Ernst Cassirer

Ernst Cassirer (Breslau, 1874 – New York, 1945) was a philosopher of Jewish and Prussian background who became a Swedish citizen in 1939. Trained in the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, he is best known for turning Kant's critique of knowledge into a broader inquiry into human culture. His major work, the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, examines how people build meaning through language, myth, religion and science.

Born in Breslau, in Prussian Silesia, now in southwestern Poland, into a Jewish family, he studied law, German literature and philosophy before settling at Marburg under Paul Natorp and Hermann Cohen. His dissertation dealt with Descartes, and his prize-winning work on Leibniz was not accepted as a habilitation everywhere. He finally qualified in Berlin in 1906 with a study of the problem of knowledge in modern philosophy and science. He taught in Berlin for about thirteen years and from 1919 at the newly founded University of Hamburg, where he found the library of cultural sciences that Aby Warburg had established.

When Hitler came to power he left Germany in 1933. He taught at Oxford and at the University of Gothenburg, but judged Sweden unsafe as the war went on and moved to the United States. He worked at Yale and then at Columbia University, where he died of a heart attack in 1945.

In his early phase he followed Hermann Cohen in seeking an idealist philosophy of science. He argued that scientific concepts express relations rather than things, and that the object of knowledge is a web of relations. He abandoned Kant's a priori tied to sensibility and kept only a rational, regulative a priori. After Cohen's death in 1918 he took a decisive turn: symbols, not only scientific knowledge, became his route to understanding the world. Humans appear as a "symbolic animal" that organizes experience through language, myth, religion, art and science. Kant's critique of reason becomes a critique of culture.

Cassirer also defended Enlightenment ideals and liberal democracy at a time when they had little appeal. In his final book, The Myth of the State, he examined the power of political myth and the surrender of reason to fascist mythology. His reception was mixed after his death, but later scholarship has stressed his role as a defender of reason against barbarism. His influence extends to the philosophy of culture, symbolic anthropology and the history of ideas.