arnett, ernst cassirer and the epistemological values of religion

Ernst Cassirer and the Epistemological Values of ReligionAuthor(s): Willard E. ArnettSource: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Jul., 1955), pp. 160-167Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1200918 .

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ERNST CASSIRER AND THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL VALUES OF RELIGION

WILLARD E. ARNETT*

TH E struggles of religions with the

truth-their efforts, their claims, and their contradictions-are such

as to baffle and frustrate all but the most persistent students of religions. Various religions have, on occasion, claimed to be, if not the only road, then certainly the high and privileged road to truth, while seekers of the truth in other areas, especially in recent years, have fre- quently denied that religion is a way to the truth at all. Thus philosophers inter- ested in religion and in truth or knowledge of the truth find themselves con- fronted with a number of problems: What is the function of religion in regard to knowledge of the truth? Does religion, as the positivists claim, have no epistemological value? Are religious proposi- tions and the religious experience simply expressions of emotion and subjective contortions of the human organism? Is there no existential reality, objective or relational, in the religious experience that is comparable to the so-called "objective" world that science claims to know?

Ernst Cassirer, in his philosophy of symbolic forms, has perhaps provided

the religious epistemologist (if the label is not a contradiction in terms) with a new and potent weapon in the struggle for a share of the claim to knowledge, though, indeed, traditional religious claims may have to be reinterpreted in a manner not altogether satisfactory to many religious orthodoxies.

Actually, there is a great deal of am- biguity in Cassirer's attitude toward religion. By faith he was ostensibly a Jew, though this was perhaps largely a matter of respect and sympathy for a cultural and intellectual tradition rather than any ritualistic, theological, or cosmologi- cal orientation. He was possibly a Jew in the sense that Santayana was a Chris- tian. Cassirer consistently included religion and myth-which he never clearly distinguished-among the symbolic forms out of which human reality is created; yet, time and again and especially in his latest work, The Myth of the State, he suggested that the myth-making propensity of man-and consequently most religious orientations-must somehow be outgrown or brought under the control of the cognitive symbols of science. That this final emphasis was a result of the despair and terror he experienced as a witness of the contemporary and deliber- ate German myths is surely a matter for speculation only. That he did not exploit the implications of his symbolic philosophy as fully in religion as in either science or art, however, or with the same cool objectivity is fairly evident to the stu- dent of his writings. Perhaps this was not

* Willard E. Arnett, a native of Virginia and a Ph.D. of Columbia University, began his teaching career in 1950 as instructor in philosophy at the University of Arkansas. He is now associate professor of philosophy at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His book, Santayana and the Sense of Beauty, will be published by Indiana University Press in October. Professor Arnett's article, "Critique of Dewey's Anticlerical Religious Philosophy," ap- peared in the October, 1954, issue of the Journal of Religion.

160



THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL VALUES OF RELIGION 161

a matter of bias, but one of perspective and interest only. At any rate, he has done the spring plowing in a field which epistemologists with a flair for religion might prepare for the harvest by re- ligionists with a bent for epistemology. By temperament Cassirer was a human- ist, and in method a scientist; and in these two things he should prove himself interesting and perhaps congenial to a wide variety of philosophical seekers who might find little or nothing to admire in one another.

Cassirer, following the anthropologists, has presented striking evidence that it is not-at least not fundamentally-the rhythms and vicissitudes or the order and disorder of an external world or inner rational considerations which produce mythical and religious activities. Myth and religion, according to Cassirer, grow out of the internal, spontaneous, nonconceptual nature of man. The mythical and religious are forms of experience-which, of course, may be in- fluenced and modified according to en- vironmental conditions but which re- main essentially the same in all the varied expressions.

Indeed, the fundamental theme of Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms, in the remodeled framework of epistemological idealism, is that reality is de- termined by the nature of the experienc- ing organism. He suggests that it simply does not make sense to talk of a sea- urchin environment if one is concerned to understand flies. Likewise, it is nonsense to attempt to talk of an objective world of things for man apart from the symbolic forms through which the human world is constructed and seen. The real world for man, then, is a spiritual world -a world of linguistic sounds, mythic activity, artistic images, religious rites, and scientific concepts. These are the spirit-

