn't believe that science is able to describe the thing-in-itself like some claim.
Sorry for the rather haphazard post I wrote this up quickly as I'm off to bed.
Also one of the better Shakespeare actors of his day, for which he gets very little credit now.
I didn’t know he was a Shakespeare actor