Video transcription

In the previous video we left off with part of Philosophy reacting against formalism and Science and with a desperate demand for meaning. From the standpoint of this narrative, the fourth movement of Philosophy is the opening of the passage from Signs to Forms, still incomplete and still unfolding.

In response to the coldness and rigidity of scientific logic, Edmund Husserl seeks to re-legitimate the element of meaning, by means of a counter-thrust. He maintains that every human action contains within itself a telos, a finality. Every act of knowledge constructs forms endowed with sense and value. Intentionality, the directing of consciousness towards something, grasps the object not in isolation but as part of a web of relations that also includes the object's value in relation to the knowing subject. It is an attempt to recognise, as indispensable for Philosophy, the vital recovery of the relation between the Whole and its Parts.

In the XX century, currents such as Phenomenology, Existentialism and Deconstruction arise as anti-system reactions which, true to the spirit of modern scepticism, cease to focus on answers and limit themselves to producing incessant questions. Many reactions against formalism take open, tentative forms: the inconclusive enquiry into Being, the attention to lived experience, and deconstructive practices push Philosophy towards uncertainty and the indefinite.

It is against this precarious background that the thought of Ernst Cassirer stands out. Through an analysis of the Symbol, and in proposing an interpretation of the history of human culture, Cassirer reopens the path towards the intelligible dimension as we are attempting to reformulate it here. By the term Symbolic Forms, Cassirer designates precisely four expressions, culturally stabilised, through which human beings confer meaning upon the world, transforming mere givenness into an object of sense:

"Every function of spirit is characterised by an original formative activity within itself and not merely a reproductive one. It does not express, in a merely passive manner, something that already exists. Rather, it contains within itself an autonomous energy of spirit, through which the sheer existence of phenomena acquires a determinant meaning, a distinctive ideal value. This holds for Art, as for Science, for Myth, as for Religion. These Symbolic Forms live in peculiar worlds of images, in which an empirical datum is not simply reflected, but which, instead, they produce according to an autonomous principle. None of these Forms is purely and simply dissolved into another, or can be deduced from another. Rather, each of them designates a conception of spirit and, at the same time, a specific aspect of the real. They are not different ways in which a reality, existing in itself, reveals itself to spirit. They are, instead, the paths that spirit follows in objectifying itself, that is, in manifesting itself."

Trained by Kant to split 'mind' and 'reality', we cannot help asking whether it is the human spirit that orders experience by endowing it with meaning, or whether there is an order that spirit encounters and recognises. It is here, in our view, that Cassirer does not fully resolve the underlying ambiguity.

His Symbolic Forms would be human expressions, yet at the same time, modes of a peculiar "grammar" of objectivity. They are, so to speak, the rules through which what exists becomes knowable and shareable. Thus the decisive point remains in shadow: where are these rules to be situated? To which epistemic dimension are they to be assigned? Are they determinations of human thought, or do they imply a "subsistence" that cannot be reduced to the mental act?

If human beings recognise that each Symbolic Form is different, is it because they are applying to the given an arbitrary classificatory rule of their own? Or is diversity an "essential quality" of the phenomenon, purely intuited?

"Just as modern Philosophy of Language has introduced the concept of an "inner-linguistic form", so one may maintain that an analogous "inner form" must be presupposed and sought for Symbolic Forms as well. This "inner form" is the law that conditions their construction."

In seeking the peculiar, internal law that governs each of them, Cassirer thereby renders the Forms objective, autonomous with respect to the human being. Autonomous, of course, not because they exist as "things", but because they subsist as binding rules that do not depend on the arbitrariness of individual consciousness.

In this inquiry he does not begin from a Structural Deduction through that Dialectical method that leads Pythagoras to the elaboration of the archetypal diagram, and Hegel to his Phenomenology. Lacking a formal key, Cassirer instead retrieves the internal law of each Form by starting from a historical and comparative analysis:

"Without doubt, there is no other way of ascertaining this law than by showing it in the phenomena themselves and abstracting it from them. Yet precisely this abstraction shows that it is, necessarily, the essence of what constitutes the content of the individual phenomenon."

Yet historical analysis is not sufficient, we add here. Cassirer, by means of an act of eidetic intuition that passes almost unnoticed in the background, detects in cultural phenomena a peculiar essence, that is, what renders each of them distinct and definable. The limit of his theory, however powerful, is that it refrains from decisively affirming the real subsistence of the intuited Forms, even though their autonomy is often asserted. By virtue of what principle can Cassirer assert the objectivity of his Forms? To answer, we must enter the heart of his epistemological reflection.

His work Substance and Function is earlier chronologically yet bolder in its architecture. It is here that the Symbol, along the lines of Heinrich Hertz's thought, appears as 'relation', 'function', 'constant'. Here the analysis of the linguistic form of thought expressed through mathematical symbols, becomes an integral part of the critique of scientific thought:

"Science arises within a form of reflection that found its first expression and stabilisation in language. Yet while using language as its basic material, it necessarily transcends it at the same time. A new logos, guided and dominated by a principle different from that of thought as expressed in language, presents itself and develops in an ever more determinate and autonomous manner."