ual forms through which the dynamic human self is expressed and created. The world in which man lives, according to Cassirer, is not a world of hard, irreducible data or matters of fact; it is rather a world of meaning, a world interpreted or, perhaps more accurately, constructed; it is a world which, strictly speaking, would not exist apart from the forms which experience takes. But this is not a subjective world: The worlds pro- duced by symbolic forms "are image- worlds whose principle and origin are to be sought in an autonomous creation of the spirit. Through them alone we see what we call 'reality,' and in them alone we possess it. . . . In this sense each new 'symbolic form'-not only the conceptual world of scientific cognition but also the intuitive world of art, myth, and language-constitutes, as Goethe said, a revelation sent outward from within, a 'synthesis of world and spirit,' which truly assures us that the two are origi- nally one."' Subject and object are in- extricable parts of a whole, and the history of human culture is the story of man's continuous attempt further to hu- manize the cosmos-a dynamic, spontaneous, necessary humanization-through the creation of instances of symbolic forms. Language, myth, religion, art, and science are thus fundamentally autonomous ways of humanizing the universe or, it might be said more correctly, ways of constructing human universes: "Cog- nition, language, myth, and art: none of them is a mere mirror, simply reflecting images of inward or outward data; they are not indifferent media, but rather the true sources of light, the prerequisite of vision, and the wellsprings of all forma- tion."2 Man, beginning with what might be called the "miracle" of language, goes on to ever more diverse and complex modes of creation and expression; the



162 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION

world in which he lives becomes richer; and the world symbolized becomes a part of man's spiritual self, even as food eaten and digested becomes a vital part of the body. "It is symbolic thought which over- comes the natural inertia of man and en- dows him with a new ability, the ability constantly to reshape his human universe. ")

There is, then, no apparent theoretical justification in Cassirer's philosophy for any hierarchy of the forms of experience. At least, there is no adequate indication that the later symbolic forms are superior to the earlier forms either in complexity or in function; indeed, each symbolic form undergoes a constant and internal evolution, possibly providing a founda- tion for new developments but never be- coming synonymous with, or being su- perseded by, another form. Language, apparently one of the earliest symbolic forms, is thus a necessary step toward scientific symbols and concepts; but scientific symbols and concepts can never arrogate to themselves the functions that belong to ordinary discursive symbols. Each symbolic form, being spontaneous and necessary, takes its place in the development of human culture. Each symbolic form represents an irreducible and peculiar approach to the unity that is the world and the human self. Therefore: "Instead of measuring the content, meaning, and truth of intellectual forms by something extraneous which is sup- posed to be reproduced in them, we must find in these forms themselves the meas- ure and criterion for their truth and in- trinsic meaning."4 Yet, methodologi- cally, Cassirer was a scientist, and, with or without justification, he applied to science such phrases as, "the highest and most characteristic attainment of human culture"5 and neglected what he called the "nonconceptual" symbols. However,

in his latest writings he gave considerably more attention to the arts than to myth and religion, so far as epistemological elements are concerned. But that art and religion are quite closely related is indi- cated. He suggests: "Religion and art are so close to one another in their purely historical development, and so permeate one another, that sometimes the two seem indistinguishable in content and in their inner formative principle. It has been said that the Gods of Greece owed their origin to Homer and Hesiod."' And art, to Cassirer as to Santayana, is fundamentally an intensification or restoration of the dynamic fulness of reality, which science must deny by its process of ab- straction. The reality with which art is concerned, however, is not that of causes and consequences, but the reality of forms. "The artist is just as much a discoverer of the forms of nature as the scientist is a discoverer of facts or natural laws."' Consequently, two painters who are concerned to paint the very same landscape may paint two very different pictures, but nevertheless both present reality. What each presents "is the individual and momentary physiognomy of the landscape."8 However, "the imagination of the artist does not arbitrarily in- vent the forms of things. It shows us these forms in their true shape, making them visible and recognizable. The artist chooses a certain aspect of reality, but this process of selection is at the same time a process of objectification. Once we have entered into his perspective we are forced to look on the world with his eyes. It would seem as if we had never before seen the world in this peculiar light. Yet we are convinced that this light is not merely a momentary flash. By virtue of the work of art it has become durable and permanent. Once reality has been dis- closed to us in this particular way, we




continue to see it in this shape."' In some sense, then, art, no less than physics, is an "interpretation of reality-not by concepts but by intuitions; not through the medium of thought but through that of sensuous forms."'1 Indeed, Cassirer's chief emphasis in his philosophy of art, as in the entire philosophy of symbolic forms, is this: "The artistic eye is not a passive eye that receives and registers the impression of things. It is a constructive eye, and it is only by constructive acts that we can discover the beauty of natural things.""' Art is an independent universe of discourse, and "a great painter or musician is not characterized by his sensitiveness to color or sounds but by his power to elicit from his static materials a dynamic life of forms."•2 Art may be called knowledge, then, in that it gives man "a richer, more vivid and col- orful image of reality, and a more pro- found insight into its formal structure.""3 "Art discloses a new breadth and depth of life. It conveys an awareness of human things and human destinies, of human greatness and misery, in comparison to which our ordinary experience appears poor and trivial."'4 If this is truly the function of art, surely the arts may be excluded from epistemological considerations only at the risk of a too narrow theory of knowledge.

