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5 - Cassirer’s Functional Account of the Animal Symbolicum

from Part II - ‘What Is the Human Being?’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2022

Simon Truwant
Affiliation:
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
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Summary

Argues that Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms relies on an account of human subjectivity that he deliberately keeps in the background of his writings. Remarkably, even though Cassirer considers a systematic account of human subjectivity to be an essential component of a philosophy of culture, he never seems to develop one (5.1). This omission is the result of Cassirer’s belief that consciousness can only be approached through the mediation of diverse cultural products (5.2). Cassirer solves this difficulty by developing a ‘functional conception of human subjectivity’ that forms the exact counterpart of his account of objectivity and therefore needs no separate treatment (5.3). This conception allows him to characterize the human being as an ‘animal symbolicum’ in An Essay on Man (5.4). Cassirer’s posthumous text The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms then merely translates this view of the human being into the language of his contemporaries ‒ rather than deviating from his published writings, as is usually maintained (5.5). In sum, this chapter retrieves the hidden, anthropological foundation of Cassirer's philosophy of culture.

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Chapter
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Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos
The Philosophical Arguments
, pp. 111 - 130
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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