Language and Myth by Ernst Cassirer (PDF)

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In this important study Ernst Cassirer analyzes the non-rational thought processes that go to make up culture. He demonstrates that beneath both language and myth there lies an unconscious “grammar” of experience, whose categories and canons are not those of logical thought. He shows that this prelogical “logic” is not merely an undeveloped state of rationality, but something basically different, and that this archaic mode of thought still has enormous power over even our most rigorous thought, in language, poetry and myth.The author analyzes brilliantly such seemingly diverse (yet related) phenomena as the metaphysics of the Bhagavat Gita, the Melanesian concept of Mana, the Naturphilosophie of Schelling, modern poetry, Ancient Egyptian religion, and symbolic logic. He covers a vast range of material that is all too often neglected in studies of human thought.These six essays are of great interest to the student of philosophy or the philosophy of science, the historian, or the anthropologist. They are also remarkably timely for students of literature, what with the enormous emphasis placed upon “myth” in modern literary speculation. This book is not superficial speculation by a dabbler, but a penetrating study by one of the most profound and sensitive philosophic minds of our time.

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⭐This short (126 pp.) work was originally published by Cassirer in his native Germany. The English translation was undertaken by fellow philosopher–and in some ways his successor in the aspect of his project–Susanne K. Langer. The English-language edition was published in 1953. It’s not a quick or easy read, but well worthwhile if the reader has an interest in the roots of myth, language, religion, and thought.This is my first book by Cassirer. His titles, An Essay on Man (1943), The Myth of the State (1946), and Language and Myth were found on many book store shelves and The Myth of the State (which I’ve now started reading) was included on political theory “additional reading” bibliographies. But Cassirer wasn’t taught in any class that I took, and I never got around to reading any of his work. But my curiosity was renewed when I read The Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy (2020), in which Cassirer comes across as the most establishment and the most traditional of the four thinkers discussed in that book. However, he also came across as the most sensible and accessible. The climax of the book was a “debate” between Cassirer and Martin Heidegger that was held in Davos (yes, that Davos) in 1929. Some thought Heidegger received the greater approval of those present, but I came away with s greater appreciation of Cassirer. (N.B. Heidegger remained in Germany in 1933 after the Nazis came to power and accepted a Nazi-approved position; Cassirer, who was Jewish, fled Germany that year for Britain and eventually came to the U.S., where he finished his career.)Thus my taking up Language and Myth.This is a dense book, not a long read, but neither is it a quick, easy read. In fact, in order to write this review, I went back and read it a second time. But the additional effort was worth the time spent.Cassirer wields serious credentials as a scholar and as a thinker. His mastery of the literature of myth and religion from the nineteenth-century up to the time of his original publication in 1924 reveals his bona fides as a scholar. Many of the fellow scholars whose works he cites are unfamiliar to me (and wrote in German), but a few, like Frazier, Tylor, and Max Muller, are familiar. Cassirer delves deeply into these sources in his attempt to understand the relationship between language, myth, religion, and later formal modes of thought (such as philosophy and science). That Cassirer relies on so many early explorations of mythology and religion makes me wonder how later developments in the field may alter the validity of his conclusions. In any event, these early European (and American?) scholars delved deeply and enthusiastically into other cultures and their ways, which is certainly one of the positive outcomes of the spread of Westerners around the world and their encounters with different civilizations and cultures. Cassirer seems quite well-acquainted with this pioneering literature. And what does he make of it?In short, Cassirer argues that that language and myth share a common linage and that one doesn’t predate the other. Myth and mythological (and magical) thinking pre-date later developments of what we’ve come to know as rational, logical thought. He spends the last chapter discussing metaphor as a key function of language. Put in the simplest terms, our logical-deductive, denotative language tends to abstraction and generalization, while our mythical, more metaphorical language tends toward specification. I come away with the feeling that Cassirer doesn’t intend to crown one way of language and knowledge over the other, but he sees them as complementary. And don’t be fooled by his sympathy for the archaic, the mythological, the metaphorical. This is a man who was a leading “neo-Kantian” and who wrote a book explaining Einstein’s (then) new theory of relativity.As I remarked above, I’ve just embarked on The Myth of the State, and I also have my eye on his An Essay on Man, both of which should take deeper into his project of “philosophical anthropology.” After those two works, I’m looking forward to some of Susanne Langer’s works. And, reading Myth and Language has me thinking about how his work compares to that of his peer, R.G. Collingwood, who served as a reader for an OUP book of essays dedicated to Cassirer, who was then living in the UK. So no doubt Collingwood had some acquaintance with Cassirer’s project. Both of these thinkers were concerned with art and appreciated non-Western and archaic cultures and traditions. (And Collingwood made interesting observations about magic as well.) I also wonder how Cassirer compares to Owen Barfield, a younger contemporary concerned with the “evolution of thought” and origins and development of language. Finally, among our contemporaries, Iain McGilchrist cites Cassirer a few times in his masterwork, The Master and His Emissary, and I suspect that there are a good many more shared perspectives and potential influences than one might glean from McGilchrist’s passing citations. (Perhaps McGilchrist’s forthcoming book will shed some light on this topic.)Cassirer is another thinker from the first half of the twentieth century and from Central Europe whose writing about philosophy, history, politics, religion, and art–and about their contemporary world–continues to fascinate me. A century ago they were dealing with the Great Influenza that ravaged the world in 1918-1919 while at the same time dealing with the destructiveness of the First World War and all the changes that it wrought. And it was a time of new mass media (radio and film), economic disruption (post-war and then the Great Depression), cultural change, and political extremism and violence. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and the rhymes I hear make me nervous and therefore eager to take advantage of the insights and wisdom of those who dealt with similar challenges a century ago.