The affinity between religion and the arts is further suggested in The Problem of Knowledge: "By its very nature religion can never escape from the sphere of the 'image,' the sphere of intuition and fantasy. From them it derives its peculiar power; it would wither away and die were it not continuously nourished from this soil." Paradoxically, however, religion is always attempting to escape from the confines of the image, to de- stroy the icon and approach reality im- mediately. Thus religion and art are ap-

parently distinguished, in part at least, by the fact that the religious "image can never be treated as merely a picture, as an arbitrary play of the powers of imagination. The image has a meaning, in that it not only represents the truth but is the truth itself."'5 In other words, art may on occasion be content with the sensuous surface, with the image out of context, with isolated events and pat- terns-or, like the individual sciences, with one aspect of reality; but religion demands, though perhaps in vain, that its symbols be somehow indicative of, or even identical with, total reality.

With the affinity between art and religion in mind and in the light of Cas- sirer's suggestion that "it is characteristic of the nature of man that he is not limited to one specific and single approach to reality but can choose his point of view and so pass from one aspect of things to another,""16 an attempt will now be made to develop, as explicitly as possible, some implications of the philosophy of symbolic forms for the problems of religious knowledge. Cassirer himself, I am suggesting, never faced frankly the problems of religious knowledge, although he did observe that "religion claims to be in possession of an absolute truth; but its history is a history of errors and heresies. It gives us the promise and prospect of a transcendent world-far beyond the limits of our human experience-and it remains human, all too human."" And, indeed, this is apparently the only instance in which Cas- sirer suggests that to be human is a vice rather than a virtue. To summarize briefly Cassirer's philosophy of myth and religion, he disagrees with both those who maintain that myth is simply make- believe and with those who suppose myth can be fully interpreted by a process of intellectual reduction-to sex, to




economics, or to some other obvious or dominant need or characteristic of man. Neither is myth, according to Cassirer, simply a nonreasonable or pseudo-scientific attempt at theoretical explanation. Myth, he suggests, must be understood in terms of action-a formative action that has its genesis in the nature of man, even as singing has its genesis in the nature of the bird. He accepts the conclu- sion of the anthropologists that "ritual is prior to dogma, both in a historical and in a psychological sense,""' and he makes the inference that myth is the concrete, active creation and expression of feelings and emotions. Thus he quotes Malinow- ski, apparently with approval: "Super- naturally founded ceremonial grows out of life, but it never stultifies the practical efforts of man. In his rituals of magic and religion, man attempts to enact miracles, not because he ignores the limitations of his mental powers, but on the contrary, because he is fully cognizant of them."'" (This is not less interesting because it is so directly opposed to Dewey's pragmatic denunciation of the supernatural.) Myth and religion are quite different, then, from science and logic. "The real substratum of myth is not a substratum of thought but of feeling. . . . Its view of life is a sympathetic attitude-an attitude that recognizes "a fundamental and indelible solidarity of life," and in this attitude, "nature becomes one great society, the society of life.'"20 Cassirer sees primitive religion as one of the greatest affirmations of this thesis, and he regards ancestor worship, in so far as it empha- sizes the continuity and indestructible- ness of life, as "a really universal, an irreducible and essential characteristic of primitive religion."21 This, he suggests, belies the hypothesis that religion begins in fear, although fear is obviously a powerful and persuasive element of hu-

man life. In their origin, then, myth and religion are not, Cassirer suggests, separable from the feeling that all life is one; in the development of religion, this feeling of oneness remains and is expressed in the highest ethical perceptions and commandments. In his earlier writings Casirer separated myth from religion by noting that whereas in myth there is no distinction between existence and meaning, between the image and the deity, in religion this distinction is crucial, and the sensuous images and signs must be recognized for what they are: as inadequate attempts to express meanings. But he also notes that myth and religion are so interwoven that it is impossible ever to make a definite separation.22 In his later writings, if he distinguishes between myth and religion at all, it is largely in terms of the predominant concern by religion with moral issues, with the problem of good and evil. In the ethical religions, nature is no longer simply the source and locus of all life and processes; it is rather "the sphere of law and lawful- ness,"23 the sanction of goodness and righteousness. In the monotheistic religions a universal ethical sympathy, em- phasizing the importance of individuals, replaces the feeling of a natural or magical continuity of all life. According to Cassirer, then, the fundamental religious fact-expressed in the rites of magic, myth, and religion-is the sympathy of the individual with the whole, with his community, with man, and ultimately with the universe of life. Religion, says Cassirer, is distinguished, by its pre- occupation with the moral relationship of man to man in a universe that is characterized by oneness.

