141: Ernst Cassirer - Language & Myth

In this episode, we're venturing into the life and thought of Ernst Cassirer, the last humanist of the Enlightenment tradition. Cassirer is widely known today for his debate with Heidegger at Davos, in which Cassirer appeared as the old style philosopher against the new world signified by Heidegger's radical existentialism. And yet, the very fact that this debate was taking as symbolic of the broader trends in philosophy is in some sense a vindication of Cassirer, who believed that mankind was properly undertsood as animale symbolicum: the animal who symbolizes. Thinking in the Neo-Kantian tradition, Cassirer doesn't seem the symbolic world as approximating a "ready-made" world of objects, but as the conceptual organ for experiencing and thinking about the world at all. From this framework, Cassirer advances a remarkable notion: that language and myth are two shoots from the same stem, and if we want to understand language, we should look to the phases of mythic thinking. The central mystery we shall explore is how the "metaphorical transference" can take place, in which a sound comes to stand for an image, and the specific for the general category. At the root of all this, Cassirer raises an intriguing possibility: perhaps all of language originates in magical thinking and spiritual excitement.