Ernst Cassirer and the Philosophy of the Enlightenment

Three key concepts

• The Enlightenment as the culture of Logos. Cassirer believes that the process of culture entails a constant self-liberation development, a form of emancipation, as he emphasizes in his work Freedom and Form (1916). In that sense, the whole process of the Enlightenment is, according to Cassirer, best described by Kant’s famous definition of it as “man’s exit from his self-inflicted immaturity”. The period of the Enlightenment represents a revolutionary moment in the evolution of culture, where the old theological explanations regarding the natural world and the place of humankind on it become unsatisfactory, pushing man to find new answers but this time appealing to rationality. As a result, Cassirer believes that the Enlightenment forged a new cosmovision, moreover, a ‘new culture’, which allowed an anthropological transition from mythological thinking (Mythos) to a rational one (Logos). 

• Symbolic forms and the Enlightenment. According to Cassirer, in order to understand man, it’s not enough to study him from a certain discipline, whether it be empirical or metaphysical. Cassirer aims, and here lies his (neo)Kantianism, to find a transcendental structure that interweaves all cultural dimensions (science, language, religion, history, art, myth, etc.) in order to expose them as parts of an organic unity rather than as unconnected manifestations. The author explains that this transcendental structure is what he calls ‘symbolic forms’, which he defines as a sort of ‘energy’ of the mind through which the spontaneity of the consciousness attaches a meaning to the sensory stimuli coming from the external world. Given the latter, the symbolic forms can be described as a form of activity of the mind over the passive data provided by reality. In this context, Cassirer argues that the Enlightenment is the only epoch in the history of philosophy that acknowledges that the act of understanding represents a spontaneous activity of thinking, which is the basis for the defence of the autonomy of the subject.

• The Enlightenment as autonomy and self-determination. For Cassirer, the Enlightenment’s philosophy was driven by the idea of rational ​​self-determination. In contrast to the Scholastic philosophy, for which human reason should resign itself to just passively contemplate the ‘architecture of Being’, the Enlightenment’s philosophy is convinced that reason is an active force in the comprehension of the world and society. According to the Enlightenment, nature and thought are both self-sufficient entities. They don’t need to be grounded in any theological nor metaphysical meta-category and can thus be rationally understood without the need to appeal to a transcendental authority (God). For Cassirer, that is precisely the Enlightenment’s basic conviction, which characterizes its whole philosophy of knowledge, politics, aesthetics, etc.: the belief in the autonomy of reason, which will have in Kant’s transcendental idealism its outmost manifestation.