But Cassirer's philosophy of religion ends rather abruptly at this point. He suggested in one of his earlier works:




Myth, art, language, and science appear as symbols; not in the sense of mere figures which refer to some given reality by means of suggestion and allegorical renderings, but in the sense of forces each of which produces and posits a world of its own. In these realms the spirit exhibits itself in that inwardly deter- mined dialectic by virtue of which alone there is any reality, any organized and definite Being at all. Thus the special symbolic forms are not imitations, but organs of reality since it is solely by their agency that anything real becomes an object for intellectual appre- hension, and as such is made visible to us.... Once language, myth, art, and science are recognized as such ideational forms, the basic philosophical question is no longer that of their relation to an absolute reality which forms, so to speak, their solid and substantial substratum; the central problem now is that of their mutual limitation and supplementation. Though they all function organically together in the construc- tion of spiritual reality, yet each of these organs has its individual assignment.2"

Yet he does not proceed to develop the implications in regard to the religious "supplementation," and it is in view of this lacuna that I turn now to the most fascinating, but also the most dangerous, task of philosophical criticism-i.e., to suggesting what Cassirer should have said.

Cassirer should have pointed out that, in the philosophy of symbolic forms, questions about the relevance of scientific fact to the dogmas of religion and in regard to the intra and mutual contradictions of the various religions are actually meaningless questions. He has no theoretical justification, apparently, for the suggestion that the history of religion "is a history of errors and heresies," un- less he applies the criterion of some particular religion, or a nonreligious criterion, to the history of religion. For each individual religion, being in some meas- ure symbolically unique, must develop its own criterion; it cannot be judged by the criterion of science or by that of an-

other religion. He might have observed, too, that often the denial of epistemological value to religion is simply a conse- quence of defining knowledge so nar- rowly that nothing is knowledge except that which can be predicted or achieved through the conceptual symbols of science. Further, he might have suggested even more explicitly that science itself, by reflecting in symbolic terms the structure and processes of physical reality, should recognize that its own under- standing of the world is selective, hypo- thetical, pragmatic, and functional-not true, certainly, in being a complete and accurate account of the actual physical events. And he should have added that, though the myths, the poetic visions, and the parables of the religions are not liter- ally true, if a search is made into the meaning of these, there is discovered a human world that is served as pragmati- cally and functionally by the religious experience as are other human interests by the sciences. For surely the human mind and personality, with the capacity for love, beauty, and goodness, with the power of aspiration and vision, and with a perennial predilection to metaphor as well as to formulas, are no less a part of "reality" than the processes and structure of matter. Thus it is, I believe, an implication of Cassirer's philosophy that there is a dimension of human experience -a human reality-to which the conceptual symbols of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and even the social sciences and philosophy are inappropri- ate and useless instruments. There is, in other words, a dimension of human experience which, if known at all, is known only as the individual participates in the communal experience that gives an en- during meaning to "goodness," "holi- ness," "sacred," "divine," and other religious terms. For these are symbols of




community values, of experiences that nurture and are nurtured by the common life of kindred minds. This is a reality-- an area of knowledge, if you will-that cannot be exhausted by the formal and experimental approach of the scientist in his laboratory or the thinker at his desk; it is a reality that exists and is known only in being generated by a congress of congenial spirits. The ritualistic, poetic, metaphorical, and ethical elements of religion are the creation and revelation of a reality latent in the dynamic and intri- cate recesses of the human soul. It is a reality actually created by the activity that is indicative of it and without which the soul may be stunted and solitary.

If Cassirer had said something of this sort, he would most probably have gone on to say-and rightfully, I think-that religion is not the only approach to this reality, that in the best of poetry, in the communion of dedicated souls in any human association, something of this flame- like reality is kindled. But he might have observed that for a large segment of hu- mankind the various religions are presently the chief avenues to this dimension of existence. And, indeed, the diversity of religions is perhaps in no way better justified than in the view that religion is an autonomous approach to a certain dimension of human existence; for the symbols which a people can understand and appreciate depend apparently on culture, training, and temperament, so that it is foolish to expect all men to respond to the symbols of each and all religions. Each religion, like each poet, speaks about the affairs of the human heart, about human relations and the pursuit of happiness, on a specific cultural, intellectual, and emotional level. If one does not understand the comfort and the meaning which a person derives from his religious symbols and activities, it is not

that there is no comfort or meaning there; it is rather that he is tuned, in terms of his mental and cultural heritage, to a different frequency.