⭐This book develops vital concepts encountered in others about religion, human history, and our mental evolution, including morality and science. The ideas seem foundational. However, as the study of language is new to me, I can’t gauge whether Ernst Cassirer’s ideas are dated or not. Written in 1946, it refers to others written in the late 1800s, early 1900s. For philosophy, fine, for neural science, not so much. As Frans de Waals clarifies (“Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are”), Cassirer’s passing dismissals of animal cognition are wrong. At times this text was so remarkable it knocked me off my chair; at others, I felt I was reading a dissertation about the topology of knots.Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) was a neo-Kantian German philosopher, interested in knowledge and culture. Contrary to learning as an orderly development of facts, Cassirer claims just the opposite: knowledge and its engine, language, are born from a peculiar sort of “mythological imagination.” From conceptions of things and places come language as the symbolization of thought to communicate awe. Rational thought emerges later, resulting in two language modes: analytical and imaginative. Language reaches its mythological peak in religion, its analytical height in science, both hostile to the other. “Reason is not man’s primitive endowment, but his achievement,” says Cassirer.Cassirer notes that language as a translation of thought comes with inherent ambiguity. “Just exactly what I’m trying to say” is hard. Some exaggerate this to claim language is “nothing but subjective misconception and falsification [while] all other processes of mental gestation involve the same sort of outrageous distortion,” sneers Cassirer. From here, it’s “but a single step to the complete dissolution of any alleged truth concept [which expresses] not the nature of things, but the nature of the mind.” And yet those billions of devices built by science work just as science designed. Today we call this relativity, postmodernism, long embraced by the Left, now by the Right as “alternative facts.” Cassirer masterfully dismantles it.The awe that language first expresses appears as a side effect of consciousness, the ability to comprehend our nature separate from others and the world. Awe embodied first as a personality in everything from rocks to rivers, followed by magic in the names of things, to religion with many named gods, each its own power, eventually rolled into one who goes beyond names to no name at all. As the Egyptian god Ra, and the much later Hebrew deity say, call me “I am.” A final step in trying to make the language as incomprehensible as the god, like the awe that can never be entirely captured by symbols. Reminiscent of Marcel Gauchet’s notion (“Disenchantment of the World”) that religion is finally the illogical solution to our illogical condition. A thought-provoking book.

⭐This interesting book rests at the intersection of the philosophy of language origins and its ties to metaphor/myth, on the one hand, and ethnography on the other. Unschooled in these areas, I can yet speak of my impressions of the book.Cassirer writes with authority and clarity. The annotated footnotes in and of themselves, are of great interest, and help to clarify and expand on the text proper.I liked the notion of “momentary gods” and its connection to the rudiments of religion. We have all experienced surprise on occasion, and I suppose most of us have even been awe-struck. It seems a small step from such a fundamental emotionto exclamation, vocalization, and then metaphor. I also liked Cassirer’s distinction between A “logical” thought and B “primary process” thought, to borrow a psychoanalytical term. It goes something like this: A:B as “One swallow does not a summer make”: “One swallow does a summer make”.Perhaps this book warrants 5 stars. I gave it 4 because it is dated, and some of it information may deserve updating. On the other hand, I feel this book may be a classic. lwl

⭐Everything is perfect.

⭐Very good book.

⭐Very well explains the basic forms of myths associated with and manifested in diverse array of languages.

⭐Great service. Very happy with the book.

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