In Substance and Function, the symbolism of Physics is not merely a cultural product, but the perfect and accomplished expression of the structure of Formal Relations through which reality is constituted as a knowable object. Translated into Pythagorean vocabulary, in the symbols of Physics the Forms appear as "transcendent constraints" endowed with objective validity. Thus Cassirer reopens the question of Philosophy's position with respect to Science. His is a highly radical critique because it withdraws from Empiricism the true origins of Theoretical Physics.

Every act of knowledge, Cassirer argues, however much it aims to grasp singular objects, tends to subordinate the multiplicity of phenomena to all-encompassing and synthetic laws, because "understanding" answers to a unitary principle of knowledge. Every law that Science can determine is not a sensible datum among data. The law is the form of connection that renders data intelligible and comparable. When a researcher records the data of an experiment on a sheet of paper, he is a perfect scientist. But when, a moment later, he takes the sheet in hand and embraces the whole set of data in search of a general law of connection, he performs a theoretical gesture that Philosophy can make explicit because his consciousness runs from logical singularity to logical universality; runs from the existing Multiplicity of Phenomena to the subsisting Unity of the law that governs them:

"As soon as we take a step beyond the first naive observation of individual facts, as soon as we seek the connection and the law of the real, we are already surpassing the strict limits prescribed to us by the positivistic postulate."

The scientist, whether aware of it or not, when he traces a law, constructs a logical and metaphysical model of reality, whose presence he will subsequently cease to notice. The Symbol enables him to organize and comprehend the Sensible World according to an objective logical structure that transcends individual thought. This authorizes us to speak of the "subsistence of Forms" and to claim the presence of an autonomous dimension that struggles to be integrated into the modern epistemological framework, even though it is continually intuited and invoked by idealistic thought.

Thus, through the analysis of language, the Intelligible World reappears on the horizon. Thus, through the Symbol, the fourth movement becomes visible. The Symbol does not confine knowledge within Language, within the Sign. Rather, it opens it and propels it towards Form.

And Cassirer continues to aspire to a unitary structure of logical Forms, urging philosophical reflection to aim towards this goal:

"Philosophical reflection ought to succeed in finding a standpoint that stood above all Symbolic Forms and yet was not simply beyond them. A standpoint that would allow one to take in their whole complex, at a single glance, and yet would not attempt, with that glance, to render anything other than the purely imminent relation that all these Forms have among themselves and not the relation they might have to a "transcendent Being" or to an external transcendent principle. A systematic Philosophy of Spirit would then arise, in which each particular Form would acquire its meaning only by virtue of the 'position' it occupies, in which its content and meaning would be indicated by the richness and the specific nature of the relations and implications in which it stands with other spiritual energies and ultimately with their totality. The universality of spirit, its concrete totality, can be said to be truly understood and philosophically penetrated only when one succeeds in deducing it from a single logical principle. In this way the pure 'form of logic' is once again elevated to the prototype and model of every spiritual form."

As is clear, Cassirer too is seeking the key to Synthetic Logic, and this inclination shows through in the "visual terms" he continually employs: "Standpoint", "above", "a single glance", "position", "totality". Precisely because of this spatial, inferential mode, he cannot fail to see in Hegel a natural precursor:

"In Hegel this systematic connection presents itself with perfect clarity. The demand to think the totality of spirit as a concrete totality, and thus not to stop at the mere concept of it, but to develop it in the totality of its manifestations, was asserted by Hegel with a sharpness not achieved by any thinker before him. The Phenomenology of Spirit, in seeking to satisfy this demand, does nothing other than prepare for Logic the ground and the path to be taken. The multiplicity of spiritual Forms as presented by Phenomenology converges upon a supreme logical summit, and in this term it finds its complete truth and its essence. However rich and multifarious it may be in content, it nevertheless obeys, in its structure, a single and in a certain sense uniform law. Namely, the law of the Dialectical method which constitutes the ever identical rhythm of the movement proper to spirit."

And here the problem of formalizing this Synthetic Logic arises. How is one to represent this logic, Cassirer asks, born of the idealistic aspiration to the unity of Forms?

"If one can find a 'medium' through which every Form passes and is transformed, and in which, notwithstanding this, each preserves its particular nature, its specific character, then we shall have found the necessary middle term for passing from Multiplicity to the Totality of Forms."

The logical passage from Multiplicity to Unity, and vice versa: this is Pythagoras in his purest essence. The medium Cassirer identifies is the Symbol. Yet he does not deepen the role of the diagram, the only true expression of spatial, synoptic, synthetic thought. In Substance and Function he confines himself to analyzing the Symbol in an algebraic sense, and thus remains trapped within the domain of sequential and analytic thought.

To this day, the powerful intuition of Ernst Cassirer has not yet ripened into its consequences. Hence, the movement of Philosophy's transformation from an idealistic standpoint, has not yet been completed. Here ends our exploration of the fourth movement.

In the next video, the last of the Symbol stage, we shall draw the conclusions of this brief Phenomenology of Metaphysics reflecting on the role of Philosophy in modern society. "To the Principle!"