Cassirer would perhaps be apalled by what has been suggested here as the implications of his philosophy in the area of religion. Yet I can see no other consistent interpretation, in spite of the fact that it is suggested in the final chapter of The Myth of the State that man must aban- don, or subject to control by his conceptual symbols, the mythical and religious approach to reality. And, indeed, I intend a tribute to a very humane and learned man. For apparently it is only in some such theory as Professor Cassirer's that the poet and the logician, the priest and the philosopher, the physicist and the prophet, may all feel at home and equally useful in the human community; it is only in some such system as his that one may accept and proceed to understand the whole of human experience- religion, art, science, and social institu- tions. If the religious is truly a form of human experience, like unto science and art, then surely it cannot be safely oblit- erated or thwarted. If man learns by experience, religion and art no less than science are inseparable from the poten- tial expanse of man's knowledge of man. Scientists, then, as well as the philosophers and priests might well join in the task of unraveling that frayed and en- tangled web which religious epistemology presently is.

There are, indeed, serious limitations in Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms. From time to time suggestions creep in that there is a certain formal necessity or determinism in the development of any given symbolic system and a consequent circumscription of man's ability to deal with both the physical and




the human world. "In language, in religion, in art, in science," Cassirer has suggested, "man can do no more than to build up his own universe-a symbolic universe that enables him to understand and interpret, to articulate and organize, to synthesize and universalize his human experience."25 Thus there is a very definite limit to the nature and extent of possible progress in the solution of the most critical human problems. The philosophy of symbolic forms, then, may be inadequate to enable man to deal at all confidently with the present human cri- sis. As Cassirer himself realized all too keenly, human symbols may be turned to nonhuman ends. And this seems to suggest, if one wants to steer clear of the

morass of contemporary existentialism and neo-orthodoxy, that somehow the human mind must either penetrate be- neath the forms of experience to the powers and resources of experience or transcend the forms to offer a valid and efficacious criticism of them in terms of a metasymbolic system. For a symbolic or methodological determinism is no less fatal to human confidence and hopes than metaphysical or physical determinism. But perhaps both alternatives are actual possibilities within the framework of the philosophy of symbolic forms. At least, this limitation by no means invali- dates the value of Cassirer's suggestions in regard to the possibilities open to artistic and religious epistemology.

NOTES

1. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. I, Language, trans. Ralph Manheim, Preface and Introduction by Charles W. Hendel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), p. 111.

2. Ibid., p. 93. 3. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), p. 62. I must confess to being troubled by Cassirer's use of "human universe." Does it mean the world of symbols alone? Does it mean those features of the social and physical world that have in some meas- ure yielded to man's symbolic conquest? Does it mean the theoretical or imaginative locus of the human drama, which is present in mythical and magical systems as well as in the systems of science and philosophy? The "human universe" is not only ambiguous but also Protean, since Dante's universe is a human universe, as is Goethe's and Milton's and Lucretius'; and yet none of these or any combination of them, or Newton's or Einstein's, is the human universe. In some sense the human universe is surely not separable from any of these; but neither is it separable from the innumerable and uncharted forces and processes which pervade, as well as extend infinitely beyond, the apparent locus of human activity. The powers and processes that underlie or surround and support what might be called a "fly world" or a "sea-urchin world" are infinitely more than are given in either perception or imagination, if flies and sea urchins perceive and imagine; likewise, the extent and dimensions of the human world, including any and all things that in-

fluence in any way the nature and destiny of man, may include a great deal more than Cassirer apparently intends by the "human universe."

4. Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (New York and London: Harper & Bros., 1946), p. 8.

5. An Essay on Man, p. 207. 6. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. I, Lan-

guage, p. 82. 7. An Essay on Man, pp. 143-44. 8. Ibid., p. 144. 9. Ibid., pp. 145-46. 10. Ibid., p. 146. 11. Ibid., p. 151. 12. Ibid., p. 160. 13. Ibid., p. 170. 14. Ibid., p. 147. 15. Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge,

trans. William H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), p. 295.

16. An Essay on Man, p. 170. 17. Ibid., p. 72. 18. Ibid., p. 79. 19. Ibid., p. 80. 20. Ibid., pp. 82-83. 21. Ibid., p. 85. 22. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic

Forms, Vol. II, Mythical Thinking, trans. Ralph Manheim, Introduction by Charles W. Hendel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), p. 239.

23. An Essay on Man, p. 100. 24. Language and Myth, pp. 8-9. 25. An Essay on Man, p. 221.



arnett, ernst cassirer and the epistemological values of religion

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